Margotlog: Neapolitan Cousin
The taxi from the airport was surrounded by boys with rags. Leaning out, the driver shouted imprecations as they swiped the windshield. "Cholera," warned one friend; "pickpockets" warned another: "sling your purse across your body and clutch it like a life preserver." Finally safe, high above the streets, in Naples' only sky-scraper--"grattacielo"--I stared down at the old castle, squatting like an enormous egg on the harbor. What had I done, coming solo to Naples, with only a few years of Italian on my tongue?
Several years before, my soon-to-be-ex and I had met my father at this very hotel, then driven into the mountains. In Pescopagano, where mountains crouched close on their haunches we found an ancient cemetery, but no family graves, only bins of femurs, digits, skulls in the Ossarium, Who could tell which belonged to the great-grandfather Michael, reputed to be a horse thief, who'd died when my grandfather was seventeen? There was no hope of identifying dates and names, but, miracolo, real-life relatives put us up, the portion of the family who'd stayed in this mountain town while others crossed the ocean for the grey-green mountains of Pittsburgh--Gonellas, in particular, one of whom, Maria, married to a well-to-do lawyer, had reclaimed an old tower for modernity.
I had to have more; I had to prove that my life wasn't fractured irrevocably by divorce. Writing to Maria, I learned that her sister Giovanna lived with their mother outside Naples. Giovanna taught middle-school. Would she come into the city to meet me? In Naples everybody lived life in the open. Glancing into a butcher's shop, I saw a lovely woman in deep conversation across the cold case with the butcher. He reached across and gave her cheek a pizzichille, just as my father used to do with me--little pinch kiss. Women walked arm and arm, men hugged and kissed each other on both cheeks. Motorscooters sped by as I hugged the walls.
Giovanna was adorable: small and light, with golden curls above her school-teacher rimless glasses. Where did I want to go, as a tourist? she asked in clearly enunciated, standard Italian. I pointed up up to the rim of the city where the palace/museum of Capodimonte stood. Trip-trip-trip went her little heels as she inquired of bus after bus if they stopped at the museum. Eventually, as the motor strained up the steep hills, the panorama of turquoise bay, and distant islands spread before us. We looked down into apartments where households were making beds, preparing pasta--our vision almost as close as a window-washer's.
The huge red-facade of the Museo di Capodimonte (head of the mountain) fronted a lovely park where we sat to catch our breath. Built by the Spanish-Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies, Charles VII as a dwelling for his Farnese mother and her huge art collection, the museum did indeed rival the Vatican's collection with room after room of Titians, Caravaggios, Raphaels and many minor followers. But it was the porcelain collection which sent Giovanna clicking around the gallery, repeating "Beh, Beh, I did not know such excellence existed." I too was intrigued by story-telling scenes of monkey tormenting parrot, or lifelike birds swaying on branches as they pecked at fruit.
By now, Giovanna and I had eased into tentative friendship. I could speak well enough to answer her questions about gli Stati Uniti, and to understand her family stories of Italy. Her father had immigrated to Pittsburgh where he'd been forced to stay by the war, leaving Giovanna, her older sister Maria and their mother Elisa in starving Pescopagano. Eventually they packed the little they had in a neighbor's cart as he traveled down the mountains into Naples to sell the town's two cheeses: Burro, a soft mozzarella with a buttery center, and Cacciacavallo or was it Caciocavallo? This cheese, like two little provolones connected by a cord was thrown over the horse's neck to go out and "bing, bing" shoot, Maria had emphasized. The cavallo clearly meant horse, but was the first part of the word cacio for cheese or caccia for shoot? Maria said shoot.
Naples at the end of the war was swarming with British and American soldiers. For a while Elisa worked in a military hospital, cleaning and making beds, but leaving the two girls locked in a room all day long. This dangerous city was no place for two bambine to wander alone. Soon, she acquired a commission from the hospital to stitch sheets. Her prized possession, a sewing machine, thus allowed the three to take lodging with two other families in a large room; each family group separated by sheets hung on wires.
"Even wars end," said Giovanna. By now we had left the museum, and were walking the Old Quarter of Naples where she showed me the Policlinica where my great-uncle had studied. Its facade lined with beautifully blue accacia trees. "Finally my papa reunites with us," Giovanna said, as we walked a narrow, cobble-stoned street in the old quarter, so narrow it wasn't designated Vico for street, but Vicolo, diminuitive street. Suddenly a roar. A motorscooter shot by. Giovanna let out a cry and clutched her throat. The scooter passenger had torn a gold cross from her neck.
Weeping as we sat for relief in the ancient church of Santa Chiara, Giovanna said over and over, "It was from my father. It was all that remained from him." When her father returned after the war, he could not find work, though he'd been trained as an engineer. Within a few years, he immigrated again, this time to Ethiopia, which had been an Italian colony for a short time. He send money back to Naples, but later died in Ethiopia, never having returned.
As I held her hand and murmured my few words of condolence, "peccato, peccato," too bad, too bad, I felt keenly the irony of this loss, falling on the daughter of Italy rather than on the distant American cousin. With my tourist caution, I'd worn no jewelry; Giovanna, no doubt wanting to dress up for her visitor, had put on a cross which she perhaps always wore. I felt deeply the sadness of separation and war, which had barely touched my immediate family--my father being too near-sighted and flat-footed to be drafted for World War II. And wished intensely I could comfort her for all she and her family had lost.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Margotlog: Traveling Companions
Margotlog: Traveling Companions
Usually I like to arrive solo. Fran, my husband, and I are terrible auto-companions--I clench as he sashays, speeds ahead, breaks for sudden red lights. No wonder I make him nervous. For air travel, we do ok, but usually only once a year do we want to go in the same direction: someplace warm, away from Minnesota's socked-in snow. Otherwise, he hightails it west to the wilds of Las Vegas or California; I fly east, to Italy or maybe Paris, Brussels, Munich.
In my mind's eye spins a distant version of our solar system: the sun blazing against interplanetary dark, and eight (or nine) planets rolling in their orbits around it--product of fifth-grade science when Mrs. Weston, music and science teacher, presented us a replica on wires with an orange for the sun. What these planets couldn't show was their individual tilt. Now, in early morning dark as I write this, I imagine our part of the earth tilted away from the sun in winter gloom, while Buenos Aires offers its southern flank to long summer days. Lucky we spin, I inform myself; otherwise, half the earth would be constantly scorched; the other, perpetually starlit. A shivering proposition.
Rhythmic fluctuation, light-dark, light-dark: implanted in us in the womb. Our cats come alive at night, hunters of small timid creatures of the dark, prey to the cats' superior vision and rampant claws. We are committed to motion from inception. Not gigantic leaps, kangaroo-style; not sudden scurries and bounds like rabbits. But steady pacing back and forth, up and down furrows, following herds and ripening fruit; delivering mail to neighborhoods; stuck in traffic five days a week, still miles from home.
