Washington, D.C. 24.10.2009: Luminous Turners and Fake Gelato

Steve had two meetings today near the National Gallery of Art, so after the meetings were finished, we walked to the museum. Didn’t have any particular objective in mind in going there. That is, there wasn’t a current exhibition that had particularly caught my eye.

If anything, I wanted to have another look at the Turner seascapes, which never tire the eye. And it occurred to me that I had never tried to find the few Winslow Homers that are at the National Museum. I don’t have a thing for Winslow Homer. But I realize as I age that I haven’t done as much to familiarize myself with American painters over the years as with European ones, so I wanted to fill in some of those gaps.

We found the Winslow Homers, and they were nice to look at. But what really caught my eye in the same series of rooms in which the Homers hang were Thomas Eakins’ paintings.

He hasn’t been on my radar screen, though now that I know a bit more about him, I realize he did the famous homoerotic “Swimming Hole” work that has appeared—I think—on some editions of Whitman’s poetry. In fact, Eakins and Whitman were friends, something I surely must have known already somewhere back in my mind, since I’ve read a number of Whitman biographies.

“Swimming Hole” isn’t in the National Gallery. But several other of his works there rang a bell for me—to be specific, a homoerotic bell. I’m not sure what it was in the sensibility and composition of these works that said “gay” to me, but something did, and I wasn’t surprised, as a result, to see in the Gallery bookstore a number of biographies of Eakins noting a debate about his sexual orientation. I bought one of these, William McFeely’s Portrait, and have begun reading it with great interest.

We did happen on the Judith Leyster exhibit, and I am glad to have seen it, though I can’t say I was bowled over by her work. It’s technically superb, but derivative in a way that most of the Dutch old masters seem to me—derivative, in particular, of Rembrandt and Vermeer, though Rembrandt was almost precisely Leyster’s contemporary and Vermeer somewhat younger than she was, so she can’t have been imitating their work.

That’s not precisely what I mean by “derivative.” What I mean is that when you’ve seen what Rembrandt and Vermeer excel at—the play of light and shadow in precisely drawn, evocative portraits of people posed in interior settings—any other painters of their time and place employing similar techniques seem less imposing. Worth looking at; technically astonishing. But not world-shaking in the way Vermeer and Rembrandt are.

Leyster reminded me, strangely enough, of some of her Spanish contemporaries—Velasquez in particular. I don’t believe there was any intersection of influence between her and Velasquez or other Spanish court painters of their period. But something about the way that they pose their subjects and then study the play of light on their countenances seems similar. Not surprising, I suppose, to find interplay of Spanish and Dutch cultural influences in this period, given the political ties between the two countries.

What will long remain in my mind, though, from this visit are Turner’s seascapes, with their luminous, gloriously transcendent blues. I will never grow weary of looking at them.

After our stroll through the American and British 19th-century galleries and the Leyster exhibition, Steve and I had coffee and gelato in the café below the museum. As we sat near the waterfall that cascades down outside a window there, it struck me how essential places like this are to the human spirit—how they ought to exist in every city.

Places to sit amidst and look at art in various media, to hear and watch the play of water and light, to have coffee and pastry, listen to music, talk, dream. Humane cities and towns build such spaces into their cultural landscapes as a matter of course, as essential needs of the human spirit.

I wish I could recommend the gelato that accompanied this restful, soul-building experience. It was horrific, though. Without my prompting him to comment on his raspberry-cherry choice, Steve exclaimed, after tasting a spoon, that it was totally artificial. As was my dulce de leche choice, with its cloying synthetic (and probably petroleum-based) rum flavoring.

Why, I have to wonder, do we Americans produce such monstrosities and then try bill them as “authentic” culinary compositions? Why try to pass off what is so screamingly fake as the real thing? Why do we not demand better—especially in our national capital, in a place people from many different cultures will be visiting in the expectation of having an iconic American experience?

I have to conclude that we don’t ask for better because we don’t know better. And because sham often attracts our attention more than the real thing does.

