by Robert Lax
these graceful movers
are asked to give a show.
Mama,
sitting in her chair
at twilight,
assumes (like the sun)
the same position at twilight;
after the glow,
before dinner,
the hour of rest,
of gossip,
of comings and goings.
Mama sits in her chair and judicates;
weighing the family,
weighing the world,
saying too bad at what is too bad,
and laughing at what is funny.
Mama, on the judge’s folding chair,
sits in some town each day at twilight
weighing the world with her eyes,
pronouncing judgment
with the corners of her mouth.
Mogador,
somersaulting on a horse,
praises the Lord;
Creator of horses and men,
Creator of light wherein
the acrobat disports
with skill he has acquired,
holding on the invisible wires
on which the world is strung.
Mogador, brightly dressed
and riding in the light
while music plays,
is like the juggler at Our Lady’s shrine
is like King David dancing before
the Ark of the Covenant
is like the athletes of God
who sang their praises in the desert wind.
Why does he look so intense.
What makes an acrobat look burningly
from his eyes,
narrow them
and burn for a particular thing.
You have your answers, which are good.
He is a younger brother
in a family of talented acrobats.
He wants to be as good as they,
better than they to justify his existence.
He is the younger brother of Lucio;
the dreamer, the entrepreneur,
the one who wants to start the great circus.
He wants to do it with talent
& taste, and acumen, and honesty.
Mogador wants to be Lucio’s partner.
He wants to have all Lucio’s qualities
and an additional one:
a taste for elegant showmanship
(He likes this so much
and considers it so much of the essence
that he is willing to attribute it to Lucio,
who has indeed some feeling for it,
but Mogador knows that he has the most)
He is the younger brother of Chita;
a queen of elegance,
the most graceful and beautiful
bareback rider-principal act
there ever has been,
in his opinion.
Mogador also rides principal.
His riding is
and must be
in the same tradition as hers.
It is not acrobatics on horseback.
It is ballet.
It is not comic ballet.
It is appropriately dignified praise.
An ancient
and very pure form
of religious devotion.
It is easy to compare it
to the childlike devotion
of the jongleur de Notre Dame;
But it is more mature,
more knowing.
Like the highest art,
it is a kind of play
which involves
responsibility
and control;
An activity which involves
awareness
and appreciation;
Its own symbolic value.
Like the prayers
of the old in wisdom,
it has the joy
and the solemnity of love.
By day I have circled
like the sun,
have leapt like fire.
At night I am a wise man
on his palanquin.
By day I am an acrobat,
spinning brightly,
a juggler’s torch.
Nights I am contemplative,
drinking deep of silence.
Road, prairie, night
go through me:
Songs of praise
like mist rise up:
Blessings
tumble down
like dew.
Into the dark the truck rolled, my eyes were on
the road, the blond dirt road in the light of
the headlamps, we sat high on the truck’s
wide smooth seat, our luggage in back, there
was plenty of room, for all we carried were
the sandwiches in the brown paper bag and
the thermos bottle.
The night before, we had talked a great deal, of
love, of women, Mogador had said that the
kind of smile he liked in a woman was a smile
as of the wind hitting flowers. And we
said many another rare and true thing. Enough
to make a man less than Mogador tend to
close up, to be a clam on the subsequent night,
but he did not. In truth we were both
eager to talk. And yet for the first
couple of minutes of riding in silence
I felt some panic at my solar plexus
thinking, what’ll I ask him now we’ve
both been over the main things
and we know so well what the other
is thinking, about most of this.
There is no point, in fact it is almost
impolite to ask more questions.
And further (particularly if
Mogador doesn’t feel like talking)
my questioning him and his
lapsing into silence of
reticence, or my driving him
to utter a half truth (as we do
when we’re weary or irritated)
will make it a long unpleasant
ride. And everything has been
so good so far.
We rode along a little farther.
A wobble developed
up front. The radiator cap, it
was loose again. All the night
before, we had had trouble with
it rattling and falling off. We’d
have to hop out with a flashlight, look
around on the road behind us & pick it
up. Usually a couple of the circus
trucks would pass us as we searched.
We got out again.
“May as well put it inside the truck”
I said.
Mogador agreed
“We’ll get it fixed tomorrow.”
We started again.
He was being very serious and “acting” serious
at the same time. I was being serious and
acting serious too.
For every sort of conversation,
open or secret,
light or heavy,
there is a convention
and a tradition,
an appropriate tone of voice,
a proper stance
or sitting position,
a rhythm of give and take.
People who are fond of form
don’t try to avoid these conventions, unless
to avoid them is also appropriate. Our
talk was in the form of youthful speculation.
We each may have felt ourselves to be a little
old for it, but in our association we were
still young. In establishing the
terms of our conversation we
were adolescent. And a return
to that freshness (with new minds)
I think was pleasant for us both.
I was as thrilled on that
ride as I could be. I guess I
; was as happy as I’ve ever
been. I don’t know whether
I could ever tell anyone
how or why (I suppose
someone could tell me how or
why) and I don’t know
why I should try to tell
anyone anything about it.
I think it’s partly just
a nice instinct in me and
in everyone to try to share
all good things with everyone.
I’d like to tell about it because
I’d like to remember it. I’d like
to have it in writing so I can look
at it later. I think I’ll remember
it all my life. But if I have it
in writing (and have written it
well and fully) it will be fun to
reread later, to see how much of
a self-enriching experience (or
what gets better in the memory,
and comes to mean more as the years go by)
how much of it you appreciate as it
happens, and shortly after it
happens. I think if it happens
at a good time (of maturity) a
ripe moment, you appreciate most
of it as it happens. That nothing
can be added to it except the
perspective of time, and even
that addition is at the sacrifice
of some detail
or some immediacy.