The fluctuation I like best is revisiting critters and places, day in and day out, season upon season, or, with luck, once or twice a year. Tilly the cat curls behind me in the desk chair as I write, her body warm against me, adding a slight purr to the comfort; the backyard bird-feeding extravaganza viewed ten times a day from the big picture window upstairs: there's a flash of red--cardinal in the woeful pine; I count ten squirrels at various seed dumps in the criss-cross of paths we've managed to carve from this exhorbitant snow. More chickadees flit to the one feeder not prey to squirrels--how I love their jaunty speed. Two days ago I returned from an outing to find feathers and dots of blood strewn under the tips of the pine, and the carcass of a pigeon with wings spread, its core torn to bits. Cooper's Hawk: the third pigeon done in this winter. Fran suggests I'm luring the pigeons to their deaths. Possibly. But hawks have to live too and how could they possibly dive for voles through these feet of snow.
When I'm lured back to Italy or Charleston, time after time, it's because I look forward to finding friends there, and the friends are as much places as people. A play of light, heft of air--I'm turning a corner to step into the piazza before Santa Croce in FLorence. Tourists criss-cross, the statue of Dante, head half lowered, holds down the left edge of the church steps. The looming facade lowers to the tiny pinnacle of the Pazzi chapel to the right, this top of its tiny dome the only portion visible beyond the wall--another marvel of the great Florentine architect Brunelleschi.
Standing before Santa Croce I recall a display of photographs taken of the horrific acqua alta, high water of 1966, when the Arno, heaved high by unusual rain, overflowed its banks to the height of many many feet, toppling a Cimabue crucifix and ruining it forever, while the FLorentines heroically rescued countless other object of artistic and religious veneration.
In the middle 60s, I was working at Doubleday as a secretarial assistant to one of the early editors of Anchor Books, Anne Freedgood. She had friends and authors who knew FLorence first hand. I had yet to visit Italy, but the images of this city of art and letters roiled in mud and muck amid international rescue efforts--Jackie Kennedy lent her name, as I remember--became part of my growing library of images that would eventually put me in motion--companions of the mind and heart, urging me forward and back to many returns.
Usually I like to arrive solo. Fran, my husband, and I are terrible auto-companions--I clench as he sashays, speeds ahead, breaks for sudden red lights. No wonder I make him nervous. For air travel, we do ok, but usually only once a year do we want to go in the same direction: someplace warm, away from Minnesota's socked-in snow. Otherwise, he hightails it west to the wilds of Las Vegas or California; I fly east, to Italy or maybe Paris, Brussels, Munich.
In my mind's eye spins a distant version of our solar system: the sun blazing against interplanetary dark, and eight (or nine) planets rolling in their orbits around it--product of fifth-grade science when Mrs. Weston, music and science teacher, presented us a replica on wires with an orange for the sun. What these planets couldn't show was their individual tilt. Now, in early morning dark as I write this, I imagine our part of the earth tilted away from the sun in winter gloom, while Buenos Aires offers its southern flank to long summer days. Lucky we spin, I inform myself; otherwise, half the earth would be constantly scorched; the other, perpetually starlit. A shivering proposition.
Rhythmic fluctuation, light-dark, light-dark: implanted in us in the womb. Our cats come alive at night, hunters of small timid creatures of the dark, prey to the cats' superior vision and rampant claws. We are committed to motion from inception. Not gigantic leaps, kangaroo-style; not sudden scurries and bounds like rabbits. But steady pacing back and forth, up and down furrows, following herds and ripening fruit; delivering mail to neighborhoods; stuck in traffic five days a week, still miles from home.
The fluctuation I like best is revisiting critters and places, day in and day out, season upon season, or, with luck, once or twice a year. Tilly the cat curls behind me in the desk chair as I write, her body warm against me, adding a slight purr to the comfort; the backyard bird-feeding extravaganza viewed ten times a day from the big picture window upstairs: there's a flash of red--cardinal in the woeful pine; I count ten squirrels at various seed dumps in the criss-cross of paths we've managed to carve from this exhorbitant snow. More chickadees flit to the one feeder not prey to squirrels--how I love their jaunty speed. Two days ago I returned from an outing to find feathers and dots of blood strewn under the tips of the pine, and the carcass of a pigeon with wings spread, its core torn to bits. Cooper's Hawk: the third pigeon done in this winter. Fran suggests I'm luring the pigeons to their deaths. Possibly. But hawks have to live too and how could they possibly dive for voles through these feet of snow.
When I'm lured back to Italy or Charleston, time after time, it's because I look forward to finding friends there, and the friends are as much places as people. A play of light, heft of air--I'm turning a corner to step into the piazza before Santa Croce in FLorence. Tourists criss-cross, the statue of Dante, head half lowered, holds down the left edge of the church steps. The looming facade lowers to the tiny pinnacle of the Pazzi chapel to the right, this top of its tiny dome the only portion visible beyond the wall--another marvel of the great Florentine architect Brunelleschi.
Standing before Santa Croce I recall a display of photographs taken of the horrific acqua alta, high water of 1966, when the Arno, heaved high by unusual rain, overflowed its banks to the height of many many feet, toppling a Cimabue crucifix and ruining it forever, while the FLorentines heroically rescued countless other object of artistic and religious veneration.
In the middle 60s, I was working at Doubleday as a secretarial assistant to one of the early editors of Anchor Books, Anne Freedgood. She had friends and authors who knew FLorence first hand. I had yet to visit Italy, but the images of this city of art and letters roiled in mud and muck amid international rescue efforts--Jackie Kennedy lent her name, as I remember--became part of my growing library of images that would eventually put me in motion--companions of the mind and heart, urging me forward and back to many returns.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Margotlog: Christmas after Hugo
Margotlog: Christmas after Hugo
Flying into Charleston's airport the December after Hurricane Hugo struck in late September 1989, I stared down at miles of the Francis Marion Forest snapped like matchsticks. My mother had kept up running reports since she drove my father the day before it hit to the motel slightly inland where he had been receiving "adult daycare." Pioneer grit: she thought they could weather the storm at home in Wappoo Heights. Thank heaven, some kindly angel intruded: "Maxine, a category 4 hurricane isn't like a North Dakota blizzard. Your house won't protect you."
Conventional wisdom has it that the best place to weather a huge wind, other than a cyclone cellar, is an interior room, preferably a bathroom. There are no cellars in Charleston: the city is only six feet above sea level. By instinct, my parents' dog Cindy knew to creep into a huge downstairs coat closet as Hugo delivered winds of over 100 miles an hour. Forever after, with the first sound of thunder and lightning, Cindy clicked her way into the back of the closet. Once almost fifteen years later when I was home, the poor pooch trembled and whined in my arms as a rainstorm passed over. By that time, Hugo was, for my mother, a distant memory.
She reveled in disaster: it roused her rather phlegmatic soul to sparkling reports. "We took turns bringing water back from the Piggly Wiggly," she told me, the "we" meaning Diane up the street, and neighbors on either side whom sometimes she muttered against. Not after Hugo: they were united in sustaining each other. Hoards of builders and hurricane "experts" drove up from Florida: she hired some to repair the holes and crushed porches, front and back. My father's favorite backyard tree, a pecan, was split in two; one half crushed the tiny backdoor stoop. A huge live oak toppled over the front porch and damaged a corner. Within days after the storm, the huge tree was being sawed up and carted away.