Washington, D.C. 23.10.09: Crabcakes and Ginkgos

In D.C. these days for a short trip. Steve has several business meetings and I’m tagging along. The first two days we were here were beautiful fall days, with crisp temperatures and lambent golden light unimpeded by humidity—a wonderful time of year to see the monumental architecture of the city, its wide, tree-lined avenues, and the brick townhouses of Georgetown. Since then, the weather has turned back to Indian summer and things are a bit overcast. Still, it’s nice to be here after the muggy heat of summer, which can make D.C. so intolerable, has broken. And such a treat to see the beautiful ginkgo trees that line so many D.C. streets as they turn bright yellow in the fall weather.

We’re staying at an unmemorable hotel in Arlington, the only place available after Steve had initially made arrangements in town and his first plans had to be changed due to schedule alterations in one of the foundations with which he’s meeting. We asked the first evening in town about nearby places to eat, and the lady at the hotel desk directed us to a French-Italian bistro behind the hotel.

But when we found it, we saw that it was beside a Vietnamese pho restaurant, and we went there instead, and were glad we did. The pho was wonderful, with its fragrant broth spiked with star anise and five spices. It came with a large plate of bean sprouts, lime, sliced jalapeños, and sprigs of basil. We couldn’t have had a supper more to our liking.

One of Steve’s meetings took us to Bethesda on our second day in the city. We drove up Wisconsin Ave. to get there, enjoying the sight of the shops of Georgetown and Tenley along the way, the sight of the national cathedral at the top of the hill as one climbs away from downtown. On our way back into the city, we stopped at the cathedral and visited its gift shop, where we found a new hedgehog for Mary.

Very nice woman staffing the shop that day. She told us she had worked there over 20 years, and is delighted with the change in the federal government in the last election. She also told us of a book recently translated from French to English, featuring a hedgehog—in its title, at least. I think by someone Burberry? Will have to look for it and tell Mary about it.

We also spent some time in a thrift shop on Wisconsin operated by some group called something like the Christ Child Society. Fascinating, if a bit pricey, junk, including lots of sets of old china, discarded oil paintings, many of them of the ilk that Landrum used to call “something one’s great-aunt might paint,” and lamps galore. The latter were being snapped up by a woman from Virginia, shopping with her reluctant and seemingly in-tow husband, who was apparently footing the bill for her purchases. As she said, they left the shop in darkness, since she was buying lamps that were in use to light the wares.

That evening, we once again ate near the hotel in Arlington, this time at a highly recommended New Mexican restaurant that was truly awful. Nary a green chile in sight. The food was mediocre Tex-Mex at best, and left my stomach roiling all night long. The manager-owner and waiter couldn’t have been nicer. But, clearly, this place has seen better days, or those who have reviewed it so highly don’t have a clue about authentic New Mexican cooking.

After that, a long, tedious day at the National Archives, made more tedious by the bewildering bureaucracy, which seems to have proliferated nonsensical regulations since our last visit. I had found references to a collection of documents about the history of the cemetery at Pittsburg Landing from 1866 to 1870 in a published history of the Shiloh Cemetery. Bill Russell and I think it’s possible—likely, even—that somewhere in the National Archives, there may be documents indicating how Dr. Wilson Bachelor got the appointment as physician in charge of the cemetery’s construction in 1867, and why he left in 1870. We also think those documents may contain some indication of his medical education and qualifications for the position.

I sent the document numbers for this collection to the National Archives in an email prior to our visit, and they confirmed that the documents were, indeed, in their D.C. holdings, and I could access them while in D.C. What they didn’t tell me—what I didn’t see anywhere at all on the very user-unfriendly, bureaucratically top-heavy website of the NARA—is that they now have a system whereby documents are pulled at only certain hours of the day.

We arrived right after the 11 A.M. pull and before the 1:30 one, which meant a long wait for our documents to begin arriving in the reading room after 2:30. And though some of the staff members who tried to help me fill out forms to request the material were well-meaning, not one was really knowledgeable about this collection, or even about how one goes about researching the early history of a national cemetery. All had that bureaucratic tendency to try to shuffle you to the next desk, to bark peremptory answers to questions that require thought and expertise if they're to be answered adequately.

