The Sheila Variations

Drowning in green

The wind whipped around my room like a wild beast, rattling the walls, the house literally shaking. I would wake up to find my heavy wooden porch furniture upended by the gales. I slept better this past month than I have in eons. I slept deeply and thoroughly and woke up refreshed. I loved my room, especially on those windy crazy nights. Hope slept curled up on my knees. She was totally on my schedule. She is more like a dog. She is up when I am up, she goes to sleep when I go to sleep. Sometimes a particularly heavy blast of wind would bombard the house, and I'd look down the bed at her, and she'd be staring at me. Like: "I am looking to YOU to interpret for me what the hell that noise just was."

More pictures to come. It'll take time to upload them.

My little island house

I miss it already.

Snapshots

-- I got sucked into The Adventures of Mark Twain almost against my will. It has a ham-hocked script that rushes through the events of Twain's life (his wife, "You are an eternal boy ... why don't you write about boyhood?", etc.) - but Fredric March is a favorite of mine, and I had never seen it, and I found myself blubbering like a MANIAC at the end when he was honored at Oxford. March's face! Yes, uncanny resemblance to Twain, but it was the look in his eyes that really put me over the damn edge. Deep true acting can forgive even the most obvious of scripts.

-- It was so brutally cold yesterday that my windshield wiper fluid froze into little bursting stars the second it hit the windshield. Today, the ocean around the jetties is frozen. Solid ice.

-- We had two days of massive wind, roaring and throttling the house like a wild animal. It was more like a big presence, taking deep breaths, sudden pauses, and then roaring forward again. The wind felt TALL. It was wide, yes, but it was tall, too.

-- Today not so windy, but I am going to go exploring along the jetties, so I can at least witness a partly frozen ocean.

-- Watched Place in the Sun early in my time out here - of course I've seen it before - but the character of George got me to thinking about the Yo-Yo from last year. He is, essentially, empty, something broke a long time ago, and so he looks to others to fill him up. With opinions, feelings, desires, whatever - with life. He will be brutal about this, and unthinking, because it doesn't come from a place of consciousness. It comes from a place of need. He will get this or that need fulfilled, but if someone gets too close, too intimate, then that person must be discarded, because on closer inspection what seemed to be openness and beauty and connection will be revealed as yawning nothingness. What he has been presenting to the woman is a mirror, not a self. He looks to others on how to behave, how to be. And so he knows that for him, the jig will always be up. He will always have to move on. Cutting his losses. I had never quite put it into the context of Montgomery Clift in Place in the Sun before, that terrifying mix of sincerity and greed. If you knew one side, you would swear that was all there is. But just ask Shelley Winters about that other side. Oh, but you can't, can you? Girl is at the bottom of the damn lake. People like that always leave casualties, whether actually dead or no. It is an imperative.

-- Went up to the little Block Island airport last night as the sun was setting and the moon was rising (at the same time). It was honestly too cold to be outside for long, but the scene - still and expectant - in the long long shadows of that time of day - was truly something else. The little planes sitting on the empty fields, the moon was full (or almost) and picking up the light of the setting sun, and nobody was around. The airport is near my house so I do see the planes lining up for landings, and it's such an isolated windy spot that sunrise or sunset is definitely the time to visit.

-- The gas station is here has very odd and specific and limited hours. I needed to get gas today and thought to myself, "I should call the gas station and see what their hours are ..." That night, I walked to the only restaurant open on the island, a couple of doors up from my place, on a dark country street, to get some takeout. I sat there, waiting, and it was so cold out, freezing really, it took me 20 minutes to warm up. And sitting right next to me, waiting for her food, was the woman who works at the gas station. So I asked her what the hours were, she told me, and our nights moved on. Just thought that was kind of funny and indicative of what happens when you live an island whose population is so small during the winter.

-- Oh, North Light, how will I live without you?

On the intense periphery

I started to read Mark Helprin's masterpiece Winter's Tale, and had to put it down, since my ability to take in fiction had already started to wane. However, there has been a bit of a seachange lately, and I happened to bring it out onto the island with me, perhaps thinking that I might pick it up, as outlandish as that would be, judging from where I have been, reading-wise. This book comes highly recommended by two of the best readers I know - Ted and Mitchell - both of whom are readers I will take any recommendation from. I don't take recommendations from just anyone. Although it had been about two years since I read the first two (and a half) chapters of Winters Tale, the images stuck with me. It is the sort of book where you are presented with things you have never seen before. Never even thought of before. It skirts the edge of reality, and then goes right to the hot core of it. I remembered the opening, with the sentient white horse escaping from his stable in Brooklyn. I remembered that there was a whirling impenetrable white cloud-wall circling New York City, and no one quite understood what it was, but they knew it was mysterous and important. I remembered the baby being put in the miniature boat and being set adrift. I remembered the wild "Baymen from Bayonne", who lived across the Hudson, right up at the edge of the cloud wall, separate from civilization, feared, and yet tribal towards their own. I remembered the big meeting of the thieves in an underground water tunnel. The book is dense and magnificent. It has an inevitable rhythm. It was all too much for me to take in back in 2008.

And now I am reading it, and - along with its deep and powerful writing, and the scope of its imagination - it is, to my mind, one of the best books of New York ever written. It IS New York. It was written before 9/11, but it has in it some of the feelings of vulnerability that EB White's essay on New York has, a sense that what has been created is open to attack, and yet magnificent at its cruel hot center. I am ready to leave my island haunt now, and I think it is quite perfect that I am now deep in the throes of a book which is an extended poem to New York City, a place which had become a bit unbearable to me over the last year, and now unfurls again before me, filled with possibility. Possibility of joy, sure, but possibility of heartbreak too. As always.

The writing is almost too much to grasp, and sometimes I have to sit back after a paragraph or two, to process. To digest.

It has also been a perfect thing to go to after completing the giant book Titan, about the life of John Rockefeller, Sr. Winter's Tale takes place in his era, the deep anxiety and rapaciousness of the gilded age, the subtextual fears that come about as a century changes from one to the next, technology versus man .... technology is awe-inspiring and helped make New York ... but there are questions and worries inherent in the grasping nature of it.

I am deep into it now. No fear of putting it down now. My reading muscle is back in order.

It's a poem to Manhattan, to history, but it is also a story of an orphan named Peter Lake, and Pearly Soames, the terrifying leader of a gang called the Short Tails, and a rich young girl dying of consumption named Beverly, and a magnificent white horse who stays by Peter Lake's side.

Some of the electrifying passages about the city, my dear home:

_______________________

A great city is nothing more than a portrait of itself, and yet when all is said and done, its arsenals of scenes and images are part of a deeply moving plan. As a book in which to read this plan, New York is unsurpassed. For the whole world has poured its heart into the city by the Palisades, and made it far better than it ever had any right to be.

__________

And he was seldom out of sight of the new bridges, which had married beautiful womanly Brooklyn to her rich uncle, Manhattan; had put the city's hand out to the country; and were the end of the past because they spanned not only distance and deep water but dreams and time.

___________________________

It was necessary for him to be in Manhattan because he was a burglar, and for a burglar to work anyplace else was a shattering admission of mediocrity.

__________________

Of course, it's bad to be a criminal. Everyone knows that, and can swear that it's true. Criminals mess up the world. But they are, as well, retainers of fluidity. In fact, one might make the case that New York would not have shone without its legions of contrary devils polishing the lights of goodness with their inexplicable opposition and resistance. It might even be said that criminals are a necessary component of the balanced equation which steadily and beautifully east up all the time that is thrown upon its steely back. They are the sugar and alcohol of a city, a red flash in the mosaic, lighning on a hot night.

____________

Though he cared not at all for the mechanisms of equilibrium, if he had stopped, the life of the city wuold have fallen apart.

_______________

But when the water was flowing, and could be released at any time whatsoever from the Jerome Park Storage Reservoir to charge through the tunnels faster than a horse could run, then it was considerably worse, and a great honor for the deceased to have two Short Tails pull his corpse through the tunnel, hurriedly slam it into a crypt while they listened breathlessly for the rush of approaching water, and then lope prone through the tubs of green moss, mad for breaking into the air, speeding along like wild jittery whipcords.

_________

Much has been written and said about Castle Garden, entryway for immigrants, inlet to a new life, bursting star. But seldom have those beyond its solemn silent spaces been ready to confess that once, in a different time, it loomed for them or for their parents like the gates of St. Peter. Its servants in deep ornante dress turned away those who were unsound and unfit, in a process of judgment that was both the work of bureaucrats and a dream. Many had crossed the ocean seeking light, and were suddenly hurled backward, tumbling through white waves and green oceans, until the light receded into the point of a star in total darkness.

_______________________

They knew that to survive in Manhattan he would have to know something of bitterness before he arrived.

______________________

Manhattan, a high narrow kingdom as hopeful as any that ever was, burst upon him full force, a great and imperfect steel-tressed palace of a hundred million chambers, many-tiered gardens, pools, passages, and ramparts above its rivers. Built upon an island from which bridges stretched to other islands and to the mainland, the palace of a thousand tall towers was undefended. It took in nearly all who wished to enter, being so much larger than anything else that it could not ever be conquered but only visited by force. Newcomers, invaders, and the inhabitants themselves were so confused by its multiplicity, variety, vanity, size, brutality and grace, that they lost sight of what it was. It was, for sure, one simple structure, busily divided, lovely and pleasing, an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built.

_________

sails that filled the ends of streets with billows of white or sharp angular planes, and then collapsed into the bordering buildings or made of themselves a guillotine

_______________

The city was like war - battles raged all around, and desperate men were on the street in crawling legions. He had heard the Baymen tell of war, but they had never said it could be harnessed, its head held down, and made to run in place. On several score thousand miles of streets were many cataclysmic armies interacting without formation - 10,000 prostitutes on Broadway alone; half a million abandoned children; half a million of the lame and blind; scores of thousands of active criminals locked in perpetual combat with as many police; and the vast number of good citizens, who in their normal lives were as fierce and rapacious as other cities' wild dogs.

______________________

The entire city was a far more complicated wheel of fortune than had ever been devised. It was a close model of the absolute processes of fate, as the innocent and the gulity alike were tumbled in its vast overstuffed drum, pushed along through trap-laden mazes, caught dying in airless cellars, or elevated to platforms of royal view.

________________________

When Peter Lake danced by the night fountain in the dark green square and was given coins for his dancing, he became a thief. Though it would take a long time for him to understand the principle, it was that to be paid for one's joy is to steal.

________________________________

But here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge - dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with him. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality went around in a twisting ring. The irredeemable would be redeemed, and there was a balance for everything. There had to be. In the movement of the machines, he saw beyond everything he had yet known. Like waves, wind, and water, they moved. They were, in themselves, power and elation.

___________________

"A bridge," he proclaimed, "is a very special thing. Haven't you seen how delicate they are in relation to their size? They soar like birds; they extend and embody our finest efforts; and they utilize the curve of heaven. When a catenary of steel a mile long is hung in the clear over a river, believe me, God knows. Being a churchman, I would go as far as to say that the catenary, this marvelous graceful thing, this joy of physics, this perfect balance, between rebellion and obedience, is God's own signature one earth. I think it pleases Him to see them raised. I think that is why the city is so rich in assets. The whole island, you see, is becoming a cathedral."

_________

It was a vast underground cave between the Bowery and Rochambeau. The walls of stone were gray and white throughout half a dozen grand galleries. Arches like those of a Roman aqueduct touched to floor and then bounced away. At seven-thirty on a Friday night, no less than five thousand people dined within this subterranean oyster bin. Four hundred oyster boys labored and cried as if they were edging a great ship into port, or rolling Napoleon's cannon through Russia. Candles, gas lanterns, and, here and there, clear electric lights illuminated paths between rumbling little fires. The background noise was not unlike the famous record that Thomas Alva Edison had made of Niagara Falls, and the trajectories of the flying oyster shells reminded some old veterans of the night air above Vicksburg.