The other half of the pecan poked a hole in the back bedroom ceiling and water poured over the mattress of my parents' antique sleigh bed. Some of the Florida angels helped her drag it outside into the sun where it eventually dried: it had been specially made for this bed, which had come with the Breckinridge family from Virginia via Minnesota after the Civil War to North Dakota where my grandfather acquired it on one of the depleted farms he bought up "for back taxes" during the Depression.
Often, late December weather in Charleston, is glorious: warmish, clear, crisp and full of slanting sun. Some years when my daughter was little and we came every year for Christmas with G. & G., my father would lift her up to pluck kumquats off his little tree and pop right in her mouth. About the size of an adult thumb, these thin-skinned citrus have a combo taste/texture of grapefruit/orange, plus the sensation of biting into a sweet/sour ladies kid glove. How do I know? Pure fantasy since I've never bitten into a ladies kid glove.
December of 1989, I arrived solo. All utilities had been restored to the neighborhood, the house repaired--well, almost. The mattress put back on my parents' bed. My father's decline was obvious: he was hard to rouse. Getting him out of his chair, which Cindy protected when we weren't nearby, required a combination of urging, tugging, and pushing. Eventually my mother and I loaded him into the back seat and we drove to Folly Island Regional Park for a winter picnic. It was truly beautiful weather: not at all hard to sit outside and eat our sandwiches. Good tonic, I hoped, for all of us. Yet, my father, in his pseudo hunting hat with the flaps over the ears, was hard to disembark from the back seat. My mother's foot flashed: she was kicking him. I was shocked. It happened again after the picnic when we tried to get him to his feet to walk toward the car.
What I saw incensed me, but what did I really know? I slapped on a label I'd heard in the media: "elder abuse." For several years, I'd been urging her to place him in a "home." She knew all too well that once he was gone, he wouldn't last long, and she would have a hole in her life that no Florida builder could repair. We settled for calling the South Carolina Wildlife experts and having them trap several raccoons who were taking up housekeeping in her second floor ceiling. After all, their previous home, a huge sweet gum tree across the driveway, had snapped off during Hugo. The Wildlife guys promised with big grins that they'd release the two huge coons in the forest. Even I had enough sense to suspect the beasts would end up in a stew pot.
Maybe it was my last night at home that we decided to sing Christmas carols. For years, my sister or I had played the piano and my father his violin. This Christmas tradition was one of the family's musical offerings to my father's Italian side, especially to his mother, Grandma Rose whose little hands used to "fly up and down the keys," in his memory. With my sister well launched in an operatic career, it was clear that the musical talent in the family had been passed on. I may have even suggested the entertainment, an attempt to honor the past in the midst of such radical changes. Sitting at the spinet with several Christmas carol books open for selection, I began with "Adestes Fideles" and "O Tannenbaum," in honor of my mother's German/Swedish North Dakota. We probably sang "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," and "Good King Wenceslas," then I turned to the most beloved carol of all, because most reminiscent of the winter scenes she had left behind: "Silent Night." Over the arms of a wing chair, she had opened my father's violin case and flipped back the paisley scarf to reveal the rich red-brown violin. My father, sitting on the sofa, was apparently asleep beside her. As I began "Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright," he got to his feet and tottered to the case. My mother was beside him, helping to position the violin under his chin, and place the bow in his right hand. I began again. Creaking and squeaking, his thin melody rose above the piano's chords. He was playing along with me.
That he hadn't known exactly who I was, could not speak except a few erratic words, yet, could stand and play with scarcely any missed notes this beloved tune in honor of his family's most ancient holiday, told me that music lay at the core of who he was. He was honoring my presence, our joint continuing, and welcoming a season of joy and reunion as he said good-bye as best he could. We played the carol through twice. By then he was worn out; my mother relieved him of the violin and helped him back to his place beside her. Four months later when he developed a sore on his heel, she gave up and let him be placed in a nursing home. Every afternoon until he died at the end of July 1990, she visited, wheeling him around the flowers and little trees, planted to replace hurricane-damaged oaks.
He roused himself for me one last time. One early morning in July as I lay on the floor of a Minnesota prairie college dorm doing my exercises, preparing for a day of teaching, he appeared behind my closed lids, a figure in a wheelchair, placed against an aura of brilliant light. The light lit up his white, upstanding, cockscomb of hair. I sensed that he was asking permission to leave. Whether he spoke actual words or I only intuited sounds, I cannot say. But the message was unmistakable: he wanted me to know that he loved me, yet it was time to depart. In those seconds of connection, I accepted his affection and his need to say good-bye. It was no surprise to me that ten days later came a phone call from my mother telling us that he had suffered a massive stroke.
The damage from Hugo has healed: this December from the air, the Francis Marion National Forest looks green and tall. The huge long-leaf pines whose tops were snapped off by Hugo, now tower in my parents' neighborhood as they once did. Some benefactor replaced the ruined oaks in Battery Park with huge implants. It is hard to tell that the city and surrounding islands and towns were ever inundated and ruined. In this quiescent period, shivering in unusual chill, I return to render the only form of account I know how: offering my presence and affection to my parents and to the city who took them as outsiders to its heart and often repaid their homage with unusual kindness.
Flying into Charleston's airport the December after Hurricane Hugo struck in late September 1989, I stared down at miles of the Francis Marion Forest snapped like matchsticks. My mother had kept up running reports since she drove my father the day before it hit to the motel slightly inland where he had been receiving "adult daycare." Pioneer grit: she thought they could weather the storm at home in Wappoo Heights. Thank heaven, some kindly angel intruded: "Maxine, a category 4 hurricane isn't like a North Dakota blizzard. Your house won't protect you."
Conventional wisdom has it that the best place to weather a huge wind, other than a cyclone cellar, is an interior room, preferably a bathroom. There are no cellars in Charleston: the city is only six feet above sea level. By instinct, my parents' dog Cindy knew to creep into a huge downstairs coat closet as Hugo delivered winds of over 100 miles an hour. Forever after, with the first sound of thunder and lightning, Cindy clicked her way into the back of the closet. Once almost fifteen years later when I was home, the poor pooch trembled and whined in my arms as a rainstorm passed over. By that time, Hugo was, for my mother, a distant memory.
She reveled in disaster: it roused her rather phlegmatic soul to sparkling reports. "We took turns bringing water back from the Piggly Wiggly," she told me, the "we" meaning Diane up the street, and neighbors on either side whom sometimes she muttered against. Not after Hugo: they were united in sustaining each other. Hoards of builders and hurricane "experts" drove up from Florida: she hired some to repair the holes and crushed porches, front and back. My father's favorite backyard tree, a pecan, was split in two; one half crushed the tiny backdoor stoop. A huge live oak toppled over the front porch and damaged a corner. Within days after the storm, the huge tree was being sawed up and carted away.