It’s a shame that public research facilities like this are so often so badly inefficient and so hostile to the public they’re meant to serve. There is no overall guide anywhere—including in the NARA itself—to the extensive holdings of the National Archives. Finding materials is a hit-or-miss affair that requires the use of many tattered old typewritten indices that could easily be collated in one online collection, and updated and made comprehensive with new digitalized additions to these indices.

But creating government institutions that serve the public has hardly been the objective of recent federal administrations, has it? And when you visit a place like NARA now, you see the end result. Many of our central government institutions now function at a level about comparable to that of developing nations.

That evening, back to the pho restaurant, since we had enjoyed it so much two nights previous. This time, I tried their chicken option, knowing that pho is traditionally beef, but wondering if the chicken might be seasoned differently. It wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t so tasty as the thin slices of beef. It was dry, roasted chicken sliced and added to the broth of the beef pho—but wonderful at that. It’s a treat to have the kind of good, home-style Vietnamese food we remember from New Orleans and from our Vietnamese friends in Little Rock in the 1970s. It’s impossible to find at the Vietnamese restaurants in Little Rock now, which cut corners and cater to middle American tastes.

Before the pho supper, we browsed a bit in a little Italian deli near the hotel, and found it marvelous. Bought hefty chunks of good parmesan and pecorino at prices we don’t see at home, as well as two panfortes, one to eat now and one to give as a Christmas gift, a box of torrone, a bottle of San Giovesi red wine, and a sandwich of mixed Italian meats, cheeses, and salads. We split the latter as a midnight snack later in the evening, with a glass of the San Giovesi.

Yesterday, another meeting up in the Chevy Chase area, after which we drove to Annapolis for several hours in the Maryland Hall of Records. I had a specific record I wanted to find—rather, a series of specific records, with one citation of a particular document in the series. I was looking for any and all estate records of Thomas Hodgkin, who died in Charles or Prince George Co., Maryland, in 1756.

My previous visits to this research facility have been hair-tearing ones. This was slightly better, due to the kind help of a noted Maryland historical-genealogical researcher, who was staffing the research desk at the archives when we visited. He helped me a bit to steer my way through the maze of finding aids and bewildering designations by which Maryland files its documents. As he noted, one of the complexities of Maryland research in the colonial period is that documents were often filed simultaneously (or indiscriminately) at both the county and the state level.

He also pointed out the good work that he and others have done to survey all that seems to be known of some of these early colonial families. Even so, that “all” often overlooks key tidbits in the documents, if one can locate the original documents and read them carefully.

For instance, I found the inventory of Thomas Hodgkin’s estate compiled in Prince George Co. in 1756 signed by two of his children, both of whom noted beside their signature that they were children of the deceased. These two children—Philip and Lucy—appear in no published works about this family that I’ve seen. And this is an important lead, since the name of the son Philip seems to connect Thomas Hodgkin to the Philip Hoskins who died in Maryland in 1716, and who was part of the same kinship network to which Thomas Hodgkin’s family connects—the Brookes, Dents, Hansons, Contees, and so forth.

After several hours of work in the Hall of Records, made more exasperating by some of the officious and rude young men assisting the noted Maryland genealogist, we decided to drive across to the Eastern Shore to look for a restaurant we’d read about on Kent Island, at the Narrows. The restaurant is called the Narrows.

We got there around 3: 30 and were surprised to find we weren’t the only folks having a late lunch or early supper—a lupper?—beside Chesapeake Bay. The restaurant was wonderful—unpretentious but elegant, with an old-fashioned porch across the back where one can sit right on the water.

We had crabcakes with a side of garlic mashed potatoes and another of cole slaw, and found them wonderful—full of big pieces of what the restaurant advertises to be local blue crab meat, barely held together with mayonnaise, and lightly sautéed on both sides. It was a heavenly meal, with good bread and butter and real, well-brewed ice tea.

I don’t know if I’ve ever driven to the Maryland coast at this time of year. It was interesting to do so yesterday. I particularly enjoyed seeing how the state uses wild native plants, as one nears the coast, to line the roadside. I’m not sure of the identity of all of these plants, but I recognize them as native plants that often grow in old fields and that either flower or go to seed in the fall.

