An "Other" Story

Every Thought...

Week 31: One Summer

Facts from the pre-internet seventies are elusive and details are sure to be skewed, but the gunshot death of a high school friend still echoes in my mind.


07/29:

  TWL, Lines 249-265: Olivia's Song

  249   She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
  250   Hardly aware of her departed lover;
  251   Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
  252   'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.'
  253   When lovely woman stoops to folly and
  254   Paces about her room again, alone,
  255   She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
  256   And puts a record on the gramophone.
  257   This music crept by me upon the waters'
  258   And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
  259   O City city, I can sometimes hear
  260   Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
  261   The pleasant whining of a mandoline
  262   And a clatter and a chatter from within
  263   Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
  264   Of Magnus Martyr hold
  265   Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

250. DEPARTED LOVER: See note 248 for one (Tiresias or the carbuncular guest) “groping away”.

Compare the more painful awareness of the departed nymphs at lines 175-181.  See also Revelation 18:14 for the repeated use of the word “departed”:

 “And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.”

252. GLAD IT’S OVER: The reactions to departure have evolved from plaintiveness (see note 176) to being hardly aware (line 250) to gladness.  See note 297 for the context of the “event” now done and over.

253. OLIVIA’S SONG: Eliot: “V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield.”  See Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) 24:

  “The next morning the sun rose with peculiar warmth for the season; so that we agreed to breakfast together on the honey-suckle bank: where while we sat, my youngest daughter, at my request, joined her voice to the concert of the trees about us. It was in this place my poor Olivia first met her seducer, and every object served to recall her sadness. But that melancholy, which is excited by objects of pleasure, or inspired by sounds of harmony, soothes the heart instead of corroding it. Her mother, too, upon this occasion, felt a pleasing distress, and wept, and loved her daughter as before. ....

   When lovely woman stoops to folly,
   And finds too late that men betray,
   What charm can soothe her melancholy,
   What art can wash her guilt away?

   The only art her guilt to cover,
   To hide her shame from every eye,
   To give repentance to her lover
   And wring his bosom, is—to die.”

For echoes of Olivia’s song beyond line 253, see line 182 (“By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept”) and note 182 (Rousseau’s “sweetest melancholy”); see also lines 11 (breakfast with Marie on a surprisingly warm day) and 99 (the rape of Philomela, her cries and the nightingale’s forest song resounding through the grove) and notes 0.3 and 63 (the wishes to die of the Sybil and of the undying souls in limbo).

256. THE MODERN WORLD of Eliot’s time was full of new concepts.  Record-playing continues the song theme of this section (see note 172.5), but along with the gramophone see also the typewriter, the two career family and ready-to-eat meals (line 223), horns and motors (line 197) and airplanes (note 374).  The term automatic (line 255) was itself a burgeoning word.  Add to these the modernist movement in literature and art, a development in which Eliot and The Waste Land were key factors.  See notes 1, 248, 412 and 418.

257. UNDERTONE: Eliot: “V. The Tempest, as above.”  See Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.392, and see note 26.

258. THE STRAND, about a mile west of where Eliot worked (see note 66), is a riverside London street once lined with mansions, almost all of which no longer exist. Eliot alluded to the Strand in an early unnamed poem, commonly known as At Graduation (1905):

  “Standing upon the shore of all we know
  We linger for a moment doubtfully,
  Then with a song upon our lips, sail we
  Across the harbor bar—  no chart to show
  No light to warn of rocks that lie below,
  But let us yet put forth courageously.

  As colonists embarking from the strand
  To seek their fortunes on some foreign shore
  Well now they lose what time shall not restore,
  And when they leave they fully understand
  That though again they see their fatherland
  They there shall be as citizens no more.”

CITIZENSHIP and its renouncement would be part of Eliot’s own story, although not until several years after The Waste Land and from an opposite direction than the British immigration his 1905 graduation poem spoke of.  He was at Harvard when that poem was written, but by 1910 he moved to Paris for a year of undergraduate studies.  He eventually ended up at Oxford (1914) and the working world of London (1917), and in 1927 he renounced his American citizenship to become a naturalized Briton.

259. CITY CITY: Eliot vacillated with the Unreal City’s capitalization here; it was capitalized in 1922, lower-cased in 1923 and recapitalized in 1925. Compare line 60, and see Baudelaire’s “city, city” at note 60. For this moment, however, the city is less unreal and more appreciated.

