Hounded

And a dog stood over him. He was that sort of person. Hounded. So when the 19th-century English poet Francis Thompson wrote his most famous poem, The Hound of Heaven, it had (and still has) the power to make your neck-hairs rise with a disturbingly accurate portrayal of human anguish and despair.

Given when it was written, it's no surprise the language is overly plummy and sometimes almost impossible to decipher. "Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue." (Wist??) Ordinary words are turned on their ear: "skiey" (which I kind of like), "silvern", "dunged" (but I'd rather not go there), and, in the final line, when God finally catches up with the poor fellow, "dravest":

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.

I think that word puts me off the most, since when you finally get past all the poet's agony and are about to witness his dramatic salvation, you don't know what the hell he's talking about.

The whole reason I'm posting this is that there's a line, one out of the 184 or whatever it is (and it takes Richard Burton almost nine minutes to recite this on YouTube), that periodically repeats and repeats in my ear:

The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?

It's an example, amid the overly-florid language and sometimes offputting emotional excesses of the work, of startling clarity and brilliant economy of expression. He shoves that rind in our faces and makes us taste, and it is bitter fruit indeed.

I would never torture you with a transcription of the whole thing, because its twists and turns can be exhausting (and besides, it's just plain too long). Attention spans were much longer then, people were much more attuned to the written word (especially when recited), and almost everyone adhered to conventional Christianity in some form. So his image of God as this lumbering lout with pounding feet chasing after him was probably less oppressive than it seems today.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Oh yes. The imagery splashes pictures onto the blank canvas of the mind: running away from something, here described as "Him", but something that could be infinitely more mysterious and powerful than any conventional Christian God.

It's hard to pluck out single lines here, as the poet's thoughts tumble out with manic urgency, line blurring into line: but there are a few, yes, there are a few. . .

Across the margent of the world I fled,

And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,

Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars:

Really, it's the middle line that draws me, those gold gateways: but it's that word "troubled" that is so odd and affecting. Maybe he was just looking for the right number of syllables, I don't know. How can anyone have the power to "trouble" the stars? Either he's expressing delusions of grandeur, or the word means something entirely different to him.

I said to Dawn: Be sudden - to Eve: Be soon;

With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over

From this tremendous Lover -

Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!

Well, this is nearly a peep-show, isn't it? Quick, God is coming - put your pants back on! Dawn and Eve could be his girl friends, or wanton women at least, cleverly couched in coded language. "Dawn" and "eve" represent each end of the day, but Eve is also the "first woman", and therefore infinitely desirable. And oh those skiey blossoms, big fat plumphy cumulous heaps to roll around in (with Eve - or Dawn - whose turn is it, anyway?). And what about "this tremendous Lover"? That's nearly homoerotic, when you think about it.

To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;

Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.

I don't need to explain this one, its visual imagery startlingly cinematic. Simply brilliant. 

As I said, it's hard to pull lines out of this without dragging up a root-ball of context, but I'll try (coz I'm already getting tired, aren't you? This ain't English 101.) He speaks of "quaffing"

From a chalice

Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring.

OK. What does the poem mean? What the hell is he getting at? "Chalice" (he doesn't frequent Starbuck's, obviously) could be the Holy Grail, or the cup of communion. Lucent-weeping, well, what's that? Lucent means either translucent, permitting light, or a source of light. The poet is weeping crystalline tears, perhaps: and as far as I know, Dayspring is a reference to Christ.

This fellow does have delusions of unusual influence:

Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist

I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist

Or does this express his disdain or even contempt toward the world? If the world is but a trinket, a charm on his tinkling little bracelet, what does that make him: a cipher, perhaps? Or could it be this way: the world somehow swings around him, an egocentric sun eclipsed by his own transgressions.

But perhaps the most powerful passage, which I can't pull apart but must present whole, is this description of his self-created hell:

I shook the pillaring hours

And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,

I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years -

My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.

Oh my goodness, this fellow is not just in trouble, he's (in his own estimation) already dead, and in dire need of resurrection. In some sort of awful anti-heroic Herculean or perhaps Samsonian gesture, he has pulled the entire structure of his life down on his head. But the next two lines are tasty enough to keep you wading forward in the hip-deep mire:

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,

Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.