The other half of the pecan poked a hole in the back bedroom ceiling and water poured over the mattress of my parents' antique sleigh bed. Some of the Florida angels helped her drag it outside into the sun where it eventually dried: it had been specially made for this bed, which had come with the Breckinridge family from Virginia via Minnesota after the Civil War to North Dakota where my grandfather acquired it on one of the depleted farms he bought up "for back taxes" during the Depression.
Often, late December weather in Charleston, is glorious: warmish, clear, crisp and full of slanting sun. Some years when my daughter was little and we came every year for Christmas with G. & G., my father would lift her up to pluck kumquats off his little tree and pop right in her mouth. About the size of an adult thumb, these thin-skinned citrus have a combo taste/texture of grapefruit/orange, plus the sensation of biting into a sweet/sour ladies kid glove. How do I know? Pure fantasy since I've never bitten into a ladies kid glove.
December of 1989, I arrived solo. All utilities had been restored to the neighborhood, the house repaired--well, almost. The mattress put back on my parents' bed. My father's decline was obvious: he was hard to rouse. Getting him out of his chair, which Cindy protected when we weren't nearby, required a combination of urging, tugging, and pushing. Eventually my mother and I loaded him into the back seat and we drove to Folly Island Regional Park for a winter picnic. It was truly beautiful weather: not at all hard to sit outside and eat our sandwiches. Good tonic, I hoped, for all of us. Yet, my father, in his pseudo hunting hat with the flaps over the ears, was hard to disembark from the back seat. My mother's foot flashed: she was kicking him. I was shocked. It happened again after the picnic when we tried to get him to his feet to walk toward the car.
What I saw incensed me, but what did I really know? I slapped on a label I'd heard in the media: "elder abuse." For several years, I'd been urging her to place him in a "home." She knew all too well that once he was gone, he wouldn't last long, and she would have a hole in her life that no Florida builder could repair. We settled for calling the South Carolina Wildlife experts and having them trap several raccoons who were taking up housekeeping in her second floor ceiling. After all, their previous home, a huge sweet gum tree across the driveway, had snapped off during Hugo. The Wildlife guys promised with big grins that they'd release the two huge coons in the forest. Even I had enough sense to suspect the beasts would end up in a stew pot.
Maybe it was my last night at home that we decided to sing Christmas carols. For years, my sister or I had played the piano and my father his violin. This Christmas tradition was one of the family's musical offerings to my father's Italian side, especially to his mother, Grandma Rose whose little hands used to "fly up and down the keys," in his memory. With my sister well launched in an operatic career, it was clear that the musical talent in the family had been passed on. I may have even suggested the entertainment, an attempt to honor the past in the midst of such radical changes. Sitting at the spinet with several Christmas carol books open for selection, I began with "Adestes Fideles" and "O Tannenbaum," in honor of my mother's German/Swedish North Dakota. We probably sang "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," and "Good King Wenceslas," then I turned to the most beloved carol of all, because most reminiscent of the winter scenes she had left behind: "Silent Night." Over the arms of a wing chair, she had opened my father's violin case and flipped back the paisley scarf to reveal the rich red-brown violin. My father, sitting on the sofa, was apparently asleep beside her. As I began "Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright," he got to his feet and tottered to the case. My mother was beside him, helping to position the violin under his chin, and place the bow in his right hand. I began again. Creaking and squeaking, his thin melody rose above the piano's chords. He was playing along with me.
That he hadn't known exactly who I was, could not speak except a few erratic words, yet, could stand and play with scarcely any missed notes this beloved tune in honor of his family's most ancient holiday, told me that music lay at the core of who he was. He was honoring my presence, our joint continuing, and welcoming a season of joy and reunion as he said good-bye as best he could. We played the carol through twice. By then he was worn out; my mother relieved him of the violin and helped him back to his place beside her. Four months later when he developed a sore on his heel, she gave up and let him be placed in a nursing home. Every afternoon until he died at the end of July 1990, she visited, wheeling him around the flowers and little trees, planted to replace hurricane-damaged oaks.
He roused himself for me one last time. One early morning in July as I lay on the floor of a Minnesota prairie college dorm doing my exercises, preparing for a day of teaching, he appeared behind my closed lids, a figure in a wheelchair, placed against an aura of brilliant light. The light lit up his white, upstanding, cockscomb of hair. I sensed that he was asking permission to leave. Whether he spoke actual words or I only intuited sounds, I cannot say. But the message was unmistakable: he wanted me to know that he loved me, yet it was time to depart. In those seconds of connection, I accepted his affection and his need to say good-bye. It was no surprise to me that ten days later came a phone call from my mother telling us that he had suffered a massive stroke.
The damage from Hugo has healed: this December from the air, the Francis Marion National Forest looks green and tall. The huge long-leaf pines whose tops were snapped off by Hugo, now tower in my parents' neighborhood as they once did. Some benefactor replaced the ruined oaks in Battery Park with huge implants. It is hard to tell that the city and surrounding islands and towns were ever inundated and ruined. In this quiescent period, shivering in unusual chill, I return to render the only form of account I know how: offering my presence and affection to my parents and to the city who took them as outsiders to its heart and often repaid their homage with unusual kindness.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Margotlog: Accents
Margotlog: Accents
In my interior memory I hear the drawl of leisurely Southern voices. Best spoken by women, black or white, who come to call, but also possible to appreciate from the lips of a gentleman. Where did this languid, inviting speech originate? Recently in Charleston, my mother's neighbors Diane and Clare led me into rendition of our shared past--a tiny portion where their coming to Wappoo Heights overlapped with my parents' living there. "Ed rounded the corner off Folly Road and there, a few houses from the corner, he slowed the car. On a deep wrap-around porch, sat a couple eating their dinner by candle-light. 'Diane,' he told me, 'that is the place for us. They seemed to be enjoying the cool breeze, the candle-light, and whatever they fixed for dinner. Not worried at all about traffic or anyone bothering them.'" My Midwestern mother, with a casualness rare in true-blue Charlestonians, loved "porch picnics," where candlelight soothed, enhanced, offered the possibility of romance. Queen of romantic voyaging, yet with scarcely an ear for foreign languages or accents: all her intelligence in her eyes and orderly brain. She settled my father's estate all by herself when she was 80, and filed her taxes solo, with no help from H & R Block well into her last decade.
Of our family, my sister was the only one who picked up a truly Charlestonian drawl: she had the ear. I remember someone from out of town phoning us up and getting my sister. Later the caller told my mother, "I didn't except to hear a little Southerner on your Yankee telephone." If I'd answered, such a comment wouldn't have arisen.
I'm no expert on accents, but I can detect the New Yorkese from cultivated Brooklyn Heights of a graduate school friend. Add to that Boston or eastern New England speech: friends here in St. Paul retain their muted Rhode Island and New Hampshire twang. Though I can't tell the two state origins apart, I hear the region speaking through them: friendly but with a Robert Frost's well-made wall. Not that Charleston drawls can't also "draw a line." They simply do it with a veil of enchantment which leaves the hearer so appealed to, so cosseted that all differences or hidden agenda are forgotten.
