by Norm Sibum
‘Even as we speak, she’s reading Herodotus, playing with her ponytail.’
‘A pretty picture.’
‘But maybe she needs to drift a little. Often the young are in too much of a hurry.’
‘There’s drifting and there’s drifting.’
Fast Eddy, in his new travels, had picked up some wisdom. He vanished, presumably to go and get more.
So I said to her, to that chameleon of a young woman now attractive, now nothing remarkable: ‘Are you funked? Or are you actually captivated by what you’re reading?’
No,’ she answered brightly, ‘I’m really really reading. It says here on page 410: Bear thou unbearable woes with the all-bearing heart of a lion.’
‘Fancy that, you’ve become oracular. Pythian priestess.’
‘Pythian priestess? Avuncular, I’d say.’
‘Yes, but one high on a gas-rich artesian stream.’
‘What a life you have, Randall. You read, you write, you lay about. Not too many people take you seriously, so that not too many people obstruct you in your endeavours. You quaff your wine. You make your comments. You flip off the world.’
‘I was, after all, the class clown.’
Perhaps Moonface, too, was acquiring wisdom, and if not wisdom, a capacity for accurate observation.
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘I didn’t either, not for the longest time. I was such a serious, such a sombre boy. My betters knew best, and it was my sacred duty to honour their view of things. But sometimes wisecracks did escape my mouth and it shocked everybody, including me.’
‘You were a rebel, like everyone else in your generation.’
‘Perhaps so, but I stopped after a while. What was the point? Those who were wrong wouldn’t own up to their errors. Those who were right just got more heated and sanctimonious. It was like a nightmare Thanksgiving dinner, everyone in the family at everyone’s throats. I hate scenes. I haven’t the stomach for taking prisoners. I’ve even less for taking none. In light of this, I suppose I’m not entitled to an opinion about anything much.’
‘I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to have stopped you. Especially when you go on about poets.’
The dear girl was getting cheeky. Erotic burblings.
A Letter to Jack Swain
Dear Jack, These words I write you will, of course, not bring you back, you in your Hades reading smut, drinking swill, fending off your nagging muse. What had she ever done for you that you should present her with lines of verse? Otherwise, what news? Do you track the obscenities of my realm? I don’t suppose you do. But then, now you’ve attained a sort of omniscience among shades of reasonably civilized behaviour, how would you pronounce spanokopita? Do you chuck a football around, say, with the likes of an Ajax or a Red Baron? Is the circle you inhabit multicultural? Well, and though it’s been asked numberless times by persons more gifted with comedic gab than I, is there sex in the afterlife? The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason. I dreamed I went to bed with Moonface. As Eleanor R, one of my fellow Traymoreans, would have it, I caved. Moonface was neither pleased nor displeased. It was neither chore nor pleasure, though, of pleasure there was a certain quiet partaking. It was an occurrence that had to occur. Details? You want details? As I said, she was neither pleased nor irked. When she was not in some secret part of her mind communing with God knows who, she teased and minxed, pretending it was quite the event, this pairing of Moonface and Calhoun, her bed sheets the darkest of blues, her body pale. More than this, you’ll never know. It would violate discretion and it would be rude. And I’d be lying through my teeth, what I did to her; what she did to me. We are lonely and frightened creatures who, on occasion, chance on moments of unpremeditated grace. In my waking hours, somewhat liquored up, I have amused myself, penning a trial draft of my Last Will and Testament. To Moonface my Tacitus, Eggy too old to care. Liquor goes to Dubois, CDs to Eleanor. He’ll drain the whiskey down to the last bitter flame and she’ll just adore the Shostakovich. To Minnie Dreier my ancient mash notes, and she may do with them as she wishes. Five will get you ten she’ll make, she’ll build, she’ll cause to happen a cold holocaust of them in her fireplace. I, Randall Q Calhoun (Q to Moonface when she’s in trouble), weak in flesh, weaker elsewhere, remark that I, the last man to rate the mind over and above the pleasures, kissed a girl in the light of dawn, and the shiver of it ran down my spine, and a note too low for my ear to detect went back up it and out to the stars. But in conclusion, this: there’s never any help even if, on time, we love by appointment and routinely love. To succeed in a world gone berserk, to fail in a kinder one—yes, it’s the devil itself to come by a choice. End of reverie. Now up springs Sally McCabe, as beautiful as ever, as mischievous. She says, ‘Fine little moment you got going there, Calhoun. Who, by the way, is this Jack Swain? Anyone I might find of interest? And Moonface? You know what I call that, what you’re doing with her? Taking advantage of a dim bulb.’ Jack, did you ever comprehend the American mind? Just now, I’m looking at pictures in a book. Poussin’s Dance of Nymphs, for instance. That Priapic deity at the center could be Eggy. Adorn Priapus; adorn Hymen. This I understand even with my eyes closed, one hand tied behind my back. Baroque grandeur. Dinah Washington I understand, too. 4 in the morning, and what’s this, I’m pouring my heart out to a dead man. The other day, Jack, I’m sitting in the Blue Danube. In lopes Joe Smithers, that skyscraper of a poet. He’s beside himself; seems he’d been invited to an evening of French and English poetry, he the tallest reader on the dance card. Would I come? Why would I go? I’ve got Moonface and Eggy when I want a literary evening. Even Dubois once wrote a treatise on Camus. But I went. It was a warmish supper hour when I got downtown, 10 Celsius or thereabouts. After a long winter, people could be forgiven for thinking themselves in Miami. The boulevardier in me sought the upper hand and achieved it, close on his heels Boffo the Clown. All those girls smirking in a thaw, and what, would I sweep one of them off her feet? There was the-going-home-from-work crowd, the-coming-down-to-party crowd. Young perps of either sex looked for mischief. The young homeless had already checked in from the prairies with mongrel pets and blankets, hardcore sex logos plastered everywhere on that stretch of Ste Catherine’s. Limo drivers, communication devices clipped to their ears, received their marching orders. The driver of a cream-white hummer could only be looking for one thing in this video erotica part of town. It’s where the bookshop was in which Smithers was slated to perform. I’ll cut to the chase. Midway through his spiel, and I noticed a woman of interesting profile. Black page-boy cut to her hair which was silvered, so it seemed, with white filigrees of hair. Black pea coat, skirt and boots. But it was the way she sat, leaning forward slightly, really listening, perhaps a little disappointed—it was this aspect of her that caught my attention. Poor Smithers, he angry with all those women who consider that men have nothing to say worth hearing. Well, his vignettes in regards to our faded Jezebel of a town have some charm, but no, there was nothing much at stake in what he read, at least, not on this night. Was the woman a little embarrassed for him? Could she not discern his competent craft? A few days later, I’m in the Blue Danube again. I enter; Moonface gives me a look. Well, what? She rolls her eyes to the side in that way she has, and I follow where her eyes are leading me, and what do you know, there’s that same woman. Seated at her table, she’s deep in thought, and writing. Eggy, that sparrow of a man, death on poets, he’s appraising her with not a little pity. Dubois is absent or he would have been arching his brows. I’d gone to the Café Cherrier after the reading in the hope I would meet the mystery woman there, but she didn’t show. I knocked back the wine while Smithers went on about Yeats and Klein and Miron to a group of disciples who humoured him. In any case, here she is. Light red sweater, dark slacks, red socks, black loafers. A scarf of some subtle pattern is draped around her neck. But I notice just now, what I had not seen before, a mass of raised, pinkish flesh on her left cheek. What’s this all about?
Moonface seems bemused, Eggy bored. —RQC
A Bit of Academe
So the Lemuria did still correspond to an anxiety which was felt deep down in the consciousness of most Romans, however much they might disown the Elysian Fields or the tortures of Tartarus. Nothing shows this so clearly as the violent outburst of the elder Pliny (Natural History VIII, 190) who attacks ‘the stupidity of those who renew life in death; where will creatures ever find rest if souls in heaven, if shades in hell, still have feeling?’ Pliny’s question could be answered: ‘by celebrating the Lemuria.’
