June 3 Thursday
So full circle and a fine chuckle—-today on twitter Nicholas is recommending to this followers a novel by Frank Waters—-classic Taos Southwestern writer whose books were super big in the 60s in that area. I can see his books for sale in stores out there. So I ordered the book suggested, Yogi of Cockroach Court, a 1947 book, early, before the book of the Hopi and other later works. Controversial about how much his take on pueblo vision is authentic and how much embroidered, according to the wiki article about him. But to have NICHOLAS suggesting Waters is just amazing. How on earth did he come across it? Algorhythmic linkages I suppose. No, he says he had read two other Waters novels earlier.
4 June just talked with Phil. Peg is dying, cancer rapid, in heavy sedation since earlier this week. Just breathing, in the hospice unit at the hospital. Brothers from midwest flying in right this evening.
from Ivan M Granger’s website, his translation, the last part of St John of the Cross’s poem
And the higher he rises
the less he knows:
That is the dark cloud
that shines in the night.
The one who knows this
always remains unknowing,
all knowledge transcended.
This knowing by unknowing
is of such exalted power,
that the disputations of the learned
fail to grasp it,
for their knowledge does not reach
to knowing by unknowing,
all knowledge transcended.
Of such supreme perfection
is this knowledge
that no faculty or method of mind
can comprehend it;
but he who conquers himself
with this unknowing knowing,
will always transcend.
And if you are ready to receive it,
this sum of all knowledge is discovered
in the deepest ecstasy
of the Divine Essence.
Goodness and grace
grant us this unknowing,
all knowledge transcended.
——
Peg died last night. June 5 They had been together forty years.
This evening, Peg, my beautiful companion since 1981, passed away from the terrible kidney cancer that has attacked her so terribly in this past month.
Ironically, it was a beautiful evening, and ever since 2018 when Peg first came down with another terminal disease, Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, she has always savored getting out of the house and into the countryside in good weather. In these last few years, she enjoyed the sun, the sky, trees, clouds, and breezes far more than we healthy people do. She really would have loved a drive this evening under a soft pink sky with the car window open to let in a mild, warm breeze.
Looking forward, I need people to understand that there will be no service or viewing of any kind in Maryland. Peg always considered herself a Minnesota girl, so I am having her body shipped back to Hutchison, Minnesota, where I hope to have her buried in the same rural cemetery outside Hutchison where her parents are buried. It's a Catholic cemetery so I also hope to arrange a Catholic graveside service. But that will be the only service or event. I do not plan to have any social event other than the simple graveside service. She died peacefully and quietly surrounded by Ofstead family members - her older brothers Ron and Eilert, her sister-in-law Carol, her nephew David, and myself, and I went to keep everything for her peaceful and quiet.
At a later date I will provide a date and time for the graveside service in Hutchison.
Phil
——-
birthday coming up for me. Do our bodies and souls re-enact things as we approach anniversary dates? Must do so on any number of rainbow strata. Nicholas posted a book cover about rainbow bodies and resurrection.
“If you knew about mystics yourself it was from associating with the state in certain dreams and an imagination you had to keep hidden.” Patrick White The Hanging Garden 131
George impressed with Ted talks by Michael Sandel—-my jesting reply this morning
“Nails it. In fact it clears up something I've been quietly noticing----you have been seeming to inhale too deeply over the past few years!!!!
Sounds like Catholic humility in lama's clothing! not that that's a bad thing, but this guy is trying to back you into Ken's bailiwick.
He's a "communitarianist" Jewish California Harvard intellectual. Have I gathered enough names to call him with ???
from Wiki "Sandel believes that only a less-restrictive, looser version of the veil of ignorance should be postulated. Criticism such as Sandel's inspired Rawls to subsequently argue that his theory of justice was not a "metaphysical" theory but a "political" one, a basis on which an overriding consensus could be formed among individuals and groups with many different moral and political views.[9]
Just kidding---I do like what he says----am just skeptical about all such "positions" and "answers." Reading now a biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector and wow Brazilian politics 1850-1950 were super super crazy!! “
[local rumorists maintain that George has socked away in his fashion a sizeable fortune over the years——our happy miser]
New this morning of Bill Taffe’s quiet death yesterday.
Today is my birthday, JacquieLawson cards from Willow. Davey had great fun regaling us with his tale of woe about the bedbugs in Paris. He worked on it the whole weekend, hoping they are gone after all the efforts.
Phil : I am finding how difficult it is to deal with just about everything, and it makes me panic when I feel things getting out of control. And people can easily make me angry because it so often feels like they are making things more difficult for me. Meanwhile it is so hard to live here in what is essentially Peg's house. How can she not be here?
Peg's relatives. Some have been extremely helpful. Others just annoy me..
Meanwhile I see human life as a long series of self-illusions. In reality we're just physical creatures who live in a huge universe, and none of us are really significant. Some people are more significant than others, but all of us are really no more significant than a chipmunk - or so it seems to me right now.