One is a bit like life-everlasting, with pearly, slightly translucent, nacreous small flowers in big bunches at the top of tall stems. The other is a native grass like broomsedge, which turns a handsome shade of gold-brown this time of year. I saw this planted along a dark brick wall lining the road as we got near the coast, a striking combination of colors.

Light always shifts slightly or dramatically as one nears a seacoast. The shift is less dramatic in the mid-Atlantic states, where colors are more muted everywhere than in more tropical areas, and where the interplay of light and dark is more temperate.

Still, it’s there, and it lures the eye. And the heart.

Washington, DC 2.10.90: Liberal Catholics and Demise of Ties That Bind

The Future of the American Church conference: a dark experience. I felt dark and full of bitter emotion much of the time. When I arrived at the meeting, I asked two women from Baltimore if the registration counter were different from the check-in counter (we were in line for the latter), and one said just a curt yes, no explanation; the other mumbled head down and no eye contact something like, “Back there,” and threw her hand about. This elicits all sorts of feelings in me about how the church talks the idea of community but serves it so badly in practice.

Then I met Christoph P., who was full of mock sympathy about Steve’s denial of tenure at Notre Dame Seminary, and who smiled with undisguised Schadenfreude at my discomfiture. What angers me most about such experiences is that I let myself bed treated this way—or that all my achievements, such as they are, don’t buy me freedom from this treatment. Ditto my encounter with Lou Mc., who was with former Glenmary Nick S. and his wife, something Thibault—but not introduced to me as such. And when I did not understand, all treated me as if I had transgressed some line evident to them—gay theologian who doesn’t understand normal relationships. I hate it—the homophobia at any of these liberal Catholic gatherings which profess solidarity with the marginal but never practice it when the marginal are gay; and the unjust and vicious hidden structures that permit people to do this to one another with abandon.

Consequently, I felt awful about my paper. Fell I’ll never go to one of these Catholic whingdings again. Feel if I’m to remain a theologian, “success” has to seek me out. I’m tired of batting my head against the wall.

The highlight was the day I spent at the Phillips Collection. What moved me greatly—and surprisingly—was the Rouault series, La cirque de l’étoile filante. I must have seen it in repros, but it struck me forcibly on this viewing. The sense of noble, tragic doom in the heads—people bypassed by modernity, judged superfluous, or what’s worse, unmodern. People who know that what they do is essential to a humane and joyous culture, but who are being deprived by that very culture of the right to do it. And so they dance and cavort in sad defiance, because they can do no other. I thought of Bakhtin’s carnival as I looked at this series. The most impressive head of all was Pierrot, who made me think of so many of those deemed Other.

Washington, D.C. and Richmond 3.1.92: Ethiopian Inculturation and the Moon Before the War

John Ash, “World’s End”:

“The issue is exile, how far we have come and will go/in a spirit of inquiry and despair . . . (in The Burnt Pages [NY: Random House, 1991], p. 90).

+ + + + +

Mr. M., who escorted us around Washington on New Year’s day, spoke incessantly, punctuating his sentences with dry laughs that were more like musical accompaniment to his words than like sounds of mirth. He spoke of Islam, which he called the “first reformed Christian church.” Of its manifold ways of praising God, of its saying that Allah is karum. He wailed these Arabic prayers in the close, ill-appointed Ethiopian restaurant, as young Ethiopians with appraising American eyes swung sidelong glances at him. Were they glances of disgust? Was he playing the buffoon for the white men? Were his tie and his formalities and his indefinable sense of command politically incorrect, proclamations of his 1950s confidence that a bit of jovial tinkering with the economies of developing nations would produce an economic “take-off”?

But did they know a better truth, these Ethiopian youths who have imbibed American culture as the sponge drinks water, who flaunt fashionable hostilities and send subtle waves of unwelcome to the white visitors in their restaurants?

Who, after all, knows any truth, any truth untarnished by human appropriation?

+ + + + +

Now back in Charlotte. The 2nd, Steve and I spent at the Phillips, then went to an 18th Street restaurant, Le Saigonnais. The owner-proprietor was excessively nice, giving us cha gio we had not ordered. His niceness made me uncomfortable—a fear I couldn’t respond sufficiently in kind, an abashed worry that he had some commercial end in his mind. Perhaps I felt as I did simply because there was something Hollywood about his bright smile and confident cadences. I prefer my courtesies less brittle, more in tones of blue and green, Oriental style, or Southern style.

