The New Hope Journal
January 2012
for SHR
Why, why, why! do you keep on trying?
The faded beauty of the faded beauties
reminds you of your faded strength.
Your passion driven past
and all it meant to you.
And now you chase your passion
the way your passion used to chase your dreams.
No wonder that confusion enters your rooms
like an intruder in the night.
Sometimes a rain soaked traveler lost.
Sometimes a malcontent.
Who are we now in our last days
but the waste under the kitchen sink
waiting to be tossed out and hauled away?
But I pray you back. I pray.
Please don't let them carry me away.
I'm not lost, but merely dying.
Like a child playing with a stick in the dust
All his life yet still before him.
--Larry L. Dill
I'm reading Harold Bloom's "Anatomy of Influence, Literature as a way of life." When I am struck down by what I used to deny but now accept as an essential part of being a writer, I go to someone like the great Bloom to help me find my way back to my natural gait, or as Bloom calls it in this new book, "the poet in the poet."
I celebrate the new year with my daughters, one with a new degree from the London School of Economics, the other promising to present me with my first grandchild this spring. There is great joy in the family.
My life has been a broad canvas. But like Pollock I've painted it in dribs and drabs without thought or reason. Just to get it all down. Here below, to welcome in the new year of 2012
is an abstract expression from yesteryear, the September 2006 edition of the New Hope Journal.
Happy New Year
September 1, 2006
I made a quick trip to New York last weekend to practice the Tango with my daughter for the father/daughter dance for her wedding in October. We’re not very good. But we keep working at it. It rained all weekend and so most of our practice sessions took place in her living room, which, empty, would have made a perfect rehearsal hall with its shiny hardwood floors and light streaming through the rain swept windows, but, filled with furniture, left us only an elevator sized dance floor. We danced in our heads. On Saturday evening the clouds broke open long enough for us to attend a Milonga around the statue of Shakespeare in Central Park. We drank wine discreetly from a cranberry juice bottle and tried to imitate the better dancers around us. At home we watched the Tango movies of Brando and Duval and Banderas.
In “Take the Lead,” Antonio Banderas teaches his ghetto students the rules of the dance. “The man leads, not by force, but by presenting his partner with a move. It is up to her to accept or not.” The essence of the Tango and romantic love.
On the plane home, high over Virginia between New York and Asheville, I thought about three willowy blondes I’d met this week.. One canvassing for the democratic party on Madison Avenue. "We're starting a grassroots movement," she said. "On Madison Avenue?" I laughed. "We should have dinner tonight and talk this over," I thought to myself. She was happy and upbeat. I slipped away as quickly as I could.
The flight attendant was sweet and sensual. Maybe not even 30. She was perhaps the youngest flight attendant I’d seen since 9/ll. I wanted to tell her how proud I was that she had the courage to take on this profession in these times.
She took my drink order and served it without collecting the $5 fee for alcololic drinks. I tried to pay her later but she said it was complimentary because the plane had been delayed. I asked for another and paid her this time and then as she came back through the cabin she slipped the curled up $5 back into my hand and whispered, “I had to give another man a second drink free because he had no change. I thought it only fair to give your money back, too." She smiled and scurried away.
The man takes the lead. It’s up to the woman to accept or not.
I read on in Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" as the wine went to my head.
The other tall blonde on the plane was beautiful, too, but ageing, like me. She had lost her sexual edge, though wise no doubt she was. She smiled at me, once, before we boarded the plane. We never had a chance to speak. The wisdom, I will have to get from books. And from the wise woman I live with.
The plane was descending through the clouds into Asheville. We’re all ageing here. Ageing, but still learning the Tango. And the loneliness of long distance runners. Speak to me only with thine eyes. Give your body to the earth and your soul to truth.
--Larry L. Dill
Excerpts From Larry L. Dill's Intimate Journals from July, 2006
July 16, 2006, Waynesville, North Carolina. Sunday, 7:30 am.
Human discourse is gridlocked. There are too many people on earth and too few resources. Too little land. Religion, like music, is a universal language but only in theory. The devil is in the details.