_________________________________

For twenty years, he had been on the streets of that city, and he loved it. He was a guide, an intimate. And yet, from a distance, catching the sun in the clear, it looked like nothing he had ever known. Following its brown spine as far as his eye could see, he lifted his head to pass over the spires of tall buildings. A hundred plumes of smoke and steam curled about this sleeping thing, which would not have surprised him had it immediately come alive. Its growing animation was catapulted across the ice and though it was sleeping in dark chains, he had no doubt that someday it would rise and brighten, like a whale bursting from the sea into light and air.
___________

silvered canyons and warm red brick, the lisp of a huge broken clock, trees like bells shuddering sound in green, silent streets as dark and elegant as mirrors in dim light

___________________

Peter Lake knew from this that the city would take care, for it was a magical gate through which those who entered passed in innocent longing, taking every hope, showing touching courage -- and for good reason. The city wuld take care. There was no choice but to trust the architect's dream that was spread before him as compact as an engine, solid and sure, shimmering over the glinting ice.

_______________________________

"Drive hard, Peter Lake, drive hard," said Beverly, holding the child.

He had never had a family. But there he was, suddenly, almost a husband and father. Small scenes can be so beautiful that they change a man forever. He would never forget that noontime on a lake of ice, nor would he ever forget her words.

"Drive hard," she had said. He would. Things were different. All he wanted now was love.

_________________________________

This was because Isaac Penn was the man behind the city's mirror. He had almost supreme power over the city's conception of itself, and, by small adjustments, could hypnotize and entrance it. If he wished, he wuold have it flail its limbs in an alarming fit. He could scare it to death, empty its streets, or make it want to hide in a hole. Because Isaac Penn could move New York in such a way that its strength would shame the giants of the earth, or lift the city's hand to have it flick the dust from a baby's eye, Peter Lake expected one of those meetings where he was made to feel like an aspiring young gnat.

___________

"Orphans don't have vanity. I'm not sure why, but one needs parents to be vain."

___________

"There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery. We try to bring it about without knowing exactly what it is, and only touch upon it. No matter, for all the flames and sparks of justice throughout all time reach to invigorate unseen epochs - like engines whose power glides on hidden lines to upwell against the dark in distant cities unaware."

___________________________

Distance and darkness converted an ebullient scene full of motion and glare into something sad and whole, of another time. He saw that Beverly had taken it and clasped it to her, as if it were a jewel in its intricate foil. She had by distance converted it into a painting, or an accidental photograph, that touched her to the quick. She had remained outside because she had never had the opportunity for society, and she was afraid. Innocent things, such as a dance in a tavern, terrified her ...

There was, truly, nothing to fear. But she did fear, and it had brought her outside, to a position in which she could embrace the scene and know its spirit. This was not unlike Peter Lake's far views of the city, from which he always learned a great deal more than he would have from within. No, he wouldn't try to coax her in -- even though she might be ordered there. He would not bring her in, he would join her on the intense periphery.

Thomas Hardy's awesomeness

A poor unsuspecting clergyman (a Dr. Grosart) wrote to Thomas Hardy and asked his opinion on how the horrors of life could be reconciled with God's goodness. He obviously expected a sympathetic ear, or at least a concession to his point of view that these things COULD be reconciled. Hardy replied, in the chilly third person:

Mr. Hardy regrets that he is unable to offer any hypothesis which would reconcile the existence of such evils as Dr. Grosart describes with the idea of omnipotent goodness. Perhaps Dr. Grosart might be helped to a provisional view of the universe by the recently published Life of Darwin and the works of Herbert Spencer and other agnostics.

Ahhhh. It satisfies me more with each and every reading.

My little house: a small tour

It is so cozy and warm. There is a front porch with a nice rocking swing. There is a front room with a big wide table, perfect for spreading out my writing on. Also perfect for my laptop. The afternoon sun coming through the slats in the blinds makes this front room a noir heaven. There is another room on the eastern side, pale blue walls - with a "kitchen nook", a counter and stools - this counter has become a repository for ... everything random. Beach glass. Change. Notebooks. The kitchen is big and beautiful, with a small window looking out over a field and a hill with a little house on top of the hill. The sun sets behind there, spectacularly. There is a steep staircase going upstairs. Three bedrooms. My room is long and narrow, with a sort of dormer window cut-out at one end, where the big bed goes. The walls are a pale green. I feel luxurious and safe in that room. I wake up when it is dark, but my favorite time up there is after my afternoon bath - when the light has started to fade. I love my room. There is a "den" downstairs with a huge wraparound leather couch that takes up all available space and is quite ridiculous and ugly. However, there is one corner where I sit in the mornings - and Hope curls up next to me, and then I don't mind that it is leather. It is "my spot". That room is where the TV is. I like it best in there on rainy freezing mornings. I start to get restless in there after a time - there's no direct sunlight - and so you feel like you're in a little isolated pod at times, and you must LEAVE it to go join the world.

There are nooks and crannies through this house that I have grown to love. I love the upstairs bathroom, but I can't stand the lighting in there. I have a candle for when I take my baths, because the lights just grate. I love the watercolors on the wall, lighthouses and beach scenes. I love my porch so much. I think it will be the porch that I really miss.

I'll post some pictures of all of this when I get home, but suffice it to say, this has been a good house for me. I am now thinking of this past month as a kind of rest cure. That's really what's been going on. I am glad I decided to take it.

"This is what you shall do"

Walt Whitman, in his preface to Leaves of Grass:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with th emothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

"My Business is Circumference"

Letter from Emily Dickinson to her editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, July, 1862. The letter is signed "Your Scholar":

Will you tell me my fault, frankly, as to yourself, for I had rather wince, than die. Men do not call the surgeon, to commend—the Bone, but to set it, Sir, and fracture within, is more critical. And for this, Preceptor, I shall bring you—Obedience—the Blossom from my Garden, and every gratitude I know. Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that—My Business is Circumference—An ignorance, not of Customs, but if caught with the Dawn—or the Sunset see me—Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty, Sir, if you please, it afflicts me, and I thought that instruction would take it away.

Plagiarism

So I knew that the image of the wind blowing back the waves' foam like horses' manes was taken from somewhere - but it was such an a propos image - there really is no other way to say it or describe it - that I went with it anyway. Of course then I had to go track it down which was not hard since I've been on a TS Eliot kick. From "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock":

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

Perfection! And it got me to thinking about literature and narrative - and what comes first? If you read widely and deeply, your brain is full of references, fragments, contexts, interpretations - handed down from others. Part of this is awesome, part of it is not - especially if you are trying to create something yourself (there is a reason why people like William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane said that their main struggle as artists were to AVOID the influence of TS Eliot, no easy task) ... but it is an interesting thing in life, and one that gives me a lot of pleasure, and makes me happy and grateful that I am an educated person. Educated in the humanities, yes, so I have all this stuff to call upon in my brain - but also self-educated, self-taught, following my own whims .... There are times when I need to track the images down. One must not steal. But then something comes along - like wind being blown backward off the waves - and you realize that someone has already nailed it down, and so perfectly, that there is nothing to do but parrot them, because it feels like they said it for you. They handed you the image, knowing that you have noticed such things too, and said, "Here. Isn't this just what it is like?"

"A thousand tons of coal..."

Excerpted from The Block Island Times, their fantastic "this week in history" section, by Robert Downie:

This week in history, January 28, 1923, Block Islanders were busy mining the coal that would heat their stoves and cook their meals. As the Newport Mercury reported the story soon after:

It is estimated that 2,200 tons of coal have been mined from the salt water, and off the beach, at the barge wreck off the West Side during the past week. There is still a thousand tons gradually washing up. From all reports this coal is giving excellent results in both ranges and heaters.

The wreck was the 265-foot vessel Penn - a barge with sails set fore- and -aft in a schooner rig - that came ashore on the Southwest Point. This type of vessel was the trailer truck of their day, but they were not self-sufficient, the sails only useful when going downwind.

At any given instant in the days of sail, several ships would usually be visible meandering along the horizon. The sailing barges were recognizable by the steam tug up ahead, towing one or two of the bulky vessels at a time.

In big storms, the coal from ship wrecks still washes up on beaches from Black Rock to Southwest Point, although nowadays, several decades after the last of the big wrecks, you'll most likely walk away with just a few pocketfuls.

Wind farms, deer hunting, and ghosts: this week on Block Island

Flipping through the weekly paper. Gives a great sense of the everyday life out here. My sister Jean taught out here for a year, and much of this echoes her stories (for example: ghosts do not fly over the water, a common bit of Block Island lore). Some headlines:

-- Pursuing programs for Block Island school's non-athletes - there was a big meeting about it last week, parents, teachers, administrators - and it sounds rather contentious.

-- Trade trailer storage now allowed on Island (this is a big deal for independent contractors who want to keep their trailers in their yards in between jobs and ferry rides)

-- Fuel leak postpones Old Harbor project. Sam Bird, the project's Clerk-of-the-works, said, "It means you will have to live with the old dock for one more season."

-- There is a cartoon showing a man and a woman sitting at a bar. The woman asks the man, "So ... what do you people do out here all winter long?" The man replies, "Before or after Groundhog Day?"

-- There is a section for Letters to the Editor and they all are about the proposal for a wind farm out here (a hot topic - the electric bills out here are astronomical, I have heard from Jean they are among the highest in the United States) - so renewable energy, solar power, and wind farms are big big issues out here, and all you have to do is stand still in the grocery store for 30 seconds and you'll hear people talking about it.

-- There is a weekly column by Martha Ball called "Island Notes". This week's column is about winter on the island as well as the seals (which I saw this past weekend, so I feel very in the loop):

There is damp in the forecast, the cutting wet that can make a day of moderate temperature feel more frigid than one of deep but sunny cold ... The beach has a cyclical life, its sandy covering usually beginning to rebuild as soon as it is torn away. January is often a good month, healed from the storms of the fall, before those of the early spring that leave visitors who come too soon aghast, wondering whatever happened to the dream they have held since the previous summer, sustaining them through the cold. January, though, is often a gentle month; some years it offers a smooth strand running from The Surf to Clay Head.

This is not one of those years. Raging seas and wind driven, coursing rain have left the shore battered; the north end of the crescent that faces the sea is the harsh winter beach, not the inviting summer shore. It is blanketed with mounds of stones, not the foot size rocks that have some stability but the smaller ones that shift under even the sturdiest soles. At high tide, it is not an inviting space, that last stretch, between the Mansion access and Jerry's Point where the boulders begin, is narrow and rough ...

There is sun on the beach and out on the water, sun from the south reaching past Jerry's Point in a way that a setting sun will not in summer. The tide is very high, only the top of the higher boulder showing through the water and atop the nearest are seals, one per rock, there is no room for more ...

A head pops up and I realize there are no birds on the surface of the sea, rather there are more seals swimming about, each looking for its own rock.

It is an exercise we witness on winter days when we are able to stop and watch, the seals, sleek and shining in the sun, trying first to lay claim to a rock, throwing themselves up out of the water, shimmying, flopping, rolling, then trying to maintain their hard fought perch as the swells around him.

I think they must be very cold but, of course, they are seals.

-- There is an ad for the ferry to the mainland, with website info, telephone number, etc. It shows a picture of the boat. The ad reads like this:

Ice Skates
Snow Shovels
Warm Mittens
Hot Chocolate
Cold Remedies
Long Johns
Firewood
Rock Salt ...

Old man winter will bring the cold.
Everything else comes on the boat.

-- There is a story about the "Deer Task Force", whose aim it is to reduce or eliminate Lyme disease on the island. You hear about "wind farms" and "the deer problem" out here - those are the two main topics. I myself have seen deer everywhere. They almost outnumber the population, that is how bad the situation is. It's hunting season right now.

-- Speaking of deer, there is a recipe for Venison Stew in the paper, in the cooking column, written by Becky and Mike Ballard. They write:

Now that we are in the midst of Block Island's hunting season, we looked around for someone who has had real success cooking venison. Fred Leeder's name came up, because of a venison stew he brought to a party at Johanna Ross's house last year. People still remember that great, tender, savory stew. If you don't know Fred personally you at least know him from the post office. He worked there a total of 23 years; for 13 he was the postmaster. Before that he cooked professionally on the island. Fred and his cooking skills in combination with the quantity of deer on the island are a perfect match. In fact, some of Fred's venison moves directly from his back yard right into his cooking pot ...