Peg's body is being shipped to Minnesota tomorrow. I'm flying out on Thursday. The graveside service will be on the 15th, Tuesday. I was told that a church luncheon afterwards is a necessary rural custom. So I agreed to it. I'll hate it, but will hide that fact from all these rural and religious rellies. Will return to Maryland on the 16th. Then it will be all hell trying to get a handle on Peg's chaotic affairs. I have no idea, for example, where the titles to her house and car are. And that's just the start of it all. P
—-
“And that is why I tell you: passion is not the way. There exists another way, the only one. We have reached a certain degree of consciousness of our intelligence and, knowing this to be our mark as men, have discovered that we should give our strength to it so as to attain human perfection. And by this I do not mean to say that we should stop being animals. Never shall we renounce this happiness. What we should seek is for this primitive state to rise a bit and for our pride in being rational to fall a bit until the two beings that exist in us can meet, absorb one another and form a new species in nature. And that is why I tell you: abandon whatever destroys. Passion destroys because it dissociates. Passion arises in the body and, not comprehending it, we situate it in our souls and become disturbed. I am explaining all this to you so that you never exalt anything that wars with the contented spirit and anything that kills itself out of love. Merely forgive them. They have yet to comprehend that in life the smile exists and that passion destroys it and transforms it into a trembling rictus, which is no longer human. If you cannot free yourself from desiring passions, read novels and adventure stories, for that is also why writers exist. And another thing: pass on what I have said to you to some youth who cannot sleep at night, dreaming up new adventures for Don Quixote. Explain to him that the “ever after” of passion tastes like a stubbed-out cigarette. Ask him, on my behalf, to be a man and not a hero, because nature demands nothing of him except that he be happy and find the peace of the open glade down less painful paths. Explain this to him and I shall be able to rest this Sunday with the necessary humility. Now if you ask me: “How do you know these things?” I shall answer in the words of Kipling, so often quoted by my Public Law professor: ‘But that is another story . . . ‘
— Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector my guess is that she refers to his advice poem “If—If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too; . . . .
What is like most in this passage by Zenith about Álvaro de Campos is “being too steeped in his feelings to actually do very much.” Call me Álvaro de Campos from now on.
“Campos, whose motto was “to feel all things in all ways,” was the most sexually liberated heteronym, as readily smitten by men as by women, but he was by no means a Don Juan, being too steeped in his feelings to actually do very much, whether socially or professionally. He studied engineering in Scotland, living there or in London when not on one of his long voyages to the Orient and other parts of the world, but he never seemed to work too hard, and when he eventually returned to Lisbon, where he’d lived as a young man, he did almost no work at all and lost interest in traveling. “The best way to travel,” he wrote, “is to feel.”” —Zenith
Yes, to feel all things in all ways is a great improvement over Burke’s everything, preferably all at once (Nemerov’s line). And the best way to travel is to feel. Wow. Such great lines.
Moser lets himself be a wee flip at times: “For these people, the Church was a logical home. Not only because, in Brazil as everywhere else, it was chockablock with gay men, but because of the redemption the Church promised those weighed down by the awareness of sin. These people did not see art as a way of addressing social issues . . . . Their mission was much more urgent: they sought to be saved through art. Writing was for them a spiritual exercise, not an intellectual one.” 100
18 June
Took the last boxes of old files and papers to the dump today. Chatted with Jeff Nielsen for the first time in months and months. Sifted through the papers lightly the day before and pulled out a few folders, the letters from VIPs and some memoirish pieces. Honeysuckle and suicide. Big folder of info on Ronale Manor and Compton Wynyates. Save the note from Northampton inviting me to visit. October of 1988, the visit happened. Temenos Conference same time but before or after Compton Wynyates?? My guess now is after, that Temenos was first. Met Nicholas there. Looking over college papers from Maryland and the novitiate. One I did for Fleming attempting to write in Finnegan’s Wake-ese about my breakdown in Eugenia Memorial Hospital. Got lots of praise on some papers. Others not. Bs! All of it gives me an upset stomach to look through now. Archival dust. What happened to that person, those persons, who wrote all of those pages?
24 June
Hi Dennis Gorgeous weather these few days. Intense full moon last night. Yesterday I surprised myself by walking over five miles (pedometer on the watch). Have been going on days off to Lebanon common. Covid made the restaurants there put up big tents for outdoor dining and everyone now wants to keep them up, so much more pleasant to eat outside. A new cafe in the old fire station, a vegan Mexican food truck run by a guy from Lebanon who has been a cook/chef for years, now lives cheaply in Vietnam eight months of the year near a beach. Interesting people walking back and forth, the fountain going. I walked around the town most of the day. First long walk I've done in a number of years. Va and her helper Elizabeth went swimming, they've been using the pool at waterville since cold spring has had ridiculous covid rules and procedures. By July 4 let's hope everything can "go back" or forward to new normals. Saw a headline the other day that says corporations are anxious to get workers back into their cubicles but that this year more people have quit their jobs and looked for new work than has happened in years and years. Seems a good sign to me. We're getting ready for the kids to show up in a month. They've had bed bugs!!!! Warned them not to bring them over! David had funny tales of doing endless laundry at the neighborhood laundromat while the professionals sprayed and powered the whole apartment. On the third time this past weekend. Get those buggers!!! The family trio played a concert at the kids school in their neighborhood. the kids will do two weeks at the Winnepesaukee theater day camp while they are here. Emma plans to read vols 4-7 of Harry Potter, her English really speeding along!