The question is quite simply this: Are wars caused by the natural consequences of the rational mind in search of peace? Or are they caused by greed and a quest for power? Something is wrong but what exactly is it? What of mine—the little that I have—would I give up?
Somewhere off in the distance someone is mowing his lawn at 7 am on a Sunday morning. It is a very small act of aggression, of disturbing the peace, that he no doubt has not considered. It is not really bothering me that much because I can only barely hear it. But what about his neighbors next door?
It all seems so hopeless. Thinking doesn’t seem to help. The mind devises categories that are only rough approximations of the truth. We dream of France this week, the Caribbean next. The French are dreaming of the Cote d’Azur. They go there in August when everyone else is there. The whole country slammed up against the southern border like a wave against a wall. People are not pack animals. They’re sheep.
I’m surrounded by Morris Berman’s books—Dark Ages America, Twilight of American Culture, Coming to our Senses. We are Hitler’s Germany now. Everybody admires what we have and everyone wants to stop us. We thought when we bombed Germany to rubble and then Japan, there would be peace on Earth. Where has it gotten us?
Israel now again in a siege mentality, waving its star and its sovereignty as if the ownership of a dream gives one rights in the real world, as if the vision of a neat lawn gives you the right to mow your lawn at 7am on Sunday morning. The Jewish myth of the Garden of Eden cannot be recovered because it never existed. For the Jews or for anybody else. Israel cannot not see itself or its military strength as mere morality play, mere medieval sorcery. Either there is no Holy Land or it is all Holy. Religion has become the universal language of despair. Without Napoleon who can say whether or not America would have become an empire. Without Napoleon’s reinvention of the Crusades who can say whether the Middle East would have become the battle ground for Armageddon that it has become.
It is 8:30 now. The noise is louder out my window. The lawnmower in the distance has been replaced by the even more annoying device: a weedeater or a leaf blower. The final touches on one mans idea of the American dream. You get it by stepping on other people’s rights.
Arundati Roy is angered by the fact that peace itself is merely a scab over festering injustice. A friend reads Joan Didion for answers or at least clues to death and its meanings? I pick up Pushkin this morning and read these lines:
She found in a romantic story
All one might care to be or know;
Living the chapters through, she’d glory
In Richardson as in Rousseau.
Her father saw no harm in reading
(He lived in quite another age);
But then he never read a page.
He did not know that books could say things.
To move you even while you slept;
He thought the tomes his daughter kept
Beneath her pillow, empty playthings;
While, on the other hand, his wife
Held Richardson as dear as life.
July 17, 6:30 am.
Money, distance, time, love, longing, war, peace, beauty, truth, hope, despair, denial and death. Words running through my head like random chords banged out on a piano.
A woodpecker is hard at work out there this morning. Something chirps. Maybe a wren. I saw a pair of yellow finches yesterday, high in a pine tree, feeding each other what looked like a potato chip. I fumbled for my camera and they flew away.
A woman came to the front door last week and asked if she could read a passage from the Bible to me. I said, “Sure, why not.” I had the storm door open just enough to speak to her and not let the dog out or let her get her foot in. The dog was naturally curious. He stood next to me like a small child, thinking to himself, I suppose, “Who are they, pop? Will they pet me? Do you think they have anything to eat?”
The woman opened her Bible, one of those soft, leather covered Bibles with concordant references in the margins and running right down the middle of each page. She opened it to the book of Revelation. She turned sideways so that I could read along as she read to me. I’ve gone back this morning and looked the passage up. It is at the end of chapter 7.
The last line is notated as an almost exact quote from the Old Testament book of Isaiah.
For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them and shall lead them unto living fountains of water: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.
At the time this door to door evangelist for Jesus was standing on my front porch I wanted to argue with her about the vengefulness of the God of the book of Revelation. But of course I could not quote chapter and verse. And anyway I was more eager for her to go away. I could have the argument with myself…later. This morning I read on beyond the passage she read and found what I was looking for:
And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.