In the national quest for locally grown, organic, grass-fed meats, Block Island deer easily fill all the requirements. Our free-range venison is practically fat-free, tender (if cooked correctly), juicy and full of flavor. With concerns over the increase in deer numbers, what better way to help control the deer herd than to make a big pot of one of Fred's venison stews?

It's illegal to sell any wild game, but seek out a hunter friend who may be eager to provide you with a venison roast, a tender back strap or juicy ribs. Chris Blansfield suggested that two or three families could obtain an entire carcass, send it to Wakefield for butchering and then divide the packaged meats up among themselves.

-- There was a listing of the Block Island deer hunting rules and regulations.

-- There is a regular feature called "Guess This House". Photo, and you can send your guesses into the Times.

-- There is an interview with Islander Fran Migliacco, who just wrote a book called More Ghosts on Block Island, a sequel to a previous book she had written, about various spooky stories and haunted houses out here. Ghosts cannot cross water, apparently (ask any Islander) - however, they CAN travel on boats. Stories abound. Ladies in bonnets and corsets walking around upstairs, knitting needles disappearing never to be seen again - some are scary, some are benign. One lady, Iris Lewis, lived in a haunted house and told Migliacco: "The Scottish side of me has a tendency to be a little 'fey', which I resist because I live alone." I'm with you, sister. Migliacco gives this charming portrait of Ms. Lewis: "While on Island, she dressed in bright scarves and jackets, adorned her jaunty hats with bits of jewelry, and loved new adventures. At the age of 100, she was taken iceboating for the first time in her life by local ice boater Charlie Gale."

-- There is a regular feature called "News & Views from Other Islands". Happenings on Jamestown (another Rhode Island island), Nantucket, and even as far as The Hebrides.

-- There are all kinds of ads in the newspaper from stores on the mainland, and their main selling point is: "We deliver to the ferry!" Because seriously, out here, that ferry is everything. I go down to the pier just to watch it come in.

-- A list of events going on in the community this week. A sampling:
African Drumming Performance at the Baptist Church
Game Night at the Library
Fundraiser to benefit the 8th grade Cultural Diversity trip to NYC (I remember Jean's stories of taking the Block Island kids down to Harlem, there is a sister school there, and how crazy and fun and awesome it was - the kids out here are country kids, island kids, sometimes with only 3 or 4 kids per GRADE, so these trips are really great for the kids) - buffet featuring foods from around the world
-- Grades K-12 at Block Island school are asking for donations for Haiti. An address is provided, and the money will be donated through water.com, that sends bottles of clean water to Haiti.

And lastly, there is a calendar called "All Around the Block", showing literally everything going on, down to the hour, on this island all week. Things listed on the calendar:
-- Every AA meeting going on during the week. Multiple locations for that.
-- Yoga classes, beginning and advanced
-- Adult knitting circle, evenings at the library
-- Women's open volleyball - all welcome - at "school gym" (no address necessary)
-- Every religious service during the week: Baptist, Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Episcopal

And I loved this. Again, a glimpse of life here, and how it operates:

-- There is a story about a meeting of the Zoning Board. Here is a quote from the article:

The board approved an addition to a single family dwelling ... Joseph L. told the board his house had been the Gully School House until 1933. He showed the group an old photograph in which the building had a front porch. At some later point, that porch was removed. L. said the proposed addition would resemble that front porch."

The board approved the addition to the house. Good work, Joseph L., bringing in that photograph!

Island snapshots

-- "He had a way of making a simple walk down a country lane into a Grand Adventure." -- Patricia Flynn, on her husband Errol's acting ability

-- Thomas Hardy bums me out, man. But I love him. Also, when reading the poems he wrote about the death of his first wife, if all you knew were the poems then you would think this was one of the most romantic successful marriages of all time, when by all accounts it was a disaster. After her death, Hardy found a notebook where she had written a screed called something like, "Everything I Cannot Stand About My Husband", obviously meant to be found by him after her death. They were miserable. But something about her death rocked him to his core, and his poems to her following her passing ache with feeling and loss. They are amazing. His anger at God is palpable, although it's more than that. He found God to be a silly thing, a useless entity really. He was not a believer in any way, shape or form, and he wrote about it quite a lot. His poems to and about God are also incredible. But still: very somber reading. I enjoy it a lot. Always have liked his poetry quite a bit.

-- It is nearly impossible to say about a day out here, "What a nice sunny day", or "What a rainy day". It always changes. Yesterday I woke up to rain after a crazy night of howling wind. It rained the whole morning in a way that made you think it would never stop. It is my favorite kind of weather. Then it cleared up mid-morning, and I cavorted about around the Island, walking up and down random beaches, watching the long long breakers rolling in from the open ocean, the foam being whipped off the tops of the waves by the strong wind and blown backwards. Huge white clouds piled up to the north, seemingly benign, but suddenly, they were upon us. It was as though the light was snuffed from the sky. It began to rain, and there were also some hailstones falling as I raced to my car. The light and shadow that afternoon were phenomenal, as rain and sun struggled for dominance, with big lines of clouds in the sky, showing clear blue sky beneath. Gorgeous. I love how the weather changes. Storm, sun, storm, sun. It is the most like my own natural rhythm. I find it comforting.

-- Anthony Hopkins asked Katharine Hepburn while they were filming Lion in Winter, "What is star quality?" She replied, "I don't know if it's a kind of energy or a kind of electricity - I don't know what it is, but I do know I've got it."

-- Watched Fifth Ave. Girl early this morning and realized, yet again, what a good actress Ginger Rogers is. She is completely understated here, almost sad, yet nobody's fool. Not your typical wise-cracking dame, either - this is a girl who understands reality, understands she needs to do what she has to do, but there's a sadness beneath all of it. As though if only it were given the chance, a soft romanticism could blossom. I loved the crazy family, the ditzy heiress falling in love with the mechanic who spouts his anger at capitalists and his love for the proletariat and then turns around and opens his own garage (hahaha) - the snotty suspicious brother - the loony mother ... but in the center of it all sits Ginger Rogers, in a plain black suit, sitting on a park bench, eating an apple, and staring at the world around her with low expectations of it ... and that makes her sad. Not bitter, but sad. She's fantastic.

-- I wonder what the seals are doing right now. Sunning on the rocks on the west side, maybe? It's a nice day. So far.

Snapshots with Wilde bookends

-- "Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or comedy ... But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications." -- Oscar Wilde

-- Siobhan, Ben and I saw a ton of seals swimming around by the north point of the island. They would bob their big snouts up out of the water, very close to shore, and appear to stare straight at us, quizzically, like: "What the hell are you people doing out here?" The seals were everywhere. It was so so awesome.

-- The Rockefeller book is fantastic. Encyclopedic, huge scope. This is no surprise. After all, I have read Ron Chernow's magnificent biography of Alexander Hamilton. I am a huge huge fan.

-- Two days of rain. Today is beautiful. I am so excited that I get to go OUTSIDE, I'm not sure where to go first.

-- Made a list of everything I need to do when I come back home and started having a panic attack. No more of THAT.

-- The wind howled about my house last night like shrieking fully alive beast. I went to bed at around 9 p.m., my new schedule, which I am enjoying very much. I am going to try to keep it up.

-- Food is outrageously expensive out here and it makes me long for the cheap world of Manhattan, which just goes to show you the situation.

-- This morning, before the sun came up, the rain was still pouring down. The porch furniture remained dry, so I sat out there, with my coffee, in the dark, soaking up the sounds and smells. I look at the bright blue sky now and can't believe it's the same day.

-- "How much truer Imagination is than Observation." -- Oscar Wilde

"Feels like a blaze of fire.", winter 1917-18

Excerpt from The Block Island Times, This Week in History: January 16, 1918

By Robert M. Downie

The winter of 1917-18 was the worst one in 200 years or more; the extended cold wave creating the most frigid winter of modern times.

Anyone who first experiences winter's northwest winds on Block Island is jolted doubly - not only by the velocity, but by the moisture packed into every gust. It is not like the mainland. Even the weather forecasters' modern-day "wind-chill charts" fail to make an accurate comparison - they allow for the wind, but not the added discomfort of the moisture.

It began on Christmas afternoon, and no thaws occurred until February 12. Both harbors froze over, which might happen every 25 or so years. But on the mainland, Narragansett Bay was frozen too, an exceedingly unusual occurrence. The most startling fact, though, is that the open ocean around Block Island turned to ice.

The country happened to be fully involved in World War I, and a full-scale naval base had been established on the island the previous summer, headquartered at the Narragansett Inn and the adjoining Payne's dock.

The Navy's chief medical officer, responsible for the health of some 300 sailors and nurses stationed here, wrote a heartfelt account of that severe cold of early 1918.

"No electric lights. No theaters. No trains or streetcars. On account of storms, at times we did not receive US Mail for 10 days. Third highest wind velocity in the United States. Storms of such severity, difficult to stay on the ground - rain coats of little value, had to wear oil clothing and rubber boots ... Ears frost bitten. With wind blowing 76 milse and thermometer 6.5 below, feels like a blaze of fire. Woolen socks and mufflers donated by Red Cross helped some. Saw one case of frozen hands. Ice 12 inches thick on the ocean for considerable distance, no boats could land. Sick bay isolated. Flashlight used when attending emergencies ..."

I have surfed a few hundred feet off the bluffs, gazing along the promontories and precipices coming successively into view the further out I go; swum in the tumbled waters at their base, snorkeled down to the rocks a few feet under the surface; sailed all along the coast, in warm weather and snowstorms, but still cannot imagine the ocean being ice. But that winter, where I have splashed summer waves skyward a thousand times, the sea was frozen, and drifted ice piled two- to eight-feet thick around the island.

The most succince visual image, though, was left by famed island ornithologist, Elizabeth Dickens, whose farm now forms the basis of the Lewis-Dickens conservation area in the island's southwest corner.

She viewed the sea near her house with binoculars on February 6, 1918 and recorded in her diary:

"I stand on the bluff at Dickens Point at noon and look east, west, south and north with glasses and can't see a drop of water, just one sheet of motionless ice."

Some Island snapshots

-- "I cannot imagine how a casual reference to Suetonius and Petronius Arbiter can be construed into evidence of a desire to impress by an assumption of superior knowledge. I should fancy that the most ordinary of scholars is perfectly well acquainted with the Lives of the Caesars and with The Satyricon. The Lives of the Caesars, at any rate, forms part of the curriculum at Oxford for those who take the Honour School of Literae Humaniores; and as for The Satyricon, it is popular even among passmen, though I suppose they have to read it in translations." -- Oscar Wilde, responding to a critic who balked at all of the literary references in Dorian Gray

-- Standing on the jetty, watching the huge long breakers roll in, crashing repeatedly on the rocks. I heard the roar from my front porch this morning. I stood out there until I was drenched in spray, and then figured I'd better beat it before I was submerged.

-- Christopher Walken on Gene Kelly for Turner Classic Movies: "People might think that dancers are always on the beat. A good dancer is always ahead of the beat. They make the music happen."

-- Speaking of Christopher Walken, he is out here right now. I keep my eyes peeled for him.

-- "I love black and white cinema; I feel as if I discovered it." -- Andrei Tarkovsky

-- In a Lonely Place was on TV early this morning. It's one of my favorite movies and certainly Bogart's best performance. He is absolutely tortured.

-- The name of the world's first oil tanker (set up by the Nobel family) was Zoroaster.

-- Dovetail between my reading of Rockefeller's life and the book I read last year about "young Stalin". Stalin had many years as a gangster in Baku, which was a primary rival of Rockefeller's in the oil biz, and the Rothschilds, and all that. Baku has been one of my fascinations for eons, and it's very cool to hear about what it was like in the 1800s.

-- Frank Capra gets on my nerves sometimes.

-- Yesterday there was frost on the grass. A sudden plunge in temperature after a couple days of mildness.

-- CRAZY ocean yesterday. Drove out to the North Light at dusk and the scene - crashing thrashing ocean as far as the eye could see - with the little light on the small ladder near the point (I guess the lighthouse isn't sufficient because it isn't right on the tip of those treacherous rocks - they need a light closer to the actual point) flashing around in flares. Everything was deep blue and white, and the waves were relentless and enormous.

