No Frigate Like a Book

At my urging, a friend visiting Provincetown this past summer stopped in the town library and went upstairs to the children's section. I had told him that he had to go there, that there was something upstairs he had to see.

My phone vibrated when I got this image from him:



The caprice of a ship on the second floor of a library delights me. Whenever I put my hand up against the sides of its painted hull, I feel buoyed up. The waves on which I am personally traveling at any given moment may be invisible to the other patrons of the library, but I share with them the confidence that each book on a library shelf seems able to inspire.

There is a way, I sense afresh then, to get where we are each going.

An explorer's heart will tell you the truest maps emerge from within.

Gazebo

As a child growing up in New Orleans, I was used to the pleasures of Audubon Park, in particular its zoo and the miniature railway. My mother’s brothers and sisters would regularly bring all my cousins to the city on a Sunday afternoon, and we would commandeer one of the public picnic tables. My aunts would open their coolers and set out bowls of potato salad and plates of cold cuts and jars of pickles and mustard and mayonnaise. As the afternoon progressed, it would become clear who had gravitated toward the tall-neck bottles of Jax beer in some of our coolers and who had stayed with what people in Louisiana called soft drinks. I recall such open-air meals as a welcome reprieve during those years before home air-conditioning.



As a college student, I had not outgrown all that Audubon Park offered. In free time between classes, I would sometimes cross St. Charles Avenue and settle with my books and binders in one of the gazebos with which the park was dotted. The structures were old even at that time, and layers of dark-green outdoor paint gave the benches a rustic, uneven feel. I could have studied at my usual desk in the stacks of the university library, but I was regularly drawn in good weather to savor the quiet of the great city park in the middle of a weekday. Overlooking what was termed a lagoon, the closest gazebo to the campus was a setting that fostered in me not just study but deep and wide-ranging reflection.

On my recent visit to the city, I joined my brother for a Saturday morning walk around Audubon Park. Although we were part of a steady stream of walkers and joggers on the pedestrian roadways, the sudden appearance of the familiar gazebo stopped me. Without walls, it had been, I realized, another era's response to the confines of rooms; it had been an invitation to relax and breathe more easily and think more widely.

There was no time to sit just then and interrupt my brother’s constitutional, but I pulled out my phone to take a picture of my old haunt. The digital image would signal me on my return home to think back to this place, to appreciate how it had been the precursor of many quiet spots that I have found over the years to enjoy an hour of meditation and whimsy.



Black-and-white image from the Audubon Institute

September

September is back to being September for me.

A drizzly Friday evening, blessedly nondescript, two weeks from the official start of fall.

Last year September was “my first month on my own.” It was a time of settling, of being unsettled but earnestly wanting to feel settled, of finding places for books and pictures and occasional flowers from the grocery store. It was a month of new curtains and new curtain rods. It was a month of new drives to the nearby conveniences – the bank, the wine store, the movie theatre, the dry cleaner's.

With the close of the work day, this September day has beguiled me by its coolness, its quiet, its ease.

I got to sit on my couch with a volume of Mary Oliver’s poetry and just read.

I got to listen to slow, steady dripping outside the window.

I got to enjoy the summer’s purchase of Willoughby Elliott’s Two Warm Trees on the wall across from my couch.

I recognized the familiar invitation of a Friday evening to let a tightly wound week unfold and unfurl and drift easily off to the corners of consciousness.

I recognized some familiar ways of being John.

Life-size

I got to visit family in New Orleans this Labor Day weekend. I enjoyed a cup of turtle soup and an oyster po-boy at Mandina’s on Canal Street, I attended a production of Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida at Le Petit Theatre in the French Quarter, and I sat with a high school friend in his living room after a midday thunderstorm, paging through the books by which he has embarked on a reading of The Iliad in Greek.

The city had just held commemorations of the fourth anniversary of Katrina. The first Sunday after Katrina wrought its devastation in my hometown, I had written a response that reflected some of my own history with the city:

Throughout New Orleans statues stand today in empty churches.