If hell can be this heavenly, why fear the hound?

Everything I touch turns to. . .

Yes. Every once in a while, everything turns brown.

I sort-of figured out why I can't attach links or embed videos. I have it more-or-less under control, though the videos are small.

Then another problem, so bizarre I don't know if I can even describe it. I lost the title to my blog, which used to appear below the photo of the little girls. It just wasn't there any more, though it was saved correctly under Design and should have been displayed.

I can't have a no-name blog. I'm not Anonymous. My name is on it for a reason. It's a kind of ad for my work. So I got to work fixing it, and came up with: white lettering against the background of the photo (at the top). It looked OK and was saved and everything.

And it shows up fine, until. Until you go to Older Posts, or an individual post, or a brand-new post, or anything except the home page. Then it shows up. . . brown.

Brown, as in I can't see who the hell wrote this. BROWN, as in, sorry, you didn't fix the problem at all, you stupid bitch, phhhbbblblblblbphhhbllblblblblbllblblbllbtt!

To make it even more screwy, the "blog description" (the line below the title) still shows up in white. I have gone over this again and again, and the setup is perfect. Then I get this intermittent (not even consistent!) problem with display.

I will not go on one of those help sites. They make me ill and never tell me what I need. I need to email a real person who knows what to do. Even my son the techie wizard is stumped.

Nevertheless. I somehow figured out the other problem, or most of it at least. Enough to avoid a nervous breakdown in the near future.

But this.

Let's not let a little suicide spoil our fun!

 

Commentary: Bravo should have cancelled Real Housewives

By Mary McNamara, September 6, 2011

 

 

The only meaningful statement Bravo could have made after the suicide last month of "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" spouse Russell Armstrong would have been to cancel Season 2, which depicts, among other things, the collapse of the Armstrong marriage.

There's nothing that a little cosmetic surgery can't fix, including, apparently, suicide.
The only meaningful statement Bravo could have made after the suicide last month of "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" spouse Russell Armstrong would have been to cancel Season 2, which depicts, among other things, the collapse of the Armstrong marriage.

That, of course, was not going to happen — any hint of responsibility would have been taken as an admission that being on television has become an attractive nuisance, like an unfenced swimming pool. Instead, after offering their heartfelt condolences, the producers simply re-edited the season premiere a bit and added a preface, filmed Aug. 29, in which the cast directly addressed the tragedy.

Which meant, for five minutes or so, all the housewives except Armstrong's wife Taylor — in full hair, makeup and Jackie O. sunglasses — converged on Adrienne Maloof's over-kitschy manse to reassure themselves that they had nothing to feel guilty about.

Looking serious and dabbing occasionally at their eyes, they each professed their shock and sorrow ("I never saw any sign of it," "I don't think any of us saw any sign of it") just as if they had actually been friends with Armstrong and not simply participants in a franchise built around the drama of discord, including and especially marital problems.

In other words, they reacted to his death in character, maintaining the fiction that their show was more or less a documentary rather than a manipulated if not outright scripted drama in which certain participants were encouraged to play certain roles. Even for a spouse, Armstrong was rarely seen in Season 1, and when he appeared it was simply to illustrate the complaints Taylor had about him — he was distant, he was cold, he worked too much, he did not want her "to have fun" (which appeared, even last year, to be code for "he doesn't really want to be on this show").

When the issue of "casting" was raised in the preface, when Kim Richards suggested that perhaps the friends (i.e. the show) concentrated too much on Taylor's unhappiness at the expense of Armstrong's, the rest of the cast quickly disagreed — "I don't think even Taylor knew," said Lisa Vanderpump. "We were all told the same thing," said Camille Grammer. "We were all acting on what we were told."

Blinking away their tears, they all agreed they would not have done anything different, and then Kyle Richards stepped up to the narrative plate: "A lot of us have guilt about not seeing this coming," she said. "You can't feel responsible for that. It was his choice, it was his choice," she added, and it was not clear whether she referred to Armstrong's suicide or his decision to do the show. But her final declaration was clear enough — "It's hard for me to move forward, it was such a tragic situation. But as difficult as this is, life goes on."