The founder in 1676 of Magnolia Plantation on the Ashley River northwest of Charleston came from Barbados. So did many other early Charleston plantation settlers, both white owners and enslaved black people who were brought with them. Originally from England, the Drayton family speech like so many others must have been affected by the African languages and accents of their servants and field hands, and of course, vice versa. Deep in the large sea islands between Charleston and Savannah, huge plantations often housed an entirely black population. Years ago I tried to study the Gullah dialect which survived there, and listened to recordings of services held in tiny off-the-road churches. Gullah itself to my ear was almost indecipherable. Yet hearing it helped teach me that the rich sounds which emanate from African-American throats are rarely duplicated by whites. I know: any recognition of racial distinction can sound goofy, if not dangerously racist. Yet, what is wrong with considering how eons of living in warmth, sending the voice across acres toward a resounding answer, might shape the way a people create a speech? My sister sends me a digital holiday greeting which includes a lovely rendition of "Silent Night, Holy Night," quintessentially German melody of snow-stilled fields. "Does anyone else associate "Silent Night" with British boy sopranos?" she writes at the end. There's that extraordinarily acute ear of hers: I heard only soprano, neither boy nor British.
When Toni Morrison reads Beloved on books on tape, her story of the black woman who steals herself and her children from Kentucky slavery and crosses the Missouri river into Cincinnati enriches my ear with a deep unmistakable voice. Her story includes a decent slave-holding family who sacrifice to avoid selling these humans they have enslaved. This fiction reminds me of the history I learn when Diane and I tour Magnolia Plantation's house. Owned before the Civil War by a fourth-generation Drayton who served God as an Episcopal minister and as a fellow gardener working with the black people on the plantation, the Magnolia Plantation house was burned just before the war ended. The white family had left for North Carolina. It is possible, suggests the most recent young Drayton in charge, that the black people living there throughout the war set the house ablaze. I think about this while I stand in front of photographs showing a Christmas gathering of blacks and white on the steps of the current plantation house. Yes, a kind of family, but divided by their shared history. Such a division can happen anywhere; but the particular form it has taken in the American South brings that schism intensely alive and public. Accents and voices will always carry different burdens. Yet, Magnolia Plantation today stands as a remarkable effort on the part of its family-run board to make the racially complex history of plantation Carolina available to visitors. The day Diane and I visited, it was too cold to walk through the row of slave cabins and hear the stories their curators could relate. Think how cold it must have been to live there in such weather two centuries ago, I say to myself, not wanting really to feel that hardship.
In my interior memory I hear the drawl of leisurely Southern voices. Best spoken by women, black or white, who come to call, but also possible to appreciate from the lips of a gentleman. Where did this languid, inviting speech originate? Recently in Charleston, my mother's neighbors Diane and Clare led me into rendition of our shared past--a tiny portion where their coming to Wappoo Heights overlapped with my parents' living there. "Ed rounded the corner off Folly Road and there, a few houses from the corner, he slowed the car. On a deep wrap-around porch, sat a couple eating their dinner by candle-light. 'Diane,' he told me, 'that is the place for us. They seemed to be enjoying the cool breeze, the candle-light, and whatever they fixed for dinner. Not worried at all about traffic or anyone bothering them.'" My Midwestern mother, with a casualness rare in true-blue Charlestonians, loved "porch picnics," where candlelight soothed, enhanced, offered the possibility of romance. Queen of romantic voyaging, yet with scarcely an ear for foreign languages or accents: all her intelligence in her eyes and orderly brain. She settled my father's estate all by herself when she was 80, and filed her taxes solo, with no help from H & R Block well into her last decade.
Of our family, my sister was the only one who picked up a truly Charlestonian drawl: she had the ear. I remember someone from out of town phoning us up and getting my sister. Later the caller told my mother, "I didn't except to hear a little Southerner on your Yankee telephone." If I'd answered, such a comment wouldn't have arisen.
I'm no expert on accents, but I can detect the New Yorkese from cultivated Brooklyn Heights of a graduate school friend. Add to that Boston or eastern New England speech: friends here in St. Paul retain their muted Rhode Island and New Hampshire twang. Though I can't tell the two state origins apart, I hear the region speaking through them: friendly but with a Robert Frost's well-made wall. Not that Charleston drawls can't also "draw a line." They simply do it with a veil of enchantment which leaves the hearer so appealed to, so cosseted that all differences or hidden agenda are forgotten.
The founder in 1676 of Magnolia Plantation on the Ashley River northwest of Charleston came from Barbados. So did many other early Charleston plantation settlers, both white owners and enslaved black people who were brought with them. Originally from England, the Drayton family speech like so many others must have been affected by the African languages and accents of their servants and field hands, and of course, vice versa. Deep in the large sea islands between Charleston and Savannah, huge plantations often housed an entirely black population. Years ago I tried to study the Gullah dialect which survived there, and listened to recordings of services held in tiny off-the-road churches. Gullah itself to my ear was almost indecipherable. Yet hearing it helped teach me that the rich sounds which emanate from African-American throats are rarely duplicated by whites. I know: any recognition of racial distinction can sound goofy, if not dangerously racist. Yet, what is wrong with considering how eons of living in warmth, sending the voice across acres toward a resounding answer, might shape the way a people create a speech? My sister sends me a digital holiday greeting which includes a lovely rendition of "Silent Night, Holy Night," quintessentially German melody of snow-stilled fields. "Does anyone else associate "Silent Night" with British boy sopranos?" she writes at the end. There's that extraordinarily acute ear of hers: I heard only soprano, neither boy nor British.
When Toni Morrison reads Beloved on books on tape, her story of the black woman who steals herself and her children from Kentucky slavery and crosses the Missouri river into Cincinnati enriches my ear with a deep unmistakable voice. Her story includes a decent slave-holding family who sacrifice to avoid selling these humans they have enslaved. This fiction reminds me of the history I learn when Diane and I tour Magnolia Plantation's house. Owned before the Civil War by a fourth-generation Drayton who served God as an Episcopal minister and as a fellow gardener working with the black people on the plantation, the Magnolia Plantation house was burned just before the war ended. The white family had left for North Carolina. It is possible, suggests the most recent young Drayton in charge, that the black people living there throughout the war set the house ablaze. I think about this while I stand in front of photographs showing a Christmas gathering of blacks and white on the steps of the current plantation house. Yes, a kind of family, but divided by their shared history. Such a division can happen anywhere; but the particular form it has taken in the American South brings that schism intensely alive and public. Accents and voices will always carry different burdens. Yet, Magnolia Plantation today stands as a remarkable effort on the part of its family-run board to make the racially complex history of plantation Carolina available to visitors. The day Diane and I visited, it was too cold to walk through the row of slave cabins and hear the stories their curators could relate. Think how cold it must have been to live there in such weather two centuries ago, I say to myself, not wanting really to feel that hardship.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Margotlog: At the Edge of the Continent
Margotlog: At the Edge of the Continent
At the Holiday Inn Riverview, I look down twelve stories onto a sweep of Ashley River and marsh. Charleston, South Carolina, where I grew up, is chilly this December. My parents, from Pittsburgh (father) and Hankinson, North Dakota (mother), used to complain that damp Southern cold penetrates far worse than dry, Northern cold. As a kid, I pooh-poohed this. Yet, now that I'm edging far beyond that designation, I understand what they mean. Still I love these winter-brown marshes where suddenly, swooping past my view, a small flock of something with curved beaks descends over the river toward the parade grounds of The Citadel. Ibis, the Egyptian dream-god Thoth, arbiter of good and evil.