Enjoy the summer,
Bob
——-
from review of Chatwin’s Ouidah in the Independent 2011 —-
Chatwin's rendering of the Kingdom of Dahomey is not as imperial as Conrad's Congo in Heart of Darkness, but there are echoes: "Gradually Africa swamped him and drew him under. Perhaps out of loneliness, perhaps in despair of fighting the climate, he slipped into the habits of the natives". Only a non-African could have written this book; it is Africa viewed from the outside: clammy, lethargic, filled with emotional torpor and inexplicable weirdness. That said - white, black, African, Brazilian, no one escapes the author's fascination with treachery, immorality and the grotesque extremes of human behaviour.
Chatwin died aged 48 in 1989, before I could worship at his feet, but I did visit da Silva's shrine in 1992. He's buried, as he is in the novel, in the family compound in Ouidah. I was shown around by one of his beige-skinned, grey-eyed descendents, who was unashamedly proud of his slave-trader ancestor. Remarkable.
Bernardine Evaristo's novel 'Blonde Roots' is published by Hamish Hamilton
——-
In the early eighteen-hundreds, Francisco Felix da Souza, a Brazilian slave trader, helped a Dahomeyan Prince to seize his country's throne and was rewarded by being granted a monopoly over the sale of slaves in that entire part of Africa. However, the friendship with the African ruler did not last and da Souza died a ruined and broken man. Bruce Chatwin, who originally intended to write a biography of da Souza, realized Pierre Verger's monumental study of the Benin-Brazil slave trade had already covered the subject extensively, and decided instead to transform the historical details into a work of fiction. The result, published in 1980, is a terse and compelling novel about one Francisco Manoel da Silva, a poor, white, and footloose …
Utz, Richard. "The Viceroy of Ouidah". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 March 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8047, accessed 26 June 2021.]
Did Chatwin get his character Utz from this scholar? No, but the uncanny link here is wonderful.
Chatwin was caught up in the violence of a coup in (now Benin), where Ouidah is located, when he was researching the book.
The novel received mixed reviews. John Thompson compared The Viceroy to other about-Africa prose works:
"One could mention Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps or, for a work of the imagination based on somewhat less horrendous events, Achebe's Arrow of Gold. That novel of West Africa has violence enough, and cruel superstition too, yet it is suffused with the common humanity of which I find not one dried drop in The Viceroy of Ouidah."
Years later, in a 1999 review of Nicholas Shakespeare's biography of Chatwin, The Guardian described the Viceroy novel as "a rococo piece of candyfloss."
harsh but interesting ! and maybe true in its way. the blood brotherhood between the king and Da Silva is key, however, in Chatwin's mythology —-
I did finish and admit to skimming the last few pages, maybe ten or so because indeed it felt as if a nightmare was taking too long to finish itself. Maybe the whole book is a research project on steroids or hashish or cocaine or just writerly anxiety and hyper-adrenaline. Forced and excessively excessive. Guess that is rococo, or hyper something else.
Today I finally realized: Holy Cow, Dahomey > Benin. that is the country Octave is from, Octave the African exile, Royal, who was here at PSC for years. Ten? He and his family lived in that house they bought on Merrill Street, sits up a bit, higher, on the left after the corner with Langdon. So Octave's great-, father might have been in the court circles of descendants of the people in Chatwin's book. Bob Feeny went to Benin with Dick Hage for some ceremony. Hage sent used dorm furniture over there. Have to ask/urge him to write all he knows about Octave and the royals of Benin in his memoir!!
this tweet and Nicholas's reply has me buying the recent bio of Blake.
alastairmci (@Alastair McIntosh) Tweeted: This passage I got the sense that the BBC author was missing the fullness of what Blake (as England’s greatest prophet) knew imagination actually to be. Imagination cannot be understood within secular frameworks. We don’t just have imaginations, we move in (divine) imagination. Yes, the world is transformed when you realize that you dwell in the Imagination, not the reverse, and the ‘human’ here is the whole body of reality, not individualized bags of skin. Everything is a human face because it is divine imagination.—-Nicholas
Octave was a political prisoner for quite awhile . His brother got a woman pregnant remained married for awhile then divorced . I suspect it was to get his green card? —- George
July 1
Well I guess somehow I found Lispector, Brazilian (but/and lived for year in DC because she married a diplomat), back in '98. Read most of her works back then, the ones that were in English. Now there are lots more. Back then I was just looking for anything in translation to get out of the anglo-american boxes. Then somehow years later I found Pessoa's Book of disquiet. Although I had found a British book of his poetry one time when we were in Barcelona (also '98??) and I couldn't make head or tail of it then. Disquiet book I loved, though. Then I noticed that Saramago (nobel prize?) had a novel in which the maincharacter is one of Pessoa's inventions. A few years ago we took that cruise on the Duero and I finally saw Lisbon for a very few days. (we had seen a few places in Portugal on a road trip through Spain
that we took with Va's parents years and years ago). Once I took in Portugal I realized how totally different it really is from Spain. The history intersects politically with Spain for only about ten years of occupation. The Atlantic coast makes all the difference. Of late I noticed this contemporary novelist (Antunes) who has this book on the war in Angloa. Angry narrator. Coincides with our having been shown around Sintra on the recent trip by a diplomat and his wife, retired. He had a junior year in Albuquerque as an exchange student and was in love with Va. Someone reminded her of him and we managed to get in touch with him. Beautiful couple. After college he had been drafted into the Angola war before getting into diplomatic service. For some of those years they were posted in an African country (Burkino Faso?)
and experienced famine up close and personally. Horrifying tales. After all of this, duh, I recalled my Uncle Eddie Costello. Government office worker who married my mother's sister, Dot, and they lived in College Park. I spent about four summers with them between 12 and 15 (ok, 3? memory not clear). Would drive into the District where they worked in the Fed triangle and I would wander around town all day and meet up with them for the ride back home in the late afternoon. He had a Portuguese coat of arms decoration on the wall (for Costello, am sure it was a tourist item). Regret that I now know very little about him. Cousin tells me he must have been first generation American-Portuguese, from the South, Alabama or Arkansas or South Carolina, no one is sure.