Cue music and the vacuous nonsense that passes for life in the "Real Housewives" universe, in which with Season 2 nothing, and everything, has changed. The Vanderpump daughter may be getting engaged; Camille will survive her divorce from Kelsey Grammer; Kyle and Kim cope with their leftover sister issues; Adrienne pits her tiny dog Jackpot against the Vanderpumps' tiny dog Giggy.

A bit about Taylor shopping for naughty underwear to spice up her marriage was, tastefully, excised, but it is impossible to edit real life from reality. A dinner party at Adrienne's house quickly proved why Bravo should have gone with "cancel Season 2."
A fight between Adrienne and her husband, Paul Nassif, obviously manufactured to make everyone "uncomfortable," led Paul to ask how Taylor was doing (Russell Armstrong was not in attendance).

The discussion turned to the fact that Taylor and Armstrong were in therapy. This gave Ken Vanderpump the chance to play the Neanderthal and say, among other things, that if he had to go into therapy he "would feel weak."

Cue ridiculous silence from guests as camera pans the table and everyone puts on their "shocked and uncomfortable" faces. Taylor storms out, Kyle quickly behind her. Tearful conversation in bathroom ensues, interrupted by Lisa, looking witchy and saying in voice-over, "Taylor's very manipulative; now she's drawing Kyle into her drama."

It is impossible for even an impartial observer to not parse a scene like that for indications of what we all now know is to come, which not only turns the show into a creepy necro-party game, it shatters the suspension of disbelief required for these shows to succeed.

The allure of the "Real Housewives" shows has been, in part, their celebration of the unreality of life — all those dinner party conversations that were just as manufactured and misguidedly narcissistic as the surgically altered faces, the carefully arranged decolletage, the anorexic arms that wreathed the table. But now we know that as these tableaux were constructed, as these little scenes were nursed into being, the petty tensions fed, the catty diatribes coddled, offstage a man was slowly moving toward self-destruction.

How can we now watch and think of anything else?

The Vancouver Sun

Whose blog IS this?. . . Anyway?

I fight with technology all the time. It's a useful tool, but I don't "speak" it and never will. My son is a techie who speaks about 47 languages at light speed, and I can't even catch on to the English version. So near, and yet so far.

I've lost the title to this blog. It used to say margaret gunning's house of dreams, all nicely set up in title-sized font, then below that, in smaller font, Step into my dream. Now it's not there, except for some weenie thing in flyspeck type, in the wrong place. This was the best I could do to restore any title at all.

When I try to use the design feature, it all shows the correct headings in the right places. I assume something is checked or unchecked to not display the title, which is just about the stupidest thing going. Who wouldn't want to display the title of their blog?????

I've been tinkering with changes, mainly because I could no longer do the things I wanted to do. I hate change, especially this kind of change, because it makes me feel stupid and inadequate, and slow. No one wants to feel this way.

When I solve one problem, ten more pop up, even more obscure and hard to solve. I just don't have a head for it. I did fine for a whole year, now it's all screwed up. I want my blog back! Vindictive leprechauns are nibbling my toes. Help.

Quite possibly the weirdest video ever

 

This beast of a machine is giving me trouble today, so I don't know if this is even gonna work. But I'll give it a shot.

Every so often I go on a Melies kick. Y'know, Melies. Weird guy from the early 20th century, actually the late 19th, a cinematic innovator who started out filming magic tricks on a stage in one shot, and went on to phantasmagorical fantasies with a lot of men dressed as wizards running around with telescopes. 

His most famous film is A Trip to the Moon, a bizarre take on a Jules Verne classic (with lots of men in wizard costumes running around with - ). The moon is depicted as a big gooey cream-pie sort of thing with an actual face on it, and the space craft, a big bullet, hits it in the eye. The story is disjointed: I never did get how they (the scientists) got back to earth. But at that time, "pictures" were new and innovation was free and open. No matter what a filmmaker did, some audience, somewhere would be enthralled. 