Millions of ibis were mummified, so says Wikipedia, to honor the god Thoth in ancient Khnum. I remember no ibis in Charleston when I was a girl. But there were pelicans and gulls galore. Now I anxiously scan the marshes for pelicans, the poster bird of the Gulf Spill: a pelican, coated in heavy oil, raising its dripping wings, beak squawking in alarm. Even as I write this, my heart cramps. Then I spy a pelican, flying low as they do, over the water, huge head humped into its body, large bread-basket beak outstretched. And another. I breathe a sigh.
The edges of the continent, of any water-meets-land connection, teams with life. Amphibians, deep-water mammals--in the Ashley River, often dolphins crest above the waves--wading, diving, skimming birds; crustaceans--I identify a small boat loaded with crab crates and followed by an erratic medley of gulls. I am so happy to be home, beside this landscape, wide at the tidal rivers, then dotted with pine and cedar islands and finally fringed with the rich loops of magnolia, live oak, and the tall long-leaf pine that stretch above the rest.
My parents' last home in Wappoo Heights wasn't far from the Holiday Inn Riverview, which is why I choose to stay here. We were outsiders, but that was a human designation. I pride myself on absorbing close to my heart the smell of pluff mud, the sea-scented breeze, the watery light of coastal Carolina. This business about who belongs has agitated our country since its inception; maybe I should say agitated humankind. During the Continental Congress of 1775-6, so I'm reading in David McCullough's masterful story-telling biography of John Adams (2001), long debates agitated the delegates: should the thirteen colonies break with dastardly England and George III who was burning their cities, creating havoc with their shipping, etc. etc.
Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence included a rant against the English king, blaming him for the slave trade which, by 1776, was responsible for a population of 500,000 Africans enslaved in the thirteen colonies, one-fifth of the entire population. This language of Jefferson's was removed by Congress; after all, argued Adams, pre-eminent tactician and goad for independence, New England ships had carried the slaves and made huge profits; Southern plantations owned their very existence to slave labor. One English king could hardly be blamed for such an extensive enterprise.
Perhaps it's easier for outsiders to see what is wrong, though harder to plump the depths of what it means. As a girl, walking to Ashley Hall through a broken-down neighborhood, where a trail of blood dotted the sidewalk, I knew instinctively as an outsider that the black children peering at me from their third-floor porch were poor. I felt a tug of guilt. Their obvious need frightened me. Later, as a teen, I argued mightily against my father's racism. "No black boy is going to knock at our door and want to date me!" I cried. "I don't know any black boys!" I refused to let my father, stewing in his cauldron of hatred and fear, use me as fodder. In fact, Southern white women often led the call for abolishing racism, especially lynching.
But I was not really a Southern white woman. Still, the core of who I am resonates with the Carolina low-country. As racism used to pain me as a girl, what pains me now is the desecration of the beach with enormous MacBeach Houses. Thirty years ago, we could walk the beach at Edisto or Folly Islands and pick up a wealth of shells. Moon snails laid their collars of wet-sand, filled with tiny off-spring, on the December beach. Now with huge houses on stilts just beyond the dunes, sometimes right at the edge of high-tide, not only is the view from across the marsh toward the waves blighted, but shells and moon-snail collars are rare. No doubt pollution for which we're all to blame, is a huge reason for this decline.
Thoth's flocks of ibis know where to congregate: at Magnolia Cemetery where my parents are buried. Pre-Civil War, this lagoon land of grey obolisks, Egyptian temples circa 1890, cunning cradles of marble to lament child deaths--hosts birds galore. It's almost too cold to walk far, but I drive to the tip of Green Isle, locate my parents' gravestone and the magnolia my mother planted to honor my father in 1990 when he died. The tree is now two stories high, I'll be able to tell my sister. Someone has left a stone on the top of their gravestone; I'll add one, in this wonderfully perennial Jewish tradition. And I will catalogue the birds: a black-crowned night heron, a yellow-crowned night heron, a great blue heron, a snowy egret, its fluffy plumage all bedraggled. They crouch at the tidal edge in a bit of sun. As I drive past on my way to the airport, suddenly on the opposite bank of the lagoon, a flurry of white--ibis. They settle near the car. I snap a photo of their awkward orange beaks, a bit like heavy chopsticks. Suddenly a huge winged nemesis flares across our path: the great white egret. It's time to go. We travelers owe each other some space to be calm for a while.
At the Holiday Inn Riverview, I look down twelve stories onto a sweep of Ashley River and marsh. Charleston, South Carolina, where I grew up, is chilly this December. My parents, from Pittsburgh (father) and Hankinson, North Dakota (mother), used to complain that damp Southern cold penetrates far worse than dry, Northern cold. As a kid, I pooh-poohed this. Yet, now that I'm edging far beyond that designation, I understand what they mean. Still I love these winter-brown marshes where suddenly, swooping past my view, a small flock of something with curved beaks descends over the river toward the parade grounds of The Citadel. Ibis, the Egyptian dream-god Thoth, arbiter of good and evil.
Millions of ibis were mummified, so says Wikipedia, to honor the god Thoth in ancient Khnum. I remember no ibis in Charleston when I was a girl. But there were pelicans and gulls galore. Now I anxiously scan the marshes for pelicans, the poster bird of the Gulf Spill: a pelican, coated in heavy oil, raising its dripping wings, beak squawking in alarm. Even as I write this, my heart cramps. Then I spy a pelican, flying low as they do, over the water, huge head humped into its body, large bread-basket beak outstretched. And another. I breathe a sigh.
The edges of the continent, of any water-meets-land connection, teams with life. Amphibians, deep-water mammals--in the Ashley River, often dolphins crest above the waves--wading, diving, skimming birds; crustaceans--I identify a small boat loaded with crab crates and followed by an erratic medley of gulls. I am so happy to be home, beside this landscape, wide at the tidal rivers, then dotted with pine and cedar islands and finally fringed with the rich loops of magnolia, live oak, and the tall long-leaf pine that stretch above the rest.