Long convoluted answer!! How do the literatures differ? I've not read enough, of course. I will google that question to see what I find. Lisbon feels at once like a much lighter and softer and gentle city (3 days!) in contrast to Madrid (which I did know well). And the sound of Portuguese on the ear seems much softer and finer than Spanish. Machismo vs gentility? The P don't kill the bull but jump around with it. And that is not nearly as central, as it was to Spain for centuries. I think. On the other hand the sound of Portuguese is really strange, I try to make it sound like French but it doesn't at all. Haven't heard enough. I would go back to Lisbon in a heartbeat. Spain is too complicated in my memory by now. Prefer Madrid to Barcelona but again, long experience with one and not with the other.
On the other topics----you're in shock, ptsd and all that. Not much anyone can do or say at this point and it doesn't help to hear that much. From my experience with Va's stroke 18 years ago. First three years I could barely brush my teeth each day and I did have a real black out one time. Was able to call David and find out where I was and what was next in the morning. Had checked out of the motel ok but had no memory of having done so. Thank goodness we had cell phones at least.
Cooler here today. Hope you get some relief there soon. Big thunder storm yesterday, seems the roof is leaking right over our bed. Hope its a slow enough leak for now!
B
——-
“The ‘beautiful angels’ in Blake’s way of speaking may simply have meant people who were a little pompous. Blake could take a dim view of angels: he asserted–after having read Swedenborg’s accounts of angels–that ‘angels’ had a tendency to think themselves always right! Alternatively, he could talk of his friends as ‘angels’ when doing something he considered divine. An angel is a being who brings something from God, an intermediary. As Blake’s widow said to Crabb Robinson in January 1828: ‘he died like an Angel’. Do angels die?”
— Jerusalem!: The Real Life of William Blake by Tobias Churton
“Was the parents’ special consideration because John was a lost child ‘returned’, at least in name? Or was it because they could identify more with him in some way? Whatever the reason, we may note that the middle brother is frequently frustrated by the question, uttered or held in silence: ‘What about ME?’ There is something of the partially aggrieved-yet-spoilt personality lurking”
“William Blake’s adult psyche, which, as you get closer to him, becomes less attractive, though he could gently charm when so inclined. Furthermore, it is plain from all the records that William Blake was a ‘hyper-child’, precociously intelligent and hyper-conscious, extremely sensitive and ‘different’ from his fellows. Was there something in his education that brought this forth?”
“Robinson enjoyed one of his final conversations with Blake. And this day he spoke of the Old Testament as if it were the Evil Element. Christ, he said, took much after his Mother & in so far he was one of the worst of men. 10”
“Feeling is ascertained by Experience; Reasoning is hurtful, as makes us lose ourselves.’” 45 Zinzendorf's comment. His thought "reveals . . . something about how hard logic and rationality can divorce a person's mind from intuition, feeling, understanding, and even common sense. His comment could have been uttered by William Blake at any time in his career. Churton
ncolloff (@Nicholas Colloff) Tweeted: If you start from the premise that everyone must be saved (rather than help people realize they already are), you do rather end up with planting 10,000 churches (or whatever dazzle figure comes to mind) and the language of limits rather than of holiness.
This is so clear and good—-why has it never been brought home to me before this? Why hasn't N explained this to me before this???? Why hasn't anyone!!! Or is it that I am that dense??? me???
here is the sort of explanation I've been looking for and have never found until now—-from Churton—- seems so clear that the same process underlies Pessoa's heteronymns—or close enough to describe the spiritual vision poets and artists can give us if they see things according to spiritual correspondences as described in Swedenborg—-
Blake would often himself see events or images in at least two ways: the ‘vegetable’ image that came with the eye, and the spiritual meaning – also expressed as an image – that came through the eye. The physical eye delivered an apparent solid, based on sense data conditioned by time and space. The spiritual eye delivered a sign. And a sign forces us to see an object through its significance. The poet’s job, as Coleridge would assert, was to ‘disembody the soul of fact’. Thus, a thistle on a road obstructing Blake’s path could be both a plant and an array of spiritual enemies sent to test him. His imaginative powers being highly cultivated, he could then see his spiritual enemies as figures. The sign, being of spiritual origin, guaranteed the reality of the vision. Conversely, a countryman saying casually ‘The gate is open’ could enfigure an angel’s happy, encouraging announcement that a new stage of life had begun. There is, of course, the famous interchange of Blake with a ‘once-born’ interlocutor who asked, ‘Why, Mr. Blake, when you see the sun rise, do you not see a red disc in the heavens, rather like a golden guinea?’ To which Blake replied: ‘Oh no, oh no! I see the Lord God Almighty and the whole company of heaven crying out “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty.”’
Churton, Tobias. Jerusalem! (p. 125). Watkins Media. Kindle Edition.
Blake: "& every thing on earth is the word of God & in its essence is God." 137
7 July Looks like we might buy Claude's piano from Warren Book!! Most Amazing. What a development and a Sign! Of what? who?