Eventually Melies' work went out of style, perhaps being just too weird for later audiences (and those quivering cardboard flats in the background didn't help much). When you look at Melies, you see where Terry Gilliam got most of his ideas. Bodies fly through the air, particularly semi-nude women's bodies in mermaid-like poses. Big puppetlike heads appear for no reason and open and close their mouths. Things drop out of sight in a puff of smoke, then pop back up out of thin air. It's a kind of fever dream mixed with an acid trip. 

Sadly, once Melies' work went out of style around 1912, he went bankrupt and had to resort to selling toys in a Paris train station. The films were confiscated during World War I, the celluloid melted down to make boot heels for soldiers: so they were literally walking all over poor Georges. But a few fragments survive. 

I don't understand this passage at all (an excerpt from a picture called The Eclipse), and it appears it might be cut off on the right-hand side. It's pretty gay, to be sure, but I'm not sure why. And I don't know why they're licking their lips like that. It's all too squirmingly sexual. Why not have a seductive woman as the moon, and a nicer-looking man as the sun who didn't look so much like freaking Satan? Never mind, I am somehow drawn to Melies and his strangeness and sat through the Turner Classics compilation for the second time last night. I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it. But I did.

Caitlin sings "I Love You Like a Love Song" by Selena Gomez

toujours gai toujours gai

the song of mehitabel

By Don Marquis, in "archy and mehitabel," 1927

this is the song of mehitabel
of mehitabel the alley cat
as i wrote you before boss
mehitabel is a believer
in the pythagorean
theory of the transmigration
of the soul and she claims
that formerly her spirit
was incarnated in the body
of cleopatra

that was a long time ago
and one must not be
surprised if mehitabel
has forgotten some of her
more regal manners

i have had my ups and downs
but wotthehell wotthehell
yesterday sceptres and crowns
fried oysters and velvet gowns
and today i herd with bums
but wotthehell wotthehell 

i wake the world from sleep
as i caper and sing and leap
when i sing my wild free tune
wotthehell wotthehell
under the blear eyed moon
i am pelted with cast off shoon
but wotthehell wotthehell

do you think that i would change
my present freedom to range
for a castle or moated grange
wotthehell wotthehell
cage me and i d go frantic
my life is so romantic
capricious and corybantic
and i m toujours gai toujours gai

i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell
oh i should worry and fret
death and i will coquette
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai

i once was an innocent kit

wotthehell wotthehell

with a ribbon my neck to fit

and bells tied onto it

o wotthehell wotthehell

but a maltese cat came by

with a come hither look in his eye

and a song that soared to the sky

and wotthehell wotthehell

and i followed adown the street

the pad of his rhythmical feet

o permit me again to repeat

wotthehell wotthehell

my youth i shall never forget
but there s nothing i really regret
wotthehell wotthehell
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai

the things that i had not ought to
i do because i ve gotto
wotthehell wotthehell
and i end with my favorite motto
toujours gai toujours gai

boss sometimes i think
that our friend mehitabel
is a trifle too gay

Sometimes. . . it's just too easy to be negative

Sometimes. . .

I just hafta delete something that maybe tells too much truth about me.

Sometimes. . . it's a whole post.

Sometimes. . .

I have to accept the fact that things aren't

going to go the way I want them to

Sometimes. . .

I just have to hang in

or hang on

Sometimes. . .

I just have to remind myself to Never Weaken

and ask myself WWHD

it's better than eating a whole large bag of kettle corn

before dinner every day, I guess

cuz that doesn't get you a contract, does it

but it can take your mind off the obsession

for as long as it takes you to chew

(Disadvantage: extreme fatness

bearing down on you

bombing through the Truth Tunnel

like an approaching train)

but as Mehitabel once put it

wottehell wottehell

and I am

if not happy,

then

at the least

toujours gai



Water sports

Take me away, please - no, I mean it

Pink cow

Now we know where Strawberry Quik comes from.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Dick, take over while I fix this thing.

August 19, 2011, 9:00 pm

By DICK CAVETT

Dick Cavett on his career in show business, and more.

Flying? Increasingly for the birds

 

“I’ll be passing the back of my hand over your buttocks and then come up the insides of your legs up toward the private parts. Is that O.K.?”