In the now still, hot air of the parish church I attended growing up, a white marble figure of the young Roman martyr Agnes cradles a lamb in her arms.

In a silent uptown church where a cousin got married when I was a student in parochial school, a polychrome Francis of Assisi welcomes into his arms a crucified Jesus leaning down to converse with him from the cross.

In the church on the campus where I completed my undergraduate degree, a cassocked Francis Xavier extends his right arm, holding high over an invisible congregation his missioner’s cross…

I had set myself a project for the days I was in the city this past week. I determined that I would go to each of those churches if I could, walk inside them once again, and take pictures of the statues that had stayed vivid enough in my memory that I was able to reference them in what I wrote at that sad time four years ago.

Would there be a message of hope in this venture, I wondered? Would I find reason to think that these places in my personal history still held the key to a kind of healing I needed?

More than once I needed to ring a doorbell at a rectory to gain access to a church that was locked midday. Surprises awaited me, though, in the people who interrupted their workday duties to accompany me on these visits to my past.



In one church I met a man whose family had moved to the parish in the very years that I had been an altar boy and a member of the student choir. Names of the teachers and parish priests from my years there met with recognition as this kind man and I talked. I pointed out to him the side pews where my mother and I had sat on Tuesday evenings in the summer when the novelty of air-conditioning had drawn us to the parish novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help.



In another church a parishioner employed at the rectory turned on the lights in the church and permitted me to photograph a remarkable statue above the main altar. Despite the vividness of my memory, I had never been this close to the two plaster representations of Francis of Assisi and the crucified Jesus. The tenderness of their embrace made me freshly aware of the hope that churches of my childhood must have given me that the kind of emotional and physical tenderness of which I felt myself capable could eventually find a place and meaning.



At one time a student for the priesthood, I sat in the pews of another church and gazed at a very familiar statue of Francis Xavier. Friends in seminary had lived out more faithfully than I the life of that traveler to distant climes. The unmistakable smells around me recalled visits to this church that I had made with my parents, who used to sit dutifully and resist my impatient urges that they come up closer and see these images.

In place after place I recognized the lure that these statues had wielded over me as I grew up. A tradition had wanted me to move beyond the written and spoken words of my faith. The training I received had urged me at times to rest in the presence of these life-size images of individuals whose hearts had mattered enough to them that they were willing to change their lives.

These images from my youth truly were life-size.

A click on each of these images will reveal details worth examining.

To Live Largely by Words

He was a handsome man. At least if this photograph tells an accurate story.

I was a junior in high school when I first got C. Day Lewis consciousness. The Doubleday Anchor cover of his translation of The Aeneid from which I gleaned an initial sense of Vergil’s epic plot carried no photograph of Lewis. The Latin teacher who had assigned us the reading of the translation was more interested that we not confuse Cecil Day Lewis with C.S. Lewis rather than that we know what either Lewis looked like.

Clive Staples Lewis was the Oxford don responsible for Mere Christianity and a pair of other books we were planning to use in our religion classes that year and next. The other tripartite Lewis name seemed of a piece with what we were learning British intellectuals do: they wear tweed, smoke pipes, spell color and labor with a u, frequent Oxford and Cambridge pubs, and read their work as radio talks on the BBC. My classmates and I may have been told when C. Day Lewis was appointed Britain’s Poet Laureate in 1968, but my acquaintance with his work was not to be broadened in any English class that year or later in college.

Subsequent years have been kinder to the reputation and writings of C. S. Lewis, who even got Anthony Hopkins to portray him opposite Deborah Winger in Shadowlands. The Day Lewis name has not been absent from movie theatre marquees, but the poet’s literary works garner less frequent public attention these days.