Read lots of Jerusalem today (in Lebanon) and listened to David Malouf's novel about Ovid. Brilliant and moving. Wins hands down over Aciman's book on Audible also.
Guess who lived most of his life in Görlitz!! Jakob Böhme. I love the way Churton reviews the history of the whole period, the Age.
Years ago, in journalism school, I was told that the term for writing about a subject that interests no one was called "Afghanistanism." Editors trashed stories guilty of "Afghanistansism." How times have changed. But maybe things will eventually return to what they were in the early 1970s when no one cared about Afghanistan.
Sitter: Over the years I haven't had much communication with him. I visited hm once in Amherst, Mass in the early 70s. The next time was in the late '90s or early 2000s in Atlanta. In between was perhaps a half dozen letters or emails. Recently maybe 15-20 or so emails, but nothing really substantive exchanged. I don't think I had more than one or two contacts with him when he was teaching at Notre Dame. So I KNOW almost nothing about his reasons or motivations. But I can guess. He learned a "proper, liberal attitude" at Harvard and has never lost it. He can use Catholicism to further libera goals but that's about as far as it goes, I think. Is he religious? Maybe a little, not much. He's more a humanist, I think, and some Catholics, such as the current pope, are kinds of humanists. So he gets along with them. And I think that's all the encyclical was to him. A useful tool with Catholic students. Deep Catholic roots? I don't think so. In fact one of his parents grew up Presbyterian and converted to marry. I think that was his father, but I'm not sure.
Nevertheless, maybe 12 years of Catholic education did leave a residue. I think it left a residue on you, but I took it seriously only for a few months in the sixth grade. After that, I just ignored or endured it. Dad wasn't religious, and my brother always said of our mother: She went to mass every Sunday and didn't have a religious bone in her body
Peg wasn't very religious but still retained a vague belief in something like a good spirit/a god, I think, but this was just one more subject we didn't talk about.
P
——
shoes: first they feel great, ok, two days later, oy vey.
thanks to FIP a discovery for me this sunday morning: Lakmé: Viens Malika / Dôme épais de jasmin (Acte 1) Duo The Flower Song by Delibes —- or the Flower Duet I had guessed the Rhine maidens but was wrong. Nice to learn about Delibes. Delibes: Lakmé - Duo des fleurs
short visit with D & C on Facetime. They are driving to Chezet. Kids went down two days ago with RP and Annie.
Road to Santiago now taking place online. Virginia on it. Road Scholar Zoom
What if we have made a huge mistake?? Urizen worries this to death. Imagination replies with wonder and possibilities.
David Malouf's first story The Valley of Lagoons really good. Next one give the collection its title, Every Move You Make.
Finished Antonio Lobo Antunes, Asshole of the World, novel, translated title as The Land at the End of the World. Tour de force and brilliant. Got a little impatient but maybe that is just this Monday morning rainy day impatience while Willow finishes the Santiago session, now twenty minutes overtime. Type another document (below) takes so long!! To think of how we typed and re-typed over and over and over.
I'm rereading Henry James's The Princess Casamassima & the Princess has just asked "what art was, after all, but a synthesis made in the interest of pleasure" Synthetic in both senses and pleasurable: this is the best definition of art ever.
———
Did I really send this letter to Spencer Compton, Earl of Northampton? Excuse me, Marquess.
Where does the Marquess of Northampton live?
The family seats are Castle Ashby House and Compton Wynyates. The heir apparent to the marquessate and its subsidiary titles is Northampton's only son Daniel, Earl Compton (b. 1973).
apparently I did. Copying this from a photocopy (on long Euro paper, so Spanish photocopying machine). 21 October 1988 It could however be a letter I wrote as a diary entry to record the journey. I suppose I did send it as the thank-you note for the visit.
Av. Menéndez Pelayo 37
28009 Madrid
21 October 1988
Dear Spence —
The visit to Compton Wynyates has been doing its work—Hermetic work—during the TEMENOS Conference & after, in London (where I went out to look around Canonbury). I returned to Spain last night
Fire —- have you ever had a fire in every fireplace all at once? Does each chimney work? A once-a-year ritual perhaps, to mark some date? Since fire seems such a key element for the house—the bricks, the colors, the chimneys on the tower side, the way the house seems to float on green water (and over the underground waterway) like a candle or a lamp floating on a pond. And fire for the house as a center for the transmutation of earth and water into air. (And the flamelike Buddha in the hall window).
[He didn't reply to this letter but I wanted him to do so to confirm what a woman out for a walk had told me. After I drove up and out of the property, I parked the car on the high road and took a walk to collect my emotions and memories and thoughts. A woman came along walking her dog and I asked her a few questions. She said at Christmas time the house would be full of people and ablaze with fires in every fireplace. A large golden Buddha sits in the window of the great hall. ]
Heart — of England, of Europe — and in some way, for me, of a brotherhood or fellowship — in some way a masculine heart energy — maybe Henry VIII and The Comptons, Cavaliers dying for King and Country — also Masonic work — but there I have to learn much more. The house in Philadelphia (City of Brotherly Love) which imitated C.W. — was "inspired" by it — was a sort of spiritual projection of it — was lived in — after the original owners sold it — by a communitarian sort of brotherhood — so when I was there — about 50 people lived there. Lodge-like. And then there is this Heart link, according to some astrologers — Tuesday, October 18 — Saturn & Uranus met at 27 degrees of the constellation of Sagitarius — thought to be the heart center of the galaxy. Staying in England through that date seemed important, back in August. The house as you talked about it in connection with England & The World — seemed to connect with that spirit. Whether Canonbury does or nor I don't know, but that is the afternoon I went out there. There were other hermetic configurations that opened up for me then —& the house figured — but they should be held for a while longer.