“Sounds peachy to me,” I knew not to say. You’re not supposed to joke with airport security, as people have learned the hard way.

This makes sense, but as with so much about airport security — or as someone has called it, “Security Theater” — it seems a bit silly. Are terrorists known for their tendency to joke? (Is there a paperback called “Jokes for Jihadists”?)

When you refuse, as I do, to be ordered into the big scanner with its “safe” amount of X-ray, you are made to feel like a wimp and told to “Stand over there!” And over there — with maybe one or two others who have also noted that whatever X-rays you are urged to get in life are invariably “safe” — you stand, a little ashamed, waiting until the patter gets back from the toilet.

On a recent patting (and the patters, I should say, are a nice lot, picked perhaps for their demeanor) the description “toward the private parts” had a grain of inaccuracy. The rising hands didn’t stop short, causing a slight “ow” on my part. “Sorry” was delivered feelingly (no pun intended).

Another time, after having been felt up in public, I fell into a pleasant chat with the man with the business-like hands. He’d recognized me, and there were no other pattees waiting.

I asked, “What sort of jokes are you tiredest of by the one patted?”

“Oh, you can probably guess,” my guy said cheerfully.

“Something like, ‘Hey, cute stuff, whatcha doin’ after the show?’ ” I guessed.

“You got it.”

“Any of the would-be humorists ask what sort of man would seek a job patting other men?”

“You got it again.”

“How are you supposed to behave in the face of such wit?”

“Smile and keep patting.”

I’m sure no professional patter lives in fear that an accumulation of such micro-erotic experiences will endanger his orientation. Or the passenger’s.

It moves! . . .Or does it?

It moves. But my computer doesn't. Bloody hell.

Blasted bloody HELL

Lack of proficiency on this blasted bloody machine makes me feel miserable, embarrassed and even afraid. And it happens regularly. I click on "something", usually to try to make things better, to solve a specific problem, and nine other problems suddenly pop up. My well-meaning but SLOW SLOW husband comes into my office and hunts and pecks for two hours, then tells me, "I can't resolve the problem." I sit down and find each problem now has at least three more problems. They have grown organically, and soon will take over the already-hectic garden of my mind.

And oh, DON'T go on a "help" site, for you'll get stupid useless wads of information from "users" telling you all sorts of Byzantine, acrobatic ways of NOT solving the problem. All done in gobble-eze, so you feel even more stupid. It's like being seven years old and standing on the playground and EVERYONE else has learned a secret language except you, and the reason you haven't learned the secret language is:

(a) they don't want you to, and/or

(b) you're incredibly stupid.

So I flail around, speaking broken English and gesticulating madly while others speak fluent "whatever", going so fast I can't pick up even the gist.

The ultimate solution is calling my son, a techie by trade who has never yet been defeated by any sort of computer problem (including the time years ago when the screen was swirling like something out of The Time Tunnel. He looked at it for a half-second, said "oh, that's the bananasplitzonefurtwangler," hit a key, and all was resolved.)

But this time, some of the problems at least were things I blundered into myself. Soon my ankle was caught in a rope, and the more I pulled the tighter it got, and the stupider I looked. I put my own name down as a follower, completely by mistake, and now I can't get out of it, though I can block any other follower on my modest list. I can't post YouTube videos, and I can't post links to articles in papers and magazines. It just doesn't work, though the appropriate box comes up.

Dead boxes get me, dead icons, little dead arrows, things that are supposed to "click" and just sit there mocking you. (Oh, there's Margaret. Qulahgoinagzapadoodlefromfromjaggajagaboo.)

I wasn't born for this, except that email was a breaktkhrough and an energy-saver from the 15-page letters I used to hand-write. Manuscripts, yes, they became a lot more manageable, no more whiteout or carbon paper (yes, I do remember carbon paper, and even Gestetner stencils with correcting fluid like nail polish). And etc. etc. etc. The internet flung open a door to millions of other doors, and I revel in learning from it. Yes. All that is good. But the price seems to be my self-esteem. I feel like such a bloody idiot for not KNOWING all this stuff, for making blunders that seem to be permanently stuck in Krazy Glue. For hitting keys I, ohGodforgiveme, NEVER meant to hit, so can I pleaseplease get out of this thing now??