-- Read a lot of Gerard Manley Hopkins' stuff yesterday, which I believe contributed to my epic dreams last night, starring the person who introduced me to his stuff. Damn you, Hopkins! But Hopkins is one of the greatest there is, one of the poets of my heart - he makes up words, he puts them together - but never obscures the meaning. The individuality of his language is the emotional entryway into his work. His emotional punctuation and hyphenated words reminds me very much of Keri Hulme's The Bone People, a strange connection I suppose - but her preface to her novel is all about language and how she had to basically train the copyeditors who worked on her manuscript NOT to correct her work, unless there was a spelling error. Everything had to go by her first. She felt that there is a huge difference between "blue-black" and "blueblack" - it calls up a different response in the reader - and Hopkins' stuff to me seems equally as individual. "dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon", "blue-bleak embers", "fathers-forth" - Now that last one is interesting. Something in the poem "fathers forth" - but it certainly feels different with that hyphen there. The meaning is connected not only to the sound but to the LOOK of the words. "selfwrung, selfstrung, sheath- and shelterless." Some of this experimentation with sound predicts the Beat poets in the 1950s. Hopkins was way ahead of his time.

-- I love Robert Montgomery so much.

-- The commercials on Lifetime are alllll about digestion and poop.

-- I never ever want to hear the phrase "I can't make any promises ..." ever again. Come on, make a promise. Even if you end up not keeping it, see what it feels like to make a goddamn promise. A red flag.

-- Watched the ridiculous The Fountainhead, and found myself thinking so much about Patricia Neal (it was her birthday this week), and all of the tragic elements of her life. Watching her and Cooper onscreen, I thought of her heartwrenching and beautiful autobiography and the story of their love affair, and how she never stopped loving him, until he died. There's a cautionary tale there, and I've been thinking about it a lot. In a way, that's what my script is about, and what I have been working on. Can we choose the narrative of our lives? Not really - events are events - but the interpretation is up to us. Way easier said than done. Much of the marks left on us date from before the time we might have figured all of this out. The first cut is the deepest.

-- Too funny: I have found over 30 pieces of beach glass in my time out here. That first one seemed so miraculous, now I'm so over it, and just casually toss new pieces on the pile when I come home.

-- Heaven Knows Mr. Allison was on again. I was flipping through the channels - and, literary conceit, landed upon it - RIGHT AT THE HOT MOMENT in the fake cave that I had missed when the electricity came out. What are the odds. I didn't have to bide my time, watching the whole thing again - I came upon the scene, her lying shivering on the floor in her habit, and got to watch the whole thing. It's very erotic.

-- In the graveyard, there is a stone for a 16 year old girl named Annie, who died in the late 1800s, and at the bottom is engraved: "Darling, how we miss thee." The simplicity of that statement, the feeling behind it, really got to me. To me, that's all that needs to be said. Darling, how we miss thee.

-- Still obsessed by generosity and how it operates in my life. I have a tally sheet. I check things off - Me generous, Him generous, Me generous, Him generous. Tit for tat. Keeping track. So far, it has kept the madness at bay, although keeping a TALLY SHEET is mad in and of itself. Oh well. It all makes sense to me, and it feels right.

-- Speaking of generosity, a quote from T.S. Eliot jumped out at me the other day:
Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving.

"The giving famishes the craving". I don't think 10 minutes have gone by since I read that that I have not thought about it.

-- Getting ready to start Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. I am a huge Waugh fan, but I have never read that one.

-- Hope is OBSESSED with a seagull feather I brought home. She is tormented by its very existence.

-- I go out to sit on the porch with my book and my coffee, in the cold morning sunlight, and Hope sits on the windowsill staring out at me. I want to tell her to get a life, but then I remember, oh wait. This IS her life.

-- "the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy" - e.e. cummings

-- "Why must you write 'intensive' here? 'Intense' is the right word. You should read Fowler's Modern English Usage in the use of the two words." -- Winston Churchill to his director of military intelligence while looking over plans for the invasion of Normandy. I love that even at such a tense time, incorrect grammar annoyed him. That's my boy.

-- This kills me. Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for sodomy. His library and possessions were put up for sale. He suffered in prison, yes, from hard labor, but also because he had nothing to read. His friends (the ones who stuck with him) tried to buy his books back from the people who bought them at auction - and eventually there was a milder warden at the prison who asked if Mr. Wilde could write out a list of the books he would like, and he would see what he could do. Friends began to send books to the prison. The nice warden would bring them to Wilde's cell, and Wilde would break down in tears at the sight. And, in his file, there is a letter from an "Irishwoman" - anonymous - no name - and here is the letter she wrote to the prison in 1895. It brings tears to my eyes, and makes me feel that yes, there is good, there is mercy on this planet. Listen:

Please give Mr. Wilde the book. I have never ever seen him but it must indeed be a hard heart utterly unacquainted with God's love that does not bleed for such a shipwrecked life ... I feel this book which I send, may be helpful. Faithfully yours, an Irishwoman.

Isn't that something else. Sadly, there is no record of what book she sent to "Mr. Wilde", but across the century, I salute this anonymous Irishwoman as someone who represents the best in all of us.

-- I tried to sit down and read a bunch of Emily Dickinson poems, and found she freaked me out too much. I really can only deal with her one poem at a time. She's just too huge, too brutal, too scary.

-- Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979 interview:

In Andrei Rublev, there was a scene that might have been from Mizoguchi, the great departed Japanese director. I wasn't aware of it until it was projected. It's the one where the Russian prince gallops across the countryside on a white horse, and the Tatar is on a black horse. The quality of the image in black and white, the landscape, the opacity of the overcast sky, had a strange resemblance to an ink-drawn Chinese landscape.

It's one of my favorite images in that film full of amazing images:

Island Snapshots

-- Big storm. Crashing surf. Mountains of spray. Wind so loud it literally shrieked.

-- Crazy bright stars.

-- Finished the novel Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig. Can't believe it is not more well-known. The fall of Empires is in it. The crackup of the world in World War I. The disintegration of certainty. The disorientation of the modern world. Not to mention an excavation of the human mind, and the emotion known as "pity". Phenomenal and harrowing book.

-- Also reading T.S. Eliot. Guess I am into disintegration and moral apocalypse.

-- Great weekend with Jean, Pat and Lucy. Pat's great-grandfather was the lighthouse keeper out here back in the day, so we took a little visit. Also, just learned that in Roger Williams' first merry band of rebels that came to what is now "Rhode Island", one of Pat's ancestors was in that first group.

-- I have been taking baths. Every day. Hope sits at the edge of the tub, meowing insistently. It disturbs her greatly, my behavior. She cannot understand it. It truly WORRIES her.

-- Percolating with ideas. I needed the mental space to percolate.

-- The weather changes so quickly out here. Sunny day to black storm clouds in a matter of 5 minutes. I go down and sit on the jetty and watch the waves crash up onto it. It's all very French Lieutenant's Woman.

-- Found my favorite beach. It is isolated. I can see the lighthouse (I believe) in Montauk across the water, wavering like a mirage. I get a coffee to go at the Depot, and drive down there in the early morning. No one is ever there. A beautiful beach.

Excerpts from The Block Island Cookbook, 1962

I found this book in my house. It was compiled by the First Baptist Church on Block Island in 1962. The pastor at the time was fondly referred to as "Pastor Lou", and the first page of the book helpfully informs the reader that Sunday morning worship is at 10:45 a.m. The book is chock-full of interest. There are a couple of major families out here (and have been here for generations, from the very beginning, actually, in the 1600s.) I went to the graveyard here, and the names dominate: Dodge. Littlefield. Ball. Mott. Other prominent names (well-known to southern Rhode Islanders, because they are still everywhere): Champlin. Northup. Sprague.

The preface begins:

The ladies of the Island have long been known for their good cooking. A distinguished daughter, Miss Catherine Ray, later to become the wife of Rhode Island's governor William Greene, sent her life-long friend, one Benjamin Franklin, a gift of Block Island cheeses which he and his friends pronounced excellent, and also a gift of Sugar Plums, "every one sweetn'd as you used to like."

That's the opening paragraph of this small dog-eared book. After that I of course had to read it cover to cover, and don't even think I am not going to try to make their pickled artichokes.

The introduction continues:

The Indians gave us the "No Cake", and very probably the hulled corn and the hasty pudding. The early settlers, being of necessity almost completely self-sufficient, relied heavily on corn and cornmeal.

We have returned in nostalgia, to the time, not really so many years ago, when every family had a pickle barrel in the cellar, complete with the delectable, quite indigestible, Jerusalem artichoke ("hardchoke" to our fathers). Tempus fugit - was it only yesterday when johnny cake - thick or thin, scalded or unscalded according to family tradition - appeared on Island tables at least twice and sometimes three times a day, when hot biscuits appeared at least once and tea was the preferred beverage? Was it only yesterday that a fish could be had just for the asking? Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis!"

The cookbook is broken up into your basic sections: Meat, Vegetables, Desserts, Fish (an extensive section, naturally). Each section starts with a Bible verse appropriate to the section. For example, the Fish section has this on its title page:

"Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets." Luke 5:4b

There are also home remedies in the back to cure "the itch of poison ivy" or provide "relief from arthritis".

The recipes were submitted by Islanders, and sometimes it's something that has been passed down, from generation to generation. Sometimes, delightfully, the recipe has a little personal story attached to it.

Some examples:

CREAM OF TARTAR BISCUITS
Mrs. Rose Champlin Starr
"This was the recipe of my mother, Mrs. Annie J. Champlin, wife of the Island's only native-born resident physician, Dr. John A. Champlin."

SOUTH COUNTY BANNOCK
Miss Hope Brown Madison
"The original recipe was a Madison family favorite served by the cook Hannah for many years at the H.G. Russell farm 'The Oaks', now Goddard Park. I have adapted it to modern cooking."

DOUGHNUTS
Mrs. Rose Champlin Starr, submitted by her daughter Mrs. Charlotte Murphy
"As anyone who has ever had one can verify, my Mother's recipe for doughnuts is an especially good one. My Uncle Frank (Payne) was especially fond of them and my son Jack said to be sure and send this recipe even if it were the only one I sent. Mom had a black cast iron kettle that was a couple or more generations old that she cooked the doughnuts in - the kind they used to suspend from a crane when cooking was done in fireplaces."

JOHNNY CAKES
Emma Mitchell Gooley
" 'Uncle Jerry' taught me to make these 'Johnny Cakes' when I was only 13 years old."

BREAD
Bertrand M. Ball
"With bread at 50 cents a loaf, we use this recipe for the daily bread of our family of six."

Sometimes, you can feel the personality of the person writing. These are my favorite recipes. The FISH section starts off with a "Dissertation on Fried Fish", written by Emma Littlefield Lee, and you can feel herself whipping herself up into a frenzy as she writes. She sounds, frankly, unbalanced, and yet she also admits that openly. She loves fish and she is passionate about it.

Our family has eaten fish, literally by the ton, for generations, and to this day we will happily settle for fried fish five times a week if we can get it. Nothing on this earth is better than a succulent piece of properly fried fish, but by the same token there is no worse fare than fish, poorly cooked. Feeling so strongly on this matter I could not content myself with submitting only one fish recipe for the book; it has become necessary to my mental well-being to expound at length on the frying of that splendid creature; the Fish.

I appreciate her honesty. She sounds cracked, and I think I would like her very much.

Emma goes on, with characteristic fervor. Her "dissertation" goes on for four pages, where she cajoles, scolds, wags her finger, and expounds to her heart's content.

Fish in all the categories MUST be fresh. It's fine eaten the same day as caught, but ideally it should be eaten the day after being caught, having been on ice overnight. Fish that has been thoroughly chilled in this way is easier to fry as it doesn't curl up in the pan."

I love how it is basically assumed that people will be catching their own fish. It is also assumed that people will be picking their own vegetables ("Pick the tomatoes"), etc. So there are times when the recipes take on a truly grisly tone.