Nice, on the other hand, to feel my relationship with Steve can be not off-putting, but recognizable and affirmable.

After lunch, some desultory shopping, then back to the hotel to get the car. We headed for Richmond, stopping at the Herb Cottage, a chi-chi gift shop near the National Cathedral, before we left D.C.

The Cathedral itself technically stunning, but somehow disturbingly aseptic. The bevy of what-you-call-them, docents?—the women who show you around—with absurd purple hats with crosses on top, were like movie extras, there for the effect. Some 15 of them, and only 3 or 4 tourists to see the church, so they sat talking in bright pseudo-English tones at the front of the church as we strolled around. Among them one or two men, very feminine, who seemed at home and much liked. How nice to spend one’s days removing dried leaves from poinsettias, needle-pointing altar appointments, and chatting about the stunning peasant earrings of one’s hostess of the previous evening. What a civilized way to live.

In the Cathedral, an altar to/for the poor, and photos of homeless people taken by a D.C. photographer, who befriends the homeless and asks to photograph them in ways that show their dignity. I was moved to tears by these. I wonder if Mr. Bush ever comes to see these pictures in the church of his own denomination?

In the Herb Cottage, four women of that instantly recognizable Anglican type—cropped hair, hearty voices, no make-up, sensible shoes and sensible stride. I bent down in the shop to pick up something and the seat of my pants ripped wildly and loudly. A French woman nearby must have heard, but showed no signs of having done so.

To Richmond, where Steve and I quarreled because I honked at a man who crossed in front of us—at night, against the light, insolently and on a main street. But was that (is it) why we quarreled? I was tired, and being homeward bound elicits all my deepest fears somehow—the horror of the ordinary.

So tired we went to bed at 9:30, got up at 6:30, spent the day in the State Library, and then drove home in the dark and rain.

Richmond unremarkable—a detestable Republican newspaper with a silly, venal editorial attributing the “peace” of El Salvador to Reagan and American arms sent to the country. But as the Southern Belle told Mr. Oscar Wilde when he admired the moon in Alabama, “Oh, Mr. Wilde, you should have seen it before the war!”

Washington, D.C. 1.1.92: New Year Frolic and Groaning Tables

More chronicle: yesterday, Steve and I went back to the National Archives. I discovered two ancestors on the mortality censuses—Samuel Kerr Green and James Birdwell. Steve found more on his Kuld family.

Then we returned to the hotel, got the car, and drove up to Adams Morgan at 18th and Columbia. We had lunch at a Salvadoran restaurant, El Tazumal—rather heavy, but interesting, food. I had a “tipico” plate—a pupusa, a tortilla, a pastelito (a surprise: I had thought it would be sweet, but it was a fried meat pastry, a sort of cigar-shaped empanada), fried yucca (potato-like, but less interesting and with a very slight bitter undertone), frijoles, a salad, and fried plantains—not the patacones of our Colombian friends nor the tostones of the Puerto Ricans, but fried whole and not crisp. Heavy, starchy, fatty—good in the mouth, troubling to my poor stomach.

Then we walked around in that interesting area of the city—a used bookstore run by a macho replica of the previous bookstore owner I mention supra; an antiques shop with a young Jewish owner who tried to badger and insult us into buying; and a wonderful new bookstore, Bick’s, with an extensive poetry section, a gay-lesbian section adjacent one on spirituality, next to theology and philosophy, and near a post-structuralism section. Spent over $100 on books about Bakhtin and by G. Bachelard.

Afterwards, we returned and I so tired I slept awhile, then to dinner at a Touch of Lemon Grass on 18th—bun bo (chicken marinated and grilled, over rice noodles, with cilantro and nuoc mam), and a fried noodle dish with broccoli, bean sprouts, onion, carrots, and shrimp, chicken, and beef. Glorious.

Then to an evening of frolicking at Tracks, a huge gay disco in the southeast sector but near the capitol. As always, I was excessively nervous. My nervousness produces paranoia, so I was afraid even to get out of the car when we arrived, magnifying the threat of the neighborhood (which is marginal) and the age difference between us and the young glitterati arriving at the disco.