Priestly energy — there is some strand here that I cannot fully see yet — in terms of the house as it centers in the room a the top of the tower. Before the Philadelphia house was destroyed a man did a booklet about it & photographed it extensively & researched its history—including some of the history of CW. In thinking about trying to see the house, I wrote and asked him for more information etc. Turns out he is a priest in the Catholic Church. At Temenos, a stranger said something out of the blue to me about something concerning priestly character. [A woman from Switzerland told me I looked just like her parish priest, or a parish priest from her childhood??] Going up through the tower itself I discovered, on arriving at the top room, that I had come up through the intricately carved doorway, rather than through the doors that had been left open. [The tower has two winding stairways, a spiral like dna.] And in the room itself the energy was quite overwhelming. I want to explore Rosacrusianism more, in connection with this theme.
Did I mention that the house —- a blend by now of the "copy" I lived in & the original through books has been in my dreams for twenty-five years now. (The day Kennedy was shot is for me an event set against the brickwork of the outside walls.)
Well—I don't make anything specific of all of this — the conscious mind is taking over & obscuring the symbolic & hermetic work going on. And it may come together in some way in a poem or other literary form. [Compton had suggested something like this when we were talking in the hall before lunch was served. Or perhaps it was after. It was a notion he mentioned to Pamela, that I might write a poem about my visit to the house.]
At Temenos (which was not so good so far as spoken word was concerned but was wonderful for the music, some of the people, & the gardens at Dartington Hall), I met a sculptor named Richard Devereux. I liked him a great deal & the one piece of his work that was there. (He is not part of Raine's circle). It crossed my mind that one of his pieces/ Rites might suit for one of the secret gardens you are thinking about placing around CW. I had him send you a brochure—-but told him nothing about the garden idea. Lorna Graves was another artist there who had a wonderful spirit.
This is all by way, of course, by round about way, of saying thank you. It was such a relief —- and a release — to not talk about the Compton family history & the house —- of the civil war — or the other topics usually dealt with — the picturesque, nostalgic & romantic terms for discussing the appeal of the house. And it was so wonderful to find that the beauty of the house is what animates it —- what it animates. As you could see I was a bit dazed by it all — by what you connect with the house and by its own power — that I feel I did not — or have not yet —fully taken it in (that may be impossible). Rather it takes me into it. It was splendid to be able to walk through it slowly in silence.
Again thank you & Pam for an extraordinary opening of the heart.
Sincerely,
Bob Garlitz
———-
43 years after the event, what can I say? embarrassed by my younger self—yes I misspelled Rosicrucianism! but also moved again by all that I recall about everything involved in those memories——Tobias Churton has a book on the topic—must read!!! does he know Spencer Copton??? how could I contact Churton?
Dear F Spencer Thomas ---
Dear Tobias Churton ---
October 21, 1988 I visited Compton Wynyates for the better part of a day. Spencer Compton and Pamela invited me for lunch and then I looked all through the house. I had been interested in it because I had lived for a few of my university years in a copy of it built in Philadelphia in the 1920s (now long gone). After that visit, I attended the 2nd Temenos Conference at Dartington Hall. I was then forty-four. (And knew nothing!!)
I've only just now read one of your books, Jerusalem. Next I will move on to others--- most likely the one on the Rosicrucians because Compton mentioned them briefly among other topics.
Any chance you may know Lord Compton at all or have crossed paths through your research? Does Compton Wynyates make any appearance in any of your books?
Yours truly,
Bob Garlitz
Retired from University teaching
Plymouth, NH
————
Wednesday 14 July
While Virginia and her Road Scholar group finished their online walk to Santiago, with manchego, olives, bread and enjoyed the same feast while finishing up with Churton's book on Blake. In the discussion of Milton he doesn't say Blake is fellating Milton but he does say the figure of Blake is "in an erotic posture of total acceptance." And stresses the importance and significance of the healthy erection on Milton. The big toe on Blake's left foot is the key.
now to look at blake.archive once more to see some of the drawings and paintings
"Swedenborg specifically relates the big toe of the left foot to the genitals (a Tantric doctrine also), and its stimulation by the spiritual condition of the person brings to the left foot a 'fiery' sensation linked to the fire in the genitals: "Pain was felt in the great toe of the left foot [by Luther]. The reason is, because the great toe of the left foot corresponds to those who speak from faith derived from the Word and continually quarrel about doctrinals. They induce pain in that great toe. Therefore, also, that great toe communicates with the genitals; for the genitals correspond to the Word, as has been largely and very frequently shown. It as been often granted to sensibly perceive that communication." Churton, Jerusalem 297
Jason Whittaker on his blog Zoamorphosis —
As Miller comments on de Man, such ethicity does not assume the foundational beginnings of language, nor the triumphal return of language to a reality that validates it; rather, it obeys another imperative, the demand that language be read but that we take responsibility for our own judgements without the false security of an ultimate authority. In my mental fight, I assert that Blake more often than not believed in a free sexual commonwealth, and will frequently cite evidence of that fact – while also, I hope, not ignoring those passages that trouble me and appear to contradict his general opposition to the Moral Law – but it is also an unceasing combat, sometimes with Blake himself, but also with those other communities of readers who read black where I read white.