The answer is no. I have no gadgets, barely have a thing that passes as a cell phone, don't WANT to "tweet" (and why are all these gadgets given such appallingly stupid names? What's a "skype" anyway, and COULD the name be any uglier?). My husband has a kindle or whatever it is, kindling? He reads off of it. He's ahead of me in some ways, not being so afraid. But I stumble, blunder, and feel humiliated when I make something go wrong or come up against a blind wall.

Though I suddenly can't attach YouTube videos or links, which I could easily do before, and which are the bread and body of this blog, allofasudden a couple of my gifs seem to work (?). I can't remember them ever working before. It seems like an illusion, frankly, and I know by the time I post this, they will have stopped, remembering who they are, or maybe who they belong to.

My tool bar for the internet has disappeared, and now I can't do anything. All this came about because I dared to run an innocuous-looking Windows update on my hopelessly dated computer, a Lugblunk from the early '40s. (I bought it used from the Twilight Zone Museum of Failed Technology.)

I ran this update because I could no longer play audio clips from my kiddie record site, the one I rhapsodized about a few posts ago. They just stopped. When I ran the update, they started again, along with a zillion obnoxious pop-ups for things I didn't want. When I tried to get rid of them, everything fell apart.

Oh, I know I should delete this useless rant, I am in a bad mood, very bad, because every problem I try to solve spawns so many more (worse) problems. This takes me back to the very beginning of email and search engines (I used one called Jeeves: whatever happened to it?). I couldn't and didn't catch on to anything, so I don't know how I got this far. And I don't know how I developed such a deep dread of missteps. Maybe I think it'll all be taken away from me (especially all my novel manuscripts: poof! Fifteen years of work, gone.)

If the gifs work, you'll be seeing a lot of them. But I doubt it. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away (e. g. my YouTube/all my other links), but mostly taketh away and dumps into the "hopelessly irretrievable" bin so that only a techie who never gets out of the house (the one who works for the cops, along with Criswell the psychic) can pull it back from certain oblivion.

L'angoisse

This is the piece that my brother Arthur told me reminded him of "roast beef and Yorkshire pudding". It took me a long time to rid myself of these dinner-music associations, when my father would put on recordings more for our education than our pleasure. And yet, and yet. . .


Because of that drilling (and I just had major dental work today, OW), I am able to detect a similarity between the anguished opening of this Brahms fourth movement and the Tristan opening, the malaise and even the anxiety in it. The two aren't brothers, but perhaps cousins. Except for Beethoven, composers could not help but hear each other and be subtly influenced.

Hermetically sealed in deafness, Beethoven was forced to be completely original. Thus he did not transform music so much as transfigure it: changed it at the molecular level so that it was almost unrecognizable to his audience. Such alchemy comes at a price, and by the end of his life Beethoven "was" his music, with little else to comfort him. 

Brahms took a long time to even try to write a symphony, daunted and half-paralyzed by Beethoven's legacy. "You have no idea how it is for the likes of us to feel the tread of a giant like him behind us!" he wailed (if you can picture such a bearded beer-barrel of a man wailing). I wonder why the giant was behind him instead of in front of him, or was it a Freudian slip?

At any rate, speaking of spiritual cousins, the music of Brahms owes much to the deaf half-crazy genius who died of drinking too much coffee (the lead in the glaze in his Starbucks mugs dissolved and killed him off,  just like the ancient Romans). A long time later somebody burned some of Beethoven's hair to prove the theory, but no such doubt exists about Brahms, who died of booze and cigars. And loneliness. We won't get into Clara Schumann. . . Not this time. I wrote about yearning, did I not? Listen to this music, listen, and I won't need to say anything at all.

The lost chord

This post might be filed under the category of "lost and found". A very long time ago, a couple of decades at least, I confess I had a bad crush on someone, I won't say who or I'll feel like a complete idiot (which I already do!). This wasn't an affair or anything like that, or I would have seen the person for the total blithering idiot he was. But this was fantasyland, and I needed a theme song.