Consequently, up to midnight, we stood in the wings watching others dance, and I waiting and not having courage to enter the dance floor. At midnight, everyone had glasses of free, abominable champagne, and toasted. Steve went to get another glass and I held onto mine, and a kind man about my age walked by and clinked glasses with me, looking me in the eye. A turning point: I threw caution to the winds and began the new year dancing.

There’s a primeval thing that makes us greet the new year with merriment—that barely sensed relief that we have, despite all, lived on; the hope that springs eternal; the elation that sun does not die at the solstice. The Latinos around us ululated in Arabic fashion and kissed one another passionately as the clock struck the new year—and then danced with abandon.

I felt all these primeval impulses, even knotted in my Anglo knots, and determined that this year will be one of hope for me. At the same time, I felt a deep sadness welling up, that Simpson did not live to see this new year in. In the midst of life, we are in death: life is nothing but dying, rising, dying, rising. Even as we live, we die, and yet each death brings new life in some way. (Do I really want to say—and do I really believe—this?)

Anyway, wonderful to dance and cavort and see the beautiful beings all around. And to celebrate being gay in a healthy, open, unapologetic way. And wonderful to see the way straight couples, single people accompanied by no one, transvestites—anyone, everyone—danced together amidst gay ones without interference or rejection of anyone.

Then, today, we breakfasted with Stanislaw C.’s Ethiopian friend Abate M., a charming man of 60 who took us to an Ethiopian dinner at Sheba Café—injeera, curried chicken, fried fish, curried peas, collards, cabbage, salad, and bulghur. We ate with our fingers and talked and talked, drank Ethiopian mead, and then Abate M. drove us around the city.

It was charming to see the Lincoln Memorial and the Einstein statue and the National Cathedral at night, in the starkness of winter. Other hearty souls were about, and one heard snatches of conversation much more interesting than one hears in the day, among tourists.

The Vietnam memorial was an experience—my first time to see it. Of course, reading had prepared me, so the actual experience was something of a let-down. Even so—so many lives, and think what remains. And not a single statement of repentance, or a vow not to let this happen again . . . .

Washington, D.C. 30.12.01: Urban Decay and Hope Amidst the Ruins

I feel I always write tripe when I travel. Partly the result of never sitting down to write until I’m too exhausted to think. Also because I fall into chronicle format.

To wit: today we spent most all day in the National Archives. Steve had great success doing research: found the ship’s list of his immigrant ancestor Anton Kuld. I was happy to be able to help him. I had less success myself—mainly because I prepared too little for this visit.

After that, we returned to our hotel. We read last night in a local paper that the Radisson at Rhode Island on McPherson Square has a $59/night special for the holidays, so we moved to that hotel, as that is the same price we were paying at our sleazy hotel in Chinatown.

Then we went to Dupont Circle, a few blocks away, and did some desultory book shopping, and afterwards walked up 18th St., where we had noticed (in the phonebook) there are many restaurants. We ate at a Malay restaurant partly because it looked good (and was), and partly because, not knowing the neighborhood and it growing dark, we became a little apprehensive about walking around without any clear destination.

Always in the back of my mind is the alarming homicide rate of the city. Men panhandling everywhere, some minatory as they ask for money. Across from where we ate was a liquor store lot full of men waiting, lounging, talking. More and more our cities are like some third-world country inhabited by a few epicene wealthy, their camp followers, and the destitute. We camp followers look out the cozy windows of our cozy restaurants at the strange world of the poor—as if we’re watching reels of a slow-motion revolutionary documentary.

Steve said during dinner that’s it’s a shame our cities are decaying. I’m not so sure. For one thing, there are also signs of vitality amidst the decay—the confluence of ethnic groups and the gay community, for instance, new artistic movements, a healthy sensuality expressed in concern for food and for the aesthetic.

Maybe urban vitality has to find its away around heterosexist males and their death grip on everything. “Real men” continue to feel nothing. They relegate feeling to women or “inferior” races or children. Consequently, they don’t take in much happening around them. The senses themselves make us receptors, and thus feminine, in the minds of “real men.” Men control, and so bypass and choke feeling.