And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth; and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.
And it was commanded then that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.
And to them it was given that they should not kill them but that they should be tormented five months and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man.
And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
I lay the prophecies of Revelation aside and pick up another book close at had that was published a year before 9/11. A passage I had marked fairly leaps off the page:
Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable. The innocent of the twenty-first century are going to harvest unexpected blowback disasters from the imperialist escapades of recent decades. Although most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was, and still is being done in their names, all are likely to pay a steep price—individually and collectively—for their nation’s continued efforts to dominate the global scene.
--Chalmers Johnson, “Blowback.”
July 18, 2006, Waynesville. 8am.
My mind was blank for a while. Then I was thinking vaguely about Napoleon and the French Revolution. Then I drifted like a dream does into thoughts of beautiful women. I saw one sitting in the window of a sandwich shop in Waynesville the other day, looking at me as I passed by. Neither a smile nor a frown did she have for me. But her eyes looked directly into mine.
I was thinking then this morning about the patterns and the intimacies of the mind. How does one define one’s intentions, one’s driving force. One’s beliefs, hopes, moral imperatives. Is it not an ideology? Just as he hijacked the French Revolution for his own purposes, Napoleon hijacked the newly coined word, “ideologie,” by which its coiner, Destutt de Tracy, meant the study of ideas. Napoleon used it to mean the muddleheaded ideas of his democratic detractors—in other words: the enlightenment itself. In “Key Words,” Raymond Williams quotes Napoleon as saying,
It is to the doctrine of the ideologues—to this diffuse metaphysics, which in a contrived manner seeks to find the primary causes and on this foundation would erect the legislation of peoples, instead of adapting the laws to a knowledge of the human heart and the lessons of history—to which one must attribute all the misfortunes which have befallen our beautiful France.
I’ve referred to this passage many times before. I picked it up this morning because I was thinking about how easy it is to find a beautiful woman in this world, but how hard it is to find one whose head is not filled with ideas averse to my own.
Not to disparage beautiful women as a class or even women in general. I just mean that a person is made up of both a physical exterior that is measured by others on a scale of beauty and an internal character that can not so easily be discerned.
For some men of course, myself at times included, what is inside a woman’s head is of little consequence beside the overwhelming effects of her physical beauty. But the deeper longings of true romantic love involve more consilience of body and soul than mere lust allows for. The mission then is to find the soul of a lover before falling too hopelessly in love with the body. Traditional romance has had a kind of metaphysical quality to it. But a deeper and more modern way of looking at love would be to see oneself as a kind of anthropologist uncovering the unconscious cosmology of the object of one’s physical attraction. An archaeology of the soul.
Or as Neil Young put it, “A miner for a heart of gold. And I’m gettin’ old.”
July 20, 2006
The essence of American “New Age” thinking is that we are too cerebral and need to get in touch with the spirit/body elements and stop thinking so much. This is ironic because one cannot come to such a position without having thought it through.
Nevertheless, Morris Berman points out in his book, “Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West,” that the mind/body dualism is a Western idea that doesn’t really exist in Eastern thought. And so New Ageism, like Romanticism is a peculiarly Western effort to bring the mind and body together in one unity. Something that is quite natural in the Eastern mind. Berman quotes from Frederich Herr’s “Medieval World.”
Medieval civilization…is to be understood as a coexistence of highly improbable opposites…This paradoxical civilization found in the figures, symbols and “adventures,” of the roman courtois the artistic and formal expression ideally suited to it. As a tapestry, the motifs intertwine in complex arabesques of meaning, drawn from many different worlds. Historians, theologians and philologists…have all tried their hands at drawing out a single thread, be it of Christian, Persian, Gnostic, Cathar, Druidical or Islamic origin. These invidious attempts are understandable, and can in a sense be justified. But they are an injustice perpetrated against the living reality of a work of art and compelling power of its symbolic figures. It is in fact the veil of form and symbol that gives the roman courtois its power. The theme of the great romantic epics is initiation, dedication, metamorphosis and absorption into a higher and fuller life, at once more human and more divine…All Arthurian romances of the first rank were attempts at expounding the processes of man’s interior development…The remedies prescribed for the man who has strayed a thousand times into the jungle of his immature passions are women, “nature,” mysterium. In the romans, therefore, a woman is always at hand to transform and ennoble a man. Through his relationship with the woman the man gains access to his own soul, to the deeper layers of his “heart.”