And so, although it
is hard to write it well
and fully
and make it neat also,
and do it as fast as I’d like
(so the family can see it soon)
and well wrought,
graceful and
as lastingly beautiful as,
say, a Picasso harlequin;
this one won’t be neat.
Instead I think I’ll surprise
my friends,
my relatives,
and loving readers,
myself most of all,
by showing
just how badly
I can write.
The other reason I’d
like to write it, and like to
make it good (yea, wonderful)
is that I’d like Mogador to see it. I’d
like, just by way of debt-paying, to
let him see that I meant it when I
said I was going to write a Cristiani
book and that it would be mostly about
him. I’d like him to see that I
understood what he was saying (a good
part & maybe all of the time) that
the sort of thing we said in long rides
in the truck (though they sounded
mystic even as they passed between
us, and telegraphic too) could
nevertheless be written down,
stated directly (retaining their
mystery) and restated clearly
so that anyone whose soul was
prepared, whose mind was
attentive, could read and understand.
And I’d like him to see,
but I guess this is asking too much,
that I can write a book,
with all the joy and verve and grace,
with all the seriousness and intensity,
with the playful formality,
the style and exuberance,
the praise-rendering wonder,
the dignity and humility,
the elegance and flow,
the tradition and originality,
the control,
the meekness,
the youthfulness and grace
with which he rides a horse.
And I want to write it so
Mark Van Doren, and my sister,
Gladys, and all my friends who
I wished were with me could
come along. And so that some,
reading the book, not
knowing the family, may see
their name on a circus sign,
and go to the show and see
what they see, and to some degree,
see what I see too.
(So grass if it knew itself
would be less than it thinks
and as great as it is
and greater than it
thinks it is)
All in a single moment.
And I’d like to write about this family,
the serious and sober,
the happy and playful Cristianis,
who seem to be
serious about living from generation to
generation as entertainers, as bareback
riders, graceful and skillful in
an art of dancers & acrobats on
horseback; extraordinary equestrians.
(“Things that are difficult to do on
the ground we do on horseback,”
says Mogador)
A family whose
aim is to own a circus
and to perform in it, and
to do this thing, dynastically
from generation to generation,
giving each child a choice whether
or not he will join the circus;
but leaving them no room for
choice whether they will love
the family, for the children
do love the family and
are proud to be in it.
I’d like to write about a
family whose activities suggest
one answer to a recurrent
question of the skeptical young:
Wouldn’t it have grown boring
perhaps in Eden? (perhaps
in Milton?)
No, there would have been horses to ride,
tightropes to walk
trapezes to swing from
ideas to discuss
jokes to make
laughter
anger.
All the emotions of the artist or
acrobat confronted with his task.
All of the joys and most (I guess)
of the tensions of large family life.
I want to write about these people
because I love them as a group and
love them individually. I like
to think about them all;
to know them all as well as I can,
and to write about them in a book.
And I’m pretty pleased about the way I
questioned him, the way the Lord put it
into my heart to question him; for I
hardly questioned him at all.
I kept silence,
let us say attentive silence,
as we rode along.
If Mogador spoke,
I listened.
If one phrase puzzled me in
what he was saying, I let it ride
until he had spoken completely.
Then I would ask him
what he had meant by this phrase
and he would tell me.
Sometimes I’d ask
him pointblank questions about
his ideas; and often direct
questions about the circus and the
routine of the act. And sometimes
I would ask questions rather
obliquely, asking a question near,
or with a rather direct,
logical connection to the
question I did want answered.
And often in asking the first
question, we would be led
to a consideration of the very
question I wanted answered.
But we must not think
of this means of questioning
(with which we are all familiar)
as a series of stratagems for
coaxing truth from an unwilling Mogador.
It was, I think, a cooperation
with Mogador to coax truth from himself.
(when one talks to the inner self)
is not at all the man the world knows.
It can almost be said
he is not the man
the man himself knows.
He is part of him
(hidden in darkness)
very often the noblest part,
and very often
very shy.
The cab of the truck
(jolt)ing through the dark,
where most nights
Mogador had ridden alone,
thinking his own thoughts,
was an excellent place in which to
ask questions (for this discussion).
For in that dark, in the long stretch
between Kamsack and Humbolt, we
were each sent, or each retired
to our innerselves and when we
talked and talked, it seemed from the
center of our being. And of
course it is true that we often rode
for miles in perfect silence.
He passed me an open pack of cigarettes
“Light me one, will you?”
I did.
“Here I will give you the pack you can
light them for me from time to time as
we drive, if you will.”
We drove through the first real darkness.
In Saskatchewan, in summertime, there is
waning day and dying sunset almost until
eleven-thirty when the very last
ray of the sun disappears in the (southwest).
There is a short period of true night.
Then at about two-thirty day begins to dawn.
“I notice when you talk about anything that
is beautiful, whether it is singing, or speaking,
or love, or a graceful act in the ring, you have
a gesture of the hand; moving it out from
the diaphragm (or solar plexus). An easy,
generous, giving gesture; your wrist
leads and your hand opens at the end of
the arc. An expansive gesture; bestowing
the good you’re talking about, and
showing the center of it seems to
be near the center of the body,
and moves out from there. Is that
the way it seems to you?”
“Yes” said Mogador “I think that
might be true.”
“And there’s a way your hand, when you
somersault through the hoop, after your
feet have landed and are secure (in fact
as they are still coming down through
the air) your arm begins to move up
and when you land you toss
your head back a little. Your
arm completes the upward
swing, your hand relaxed
and graceful at the top of the