Here is Thelma Murphy on BOILED LOBSTER:

Lobster should be alive when boiled. Most Islanders prefer to boil their lobsters in sea water - to eat them hot with plenty of mettled butter and a touch of vinegar. In fact, the Islanders eschew all manner of fancy cookery where seafood is concerned, preferring not to mask the taste of these delectable gifts of God in any manner, other than to cook them quickly and well with a minimum of ostentation.

Thelma, I appreciate your words, and my mouth is watering, but while your cooking may not be ostentatious, I certainly cannot say the same for your writing. Simplify, simplify.

Thelma appears to take my advice from the future in her next recipe, for BROILED LOBSTER, which starts off bluntly:

Kill the lobster by inserting sharp knife into joint where tail and body-shell come together, thus cutting the spinal cord.

Awesome.

E.B.D. (no name) has this to say about SCALLOPS AND OYSTERS:

Oysters are found so rarely in the Great Salt Pond now as to be considered non-existent, but scallops may be used instead of oysters in almost any oyster recipe. Scallops may be the small sweet scallop dredged up from close to shore, or more commonly, the large deep sea scallops which are often available in the market.

Captain Mel Rose (Rose is another big name out there) gets a little bit defensive and angry in his recipe for fish chowder, shouting at the innocent reader in all caps repeatedly:

Skin, simmer (not boil) until flakes come off bones to separate easily; remove fish from water but SAVE water; break in fair sized pieces ... Drain but do NOT use this water ... also heat to same temperature BEFORE mixing 1 quart of milk and 1 can of evaporated milk.

Please stop shouting at me Captain Rose.

I loved this sentence in "E.L.L."'s recipe for DAB CHOWDER:

Don't let anybody see you adding the milk; they always think you're doing something sneaky.

Al and Norma Starr seem like a lovely couple. They submitted a recipe for STEAMED MUSSELS that contains the following sentence:

We take a kettle with us to the beach and have the mussels right there. They make a marvelous beach picnic.

Thomas Littlefield submitted a recipe for FRIED COD FISH HEADS that reads like an Edgar Allan Poe poem:

Skull, clean and skin heads.
Boil for 20 minutes or until fish leaves bones.
Drain and pick out bones.
Place the fish in bread pan and press.
Chill in the refrigerator.

Louise Mitchell confuses me. She has written an essay called HOW TO COOK A DUCK and she starts with this sentence:

Forget the story about "cooking a duck on a plank and throwing the duck away.

Uhm, Louise? I don't think I ever knew that story in the first place.

Louise says later in her essay:

If blood does not follow the fork, call the duck done. If you are cooking tame duck, do not skin him. But make sure he has not been around salt water.

And how would one know that, Louise? By asking the duck?

I do think, though, that "blood does not follow the fork, call the duck done" is quite a nice sentence.

Frank Tinker cuts to the chase in his recipe for MUD TURTLE. Here is how it starts. I am picturing myself doing all of this in my kitchen in my apartment at home.

Catch mud turtle. When catching, be sure to put a gaff hook i nhis mouth so he'll bite hard on it (he won't let go). Lay turtle on chopping block, haul head out of shell with gaff hook and chop off with hatchet. After turtle stops moving (about 1 hour) cut off toes as they are apt to hook you.

Jesus Christ.

William P. Lewis sounds like a fun guy in his recipe for what he calls RICE JAZZ.

Serves four hungry people, six not so hungry.

He explains:

Call it rice jazz because it amounts to nothing more than jazzing up what was left over in the icebox after weekend guests.

Arthur Ryerson submitted a recipe for BOILED MILKWEEK. He starts off with:

This is a delicious green in the spring when the plants are new and tender. Milkweed is to be found in many of the fields here on the Island. Pick the tender tops of the plant, wash, drain and boil as you would any other green.

Arthur L. Ford only submitted one recipe, but his "resume" is listed as well: Chairman of the Council, Shoreham-by-the-Sea-Sussex-England. In a later recipe, someone mentions that she made the dish for a "reception" for Chairman Arthur Ford, so he was obviously an Islander who had traveled far. His recipe is called MY OWN FAVOURITE (note the British spelling, and also the rank egotism of the title - what dish is it, Arthur? Fish? Cake? Macaroni? Nope. Just 'MY OWN FAVOURITE'). However, Mr. Ford has a bit of the poet in him. The recipe turns out to be for poached eggs and contains the following two sentences, which show that he has a bit of a writer in him:

Stir fast until a whirlpool has been formed.
The white should be wrapped around the yoke like a transparent veil.

Florence Ball Madison has this gorgeous introduction to her recipe for THIN MOLASSES COOKIES, which gives a great feel for the sense of history on the Island, not to mention Rhode Island, and New England in general, where you can't take one step without bumping up against a founding father of one kind or another:

This recipe was given to me by a Westfield Mass. roommate at East Greenwich Academy, class 1897. Have made bushels of them for my father, Martin VanBuren Ball (born in 1838) whose chief request was "make them big". The cookie cutter may be seen in the Block Island Historical Society Museum.

Recipes are called "third generation recipes". There are recipes for "AUNT MOLLIE'S SUGAR COOKIES" or "GRANDMOTHER'S SQUASH PIE". One woman submits her recipes under this name: "By Evelyn Lee (John Lee's Mother)".

I love how Beatrice Ball Dodge (much intermarrying between these huge families, of course) starts off her recipe for IRISH MOSS BLANC MANGE:

Gather fresh moss on the beach. Rinse well in cold water and spread in the sun to dry.

There is also a section for BEVERAGES in the cookbook, and they are usually recipes that are enormous and can feed a crowd. Johnny Dodge submitted a recipe for something he called SUNSHINE SPARKLE, and the recipe yields "about 35 glasses". There is a recipe that is called COFFEE FOR FORTY. Any gathering on the Island would obviously involve pretty much every resident, so it is essential that one knows how to cook in bulk. COFFEE FOR FORTY. It kills me.

Eleanor K. Dodge submits a recipe for the beautifully named "BLOCK ISLAND, RHODE ISLAND BEACH PLUM JELLY", and it's poetry:

Wash plums. Use firm not-too-ripe plums. Boil in as little water as possible, until plums are real soft. Drain juice in a heavy cloth bag. Do not squeeze bag! Let drip until juice is extracted, then add cup for cup of sugar. Let juice boil to 224 degrees on jelly thermometer or until jelly stage (when two drops form on edge of spoon and run into one).

I love that last image. Also, I promise I will not squeeze the bag! (Unless it asks nicely.)

Mrs. Robert Schofield sends in this home remedy called ELDERBERRY BLOSSOM SALVE:

I make this every year. It is good for insect bites, chapped lips, minor abrasions, and so forth ...

Check out Mrs. Jeanne Wilde Riel's homemade recipe for COUGH SYRUP. Yeah, you might cure your cough, but your teeth will rot in the course of one weekend. But still: Yum!!

Take one large beet and hollow out the inside. Take rock candy and fill hollow, then bake in oven at 375 degrees until candy in melted. Put in jar.

Wow.

Nellie Littlefield informs us of a little local background in her recipe for SAUSAGES:

Sausage recipes were closely guarded secrets, each family having its own method ... handing it down for generations. This was particularly true of the farm families who sold meat products, each of these families having a following ... It would have been easier to get a pint of blood from a man in those days than to get his sausage recipe which he probably kept in a box with the family deeds and other papers.

Mrs. Margaret Husted Lauer (telephone call for Matt Lauer, your ancestor is calling) gives a nice little essay called TWO WAYS OF MAKING HULLED CORN:

This is a very old dish which we probably received from the Indians. In the early days it was a staple article of diet and there are still people living who remember the hulled corn man peddling the cooked corn from a large can suspended from a rope around his neck and dipped out with a dipper. It was eaten warm with milk and molasses.

I love that image of the 'hulled corn man"!

Mrs. Ruth Rose Barrell talks about the famous "No Cake"

According to the legends I've heard from the Islanders from the time I was a child, the recipe for No Cake was handed down to the Block Islanders from the Indians who lived on the Island. My father, Ambrose Rose, always said that No Cake must be made on a clear day when the wind was from the North-west.

Okay, so that one small anecdote tells me that Mr. Ambrose Rose was a romantic. A man in touch with history and tradition, and wanted to instill in his children a sense of romance and poetry. He may not have been the most practical of gentleman, he might have been a bit too dreamy, but he was well-loved, and I love him. I have no idea what I'm talking about. But that's the best thing about the cookbook. It's full of voices, clambering, chattering, gossiping. I love making stuff up.

Here is another recipe for NO CAKE, submitted by Mrs. Cemantha Mitchell White:

My dad, Frank Mitchell, used to parch sweet corn in a heavy iron fryer into which a layer of coarse sand had been poured (fine sand will stick to the corn). He kept stirring it until hot and then he would put the corn in and cook it slowly until dark brown but not burns. Then he'd sift the sand out and when the corn was cool he would grind it in a coffee grinder and we'd eat it with milk and sugar. It was like a powder but it was mighty good to me.

And I will end with perhaps my favorite sentence in this beautiful little book. It is the first sentence of the recipe for PETER MURPHY'S WILD ROSE SYRUP, submitted by Mrs. Robert E. Schofield:

Pick rose petals in the early day.

Yes, ma'am. I'd be delighted to.

The Ladybug Symmetry

I have been thinking about a day on the beach many years ago when I came across two ladybugs on the sand and accidentally separated them. I was not in a good way that summer, morbid, paranoid, and sensitive to the extreme. Everything meant something, and the weight of it was too much. I remember being on my hands and knees, trying to find the lost ladybug - so that I could reunite the pair. I remember being frantic, in tears. It was my fault. I had to reunite them. It was the end of the world.

It is lunacy to me now to think of - although quite interesting - how upset I got, how personally I took it, and how real it all seemed to me - and it has to do with my belief in meaning (something I have been thinking a lot about). I never did find the "lost" ladybug, and I had to drag myself away from the scene. I was wrecked by it. This had to be almost 20 years ago, but I remember it vividly. It seems important.

While I have been out here, I watched one of my favorite movies, The Double Life of Veronique, and thought, again, of those ladybugs. And that feeling of doubles. Of reflections and alternate lifetimes. It has deep resonance for me, although I had turned my back on a lot of that, recently. The tendency (to find meaning, connection, symmetry) sprung back to life this past spring in a much more grandiose and, ultimately (I believe) mad way. My thoughts became rigid and perfect. It was the DOVETAIL of a lifetime. Beware the dovetail. It will be hard to give up. There may not be a lot of sense in this, although there will be for some, and it is to those people that I write (as always). When a "dovetail" of events has that much perfection (as my experience this past spring - which even had a perfection in its dates: 3 months exactly, to the day, from beginning to end) - it is a warning. This sort of weightiness (the separation of the ladybugs, the dovetail of the past spring - which ended when a man told me how RELAXED he felt with me - the "double life" of Veronique) has also made me think of Possession, bu AS Byatt - a great book of doubles, and dovetails, and connections - not to mention the weightiness of too much context. The book has a view of romance and love as seen through the eyes of two modern-day literary scholars, immersed in criticism and context - and how can one fall in love under the weight of so much context? To me, my various dovetails of meaning are a weight that now need to be discarded if I want to be free. They create a burden, which, in turn, brings on a disproportionate amount of disappointment, way out of hand and out of balance. Events cannot breathe in the rigid structures of my dovetail.

Having said all of this ... after writing out a bit about the Ladybug-Debacle in my journal, pondering the narrative of that small story, and how much it has been a part of my adult life - I went up to my room to put on my hiking boots, glanced down as I tied my shoes ...

and saw a single solitary ladybug, crawling up my bedroom door.

In the middle of January. Only one. Not two. Just one.

The implications are enormous, although I also resist. It is this tension - between a lifetime of belief - and a self-protective resistance to those beliefs - that I write from. It IS the creative source. Differences and opposites are not to be reconciled. Veronique gets a glimpse of Veronika in a contact sheet of pictures she took when she was in Warsaw. Her doppelganger. Her double. She has felt alone. And suddenly. As though she misses someone. But who?

The Double Life of Veronique is, for me, the clue to how to live life. Or, no, not how to live life. How to MEET it.