I had an old tape of Wagner favorites. You know old Wagner. Hitler's favorite composer. I don't think he'll ever live down the stigma of his close association with the Third Reich, even though his heyday was decades earlier. His work had a certain bombastic grandeur, a call-to-action/get-up-and-heil feeling, inspirational in a really awful sort of way. OK then, I've just summed up the whole Ring Cycle, 18 hours of opera compressed into a not-very-well-composed paragraph.

But I don't worry about that, not here anyway. Here, I just write.

So in the throes of my hopeless longing, I discovered in my dusty tape library a recording of "the" Wagner romantic-yearning passage, the Liebestod, love-in-death. In the opera, Tristan and Isolde are sitting around singing like mad because they can't have sex, then somebody bursts in and says "hey".  But the instrumental version is the one I love - get rid of all those nasty, unnecessary voices, please!  The tape didn't run at quite the right speed because it was about to turn to ferrous oxide or something, but I listened to it incessantly. It was the only thing that helped me survive the crush.

Fast forward about a jillion years, and something comes on Knowledge Network (yet another of those 90-minute documentaries that they have razored down to 53 minutes). It's called Stephen Fry: Wagner and Me. A nice humorous little diversion, an exploration of the zany British comic's love for the glorious-if-overblown music of Hitler's favorite composer. 

I always think Fry has a face like something you'd see on Easter Island (see my little ditty, Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry). He doesn't get his hair cut too often and is known to be disshevelled (how the hell do you spell that word anyway?). In this one he was eager and animated, unlike some of the other shows he did (see the bipolar one - no, don't, it's depressing), maybe even a touch manic as he explored his lifelong passion.  At one point he played one chord on Wagner's own piano, called the "Tristan" chord for its tender dissonance, melancholy, and weird way of throwing the listener off-balance.

It was an interesting show, if a bit "golly-gee-I'm-turning-the-door-handle-on-the-theatre-where-Wagner-actually-rehearsed". It came out that Fry was Jewish, making his passion for music so closely associated with the Master Race a little disturbing.

Anyway, all this reminded me of things I hadn't thought of in years. The hunt was on for the "lost" version of the Liebestod, the version on the tape I'd chucked out years ago, the one I listened to over and over again, a piece so full of aching and longing that I can't even approach it unless I am in a certain frame of mind. Its eroticism is beyond question, with great simultaneous ascending and descending lines that gradually lift the listener to higher and higher altitudes until the air is dangerously thin, finally erupting in one of the few great orgasms of classical music.

I listened to many different versions of this piece on YouTube, but none of them remotely satisfied me. Most were played too slowly, sounding dragged out, which I hate. (This is my biggest beef with conductors. Pick it up, pick it up, will you?). Then I found this one, the one I've posted here, with Eugene Ormandy, and thought: gee, that sounds just a little bit similar.  Then on about the third listening, ding ding ding ding ding, I suddenly came to the conclusion that this WAS the original version, the one that was taken at the right tempo, the one that expressed impossible erotic longing in a way that had scored a bullseye in my heart.

Why didn't I recognize it right away? It's funny, but if you've been away from someone for years and years and see them again, they, well, look, um, ah, different (though of course YOU don't).  I think this is why I didn't immediately realize it was "the" piece, the lost chord. Or maybe it was like Jesus appearing to the disciples after his resurrection. . . they didn't know who he was, maybe because he'd changed a little bit. Death and resurrection will do that to a person.

The Liebestod is embedded in this very long piece, and begins at 11:30. (Not 11:29. That's his lunch break.) I think it represents all the best of Wagner, a tenderness and excruciating longing which can't be separated from the composer's awful sins against humanity.  Unlike Stephen Fry, I can't sit there for eighteen hours with a numb bum, so I am left with excerpts like this which a purist would say are bleeding chunks.