Nevertheless he crashed into my reading life a second time a few years back when I read his autobiography entitled The Buried Day, published in 1960 and written in large part when he was about the same age that I am now. By that time he had already translated The Aeneid and completed the other ten works that I have read – a verse translation of The Georgics, another of Vergil’s longer poems; one of his volumes of lyric poetry called An Italian Visit; and eight early novels, murder mysteries centered on the exploits of an Oxford-educated sleuth named Nigel Strangeways and published under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake.

It had been thanks to the very successful murder mystery series that C. Day Lewis was able in his mid-thirties to leave his first career as a schoolmaster and devote himself full time to writing. He would confess in the final paragraph of his 1960 autobiography:

My own basic pattern compelled me to become a person who lives largely by words and for them. In my young days, words were my antennae, my touch-stones, my causeway over a quaking bog of mistrust. After some false starts and fruitless detours, they began to lead me toward the human condition as I knew it within myself: I gradually understood the paradox that a poet must make sense of “real” things through the process of creating works of a quite different order of reality.

Writing that leads us to ourselves – sounds like what I trust my own words to do. What I have trusted them to do over the past fifty-plus years.

Photo of Cecil Day Lewis on www.stefanomanferlotti.com

Daily Company

I have just finished re-watching the eleven episodes of the BBC series Brideshead Revisited. What I had never expected to see portrayed on television in the early 1980’s – the romantic friendship of two young Oxford gentlemen and the enigmatic Catholic life of an aristocratic British family – seemed to give public expression to two important sides of my own life. Thanks to Granada Television, I would not grow as a gay man, I would not grow as a Catholic in the same fearful isolation of earlier generations.



Among my parents’ belongings distributed among their children and grandchildren when their estate was settled five years ago, a plentiful collection of prayer books and religious medals and old rosaries surfaced. I remember some of these religious articles vividly from my years growing up, and in a family meeting the day after my mother’s funeral I had expressed an interest in some of the items. A few months later I became the unwitting – but not unwilling – recipient of almost all of them.

Sorting through the cache of religious articles belonging to my parents – some of them dating from the years depicted in Brideshead – I felt as though I were touching relics from these two Catholic lives. In a compelling study of American Catholic devotional life, Harvard professor Robert A. Orsi puts into words some of the awe I felt handling these objects: “There was something mysterious and frightening about the sacred world to me as a child, frightening because I could sense in the postures and tonalities of adults engaged with the saints secrets and stories I couldn’t fully understand, like a child trying to figure out what’s going on at an adult dinner party.” (Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them, 2005) Secret places in my parents’ lives suddenly felt closer.

One of the most familiar items that came to me was a 1930 Manual of Prayers from a Catholic publishing house in Baltimore. For many years the book, bound in black leather, had accompanied my mother both when she went to church on Sunday and when she went to bed each night. Even now, in the right light, the edges of some pages reveal traces of the original gilding; among the pages whose edges show the most wear are those with a Litany of the Sacred Heart and the Stations of the Cross.

On one of the inside front pages is my father’s crisp printing of my mother’s married name, the address of their first apartment in Baton Rouge, and the request “Please return.” The book that I imagine as a special purchase on the occasion of my parents’ wedding in 1935 reached my home almost seventy years later.

In his study Orsi warns against a simplistic imagining of twentieth-century American Catholic life as a matter of linear narratives – “from immigration to assimilation, from premodern to modern, from a simple faith to a sophisticated faith.” Something richer and truer to the real life that we all live might be possible if we are ready, as Orsi puts it, “...to look for improbable intersections, incommensurable ways of living, discrepant imaginings, unexpected movements of influence, and inspiration existing side by side – within families and neighborhoods, as well as psychological, spiritual, and intellectual knots within the same minds and hearts.”

In recent months I have needed to do occasional maintenance on one of my father's rosaries from that cache of family articles. It is a rosary that I have daily carried in my pants' pockets the past few years. The wiring that connects the wooden beads had gotten loosened, and repeated efforts to untangle the resulting knots weakened the wiring and made further knots even more difficult to repair. This week I came to the conclusion that it was time to lay that rosary aside, although I have no replacement as yet for its daily company.

