Arlington Sublime

Hills Pond, July 24, 2009, 5:58 PM

Graveyard Walk

I wandered into the cemetery by chance, while waiting for a photocopying job to be finished, and felt I had crossed into a foreign country.

Unlike the rule-bound Mount Auburn Cemetery, where artificial flowers and ornaments are forbidden, anything goes here.  My favorite is the grave with the yellow and gold plastic telephone and the glass blue bird.

Peter, who lived to one hundred, is remembered for his barbering. Without the dates bracketing the span of his life, the design of the gravestone would be appropriate for Peter's barbershop sign.  

John Hogan must have loved Coke Classic.  To the right of the bottle are three quarters.  

Memorial knick-knacks.

The perspective of the heavenly staircase is dizzying to me.

Images of the Virgin prevailed, many gravestones carved with the Hail Mary.

Here, with a mossy roof, is a tiny icon of the Virgin.

Every once in a while, the wind would lift the bright balloons tethered to a gravestone. Startled, I would catch the motion out of the corner of my eye, mistaking the balloons for a person leaning over the grave, but I was the only one walking among the gravestones, which bore the signs of fresh tributes.  The smell of lilies rose from a heap of flowers over a fresh grave.  I took my last picture: a flamboyant cross.

Butterfly Garden

A member of the nearby Unitarian Universalist Church planted a butterfly garden with monarda, dill, sunflowers, black-eyed susan, cosmos, and plants I couldn't identify.  Even in yesterday's heavy rain the colors stood up.  The garden will bloom until frost.  It borders Pleasant Street, a gift to us all.   

Rich & Silly

"The very rich are different from you and me," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Not in the least: the very rich are just as silly as we are.  Asked about Robert Isabell, the event designer, who had recently died, Anne Bass, one of the very rich, said, "People think of Robert being so extravagant" . . . but "he could always find something appropriate for the occasion."  The occasion was Bass's birthday; she said, "Six weeks after 9-11, we were debating whether we should go ahead . . . Robert created the most beautiful, simple party for me with a Shaker theme.  It was so restrained, plain and perfect, with fall leaves, wicker baskets and reproduction Shaker Candlesticks" (New York Times, July 19, 2009).

Was Mr. Isabell thinking of the Shaker hymn?  Probably not.

'Tis the gift to be simple,

'tis the gift to be free,

'tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,

and when we find ourselves in the place just right,

'twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained
to bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,
to turn, turn, will be our delight
till by turning, turning we come round right,

Shakers danced to invoke God.

The talented Mr. Isabell arranged Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's funeral.

He was also responsible for the design of this Marc Jacobs fashion-show after-party.

Tina Brown "praised the movable casbah of cushions that Mr. Isabell arranged beneath the Statue of Liberty for revelers to witness a fireworks display."  "Wealth is well known to be a great comforter," wrote Plato.    

"The Point of It" by E.M. Forster

I woke, alert and nerved up at three this morning--insomnia always begins at three in the morning.  I had been dreaming of trying to cook in the kitchen of the apartment where I grew up. The oven had no door.  The refrigerator freezer, which also had no door, bulged with thick frost. Time to leave all that behind, I said to myself, and picked up E.M. Forster's "Collected Tales." 

You've heard of "transitional objects," the fashionable term for any manner of security objects, from blankets to cell phones.  I hate the term.  I prefer to actually describe Forster's  book printed in 1947.  At five by seven inches, it fits in my hand.  The weave of the blue cloth cover is palpable.  The paper is slightly yellow, thick, matt, and the jaunty chapter-head decorations are by W.A. Dwiggins.  (I'm going to look him up.)  It's a pleasure to thumb the dry, matt deckle edge.  So much for pleasure.  