And perhaps the dovetail doesn't need to be too rigid, if I can manage that. Perfection cannot be attained, no matter how much my consciousness turns towards the perfect, the smooth, the symmetrical dovetail. But surely there is no harm in imagining that after all of these years the lost ladybug has reappeared. The ladybug is okay. Still alone. But okay.

I am on the fence about all of it. I resist answers, because art is not in the answers. I also distrust answers in matters such as this. It is the thinking about it that really matters.

On the island

-- An orgy of reading. Recuperative. I am feeling less shattered than I have. But I hesitate to even say such things. They anger the gods.

-- Mitchell, Meghan and Luisa came out for the day and it was seriously one for the books. I had all these plans ("let's go look at lighthouses!") and then all we did was make Bloody Marys at my house and talk and laugh. Oh, and also blast Michael Jackson and dance around my kitchen. Luisa wielded a mop and went downstairs to inspect the cellar and get rid of cobwebs. She loves cellars. She was holding a whiskey in one hand and a mop in the other. She re-emerged with a small statue of ... well, he defies description. He's a hippie. He has long hair, beads, and is making the peace sign. She found it down there. We then proceeded to place him all over the house (and the lawn) and take pictures of him in various landscapes. Crying with laughter. Magic day.

-- I saw a standoff on my front lawn between a barking dog and a freaked-out deer. They stood staring at each other, the dog racing around barking at it. Then, the deer charged the dog. (I saw a similar standoff at Yellowstone once between a wounded deer and a small wolf - it was incredible). The dog bounded backwards in alarm and then the deer bounded off into the snow.

-- Mum came out for the night and we took some great hikes (one out by the North Light), and then we found the trail that goes along the big white cliffs that encircle the north side of the island. The views were amazing. There was nothing between us and the abyss. And there's still snow everywhere here, so the landscape: snow, sandy cliffs, and ocean - was startling to the extreme. Then we came home and had dinner and watched Searching for Bobby Fischer. Mum found a chess set at the house and taught me how to play. For some reason, I never learned. Allison (a killer chess player) tried to teach me a couple years ago but it didn't stick. Mum teaching me how each chess piece moved was so funny. "This guy ... goes like this: two and one - like an L." "This guy can go like THIS ..." But my favorite was her delineation between the King and the Queen. "The Queen can go any which way, in any direction, as far as she likes. And the King? .... Is a LOSER." So every time either one of us would make our King move, one square to the right, left, whatever, we would start laughing. I imagined a big gluttonous slobbery half-wit king, unwilling to put down his greasy drumstick in order to save himself with rapid dispatch. The Queen, meanwhile, flies about the board. It was really fun. Mum won, but I didn't do too badly myself.

-- I have been reading poetry. A lot of Walt Whitman. I love him. Every time I read the poem about the Brooklyn Ferry, it seems like a new poem. It lives and breathes, and I feel it speaking directly to me, and that, to me, seems Whitman's point. He is squinting into the future. For me. It is such a poem of America. Of New York. Intensely moving to me.

And then there is this:

What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me.
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely forever.

-- I have been taking long walks every day, choosing different sections of the island to explore. Mum and I found some good new spots.

-- I go to bed at around 9 p.m. and wake up at 5 a.m. One of my favorite things to do is to make my coffee, in the pitch-black, and go out to sit on the front porch, before dawn.

-- The other night, the temperature dropped. It had been a sunny almost mild day, but the weather changes so quickly out here. I drove up to the Southeast Lighthouse because I wanted to see what was going on. It was suddenly freezing with a bitter wind. There was some snow falling. A line of clouds lay over the ocean, with a blazing streak of sunset showing through, right above the waterline. But those clouds were low and thick. And the light up in the tower was going, reflecting off the giant mirrors. So mystical, but also so practical. A message to those out there on the sea: Beware. We are near. Beware. I stood on the giant lawn, in the quickly gathering dusk, watching that light flash, go dark, flash, go dark ... until it was finally too cold, even for a hearty girl like myself. Beauty!!

-- Found a bunch of prehistoric-looking rocks today peeking up from under the ocean. At the level of the tide when I found them, it looked like the humps of the Lochness Monster. Some prehistoric beast - struggling to be born? I've got Yeats on the brain too.

-- I watched Comrade X the other night and laughed so loudly during the last half hour of the film that I frightened Hope. Hedy Lemarr is HYSTERICAL as the humorous Communist girl. "There is pilot, then co-pilot, then co-co-pilot, then co-co-co-pilot." Clark Gable barks, "Stop stuttering." It is my new favorite movie.

"Strike me if I shriek."

A letter from Maud Gonne to WB Yeats, in December 1908. Yeats had come to visit Gonne where she was living in Paris. After years and years of friendship (not to mention what they called their "spiritual marriage"), it is believed that the two finally consummated their long unrequited affair on this particular visit. Yeats had not yet married at this point, but the later Mrs. Yeats (a formidable woman in her own right) believes as well that this was an important visit for the two old friends, and that something sexual had finally occurred. Gonne had already had two children out of wedlock with a French revolutionary (one child died when he was only one years old), and then had married (disastrously) to another revolutionary, an Irish one this time, James MacBride. The marriage didn't even last a year, although a child did come out of it (Sean - or Seghan, as it was spelled). Seghan ended up joining the IRA as a young man in the wake of the Easter Rising and living a life on the run. No surprise.

Regardless: Through the tempest of Gonne's personal life (and she always found the personal life to be annoying - it needed to come second to her life as an activist and politician), Yeats had remained loyal, although he did have a couple of affairs (mainly to let off the sexual tension he felt by loving the distant Gonne for so long). They are quite open about all of this in their letters to one another. Gonne cautioned him against marriage (she wasn't really "for" it in general), but she also cautioned him to not keep too large a space for her in his heart. She seemed to realize the sadness she caused him, and yet their bond was too strong to walk away from it altogether.

Whatever happened in December 1908, no one will ever really know, but here is the letter Gonne wrote to Yeats after he left. Having read all of her correspondence, (to him and to others) this letter stands out in tone and raw emotion. She often spent six hours a day on her voluminous correspondence, so her letters are quick, dashed off, to the point, and sometimes full of non sequitirs, like most letters between intimates. She lived primarily in France yet remained active in Ireland on all kinds of committees (committees she herself had formed) - so her correspondence was massive, and she employed no secretary.

Gonne usually addressed Yeats as "My dear Willie", and sometimes (echoing Abigail Adams) "My dearest friend". But here, in this letter, she starts with "Dearest", a greeting that cuts me to the core for various reasons, so familiar is it, so unbelievably missed.

This letter hurts me to read. I think she has a point. I am grateful (in many ways) that she did not return his love - because the very unfulfilled nature of his love for her helped create some of his best work. She is everywhere in his poetry. Would that high-flung transcendent love have survived in the everyday domestic world? Or would it have been ruined? Was it not distance itself that created such a burning need? I can never know, and it is not for me to know ... but her influence on him is paramount. The references to her cannot be counted. Yeats married quite late - I believe he was almost 50. He had a horror of growing old (he even proposed to Gonne's daughter Iseult - when she was 18, 19 years old! - Incredible!) - and was also quite sad at being along so late in life, when he should have been having grandkids already.

But it took him that long to crush down the longing for another, and to accept the situation. He was "old and gray and full of sleep" by that time. That struggle took a lifetime.

She also was quite open with him about the fact that she had a "horror of physical love" (meaning: sex) - and only believed it was necessary for procreation. She knew that he needed "physical love", and so wanted him, desperately, to "let her go", to torment himself no longer for a woman who could never satisfy him. She was not a prude in any way (obviously). But sex was horrifying to her. She could not bear it, and didn't want it in her life at all. She knew that this would be a problem for Yeats, although perhaps he insisted that it all would be all right once they got started with it. Or perhaps he said it didn't matter to HIM either, and she was wise enough to disbelieve him. Sadly, only her letters remain (or most of them), because of a police raid that destroyed her apartment and most of her papers. Only a couple of his letters to her still exist. So we just have her side. But make no mistake: this is a true dialogue. One that spans decades of life. Until Yeats passed away in 1939.

They were dear dear friends. These letters are amazing.

Back to the letter. It is December 1908. Yeats has just left Paris. It is quite likely they finally slept together during this particular visit. When she speaks of "going to him", she is referring to going to him in her mind. They communicated, long-distance, through shared visions and dreams, and made "dates" to meet up on the astral plane and then compare notes on what they both saw. Much of their letters has to do with this sort of new-age communication (this was what they meant when they said "spiritual marriage"). They experimented with it for years.

Maud wrote to him:

13 Rue de Passy
Paris
Friday [December 1908]

Dearest

It was hard leaving you yesterday but I knew it would be just as hard today if I had waited. Life is so good when we are together & we are together so little - !

Did you know it I went to you last night? about 12 or 2 o'clock I don't exactly know the time. I think you knew. It was as it was when you made me see with the golden light on Wednesday. I shall go to you again often but not quite in that way, I shall try to make strong & well for your work for dear one you must work or I shall begin tormenting myself thinking perhaps I help to make you idle & then I would soon feel we ought not to meet at all, & that would be O so dreary! -

You asked me yesterday if I am not a little sad that things are as they are between us - I am sorry & I am glad. It is hard being away from each other so much there are moments when I am dreadfully lonely & long to be with you, - one of these moments is on me now - but beloved I am glad & proud beyond measure of your love, & that it is strong enough & high enough to accept the spiritual love & union I offer -

I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you & dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed & I am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you too. I know how hard & rare a thing it is for a man to hold spiritual love when the bodily desire is gone & I have not made these prayers without a terrible struggle a struggle that shook my life though I do not speak much of it & generally manage to laugh.

That struggle is over & I have found peace. I think today I could let you marry another without losing it - for I know the spiritual union between us will outlive this life, even if we never see each other in this world again.

Write to me soon.
Yours

Maud

Yeats, when he was in his 60s, nearing the end, wrote the following poem. Many scholars believe it makes reference to this visit in Paris in 1908, especially the evocative raw line "Strike me if I shriek". Whatever it means, it is fierce and intimate.

A Man Young and Old
by William Butler Yeats

I
First Love

THOUGH nurtured like the sailing moon
In beauty's murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood
Until I thought her body bore
A heart of flesh and blood.
But since I laid a hand thereon
And found a heart of stone
I have attempted many things
And not a thing is done,
For every hand is lunatic
That travels on the moon.
She smiled and that transfigured me
And left me but a lout,
Maundering here, and maundering there,
Emptier of thought
Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
When the moon sails out.

II
Human Dignity
Like the moon her kindness is,
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in't,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow were a scene
Upon a painted wall.
So like a bit of stone I lie
Under a broken tree.
I could recover if I shrieked
My heart's agony
To passing bird, but I am dumb
From human dignity.

III
The Mermaid
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.

IV
The Death of the Hare
I have pointed out the yelling pack,
The hare leap to the wood,
And when I pass a compliment
Rejoice as lover should
At the drooping of an eye,
At the mantling of the blood.
Then' suddenly my heart is wrung
By her distracted air
And I remember wildness lost
And after, swept from there,
Am set down standing in the wood
At the death of the hare.

V
The Empty Cup
A crazy man that found a cup,
When all but dead of thirst,
Hardly dared to wet his mouth
Imagining, moon-accursed,
That another mouthful
And his beating heart would burst.
October last I found it too
But found it dry as bone,
And for that reason am I crazed
And my sleep is gone.

VI
His Memories
We should be hidden from their eyes,
Being but holy shows
And bodies broken like a thorn
Whereon the bleak north blows,
To think of buried Hector
And that none living knows.
The women take so little stock
In what I do or say
They'd sooner leave their cosseting
To hear a jackass bray;
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take --
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck --
That she cried into this ear,
'Strike me if I shriek.'

VII
The Friends of his Youth
Laughter not time destroyed my voice
And put that crack in it,
And when the moon's pot-bellied
I get a laughing fit,
For that old Madge comes down the lane,
A stone upon her breast,
And a cloak wrapped about the stone,
And she can get no rest
With singing hush and hush-a-bye;
She that has been wild
And barren as a breaking wave
Thinks that the stone's a child.
And Peter that had great affairs
And was a pushing man
Shrieks, 'I am King of the Peacocks,'
And perches on a stone;
And then I laugh till tears run down
And the heart thumps at my side,
Remembering that her shriek was love
And that he shrieks from pride.