One need look no further than Dante to illustrate Herr’s and Berman’s thesis. The Divine Comedy is the central epic of western literature. All the complex elements Herr speaks of are there. And the relationship between Dante and Beatrice is religious, sexual and platonic all at once. I quote a key illustrative passage (Canto 33 of Purgatorio) at the end of my essay on Dante and the Renaissance (July, 2005) posted elsewhere on this web site. Morris Berman continues:
The notion of a psychic revolution in the West, based on Eastern influences and a re-evaluation of the archetypal feminine, gets us to the heart of what I have been pursuing [in the study of] heresy as a secret, somatic “skeleton key,” as it were, to the history of Western Consciousness at large. It amounts to a breakthrough to interiority, an overturning of a previous “masculine” mentalité at certain nodal points in our political history; and it is the immediate political context that shaped in each case, what happened to the immense psychic energy that got released. Amidst the rich diversity of Greek philosophy and shamanism, Jewish ethics and magic, and Oriental Gnostic practices that made the culture of the Mediterranean basin so exciting and heterogeneous, one system managed to triumph. Christianity was victorious over its competitors, including the Roman Empire, only to become a Roman Empire of the mind for the next several hundred years. When the next challenge to it arose, it could only respond as a political monolith, repressing the opposition and/or co-opting it by means of the cult of the Virgin Mary…
The real development of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries is the recovery of interiority, of which heresy and romantic love, both rooted in powerful somatic experience, constitute the most dramatic public expression. The reaction of the dominant culture—a culture profoundly cut off from body experience—was a combination of repression and co-optation, and the fallout includes the emergence of thought crime and the corresponding need for bureaucratic persecution of it [the Inquisition, for example (lld)]; the secularization of romantic love; the collapse of cultural pluralism, and the accompanying rise of centralization and the nation-state as fact and concept; and the “official” obsorption of dualist cosmology (the world is a battleground of Good vs. Evil) into the mainstream of Western Christianity and, really, Western thought. All this fallout, with the possible exception of the destruction of cultural pluralism, was unintended; it was the unplanned by-product of the Church’s assault on Catharist heresy.
The Catharist heresy in medieval Langduedoc (now the south of France) and its connection to the troubadors and the rise of the literature and mythology of courtly love probably has its roots in Plato’s notion of love as more spiritual than physical. Berman, at least, seems ambivalent about which came first: love as an ascetic worship of God through a mythology of sexual passion or sexual passion raised to a level of religious (and, thus, non-sexual) devotion. It appears to me that the Cathars had all this stuff mixed up together so confusingly that the Catholic Church found it necessary to resort to the Inquisition to exterminate them. That the Inquisition was later used to root out all manner of heresy including Judaism and Islam, is part of the fallout Berman mentions above. As I said earlier, Dante’s Divine Comedy seems to me the best example of how the heresy might have looked on the ground if someone of, well, Dante’s caliber had codified it.
July 22, 2006 Saturday 9am. Stillness after rain.
I want to make clear that it wasn’t impotence that led me into a reclusive existence. To the contrary. I’d already been living and writing for some eighteen months in my two-room cabin up here in the Berkshires when following a routine physical exam, I received a preliminary diagnosis of prostate cancer and a month later after the follow-up tests went to Boston for the prostatectomy. My point is that by moving here I altered deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul, and not because the exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened by time, but because I couldn’t meet the costs of this clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience—or the toughness or falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism—to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings. As a result I was able to lessen a little my postoperative shock at the prospect of permanent impotence by remembering that all the surgery had done was to make me hold to a renunciation to which I had already voluntarily submitted. The operation did no more than to enforce with finality a decision I’d come to on my own, under the pressure of a lifelong experience of entanglements but in a time of full, vigorous, and restless potency, when the venturesome masculine mania to repeat the act—repeat it and repeat it and repeat it—remained undeterred by physiological problems.