Lunch with Greg today in Ossipee. Talked about fallen arches (in his family). His brother had hip replacements, no problem. Forgot Greg has been wearing orthotics for 25+ years. his doctor wants to do surgery on calcification in his heel, and toe. he's stopped playing tennis.
Mainly about Jim and their visit to see him a few weeks ago. Jim seems less and less there. Greg thinks that is their last visit.
—-
from the last paper I wrote for Rudd Fleming's course at MD. He said he had to read Finnegans Wake once a year or he'd go crazy. Was it a course on Joyce? or was it general contemp lit? don't recall that exactly. Anyway this was my attempt at Finneganistic writing:
I'allaylyouabet thairs mere to this than moots the aye. Too fallow the expletive method I shall tale a true explosience. Dunce upin the mist of hsyterorical oso historical Philadelphorical, I meant a beautiful lowday, Madamannaeugenia (muchstress, matron, and mandlemuckmaker) who lived on a knull of a nill in the extra excusive aria of Justnot Kill (across the Main Line into Jamintown and out Standon Offvenue). Involuted to her party, I went out to her house, an old mentally hospitiable enough a palace, but lacking the finer iceties of life. In the crowded intourayour stained nickotime brown, the guesseds clattered on truthpicks that maddered, disgusting in depth the magniferous peuple in the outsized whirled. Yougerelectrically congenial Eugenia swerved sayman pink canapillizers, clocktales, and dishes of fruits and guts and inelettuceable saladities. Aye shows the ladder. Upoopupup I wendt to the enelectable imperflectable tiptop of profound dambiguous indigestation. Twas a far far buttered wing I shouted than the munchable crunchable lunchable trankillity of dregs and scopelessness.
1968
—-
interview in Sydney Morning Herald March 1, 2014 —-
As he often does, Malouf steers the personal into the abstract or universal: "I'm very interested always, in my writing, in the erotic rather than the sexual. I think a lot of our most powerful relationships - with people and things - have a powerful erotic base without being overtly sexual." He agrees with my assessment that he is both an ascetic and a sensualist. "The whole Judeo-Christian view is that the body belongs to a fallen world and nature belongs to a fallen world, and I don't accept any of that at all. I think the sacred is in this world, not in another world, and in the body and in nature."
Until his mid-20s, Malouf thought he would marry, and even though he escaped that expectation by leaving Brisbane, he neither had a "moment" of deciding he was gay nor struggled with it. He has been in love "three or four times". One time coincided with writing An Imaginary Life, about the exiled Roman poet Ovid and his bond with a wild boy brought up by wolves.
——
handwritten on pale blue legal pad style paper in green ink — what year ?
The word "suicide" was always for him a golden room at the top of the house on a golden April afternoon. Light poured in through the window at the far end of the room. The floor was honey-oak, the thiry study tables were oak, so the sun splashed this gold up onto the white walls and the white ceiling that followed the pitch of the gable. It was work time, so no one was in the study hall. He sat up in the deep window sill, unlatched one of the four large casements and pushed it open. He hooked his left arm onto the window post and leaned out into the hot sunlight. Four stories below Kevin was mowing the grass in the formal garden that was marked at each corner by large bitter dark green boxwood spheres. Kevin looked up and saw him, guessed at once what was in his mood and struggled with himself over what to do. He threw a look of helpless pain and confusion, pleading and trying to be detached. He made a show of continuing to maneuver the mower. It was a hand-mower, it's rhythmic whisperings cut the silent air. From time to time Kevin would look up and gesture slightly to go back in and close the window. But he didn't. Instead he put one leg slowly out over the edge of the outside sill to see what it felt like. Slowly he thought about putting the other one out and over also and pivoted slightly to do so. The confusion felt as intense as the sunlight. The confusion, the dark helpless fear and pain kept him there for a while staring down at the golden emerald greens of the lawns and the draped fur of the tall evergreens. At last he let the image of his drop from the window, the letting go and the fall, take form in his mind's eye. It might not be high enough, four stories, to do the trick. It felt dangerously and gloriously high enough from there, especially with all the pressure of the golden room at his back. That golden room would thrust him outward into the still, hot air. A laugh began to catch silently at his throat as he pictured the fall. Fear, a new fear, crawled into his stomach on that chuckle and inched down into his gut. If he did fall they would never know: they would not know what he meant to do, if he had jumped or slipped: more importantly they wouldn't know if he had let his heart soften and if he had begged for mercy as he fell. If that's what he would have chosen to do. And he might have. In those few half-seconds of the falling itself or the jumping, whichever he chose, he would also have to choose to ask or not. For mercy, for forgiveness. Kevin had done the right thing to call his bluff, to ignore him. He swung around and closed the window. The oak floor and the desks were golden. The light played up onto the length of the white pitched ceiling. He laughed silently somewhere in his stomach at the foolishness of his casuistry. He sat for a while in the silent gold of the room. The confusion cleared into a shiver of gratitude, a chill of benediction.