My parents' last home in Wappoo Heights wasn't far from the Holiday Inn Riverview, which is why I choose to stay here. We were outsiders, but that was a human designation. I pride myself on absorbing close to my heart the smell of pluff mud, the sea-scented breeze, the watery light of coastal Carolina. This business about who belongs has agitated our country since its inception; maybe I should say agitated humankind. During the Continental Congress of 1775-6, so I'm reading in David McCullough's masterful story-telling biography of John Adams (2001), long debates agitated the delegates: should the thirteen colonies break with dastardly England and George III who was burning their cities, creating havoc with their shipping, etc. etc.
Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence included a rant against the English king, blaming him for the slave trade which, by 1776, was responsible for a population of 500,000 Africans enslaved in the thirteen colonies, one-fifth of the entire population. This language of Jefferson's was removed by Congress; after all, argued Adams, pre-eminent tactician and goad for independence, New England ships had carried the slaves and made huge profits; Southern plantations owned their very existence to slave labor. One English king could hardly be blamed for such an extensive enterprise.
Perhaps it's easier for outsiders to see what is wrong, though harder to plump the depths of what it means. As a girl, walking to Ashley Hall through a broken-down neighborhood, where a trail of blood dotted the sidewalk, I knew instinctively as an outsider that the black children peering at me from their third-floor porch were poor. I felt a tug of guilt. Their obvious need frightened me. Later, as a teen, I argued mightily against my father's racism. "No black boy is going to knock at our door and want to date me!" I cried. "I don't know any black boys!" I refused to let my father, stewing in his cauldron of hatred and fear, use me as fodder. In fact, Southern white women often led the call for abolishing racism, especially lynching.
But I was not really a Southern white woman. Still, the core of who I am resonates with the Carolina low-country. As racism used to pain me as a girl, what pains me now is the desecration of the beach with enormous MacBeach Houses. Thirty years ago, we could walk the beach at Edisto or Folly Islands and pick up a wealth of shells. Moon snails laid their collars of wet-sand, filled with tiny off-spring, on the December beach. Now with huge houses on stilts just beyond the dunes, sometimes right at the edge of high-tide, not only is the view from across the marsh toward the waves blighted, but shells and moon-snail collars are rare. No doubt pollution for which we're all to blame, is a huge reason for this decline.
Thoth's flocks of ibis know where to congregate: at Magnolia Cemetery where my parents are buried. Pre-Civil War, this lagoon land of grey obolisks, Egyptian temples circa 1890, cunning cradles of marble to lament child deaths--hosts birds galore. It's almost too cold to walk far, but I drive to the tip of Green Isle, locate my parents' gravestone and the magnolia my mother planted to honor my father in 1990 when he died. The tree is now two stories high, I'll be able to tell my sister. Someone has left a stone on the top of their gravestone; I'll add one, in this wonderfully perennial Jewish tradition. And I will catalogue the birds: a black-crowned night heron, a yellow-crowned night heron, a great blue heron, a snowy egret, its fluffy plumage all bedraggled. They crouch at the tidal edge in a bit of sun. As I drive past on my way to the airport, suddenly on the opposite bank of the lagoon, a flurry of white--ibis. They settle near the car. I snap a photo of their awkward orange beaks, a bit like heavy chopsticks. Suddenly a huge winged nemesis flares across our path: the great white egret. It's time to go. We travelers owe each other some space to be calm for a while.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Margotlog: Christmas in the Old Country.
The Old Country
When Geraldine Page creates "Souk" in Truman Capote's most wonderful work, "A Christmas Memory," she rises into film legend. Forget Capote's nonfiction novel from the late 1960s about a family's murder in Kansas, or even his "Breakfast at Tiffany's," with Audrey Hepburn. These are the trifles of a soul uprooted from his "old country," from Alabama. What New York and booze did to Capote has been well chronicled. I choose to hear his voice, that reedy, lisping man-boy voice narrating a piece of magazine fluff that, for me, is nearly immortal.
My "old country" is Charleston, South Carolina, in early winter, the "fruitcake weather" that sends Souk and the boy she calls Buddy across dried-up fields to gather pecans. Souk shakes her head at a sign prohibiting entrance to the grove: "I do not admire a man who puts up a sign," she says. Then with Queenie, the black-eyed terrier, running ahead, she bends under the leafless trees and calls, "Buddy, Buddy, look here; there're lots of big ones."
Some years Christmas slides almost unnoticed under the door; I take its coat and offer it a beverage or two, but I am distracted, unable to give it a true welcome. This year, I've insisted early, "Let's put up the tree." At the St. Paul's Farmer's Market, where trees lie in their casings like bound bodies, I buy a wreath from the plain-clothes farmer who tries to sell me a larger one, but I take the smaller, for there are many other purchases to make. With the tree up-- fake, I confess, decked beyond its capacity with the gems of many Christmases, four households combined before this one--I insist we have to watch our video copy of "A Christmas Memory."
Now in Geraldine Page and Capote's voices, portraying Souk and Buddy, I send my own version of forty fruitcakes--theirs went to President Roosevelt and a young couple whose car broke down and who spent several hours "with us in pleasant conversation." Their voices reverberate while I travel to my Old Country and the few remaining loved ones and scenes who bring me deep into the heart's core.
I don't want a perfect tree, done up in lace, color-coded and sprayed with glitter. I want my tree, with the balls whose surface is worn to glass; the clothespin doll with tuft of red hair, gift from some extravagant friend; the Chinese pagoda which opens into hexagonal silk scenes, gift from Fran's semi-Chinese parents (his father born of Iowa missionaries in China). This amalgam of lives, touched with the memories of other years when there were still kids full-time, when aged parents still waited in South Carolina and Tennessee, this is the tree I cherish. A tree for just us two, which Julia, the black and white, can climb as soon as it is up and peer down at us from the topmost branches.
Spare me perfection which turns my impulses toward glossy-magazine anonymity. I want the echo of Southern voices, lights to blaze in real darkness, the inevitable losses, the memories of kindness beyond measure--my mother's last tree, bought by her caregiver, a generous-hearted black woman who "gave the most glorious baths." When you're over 90, and afraid of the tub, caring hands make the body grateful. To all those I've loved, who are now wisps in the darkness, and to those still living, I send greetings.
When Geraldine Page creates "Souk" in Truman Capote's most wonderful work, "A Christmas Memory," she rises into film legend. Forget Capote's nonfiction novel from the late 1960s about a family's murder in Kansas, or even his "Breakfast at Tiffany's," with Audrey Hepburn. These are the trifles of a soul uprooted from his "old country," from Alabama. What New York and booze did to Capote has been well chronicled. I choose to hear his voice, that reedy, lisping man-boy voice narrating a piece of magazine fluff that, for me, is nearly immortal.
My "old country" is Charleston, South Carolina, in early winter, the "fruitcake weather" that sends Souk and the boy she calls Buddy across dried-up fields to gather pecans. Souk shakes her head at a sign prohibiting entrance to the grove: "I do not admire a man who puts up a sign," she says. Then with Queenie, the black-eyed terrier, running ahead, she bends under the leafless trees and calls, "Buddy, Buddy, look here; there're lots of big ones."