I began reading where I had left off, page 198, the beginning of a story, "The Point of It," thinking it would be another charming fantasy tale.  Not so.  Forster's portrayal of hell made my hair stand on end: when Micky, the central character, "opened his mouth to laugh, it filled with dust.  Choosing to open his eyes, he found that he had swollen enormously, and lay sunk in the sand of an illimitable plain . . . . Nothing moved on its surface except a few sand-pillars, which would sometimes merge into each other as though confabulating, and then fall with a slight hiss.  Save for these, there was no motion, no noise, nor could he feel any wind."  Forster goes on: "It seemed to Micky that he had lain in the dust for ever, suffering an sneering, and that the essence of all things, the primal power that lies behind the stars, is senility."  Hell "degraded while it tortured."  Why is he there?--"he was suffering for all the praise that he had given to the bad and mediocre upon earth; when he had praised out of idleness, or to please people, or to encourage people; for all the praise had not been winged with passion."  Micky had lived a supremely benign, successful life.  His wife was also in hell; while he had been to soft, she had been too hard.  What was I? I asked myself.  Not as nice as Micky, but too nice, I answered.  

How to escape the too soft and the too hard?  For Forster, in this story, by rowing to ecstasy. About another character, Forster writes: "He made himself all will and muscle.  He began not to know where he was.  The thrill of the stretcher against his feet, and the tide up his arms, merged with his friend's voice towards one nameless sensation; he was approaching the mystic state that is the athlete's true though unacknowledged goal: he was beginning to be."  This kind of feat is beyond my powers, but all day I've been thinking of "The Point of It," and how to keep my mouth from filling with dead dust. 

From left: Peter Pears, E.M. Forster, Robin Long, Benjamin Britten, Billy Burrell, at Aldeburgh, 1949.

"Roma Citta Libera"

"Roma Citta Libera" (1946) is a charming, surprising film.  The first scene surprised me the most.  It's night; a thief (Nando Bruno) climbs onto the balcony of a room he intends to rob. Miserable, distraught, the occupant, played by the dark, handsome Andrea Checchi, scrawls "basta" on his mirror, and holds up a gun, intending to shoot himself.  The thief rushes in, calls him an imbecile and takes away the gun.  He examines the man's few possessions, which he dismisses as not worth stealing.

What follows is a slow masterful depiction of how a man makes friends with an unwilling hostile person, whom he accepts unconditionally.  The would-be suicide tries to throw the thief out. He shouts; he intimidates.  The thief pays no attention, sits down, and makes himself at home.  He tells the man that he himself once tried to kill himself--by drowning.  Enormously patient he offers the man a cigarette, which the man refuses.  He won't let go of his misery.  His lover has run off with his life savings.  The thief smokes, takes his time.  They go on talking.  Time for another cigarette; the thief lights two, hands one to the abandoned lover, who this time takes it.  They smoke together.  Eventually they go out, and the action rolls on.  Life rolls on--rich, absurd, hopeful.

The thief, in the hat, of course; the saved man; the girl who will also come to life, and finally smile.

Vittorio De Sica as the character suffering from temporary amnesia--you'll have to see the film.  (There's no traffic in the postwar streets of Rome.  That column--not Trajan's.  Does anyone know which it is?)

Fresh Pond: Wild and Tame

The wild is always close to the tame--the sharp smell of sweat in a mirror-lined room, fruit flies drowning in a glass of wine, raccoons prowling manicured lawns--but at Fresh Pond, where we walked this morning, the contrasts were no less apparent.  

The meadow has been restored to its wild tangle of yarrow and lupine; and below, the newly installed curved bench, a memorial to a dead spouse, is made from a sunken ship's timber salvaged off the Carolinas.  

Here is another bench in the shape of a relaxed "W." 

And another, contrived to appear rustic.

As we came up the hilly path near the end of our walk, a cool breeze blew up; a mass of milkweed crowded a field, attracting monarch butterflies; rather than fighting the wind they rode the current.

When we got home, we found an inky-purple, seedy deposit on the wooden walk to the back door.  Some creature had left it.