—-
dated 5.23.88 printed on a matrix dot printer
Ronale Manor was a Tudor-style mansion built in Elkins Park, a suburb northeast of Philadelphia, in 1926. It was torn down in 1975. It was a fifty-room imitation of the English Tudor house Compton Wynyates. For about twenty years, from 1956 to 1975, the house was used by a religious teaching order called the Christian Brothers. About five hundred young men, then, lived in the house for at least two years. This means as architecture the house was experienced by many more people than it was originally designed for. The architect was Horace Trumbauer, though the actual work was most likely that of Julian Abel, his chief designer and assistant.
How much significance do we give to buildings? Are they not our bodies magnified and transmorgrified? Is the human body not the first work of architecture?
The human body is the first work of architecture. I say this because we can look at the body and see its structure and beauty and know that it is a designed form for the consciousness that inspirits it. We can see other animals and make similar observations; yet the human body we can see from both the inside and the outside. We experience it as both ours and as another's. We thus experience its construction in a way unlike our experience of any other part of Nature. We can imagine being a tree or a jaguar, but our bodies we do actually live and live within. Thus, we build shelters for ourselves as extensions and developments of this primary structure of our being. Perhaps then we would say the human body is the ur-work of architecture, the work that comes before the first architectural design.
It could be objected that the
——
next text is undated
When I was the fat kid my older brother used to tease me by calling me names. For a while it was "Honeysuckle." I'm not sure why. It was the title of a popular song then, but I don't know how we made the connection. He just knew it got me frustrated and angry,
He was the star athlete, with the royal blue varsity jacket, pale gold leather sleeves, letters hand-sewn on the front and back. I was the bookworm, chubby, plump, fat, full of secret self-loathing. Every Easter we would each get a three-pound egg, thick bitter chocolate outside, rich chocolate cream inside. We would slice them into heavy pieces, like sugar-bread. I always ate mine in a day or two. His egg would last a week or more. I couldn't see how he could make it last so long.
Some honeysuckle grew on the chain-link fence that divided our yard from the neighbors. I remember standing there one day just after he had passed by and called me the hated nickname. Sure, I knew somewhere that in his teasing there was indeed love and care and uncomprehending concern for me. But I stood there gripped by by helpless, hateful rage. Suddenly I looked at the fence covered with honeysuckle vines. And I saw the flowers. And I smelled the heavy, lustrous unguence they gave off into the hot, humid afternoon. The flowers were thin fluted pale orange shafts that opened trumpet-like—-miniature lilies, but with longer throats full on pistils loaded with golden pollen. Sugary, heavy, rapturous perfume, like candy cream Easter eggs for the nose and for the back of the brain, and for the eye a white golden-orange flute of piercing lightness and tenderness and delicacy.
Somehow I saw through my anger and resentment and self-hatred and through my brother's misplaced confusion and fear. And I saw that if the flower was so beautiful, then the nickname need not cut and burn me. And I saw that there might be such ambivalence in me also, a beauty of radiant possibility to counterbalance the dark disgust with which I devoured the chocolate egg in two days and lashed back in powerless fury at the word "Honeysuckle."
——
This completes salvaging documents from the great attic cleanout of 2021. Hundreds of papers, letters, old files taken to the dump and tossed.
24 July Saturday Great arrival yesterday. dinner at Italian Farmhouse. Before that Eliot and Cécile took a short walk and Eliot came back with an observation: we live on a corner, Annie & RP live on a corner and he and his parents live on a corner. Brilliant.
Today they go to a memorial for Erin O'Donnell's dad who died in January. Erin's children are Boon and Bea, did Peter Roberts. He and Erin met at St Johns in Santa Fe. Live over in Lyme.
This line is from Mayo Clinic on arthritis—-
Meditating, doing yoga, deep breathing, listening to music, being in nature, writing in a journal — do whatever helps you relax. There's no downside to relaxation, and it can help ease pain.
Holy cow. Why do I need reminders of this? Is it stress itself that tells me "oh, no one is going to ever read or want to read your journal entries, you will never be one of those great writers whose trunk of 25,000 slips of paper will be treasured for hundreds of years. Forget all of that. The whole point of writing in a journal, whether on computer or in ink in a book, is relaxation. "there is no downside to relaxation" and we might as well say, one can never relax too much!!!
what about meditating, yoga, they even mention talk therapy and "Massage might improve pain and stiffness temporarily. Make sure your massage therapist knows where your arthritis affects you." so visiting Michael every so often might still be a good idea when possible.
Visitors brought key lime pie from the Big Catch. But unbeknownst to them Bela and I went down there earlier and got huge ice cream cones and quickly had to put them into cups. The wind was up, at 6 pm and it was pretty cold. we drove up the west side of the lake and my hands got really painful for about twenty minutes. Had to pull off and stretch them out and I guess too just breathe and relax. While we watched Professor T I googled various topics about arthritis.
House full of six other people definitely changing our quiet schedule. Quite a bit. We adjust. The weather gorgeous even a bit too chill, nice breezes. Jeff Emery taking the crew out on Squam in his new party boat. Hoping for photos. Willow on the piano. Will we buy Warren's? He wants 5k. About a foot smaller maybe two than our Samick. A 1930s Howard, one tuner likes it, says he would pay 7500 for it and take no less than 5. I would place it as a divider presence between the living room and the kitchen table area, pianist facing into the living room. Have to see how narrow the corridor is between the adjuting mantel and the rest of the space passing it by. Took a short walk. Va got a good three ringer in at mid-day. One at Wally's and two at Basket.
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