Some years Christmas slides almost unnoticed under the door; I take its coat and offer it a beverage or two, but I am distracted, unable to give it a true welcome. This year, I've insisted early, "Let's put up the tree." At the St. Paul's Farmer's Market, where trees lie in their casings like bound bodies, I buy a wreath from the plain-clothes farmer who tries to sell me a larger one, but I take the smaller, for there are many other purchases to make. With the tree up-- fake, I confess, decked beyond its capacity with the gems of many Christmases, four households combined before this one--I insist we have to watch our video copy of "A Christmas Memory."
Now in Geraldine Page and Capote's voices, portraying Souk and Buddy, I send my own version of forty fruitcakes--theirs went to President Roosevelt and a young couple whose car broke down and who spent several hours "with us in pleasant conversation." Their voices reverberate while I travel to my Old Country and the few remaining loved ones and scenes who bring me deep into the heart's core.
I don't want a perfect tree, done up in lace, color-coded and sprayed with glitter. I want my tree, with the balls whose surface is worn to glass; the clothespin doll with tuft of red hair, gift from some extravagant friend; the Chinese pagoda which opens into hexagonal silk scenes, gift from Fran's semi-Chinese parents (his father born of Iowa missionaries in China). This amalgam of lives, touched with the memories of other years when there were still kids full-time, when aged parents still waited in South Carolina and Tennessee, this is the tree I cherish. A tree for just us two, which Julia, the black and white, can climb as soon as it is up and peer down at us from the topmost branches.
Spare me perfection which turns my impulses toward glossy-magazine anonymity. I want the echo of Southern voices, lights to blaze in real darkness, the inevitable losses, the memories of kindness beyond measure--my mother's last tree, bought by her caregiver, a generous-hearted black woman who "gave the most glorious baths." When you're over 90, and afraid of the tub, caring hands make the body grateful. To all those I've loved, who are now wisps in the darkness, and to those still living, I send greetings.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Lucretia and Rembrandt at The MInneapolis Institute of Art
Dream Space at the MIA. Entering into the gleaming glass entry, I stand under the fiery sunburst hanging from the ceiling. Fire and water--the air swims with possibilities. This dark season I will rise into the painting galleries and head toward the MIA's greatest work in oil: Rembrandt's "Lucretia." Painted in 1666, near the end of his life when he was bankrupt and mourning the death of his companion Hendrikja Stoffels, Lucretia draws us into the essence of life at its penultimate moment. I have stood before her, time after time, marveling at the roughness of the painting, the gleaming gold strands of her hair, the pursed upper lip with its splash of paint--so pitiful yet real yet artful. It is that combination of paint, and my awareness of it, with the absolute integrity and dramatic flesh of the image that almost makes my heart stop.
Lucretia was the quintessential Roman matron, dishonored by a friend of her husband's because earlier she had proved herself the industrious, chaste exemplar of a wife, while all the other wives, spied on by their husbands, were discovered carousing. Lucretia gathered into herself almost the only integrity allowed a woman in Rome, 500 B.C.
Later, after the contingent of men had confirmed her honor, when she was alone again, her husband at camp miles away, Sextus Tarquinius stole into her bedroom and threatened her at the point of his sword: if she resisted, he would dishonor her anyway and kill her, leaving her beside the body of a nude male servant.
What followed was her outrage, her father and husband's fury and their determination to rid Rome of these Tarquinians or Etruscans, this king and his infamous son Sextus. The revolt, which followed Lucretia's death by her own hand, led to the founding of the Roman republic. Thus, you could say, Lucretia's absolute integrity supported a people's demand for self-government. It is a stirring story in these dark days of almost-winter, when our own republic's survival seems to hang in the balance.
In the painting, Lucretia has already stabbed herself. The tissue of her chemise is stained with blood. Her eyes are flickering out. Her lip with its splash of color quivers while, with one hand, she steadies herself. "But why should she be the one to die?" The voice of my daughter echoes. It is an earlier winter; she is perhaps fifteen. We have toured the Institute, stopping at our favorite works. Hers is Ganymede and the Eagle, in white marble: the boy bends to offer the imposing bird a drink of water. She and I both love birds. I think she identifies with Ganymede in his fearless offering, and with the quiet readiness of the eagle who, according to the myth, will soon snatch the boy up to Olympus where he'll serve forever as the cupbearer to the gods.
But it is Lucretia who compels us both. Why, indeed, should her only choice be suicide when, as her husband and father both argue, her soul has remained pure. But the painting and her history focus on the body. Ideas are nothing next to what happens to the body. Rembrandt has created a masterwork because he has made her valor physical--she has stabbed herself. What remains is the weak, pathetic instant, solitary and pleading, just before her lights go out.
The marvel is that we get to witness this instant again and again, until it becomes a motif in our own lives, a beacon to light whatever is troubling us this year, this season. An image to admire, ponder, revere for what art can make of sadness and loss.
Lucretia was the quintessential Roman matron, dishonored by a friend of her husband's because earlier she had proved herself the industrious, chaste exemplar of a wife, while all the other wives, spied on by their husbands, were discovered carousing. Lucretia gathered into herself almost the only integrity allowed a woman in Rome, 500 B.C.
Later, after the contingent of men had confirmed her honor, when she was alone again, her husband at camp miles away, Sextus Tarquinius stole into her bedroom and threatened her at the point of his sword: if she resisted, he would dishonor her anyway and kill her, leaving her beside the body of a nude male servant.
What followed was her outrage, her father and husband's fury and their determination to rid Rome of these Tarquinians or Etruscans, this king and his infamous son Sextus. The revolt, which followed Lucretia's death by her own hand, led to the founding of the Roman republic. Thus, you could say, Lucretia's absolute integrity supported a people's demand for self-government. It is a stirring story in these dark days of almost-winter, when our own republic's survival seems to hang in the balance.
In the painting, Lucretia has already stabbed herself. The tissue of her chemise is stained with blood. Her eyes are flickering out. Her lip with its splash of color quivers while, with one hand, she steadies herself. "But why should she be the one to die?" The voice of my daughter echoes. It is an earlier winter; she is perhaps fifteen. We have toured the Institute, stopping at our favorite works. Hers is Ganymede and the Eagle, in white marble: the boy bends to offer the imposing bird a drink of water. She and I both love birds. I think she identifies with Ganymede in his fearless offering, and with the quiet readiness of the eagle who, according to the myth, will soon snatch the boy up to Olympus where he'll serve forever as the cupbearer to the gods.
But it is Lucretia who compels us both. Why, indeed, should her only choice be suicide when, as her husband and father both argue, her soul has remained pure. But the painting and her history focus on the body. Ideas are nothing next to what happens to the body. Rembrandt has created a masterwork because he has made her valor physical--she has stabbed herself. What remains is the weak, pathetic instant, solitary and pleading, just before her lights go out.
The marvel is that we get to witness this instant again and again, until it becomes a motif in our own lives, a beacon to light whatever is troubling us this year, this season. An image to admire, ponder, revere for what art can make of sadness and loss.
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