VIII
Summer and Spring
We sat under an old thorn-tree
And talked away the night,
Told all that had been said or done
Since first we saw the light,
And when we talked of growing up
Knew that we'd halved a soul
And fell the one in t'other's arms
That we might make it whole;
Then peter had a murdering look,
For it seemed that he and she
Had spoken of their childish days
Under that very tree.
O what a bursting out there was,
And what a blossoming,
When we had all the summer-time
And she had all the spring!

IX
The Secrets of the Old
I have old women's sectets now
That had those of the young;
Madge tells me what I dared not think
When my blood was strong,
And what had drowned a lover once
Sounds like an old song.
Though Margery is stricken dumb
If thrown in Madge's way,
We three make up a solitude;
For none alive to-day
Can know the stories that we know
Or say the things we say:
How such a man pleased women most
Of all that are gone,
How such a pair loved many years
And such a pair but one,
Stories of the bed of straw
Or the bed of down.

X
His Wildness
O bid me mount and sail up there
Amid the cloudy wrack,
For peg and Meg and Paris' love
That had so straight a back,
Are gone away, and some that stay
Have changed their silk for sack.
Were I but there and none to hear
I'd have a peacock cry,
For that is natural to a man
That lives in memory,
Being all alone I'd nurse a stone
And sing it lullaby.

XI
From 'Oedipus at Colonus'
Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
Even from that delight memory treasures so,
Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,
As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.
In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,
The bride is catried to the bridegroom's chamber
through torchlight and tumultuous song;
I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have
looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

The way she looks at him

Near the end of Tender Mercies, Mac Sledge (played by Robert Duvall) plays with a new band of youngsters at a local dance, and it is his comeback, albeit a small one, but things have already started moving in the direction of him playing music again. It has been a long hard road for him, alcoholism, divorce, not being able to see his daughter for 20 years or so. He has married Rosa Lee, a young widow who runs a windy motel on a deserted highway. She has a young son. Her husband had been killed in Vietnam. Tess Harper plays Rosa. Watching the film yet again recently made me think deeply about Tess Harper (it was so nice to see her again, even in such a small part, in No Country For Old Men) - and how that film, as effective as Duvall is, wouldn't work without her. It is the opposite of a "star" performance. She IS that woman. She is a good Christian woman, struggling along on her own, trying to make the best of it, and Mac Sledge was not something she was looking for. But she takes him on, tormented past and all. It is a beautiful performance, one very dear to my heart. I just learned that this was one of my grandmother's favorite movies (my mom's mother), and that makes me just love it even more. I watched it, and I felt closer to my grandmother in my heart.

And at this country dance, with Robert Duvall on stage, singing and performing - Tess Harper sits at a table, with her son, watching. This is her first time seeing him perform. She looks up at him, and the camera keeps going to her through the scene. The scene is good because of all that has gone before, and how much we have come to care about Mac Sledge. Duvall lets him be complex, quiet, alone with his thoughts, suddenly frustrated, flawed ... this is a man who has to take ownership of the fact that the wreckage of his life is pretty much his own fault. No passing the buck. His devotion to Christ, and his new-found love for Rosa and her son, has certainly helped him do that. There may be no second acts in American life, but there can be redemption. Personal redemption.

Tess Harper's face, as she looks up at her husband singing, is (for me, in this latest viewing) the most moving part of the entire movie. She's not just beaming with pride, although there is that there as well. The expression on her face changes, subtly, each time we see her. Sometimes she seems to have gone quiet, still, with a pool of calmness in her - the very calmness that he was first drawn to. She can "take" him. She accepts him. He is who he is. She does not grasp him too hard. She welcomes his estranged daughter into her life. She doesn't want him getting too close to his ex-wife - she's human enough for that - but she takes the man as he stands.

And yet there he is, onstage, doing what he was born to do, and it is as though he has become MORE in her eyes. She sees his talent, his gift, and also the possibility that he may be about to accept it into his heart again. She doesn't cry, but Tess Harper's face is filled with ... well, I can't even label it.

Love. Pride. Strength. Acceptance. Excitement. And maybe even a little understandable vanity ... as in: That guy up there? That's my husband.

It knocked my socks off.

The dream in life for me, so often, is to have someone look at me like that. Love me like that. Wouldn't that be something.

But in this last viewing, it changed. It became even more powerful. What I felt was how much I want to look at someone like that. It isn't just about love. It is about admiring the work that they do, separately from you. This is why I have 100% of the time fallen in love with artists. It has caused me a lot of heartache, but also given me so much joy. There has got to be a balance there somewhere, although balance is not my strong suit.

Tess Harper's face captures it all in that last scene - and normally my focus has been on HIM when I watch that last scene. I had somehow missed the strength and power and beauty of what SHE is doing.

I love that my grandmother loved this movie.

Uncle Tony knows.

I got a message from the realtor that a package for me had arrived at their offices and could I stop by to pick it up. Who could it be from? I went to get it and found it was from my uncle Tony. There is a backstory here. When I was staying with Mike out in LA, his cupboards were full of bags of Dunkin Donuts coffee, since LA is challenged in that department. Our New England roots have ruined us for any other kind of coffee. Starbucks hasn't made a dent in my taste. So Mike's dad, my uncle Tony, sends Mike packages of bags of coffee periodically, so that Mike basically has a lifetime supply - and when his guests from that area (uhm, his 500 cousins) come to visit, we can have the kind of coffee we adore. I thought that was so funny and sweet at the time. "I love uncle Tony," I said to Mike, as he opened up yet another box with Dunkin Donuts logos all over it.

I walked into the real estate office this morning, and the nice lady there said, "Your package is right there" - I looked, and saw the tell-tale orange and pink lettering and logos all over the box. You are kidding me. I am on Block Island for a MONTH (and no, there are no Dunkin Donuts out here), and so my uncle Tony who knows about my trip (the entire free world which basically equals both sides of my family knows about my trip) took it upon himself to send me a couple bags of Dunkin Donuts coffee, because he knew I'd be aching for it.

I was so touched. I started laughing. All the women in the office started laughing too. One said, "You're just like my husband. He goes away for only a weekend and he has to bring a bag of Dunkin Donuts coffee."

Nothing like it on earth.

Thank you, Uncle Tony. You're the best.

Entire worlds

I love books where entire worlds open up in the footnotes. I have often followed the trail of footnotes and found books that have become ultimate favorites of all time, because of the mention in a footnote. The footnotes to the letters of Maud Gonne and WB Yeats are spectacular, but again, the person I would want to talk about all of this with is no longer here, so I feel a bit stopped up when I read a paragraph about this or that person and don't know where to turn. Please be careful in how you comment (unless, that is, you are my family or my friends who actually know me). Maud Gonne wrote in a letter to Yeats, nervous about advice she had given him:

I fear it seems like uncalledfor advice (which is a thing I have in horror!)

As do I. Seriously, unless I ask, don't give. Many thanks.

I want to talk to him and say, "So tell me more about John O'Leary" or "John O'Mahoney", or pretty much anyone, and he would not hesitate. He would not say, "Never heard of him", not to anyone appearing in THESE pages anyway.

My point here is: check out just ONE of the footnotes in this collection of letters (below). This is just ONE, and they are ALL like that.

Now I would like to point out that many of these people are not unknown to me, due to the family I grew up in, and my influences growing up, etc. I need no introduction to Patrick Pearse or Wolfe Tone or all the rest. It's these OTHER people, just as fascinating, who make these brief cameo appearances - but I want to follow every trail.

Here is just one example of a footnote that blew my mind:

Florence Farr (1869-1917) was an actress; she married Edward Emery, an actor, in 1884 and they were divorced in 1894. Also in 1894 she acted in WBY's play The Land of Heart's Desire at the Avenue Theatre, which was sponsored by Annie Horniman. She joined the Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890, becoming praemonstratrix in 1895. After disagreements with WBY and Annie Horniman she left the Order in 1902. In the first decade of the twentieth century she collaborated with WBY in his experiments with verse speaking to the psaltery. In Dublin she appeared as Aleel in the first production of WBY's The Countess Cathleen in 1899 nand recited to the psaltery at the Antient Concert Rooms in 1902. In 1912 she went to Ceylon to become the headmistress of a girls' school; she died there of cancer.

Florence Farr was an important person in Yeats' life, a name well-known to any Yeats fanatic - I barely knew anything about her except her intersection with him, and I still don't feel I know anything, but Jesus, just reading that short biography makes me want to know EVERYTHING. And while surely you could just Google her (as I most certainly will) - there is something lovely about sitting in the not-knowing for a bit, and contemplating that evocative footnote, full of an entire life. Even just that one footnote brings up a million questions for me. And do not ruin my fun by providing me with a Wikipedia page that I could just as easily find myself, like looking something up on IMDB or something!!

What a footnote like that means to me is an entire world has opened up in my mind. What was with her divorce? It must have been a scandal, but what was really going on there? And Ceylon? Really now! I would love to know how that choice came about.

Wikipedia might provide answers but they are colorless compared to the answers I used to receive, the perceptive hands pulling a book down off the shelf where he could point to this or that passage, coloring in the edges for me about people. The gravelly voice saying, immediately, upon my question, "Well, she was born in County Donegal to Anglo-Irish aristocrats..." or what have you.

That is what I miss. That is what I long for. That is what those footnotes make me think of.

Here's another one:

Sarah Purser (1848-1943), a Dublin artist, was a friend of the Yeats family. WBY described her as 'so clever a woman that people found it impossible to believe she was a bad painter.' He recorded her comments on MG: 'Maud Gonne talks politics in Paris, and literature to you, and at the Horse Show she would talk of a clinking brood mare.' He had earlier disliked one of her portraits of MG, and she had met him 'with the sentence, "so Maud Gonne is dying in the South of France and her portrait is on sale," and went on to tell how she had lunched with Maud Gonne in Paris and there was a very tall Frenchman there [probably Mellevoye] - and I thought she dwelt upon his presence for my sake - and the doctor had said to her "They will both be dead in six months"'. As a founder member of the Friends of the National Collection in 1924, she was instrumental in securing Charlemount House as the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, where the Lane Collection was housed when it came to Dublin.

A world. A whole world.

At the edge of the world

Went out to the North Light early this morning, with a hot cup of coffee, and wearing my Dad's hiking boots. This is the lighthouse on the northern tip of Block Island. You can see the mainland off in the distance. You park your car in a little lot and then have to walk on a rocky crescent beach to actually get to the lighthouse. This is unlike the Southeast lighthouse which is pretty much right off the road. I parked my car. The wind was so freezing that the couple of times I took my gloves off to take a picture, I actually ended up getting anxious, because it was so cold I lost feelings in my poor stick-figure fingers. The ocean was a deep dark blue with tossing whitecaps, and the wind was deafening. I found myself shouting at times to myself (the place was deserted), "JAYSUS, it's fuckin' COLD!" I walked towards the lighthouse, which meant I walked into the wind. It was brutal. But the sun was coming up behind me, the blue waves tossed fiercely out to my right, the dunes lay down flat in the wind, and careless obnoxious seagulls bobbed on the freezing waves, staring at me in an arrogant manner.

This morning walk was so intense I found myself in tears on the trek back to my car. So so beautiful. I had also been thinking a bit about my collection of beach glass, which has connections for me with a man I once loved, who ALSO had a collection of beach glass (only his was fresh water, being a mid-Western boy, and mine was salt - we gave each other pieces of beach glass) - and I still scan the ground for beach glass, and I imagine even if I am 80 years old, I'll have a moment where I will think of that fresh-water man I once loved every time I find a piece. It came into my mind, the beach glass, and this particular beach is treacherous with rocks for the most part - dwindling down into a crescent of pebbles - not really a clean sweep of sand where anything like a piece of beach glass stands out.