It wasn’t until Coleman told me about himself and his Voluptas that all the comforting delusions about the serenity achieved through enlightened resignation vanished, and I completely lost my equilibrium. Well into the morning I lay awake, powerless as a lunatic to control my thinking, hypnotized by the other couple and comparing them to my own washed-out state. I lay awake not even trying to prevent myself from mentally reconstructing the transgressive audacity Coleman was refusing to relinquish. And my having danced around like a harmless eunuch with this still vital, potent participant in the frenzy struck me now as anything but charming self-satire.
How can one say, “No, this isn’t part of life,” since it always is? The contaminant of Sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are.
--Philip Roth, “The Human Stain”
I remember the first time I read these lines as I was working my way into Roth’s novel and thinking that it was the first time I’d ever thought about—ever seen anyone write about—sexual passion with such clinical objectivity.
Well, objectivity at the beginning. By the end of the passage, the narrator is back at square one where most all men reside, knowing that like the whirling dervish in Sufism, the essence of masculine humanness is “repeat it, repeat it, repeat it.” Non-sexual repetitions, whether Sufi whirling, Catholic rosaries or Buddhist, prayer wheels, or the endless variations of romantic poetry, are, in the end, mere surrogates, proxy passions for love that is beyond romance, beyond eros, beyond agape. In the end, physical love is beyond comparison to anything else imaginable in the body, the mind or the soul.
July 23, 2006, Rockledge cabin at Rabbit Rock. First light. 6am.
I still need kerosene light to make coffee and sit down to write. I am depressed. But my emotions are so changeable I’m hoping that by having gotten out of bed and come down to my own cabin and rustled around and begun to come out of that dreamy state of lucid despair that my spirits will rise.
I know what it is this time. Know what it is for sure. It’s my health. I feel trapped inside this wasting body. So many things to do out here requiring my physical attention. There are flashes now of peacefulness as dark trees outside are silhouetted by the grey light rising behind them.
This cabin held so much promise for me while I was building it. And its rugged beauty now in the near darkness—the rough stone walls and floors—takes me into some distant imaginings. Its just a retreat now. A child’s playhouse for an old man moving toward his dotage.
I was enthralled by the young Australian woman I met in New York last year. We talked about May/December romances and I told her that I believed that when women grow old they find it easier than men to find other things to compensate for sex. But old men, I said, are forever in love with the beauty of young women even as they know that there is rarely if ever a chance of recovering the passions or the conquests of their lost youth.
"I know," she said in her perky Aussie accent. " It’s very sad, really, isn’t it." She was sympathetic the way a nurse would be—the way a wise old woman would be with her old man. But there was finality in her voice. And in her eyes. She smiled and we said no more about it.
I’m reduced to memory now. Man's saddest fate, Dante said. It is like cold oatmeal for me. Nourishing but cold. I’ve found the poem I’d been looking for this morning in my old college survey of English Literature. I must have been around 20 when I first read it. It had no special meaning for me then. Still, 42 years later I search for it among the tombs.
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in a cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise,
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honoring thee
As giving it hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon did’st only breathe,
And sent’st it back to me;
Since when it grows and smells, I swear
Not of itself but thee.
--Ben Jonson, Celia, 1616
I’m thinking now with guilt about my selfish passions. I could give these last years away instead of hoarding them to myself the way a child clings to Santa Claus. I could give my heart freely now to any man, woman or child who needs me. Starting with those closest around me. My ego and my passion are like hard, gold coins I keep buried under the floor. Someone will find them someday, locked away in these wasted pages and wonder how I could have been so cruel.
"I know," she said. "It’s very sad, really. Isn't it." And she smiled.
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White Like Me: The Dark Side of American Immigration History
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