And, you know, sometimes you realize that living for a while without certain familiar comforts will be all right.

Joy Comes with Dawn

Yesterday suggested fall in New England.

Something about the light.

Something about the ease of temperatures after a long, steady lack of ease.

In years past I have experienced an eager anticipation at the approach of this particular season. At the mere mention of it, a writer friend yesterday began cataloguing corduroys, fleeces, the crunch of fallen leaves -- the reliable euphoria awaiting her in her imagination.

Cozy and picturesque, another such season on its way, its routines welcome, even welcoming.

Around six o'clock yesterday evening, I took my collapsible camp chair to a spot on a nearby campus and settled beneath a tree. The scene before me was quiet and soothing, summery and sunny. Aware how regularly in my life I have searched out such settings for a reflective hour, I thought about the season of fall. I thought about the ways its characteristics are applied to patterns in an individual life. I thought how comforting those comparisons can feel in the abstract, the utterly natural ebbing of strength and productivity that should surprise no one, panic no one.

I was surprised, though. An ordinarily optimistic man, I was aware of a kind of panic.

My life really could change.

I could in time want something that I had always thought possible and perhaps not get it. I could think of myself in an habitual way and one day find that I was no longer just like that. The wisdom that over five decades of experience had brought me could end up being needed not just to set goals and accomplish tasks more realistically and efficiently -- it could be needed to face and accept real loss.

I stammered something out loud. Solitary in that green setting, I had to say something to record the arrival of this unexpected awareness. I had to try to put it into words.

I looked down at the open book of prayers in my lap and read this verse from Psalm 30:

At night there are tears, but joy comes with dawn.

I knew what such joy could feel like -- the joy after a night of tears. In that moment under the tree, I somehow knew that in the year ahead I would feel such joy again. And maybe not just once. Whatever tears might accompany loss and change in my life, joy could still surprise me, overtake me, reassure me.

I pledge myself to expecting it.

The Comforts of Home

An inviting armchair in a hotel room sometimes seems an anomaly, a prop in a stage set, a conscious extravagance. Experience tells you that the most you are likely to need to do in that chair is keep your balance as you put on your socks or tie your shoes in the morning. While someone else is taking a shower or getting dressed, you might sit in the chair and glance through a newspaper, a telephone directory or a guide book. The conventional wisdom is that you don’t spend enough time in a hotel room to be overly concerned about such furnishings. How comfortable does the seating really need to be if there is a lobby in which to wait for people or a bar in which to entertain them or a sizeable bed in which to prop oneself up against several pillows and watch TV?

I recently returned from two nights in a hotel in mid-state Pennsylvania. A work friend’s wedding had drawn a significant number of her colleagues to take advantage of a block of hotel rooms available at special rates for guests of the bride and groom and to participate in a long weekend of celebration and camaraderie.

The sole occupant of my hotel room, I had more space than I needed. A well-upholstered armchair took up some of that space; a coordinating ottoman and reading lamp completed that section of the room. Few things suggest the comforts of home as readily as a chair, an ottoman and a reading lamp, and this hotel was charging its prices to ensure that guests experience something more like the feel of home than they might regularly find even in their own home. This is the way you really want to live, isn’t it? the furnishings seemed to say to the overnight guest.

Who more than a reader would welcome the sight of a well-placed floor lamp next to a comfortable chair? Even an inveterate reader, though, may think that there is enough time to read back at home and that a stay in another part of the country is best spent getting better acquainted with a new environment – walks, drives, tours, visits, meals, at the very least drinks in a downstairs lounge.

Having arrived Friday afternoon and enjoyed an early dinner with friends at one of the local restaurants recommended by the bride and groom, I had a full Saturday morning to myself. I had not committed to meet anyone before the one o’clock ceremony at the church five minutes from the hotel. I eyed the armchair, looked at the biography of Emily Dickinson I had brought to read in the airport and on the plane, and toyed with the idea of spending an hour or two in that armchair and with that book.