The Romans And Their Gods In The Age Of Augustus
R.M. Ogilvie
§
Book II—Piano, Accordion and Oud
As Noted
—Emma MacReady (Moonface) Jottings
Can’t toss the boys out of bed fast enough. Watching them pull on their grotty briefs, how unnerving. Hearing them in my bathroom, how off-putting. I suppose dad loves me. My man-of-the-cloth father figure, my breakaway, stud-in-his-ear, paterfamilias, he calls me up, talks silliness at me his beloved child. Am I okay? How’s work? Do I have enough money? When will I go back to school? Am I practicing safe sex? Did he? Randall has taken up with a female who has taken up with him. If she was looking for sex, she might’ve done better. His mind, his vaunted intellect? His mind’s a mess. He’d be the first to admit it. At least here he doesn’t sell you false goods. Knows what he knows, and what he doesn’t know, well, he gives you a look, the one that says, ‘You’re on your own.’ I wonder what Lindsey Price (she’s the siren, she’s the sparkling half of the au pair) is going to do when she realizes Calhoun will never scale the summit of literary derring-do. What lion sits in a café, fiddles with a notebook, looks out a window like a lost puppy muttering ‘Iran’ under his breath as if to effect a charm against the end of days?
She’s a regular now, that spoon-eyed scarlet. ‘Randall tells me you read Virgil.’ What’s Oh Alexis, have you no time for my tunes to her? Alright, she has a terrific figure. Has this scar on her face. Eleanor can’t stand her. I can’t stand her. Eggy is Eggy, Dubois titillated. What’s Randall thinking? Nymphae risere.
Calhoun beatific is not a pretty sight. They hold hands. They play at kneesies. She’s got her Raleigh. He’s got his regina. His—well, the word that would rhyme commences with v. Doesn’t he realize how truly nasty I can be, once you rub off Upper Canada and the fact my French is ex-cell-ent?
Didn’t Randall and I used to sing in the park to the tune of some Irish ditty when we were drunk enough, ‘No more ologists no more …’
Anti-Follies I
—It is a bright morning, sparkle in the air, I in my grotto, fully garlanded. It is to say I am not an object of worship; rather I am a supplicant of some as yet unspecified deity, that sparkle a harbinger of promise. And yet, it is only a season handing off to another, the end of snow for a while, a morning fit for the robins of childhood. A book of Gombrich rides the low-slung table that sits before my couch, item of furniture bordello-green. Essays on art. Ghiberti’s doors, for instance. A visitor might assume I have been reading it. Moonface might wander in and say, ‘Oh, Italian paintings. I like Italian paintings.’ Fast Eddy the spectre has been and gone already, cigar stub in his mouth, his visage somewhat peaceful, as if he rather likes being a ghost. Italian paintings mean nothing to him. Or Eleanor might sashay over in her pompadours, note the fact of the book, examine it briefly and put it down, the book holding no clue whatsoever to the mysteries of her existence. Dubois might suddenly announce his expertise in chiaroscuro. In this faded Jezebel of a city, population roughly two million, perhaps all of a hundred cognoscenti know of Ghiberti’s doors. It is conceivably an astounding number, but whether it reflects the high-end or the abysmal bottom of collective knowledge I cannot say. The question is, does it matter? Should the operator of a grocery truck have the knowledge? The cashier at the poor man’s super mart where I buy my bread? Where the men are brave and the women good-looking and the vegetables are indifferent? The doors of paradise. Made of bronze. It would seem the artist had been ambitious, won the prize, his paradise his bragging rights to those doors, back in 1401. I go out my door, cup in hand. I stand at the window at the end of the carpeted hall. On earth saturated with snow beneath Mrs Petrova’s bird feeder sparrows contest territory and mates. It is that time of year, birds collecting nest material—tissue, grass and twig. This much I have witnessed as if an alien. Harsh chittering displaces human news. Human news? What, on a bright April morning, is the most salient characteristic of a spate of human news? The universe is slowing down; catastrophe unfolds in slow-motion. Score one for hyperbole. Had the universe slowed down for the darkest days of the last Great War? Or did it hum along smoothly in its infinite expansion, human events of no especial concern to this moving toward a space not yet created, moral judgment absolutely irrelevant, people dying in their millions nothing compared to the imploding of a star? I have this great feeling that something is about to happen. Mrs Petrova’s yard will get raucous with sparrowlets insane with hunger, all other dins driven out of the Calhoun mind; especially that din that concerns a certain nation-state, its internal gyroscope out of true. The last thing one ought to trust is one’s great feeling.