I made my way close to the lighthouse, a blinding white stone building, picking up the morning sun, with the black tower, the brave light inside. I crawled around the snowy dunes trying to get as close as I could (the place is closed to the public right now), and there were times, I admit, that it got so cold, I literally huddled behind a sand dune to get some relief. The ocean was roaring on all sides. This is a point, remember. You are surrounded.

I stood on the very edge of the northern tip of Block Island, with cross-current waves streaming in at me on both sides, crashing in the middle. There was a sense of the land dipping off into nothingness. I knew I had no danger of "tipping" off the edge - it wasn't a cliff - it was a rocky beach that curved right off into the waves and that was that. Like The Titanic sinking without a trace. It was exhilarating, an exhilarating spot. I felt some vertigo at times, especially when I stood at the very "bow" of the island - so that the illusion was that there was only ocean in front of me, and that I was floating out over it. If I only judged from what I saw in my line of vision, then I was completely out to sea. The vertigo came and I actually had to look down at my boots, to reassure myself that I was actually standing on land. But what happens at this northern tip is that the water races in at it from both sides, big crashing waves on the left side, and more of a protected lapping on the right side. But make no mistake - both sides are trying to leap over the small pathway of rocks on which I am standing - to get to the other side. It must have been low tide when I was out there, shivering and freezing on the rocky outlet into the sea - and I am sure that that entire isthmus is underwater at high tide, and as a matter of fact, as I stood there, a wave from the left (the more aggressive side) made it further up over the rocks and washed a bit against my shoe.

Okay, okay. Time to go.

It was a hike back to my car, but by that point the wind was at my back (Brian's wish for me came true: Go raibh an ghaoth go brách ag do chúl) - so it actually got warm enough I could take off my gloves.

I felt exhilarated, and transparent, it wasn't even 8:30 in the morning yet, and I had been to one of the most beautiful places on earth.

I glanced down at one point, so that I wouldn't lose footing on the pebbles which were a bit uneven, and right there - right on that very spot where I happened to look down - I caught sight of a rounded piece of clear beach glass. I started laughing at the miracle of it, because I had just been thinking about beach glass on the start of the walk, and then forgot about it, because the rest of the scenery was so spectacular (almost frightening - the place was deserted - no one knew I was out there).

I no longer want to invest energy into the meaning of things because that way (for me) danger lies. I do not care to get advice to the contrary, either - unless you know me really well already (ie: friends or family). My understanding of my own narrative is my own - and it's hard-won, and well-thought-out. So no ultimate "meaning" assigned to things anymore. Let other people do that for me, if they wish.

Regardless.

I sure am glad I found that piece of beach glass. It's a nice specimen: thick and substantial. Sometimes you just find a tiny chip of green or blue, but sometimes, if you're lucky, you find a big chunk - sometimes even with raised markings on it (like it was once part of a mason jar or something like that) - albeit worn down by the sea. I like the big fat chunks, and this one - frosted over, clear and yet opaque - is a good addition to my collection. Kind of a star, actually.

Oh shut up, Mr. Allison

Watched the ridiculous-from-beginning-to-end Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison this morning, starring Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum (two of my favorites). He plays a shipwrecked Marine. She plays an Irish nun living alone on a desert island after the priest she was with died. The whole movie is basically just the two of them, trying to survive - not only the elements but the constant threat of "Jap" invasions. Also trying to survive their burgeoning love for one another. Now, Robert Mitchum could make anything interesting. Just put a camera on his face and it's far more engaging than a brilliant monologue given by a more histrionic actor. And Deborah Kerr is never bad. You just flat out like her. At all times. The relationship they create here is actually quite interesting - with shades of The African Queen, although Kerr is not as prissy or uptight as Hepburn in Queen. But whatever, there are beautiful moonlit scenes of the hard-bitten Marine and the white-robed nun basically thatching a lean-to on some damn beach, and the whole thing is total BALDERDASH.

Nobody else is in the movie. It is all them. The romance is (obviously) an unlikely one, not to mention theologically precarious - but whaddya know, she has yet to take her final vows! What will she do??

Mitchum plays his part with a soft politeness (always calling her "Ma'am") which goes against his normal type, the heavy-lidded smoking cad who says, in the face of a woman's desperate plea for innocence, "Baby, I don't care."

But still. A nun and a Marine thatching a lean-to, while hiding from the Japs?

Preposterous.

I rolled my eyes through the whole thing.

But then: at a crucial moment, the electricity went out in my house for a moment. Deborah Kerr had run away in the rain, devastated by his drinking or some such idiotic bossy-plot reason, and now lay ill and shivering in their perfectly clean cave that looks like a set from the "Brady Bunch in Hawaii" episode. He huddles over her, calling her "Ma'am", and tells her that she needs to "help him" get her out of her wet clothes.

An erotic charge fills the Gilligan's-Island-huge-spider-episode cave with its fake rocks, and the bogus shivering nun lying on the clean dry floor.

He pleads with her to take off her clothes, but all with that gentle politeness that is so devastating in a man like Mitchum. On anyone else, it might read as insincere, or, frankly, sociopathic - but on him, you just die for it.

It was at that moment I lost power.

I had been making fun of the movie in my head the entire time - but boy when the power went out - AND AT THAT MOMENT - I was crushed. I actually stood up. Said to the dark television, "Oh please no. Not now."

Not just as the nun is about to take off her wet clothes as the Marine looks to the side in a gentlemanly devastating fashion. Not now!!!

A minute later, the power came back on, and the scene had ended, and some other scene involving an invasion of Japs had begun and I felt crestfallen and cheated.

The lesson? Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is complete balderdash (not to mention the stupid title that actually makes me ANGRY because of its cutesiness and lack of connection to ANYTHING that might have ANY emotional depth) - but boy is it satisfying balderdash.

Gonne and Yeats: a fragment

Ella Young wrote in her autobiography Flowering Dusk of her glimpses of Maud Gonne and WB Yeats:

I see her standing with WB Yeats, the poet, in front of Whistler's Miss Alexander in the Dublin gallery where some pictures by Whistler are astonishing a select few. These two people delight the bystanders more than the pictures. Everyone stops looking at canvas and manoeuvres himself or herself into a position to watch these two. They are almost of equal height. Yeats has a dark, romantic cloak about him; Maud Gonne has a dress that changes colour as she moves. They pay no attention to the stir they are creating; they stand there discussing the picture.

I catch sight of them again in the reading room of the National Library. They have a pile of books between them and are consulting the books and each other. No one else is consulting a book. Everyone is conscious of those two as the denizens of a woodland lake might be conscious of a flamingo, or of a Japanese heron, if it suddenly descended among them.

Later, in the narrow curve of Grafton Street, I notice people are stopping and turning their heads. It is Maud Gonne and the poet. She has a radiance as of sunlight. Yeats, that leopard of the moon, holds back in a leash a huge lion-coloured Great Dane - Maud Gonne's dog, Dagda.

I am glad THEY were able to find Grafton Street.

I just love reading about the two of them. It makes me feel lonely, but it connects me to something deep and continuous as well.

On the island

-- There is only one four-way intersection on the island. No stoplights. The intersection is referred to one and all as "The Four Corners." "Excuse me, can you tell me where the bank is?" "The Four Corners." "Got it."

-- I spent the morning wandering around the Southeast Lighthouse, which is so beautiful and so intense I almost felt like I was mainlining some awesome drug of choice. This is the lighthouse that was moved, about a decade ago, because the cliffs were crumbling beneath it. It is a huge beautiful brick structure, with the glimmering mirrored lighthouse tower fat and squat. There was nobody about this morning, a sunny crisp morning, and the ocean was blindingly bright, streatching off in all directions. What can I say. I'm from the Ocean State. It is the landscape of my dreams, my comfort, where I want to always be. It's an old lighthouse, a national landmark, and I had a really good private time there this morning.

-- I am reading Titan, by Ron Chernow (whom I will love forever for his Alexander Hamilton book) - Titan is his book on John D. Rockefeller, and, as always, Chernow's writing is elegant, evocative, and highly intelligent. John D. Rockefeller is emerging before my eyes. He hasn't even gotten into the oil business yet. He's just a young man. It's a huge book, daunting really, but I am very glad I have started it. I am learning a lot - not just about him, but of the economy at that time.

-- I have been writing in a journal again. It makes me feel a bit silly, like a lovesick schoolkid, but it has been good for me. It's certainly exercising the writing muscles again. Which, I suppose if you read my blog may seem ridiculous - she needs to exercise? But I do, I really do. Writing down long passionate entries about my "feelings" have been pretty much forbidden for the last 3 or 4 years. Nothing much to write about. But I am forcing myself to, and I can feel ideas for other things start to bubble up.

-- I am now pretty much in love with Loretta Young, in her pre-Code movies. It was her birthday yesterday, I believe, and TCM had a marathon. I am not as wacky about later Loretta Young, although she is always lovely and natural - but her early 1930s stuff cannot be beat. Wow.

-- Also reading a book of interviews with Roman Polanski (what a mind), and also the letters of Maud Gonne and WB Yeats. Dear Maud, you are a WACKO, but I love you anyway.

-- Trying to read again. Creating the mental space for it again, despite how ragged everything has felt over the last year - a sort of scattering of my focus.

-- My little house is so cute. There's even a roll-top desk. And a front porch. I love my room too. I am sleeping like the DEAD. Going to bed early, waking up early.

-- I arrived out here in the middle of the big storm we just had. The ferry ride was rough (although I am sure it could have been rougher) - the boat climbing up the waves, then climbing down into the holes left by the waves, the spray flying over the bow. It was awesome and beautiful. That ferry boat. My, she is yar.

-- Walking on the beach.

-- Walking around a frozen pond at sunset, watching the big dunes waving in the freezing night wind off to the north.

-- I am going to go to the Southeast Light every day. I'll never get enough of that spot.

2009 Books Read

A pathetic showing when you consider how much I normally read (2008, 2007, 2006, 2005), but whatever, I did what I could. I did not read a book, not one word, from about March to August. Or, that's probably wrong - I am already remembering 2009 wrong. I know I didn't read at all from January until about March. Then I had a small burst, which abruptly fell off in around June and then months passed before I read again. It is very strange to not be reading. But here is my paltry tally for 2009.

1. Necessary Sins, by Lynn Darling. Don't miss it. Excerpts here, here, here, and here.

2. Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays (Vintage), by Joan Acocella. Loved every word. NOT TO BE MISSED. She brought me to Nureyev, and for that I am truly thankful. Excerpt here, here and here.

3. Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood: Rebels, Reds, and Graduates and the Wild Stories Behind the Making of 13 IconicFilms. Great stuff. And thank you, James Wolcott, for your continued support.

4. Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace, by Margaret Singer. I believe Siobhan gave this to me for Christmas. It's a brilliant and important book.

5. Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34, by Bryan Burroughs. Wonderful.

6. The Complete Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. I know I'm behind the curve on this one, but this is definitely the best book I've read this year. Tears, guffawing out loud, outrage ... the book has it all. It's brilliant.

7. Young Stalin (Vintage), by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I can't get enough. Clearly.

8. Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, by Leanne Shapton. Sent to me by dear cousin Mike to get me reading again ... it ended up being THE CONTEXT through which I went through the ridiculous white-hot-rage romantic situation I found myself in this year. EFF YOU, DOUCHE. Happy New Year. Post here. Thanks Mike for knowing just what I needed to hear.

10. Life with My Sister Madonna, by Christopher Ciccone. I read this while I was in LA. It is stupid and petty. Could not put it down.

11. 700 Sundays, by Billy Crystal. My dear friend Kate sent this to me. I have the best friends. A really emotional piece of work from Crystal, a true tribute to his parents. beautiful.

12. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zambardo. I am now obsessed with the Stanford Prison Experiment for all time. Great book.

13. Nureyev: The Life (Vintage), by Julie Kavanagh. READ IT. I DEMAND that you read it. A magnificent piece of work.

14. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, by Robert Hare. A must-read for anyone interested in criminal psychology. MUST READ.

I was hoping to finish (or re-finish) Crime and Punishment this year, one of my favorite books, and a perfect jumping off point from Robert Hare's groundbreaking work. I have 40 pages to go and I just couldn't get it done. I've lost my mojo.