Even as I settled deep into the upholstery, I felt some minor twinges of guilt. Was this in the spirit of the weekend? Was this coming close to being antisocial? Shouldn’t I get outside, drive to a mall, shop or do something? Shouldn’t I at least turn the television on?

I forgot those questions as I opened to my place midway in the six-hundred pages of the biography. From time to time in the next two hours I looked up from my book to the view through the window, a range of mountains and the green valley over which the hotel was perched. The peacefulness of the scene and the quiet sent me back into the chapters depicting Emily Dickinson in her twenties. Her awareness of a vocation as an artist was being born in her, and it would be accompanied by a heightened sense that home was her proper setting for responding to that call. What was before her was a spiritual adventure in self-expression that did not require or particularly thrive on the prospect of publication: “…the manuscript books were a private hoard, or a secret garden of work done, or a thing put through for its own inherent excellence.” (Habegger, p.353)



What was ahead of me? In a few hours I would watch a good friend walk down the aisle toward a man she loved; I would sip a gin and tonic amid other guests at the reception; I would initiate conversations with seven table-mates as I cut into the filet mignon; near the end of the evening I would laugh finding myself on the dance floor amid so many people I usually saw only at work.

But for a couple of hours on Saturday morning I chose this quiet time, this book, this armchair.

A year ago to the day I had been sitting at a table for my first breakfast in a new home, a home on my own. On Friday a good friend had written me: “I want you to enjoy yourself this weekend – be in the moment, relax, eat, drink, laugh.”

I can assure my friend – and myself – that I did all that.

Reading Biography

I am in admiration of the biographer. The resolute step with which someone begins to commit days and long summer weeks, steady months and eventually years to the understanding of another human life has to be an act of faith. It certainly takes interest and little short of fascination to motivate and simultaneously reward the choice that must be repeatedly made to be about the elusive heart of another’s life. There needs as well to be a sense that the biographer’s own life is being sustained and brought to light the more it directs its focus on the mystery of another’s choices.

At some stage in the meticulous process, I imagine, a biographer acknowledges that there is reliable insight emerging. What becomes available to him or her after immersion in the questions of another time, another family, another education, another geography will make possible something worth saying about how someone became just this person and not another. How far to trust logical analysis, how far to trust intuitive grasp, how far to put into words creative vision and plausible hypothesis: these are the challenges – and delights – facing the biographer.

Almost a third of the way into a six-hundred-page life of Emily Dickinson, I am aware of understanding better not just another’s life, not just the biographer’ s task, but my personal history of loving a writer. That Alfred Habegger was the scholar who could bring Emily Dickinson into particular focus for me should have been evident from the title he had selected for his work: My Wars Are Laid Away in Books (2001). That opening line of Emily Dickinson’s expresses what I expected or at least hoped growing up – that what mystified me about the circumstances of my own life could be illuminated by what poets and other writers had written about their own.

And let me admit: I am in admiration of the reader of biographies. The resolute step with which someone begins to commit days and long summer weeks to the understanding of another human life has to be an act of faith. It certainly takes interest and little short of fascination to motivate and simultaneously reward the choice that must be repeatedly made to be about the elusive heart of another’s life. There needs as well to be a sense that the reader’s own life is being sustained and brought to light the more it directs its focus on the mystery of another’s choices.

Oh.

Isn’t that fundamentally what love is about as well?



Daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson from Brooklyn Museum

Writing Cabin Mascot

Sometimes I settle myself in front of my laptop and begin moving through the steps that can lead to the kind of writing destined for a post on "Writing Cabin." A fellow cabin mate, though, likes the mood of those moments and can figure out a way to rest against me. Last night she became too comfortable too easily and fell asleep on my arm. No posting last night but a grand image of contentment, eh?