I see hope that a patriarchal society is gradually, slowly disintegrating, and the new visibility of gay people speaks to me of this hope. We drove after supper to 18th and Columbia, where all sorts of new restaurants and boutiques have sprung up, and it all seemed not tawdry or self-indulgent, but alive in an interesting and promising way.

Washington, D.C. 29.12.91: Country Churches and Urban Decay

Writing this in D.C. On Friday, Steve and I drove to Raleigh and spent a night with his cousins. Then on Saturday we drove to the Eastern Shore of Virginia and spent the night at Nassawadox. Drove today to D.C.

The weather foul—i.e., drizzly, or as they say in Newfoundland, mizzling. Foul i.e. for driving, but oddly beautiful otherwise. It’s warm—up near 60◦—and everything on the Eastern Shore was fog-enshrouded.

When we arrived last p.m., it was already turning dark at 4 P.M. But we had time to see Christ Church Episcopal church in Eastville, an 1832 (?) church of the original Hungars Parish. Cemetery full of Nottinghams. The Eastville courthouse dates from 1731 (?), and court has been held in the county from the 1670s, I believe. All is built around a commons—old, small, red-brick buildings with nice glass windows (in churches as well) and a small green in the middle.

After Eastville, we drove down the Wilsonia Neck road, where the Monks and Nottinghams lived, south of the road, between Hungars and Deep Creek. Saw the little 17th-century house called Pear Valley that appears in Whitelaw’s book on the Eastern Shore. Several of the large houses nearby—including, apparently, the one owning the P.V. cottage—are for sale.

In the morning, we returned, going via the older Hungars Parish church north of Eastville, which is strange to see. An Episcopal church out in the country, fields and pine trees all around, pick-up trucks in the churchyard—for all the world, the same feel as a Baptist church in north Louisiana.

I wanted to putter about in the cemetery, but church was going on and I felt abashed to be seen tripping and tipping over Wilkins and Mapp graves, as service sent on. The church itself as plain as any evangelical one, telling a lot about the variety of plain, non-sacramental Anglicanism my forefathers brought to Virginia. Of whitewashed brick, square, plain glass windows. I felt very keenly at home, especially in the silence of the surrounding fields, broken only by a whush of birds in the grass verges now and then. Very, very like the area of Cashie Neck where Nottingham Monk settled. . . .

D.C. is a shambles—homeless people everywhere, 480+ people murdered this year, urban decay that boggles the mind. Yet in it all, I sense hope in the open and alive presence of gay people around Dupont Circle, in the movement away from the dead and forward to the new and living in reappraisal of gender roles, increasing frankness re: the monstrous stupidity of the Reagan era, multiculturalism, artistic revisioning. I’m babbling—tired and feeling a bit hopeless myself.

Washington, D.C. 23.7.93: Angelic Messages and Green Shutters

At Barnes Exhibit, National Gallery of Art: Van Gogh, “Joseph Etienne Roulin, 1889,” is van Gogh himself—red eyes staring out frankly, the unappreciated artist, with a stylized iconographic background moving from yellow-green to yellow, with flowers and flourishes—the angelic message is the artist’s reward.

Picasso, “Acrobat and Young Harlequins” (1905): and so another harlequin to add to my imaginative collection of that fascinating image . . . .

The Matisses: the great surprise. Color used to idealize rooms “decorated” as an ideal statement of how life should be—people bleeding green light, decked in garish colors no one can even possibly imagine, sitting in rooms suffused by lavender light through green shutters.

Washington, D.C. 20.7.93: Solidarity and Death Carts

We’re now en route to D.C. with Steve’s aunts and cousin, all Benedictine nuns. I’ve rarely had such a sense of expectancy on a trip, as if the trip itself confirms that I’m now cresting a hill, and see a new inviting terrain below. It has been a hard uphill battle. I’ve struggled mightily, and I’m scarred, winded, and weary. But I feel there’s something new for me as I crest the hill.

21.7.93

At Holocaust Museum: we have to tell our stories. Every device possible will be used to keep us from doing so, from believing we have a story, from thinking it important.