A Roman grunt could expect 16 years in the field and plenty of scope for mutiny, there in the cold boggy forests of Germania. But what of that in Diyala Province? I go to the mart and buy prosciutto. Moonface and I shall tear at it with our teeth. It shall be our sexuality. If Moonface will have none of it, then Eleanor. She will eat anything, save for chocolate-flavoured grasshoppers and such-like. Eroticism burbles in my bones, a morning of sparkling air. It cannot possibly last, this state of affairs. I shall open my mailbox and detect in a cubicle galactic portions of absence. I tear at bread and a prosciutto slice alone, back in my digs.
—Yet another enduring obscenity, those coins struck in commemoration of the dead of September 11th. One imagines, going by the TV ad and its obnoxious voice, that the metal was extracted from the rubble; was gleaned from the entrapped molecules of those dead. Americans enjoy the grotesqueries they have become. It certainly cannot be claimed that the houses of Congress have been anything glorious of late. From Tiberius on, the Roman senate drifted, was not quite what it had been even if, over the decades, its makeup altered, reflecting the changing demographics of the Roman scene, gentleman farmers from beyond the Alps in on the fix. Last night, in the Blue Danube, Eggy sang, after a fashion, “Three Blind Mice”. His voice rose to a falsetto as he expelled from his ancient throat the words see how they run. Dubois said, ‘Horrors!’ To me he said, ‘We can’t let this happen, again.’ Echo came over to investigate. ‘A sing-fest?’ she asked hopefully, her eyes round like a cat’s. ‘A sing-fest. Hoo hoo,’ said Eggy, who had the wit to cease and desist. Moonface was out on the town with a new beau. Was he in communications, too? I imagined love-making with Echo. It would be brutal and sweet, brutal because there was nothing of the dreamy or languid about her, not in such a small but compact body. Sweet because she had a lovely nature. Yet she was already lost to the enduring obscenities, one of the ologies her chosen field of study. She would learn, presumably, to standardize grief, that it has various discernible if not quite measurable stages. As far as it goes with me, science concerns itself with what can be weighed and measured, or in some reasonable manner, observed. The pseudo-sciences take the rest, and what they overlook is, well, poetry. The harder the poet sings of blossoms and blooms and the love of the young for one another, young and in one another’s arms, the higher the heap of shadow-dark bones that haunt all our ceremonies. Famine, war, pestilence. (How many glasses of wine had I had? What was bringing this on?) It was an idiot who surmised that poetry is our anthropological destiny; in a certain sense he was more right than he could possibly suppose. That afternoon, a trace of heat in the air, the air however still too chilly for the Blue Danube terrasse, a skyscraper of a poet, Joe Smithers, announced how, inside a week, his father died a
nd his long-time girlfriend went insane. Goodness. But he had only been stating facts, spitting them through his teeth, as it were. He had not been looking for sympathy, his head bowed to the weight of some yoke. More likely than not, he actually had a poet’s soul, if one stretched a little thin between two pontoons that were his feet and the stratospheric elevation of his pedagogical head. I had no right, for all that, to estimate the breadth and depth of that soul, and there you have it, a poet’s scruples. To be ignored only in times of emergency, as when a pestilential Executive is on the prowl. Moonface had been on shift and overheard what Smithers had to say. She moaned slightly in her musical way and otherwise said nothing. She retreated to the galley and Gregory the cook with deliberate steps. She seemed distracted. Erotic urges occur at the oddest moments, her nape exposed, her hair upswept. I had Joe Smithers on my hands, he in a dark and panicked mood, as might have been expected. I made conventional noises; he thanked me for them. What would Echo eventually learn to say of this current phase of his grief? Was there an organization, a union, for example, that grief counsellors might join and pay dues to in return for lobbying privileges? Moonface had no clue, Echo less, but she might go farther in life on the strength of her boundless energy. Dubois had informed us, to judge by junk mail that popped up on his computer screen, that he was to go and do something obscene with some starlet of fabulous notoriety. ‘Now,’ said Dubois, ‘why would I want to do that?’ He sounded on the up and up. Soon we would be attending barbecues and coming away from them with lumps of leftover cake and sacks of peonies, with news of new colonial postings for cousins and in-laws. We Traymoreans, save for Moonface who was a student and Mrs Petrova who sold time-pieces from her shop, were more or less retired from the fray.