Come to think of it, Fry is not the only Jewish person I know (and for some reason we can't say Jew any more:  why is that?) who loves Wagner and has commented at length on the Ring cycle, which makes the Lord of the Rings look like a Smurf story. I just thought of something else (then I promise I'll stop - I know I am going on and on): back when I took violin lessons from a Polish-born teacher, not Jewish but a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto (and in fact imprisoned in a concentration camp with his mother when he was just a tot), I would occasionally stumble upon a simplified Wagner piece and want to play it.

My teacher would sort of look away and say,  I don't like Wagner. It was like saying I don't like axe murderers. Another time I had an extra ticket for a Renee Fleming concert and no one else was available, so my teacher paired me off with a Polish musician I'd never met before. One of the first things he asked me was, "What will she be singing tonight?" "Oh, Mozart, Puccini. . . " "Not Wagner." "Not that I know of." "Good. I won't go if she does."

I don't like Wagner either, except that I do love what he wrote here, how it hang-glides over such fiery, dangerous territory, then takes us right up to the sun. 

(There is a very odd post-script to this story. Looking for a CD the other day, I unearthed a Wagner compilation that I didn't even know I had. The cover art was bizarre, a map of Europe with a red bullseye over Poland. I looked on the back, and yes, there it was: the Liebestod, but not just any Liebestod. The Ormandy one. The lost chord had never been lost.)

life isn't like an essay

idon'tknow what it isinmybrain that makes me

oops whatsthat ihearsomething that'sthelaundry, the new shirt looks like it's ruined after one wearing? the one that made me look like a bird of paradise oh shit oh well

god. then have to just turn around and, oh the bird, he's hungry, so have to scrape up bird shit and jeez make that dental appointment, have to have a new crown put on have the old one jackhammered off takes about 90 minutes is all and the cost

raining hard out there, today seems fresh and grey-green, like someone has turned on a hose or a sprinkler god can't stop worrying about some things like what if someone hit me or igot run over or the kids, the kids, what if they

and things like dementia how would i know i had it if i had it how would it be to see my partner slowly incohere into inchoate mush

(so will turn my mind to other)

and what's all this stuff about god anyway, anne lamott writing about this guy who has a church of 80% sincerity, think it's bullshit, think we need to aim at 100% to get 80 and if we aim

thinkiamlosingmymemory. talking to my best friend, kept blanking on things. was embarrassing and the more i did it the more i did it, also stumbled on the curb and swore at a bus driver ithinkshewasreallyshocked

but he was a fucking loser anyway

mail is here with a chunk/clunk, paper on metal, steel myself no there's no letter not yet no rejection from those people who are - not yet, it's coming, it's coming, then what will i try next,  have to try something because

thoughts of depression descendingtoruinmy world. rain supposed to be "bad". not wanting to be outinit but minding how it forms a liquid curtain between the layers of cedar branches, my office curtains, patiently standing for their showery silver bath

my brains, my brains

god when will i get it together i can't see. all type is suddenly smaller and room has gone grey. have to write something this afternoon and it's well i took it on didn't i? a process of mental martialling and people learn how to do it and it's total bullshit because NO ONE REALLY THINKS THAT WAY

a ruse. Way to assemble a ragged spaghetti explosion of simultaneous thought

not dressed yet and it is 9:45 a.m. and if something like a parcel comes to the door, can't answer it which is maybe good so the fucking manuscript can't come back to me today and knock my front teeth out and push in my face

all my life told not to care so much by people who have no idea and don't care enough. People who think we get to engineer ourselves from the ground up. come from good families not my family.

anne lamott has a sort of sense of being dishonest but getting away with it. i see her slip through cracks that are of course there for all of us but if we aim at 80% we might just hit 60%:

honesty on our tax returns
marital fidelity
truthfulness with friends
trustworthiness
sobriety

can't see it, people are bad enough as it is as far as iam concerned, especially people who claim to be holy when

jesus! what to have tonight, have to unthaw something, don't want to fix anything but we always always have to EAT. last night my husband laughed at me for being angry one day this could lead to disaster it came very close/do not like being laughed at for being angry am not trying to be entertaining once made a psychologist laugh when very very angry. must be very very entertaining then why doesn't anyone pay me.

if i don't clean up within a year i think i will just

will just

I think I hear a doorbell

Father Abraham and the Smurfs - Do Smurfs Cry