The unwillingness of other nations, including those who purported to denounce the Holocaust, to take in Jewish refugees: when one is classified in a negative social category, stigmatized, even one’s “supporters” assume one is at least partially guilty. Nothing short of solidarity suffices. Solidarity is not what one gets when one gets “objective” “sympathetic” analysis and “support” premised on these.

Techniques of bullying used: silencing, shaming, suppressing questions, managing information. All this characterized my experience at Belmont Abbey College.

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On Touching a Theresienstadt Death Cart

Touch is always the last thing to go.

Sight fails, ears stop.
Still, we reach out to hold:
The final semaphore of love.

We kiss the dying one
As eyes shut,
Heart stops its beat,
And breath flies forth.

Our lips, our fingers know.


They grasp the lover's soul
Until they loose their grip
And break the bond.

Washington, D.C. 20.2.1993: Neocon Boors, Silent Chapels

Steve gone, and I alone in the hotel room. He’s at an interview. . . .

I made a point today of going to the Georgetown campus chapel and praying as devoutly as I could for a sign to light my way, for help, for wisdom to discern, for new doors to open. Somehow I thought as I prayed of some utopian “high” place—a place ringed by hills, with meadows and orchards and gray stone buildings, a place to write. Fantasy, I fear—a sheer fantasy. But some place I could wish to find, to settle in with my books and plans to write, before my life is over. . . .

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Just returned from supper. Seated behind me an obnoxious Baltimore family. Pater familias told a joke re: how a class in Virginia was asked recently who said, “Four score and seven years ago.” The only student to raise her hand was a Japanese exchange student, who said Lincoln, then gave the date. Teacher scolded the class and turned to the blackboard, and a boy yells, “F—k the Japs.” Teacher turns to ask, “Who said that?” Boy yells, Harry S. Truman, 1945.”

A conversation ensued re: how we had to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then it gets to the recent convention of conservatives in D.C. The family was apparently there. Mater familias quotes with approval Oliver North, who said we must take this country back from the homoerotic ethic and return it to its Judaeo-Christian ethical roots.

Bombing the Japs? Insulting gays with impunity—since this loud conversation took place in a restaurant in a mixed neighborhood, where the Blade is available in the restaurant lobby? These boors, and their relatives across the land, who are legion, represent the Judaeo-Christian ethic? They proceeded to laugh re: how the first child can come anytime, the rest nine months at a time, so it’s not transgression of sexual norms in general that disturbs them.

Washington, D.C. 18-19.2.1993: Drowning Dreams and Watching Angels

At the Hirshorn Museum, after a morning in the National Archives, and very weary, dissociated.

All night, I dreamt I was writing some kind of “breakthrough” letter to the college, saying now is a time of national debate, and also of crisis for the college.

For both reasons, discussion of the college’s identity seems imperative. Yet it’s being blocked, often by demonizing of the new, and by sheer refusal to discuss, as we manage conflict.

This is unjust. A college is a community—bound together, etymologically—and requires free shared discourse to be what it purports to be. Moreover, refusal to discuss covertly privileges a few, and allows power centers to manipulate, rather than invite discussion.

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At National Gallery of Art. Very moved by a series of allegorical paintings by Thomas Cole, 1842, on the four phases of life. In each, a guardian angel—in childhood, with the child; in youth, on the shore as the youth’s boat pushes off on the river of life; in midlife, watching solicitously from the clouds as the boat shoots dark rapids to a dark ocean; in old age, rejoining the boat as it enters the ocean.

There’s a type of thought about pictography. Not a new notion, I know—evident to anyone who looks at any primitive” art, that we depict in order to think. And yet think very differently from anything commonly called rationality now.

This is thought of the dark, moist, fertile self below rationality. Because it’s powerful thought, we need to suppress art in our “civilizations” of technocratic managerialism.

I don’t know how to give myself to the thought of the dark, camera oscura, pictographic self. It kills me to do so. I do so only in painful and voluptuous dreams in which any sense of self I have is so painfully fragmented and shattered, that it’s almost a violent wrenching of my body—literally so, some days—to awake. I drown in dreams, in a stream that seeps simultaneously into every crack and crevice of my being, showing me mad illuminations of the many facets of my experience that I simply cannot tolerate, or seem to connect in daytime without actually going mad.