263. TIME’S PASSAGE is unclear here. It is noon again, after Eugenides’s foggy noon (line 208) and Tiresias’s evening hour (line 222); either time has passed or the order of events is not what it appears.  See also the limbo states at lines 40, 63, 126, 329 and 344 and the revivals at lines 1-7 and after line 359.  See also note 322.

265. ST. MAGNUS MARY: Eliot: “The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren's interiors. See The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.).”  Public outcry to this 1920 proposal from the London County Council spared both Magnus Martyr (line 264) and Mary Woolnoth (line 67) from being razed. Until 1922, St. Magnus Martyr celebrated an annual Fish Harvest Festival. The church was surrounded by pubs and fish, oil and tar (line 268), and whining, clatter and chatter, yet the scene still exuded pleasant music and an “inexplicable splendour.”


07/30:

  Review, Sweet Charity

  You will remember this...

  I watched a play, Sweet Charity, so full of social choreography and the edges of emotion, so typical a musical with everything on display, pleasantly raw, that I forgot for two hours, even more, that I was there alone.  Intermission reminded me, temporarily, while the house filtered into the lobby and the actors were left stuck in an elevator in the dark, but fifteen minutes later I sat down and got right back into the play, naively sweet yet cloyingly real how he was afraid to kiss her and she was avoiding the backstory.  And I admit, I was even close to tears, close to feeling my feet in their shoes, until the ending, oh.  An artless set of lies, an unrelented pause in the music, and awkward, beatless moves from stage left to stage right, until...  an hour later I'm alone, and painfully aware.


07/31:
  
  One Summer : A True Story

  Sol didn’t cry, all through the night, but he was very quiet.  And the next day, Sunday, when his friends got together and talked about it, he still didn’t say much, even when they found out that Roxanne was actually dead.

  Everyone reacted differently.  Brandon wanted most to get the details straight.  Chad felt bad for Adam: “I wonder what’s going to happen to him,” he said.  Lenny cried, a whole lot, and he wasn’t ashamed.  And Al was a complete contrast: it was spooky how he just stared blankly into space and at the ground with a cold face.  But they were all quiet to some degree.

  There wasn’t much else to say.  One of their friends was dead, shot in the head by another friend, Adam.  Except for Sol, they had all witnessed it.  An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, but she took six hours to die, and the fact that she was dead was the news the morning brought.

  Around noon they all decided to go out to Adam’s house to see how he was doing.  They took Chad’s car.  Chad put the key in the ignition and suddenly Black Sabbath blared where it had left  off; he reached forward and ejected the tape.  “Not today,” he said quietly, smiling.  He started the car and they drove back to the scene of their party the night before.

  Sol had left early, before the third keg was cracked, but he had known the basic details of the shooting almost as soon as it had happened.  He hadn’t been home fifteen minutes when his father, the town pastor, got a midnight call, and when he came home he told Sol, who had stayed up waiting, what had happened.  For the benefit of Sol, before they went up the steps to Adam’s doorway they all stopped together and pointed to the place on the front lawn where Roxanne’s head had fallen.  The blood was dried to the color of dirt on the grass.  A couple of rains, maybe even the dew, would make it go away.

  Inside, Adam sat on the couch in his living room, his eyes red from crying.  Two of his cousins were there with him.  One of them got up to answer the door, and he immediately ushered everyone into the kitchen and offered them beer.  He said the police had come and gone and would be back later; apparently they had been convinced that Adam wasn’t going to go anywhere.

  They all went into the next room and sat with Adam.  They each made a few lame attempts at encouragement, then Chad got up and turned on the television.  A football game was on, and they watched it for a while without talking.  When it was halftime, Chad got up again and turned the television off.

  “I guess we should go,” he said, but they didn’t stand up right away.

  “Thanks for coming out here, guys,” Adam said finally, and they each went over to him and one at a time put a hand on his shoulder.

  “We’ll stick with you on this,” they all said, and Sol said it too, but at the same time it hurt for each of them to say this, because they knew that their next stop was to go visit Roxanne’s boyfriend, Bobby, who had been out of town the night before.

 The same odd silence was at Bobby’s house, even though Bobby’s position was hardly the same as Adam’s. He offered them all sodas and they watched the rest of the football game, and they all got up to leave after that, saying few words.

  Sol still didn’t cry, not yet, but he decided he would go back later, alone, to the spot that Roxanne had fallen.


08/01:

  One Summer : An Aspersion

  “You guys killed her,” she said.

  “What are you talking about,” I said quietly.

  “You had the party, you knew he was playing with guns.”

  Our accuser was my father’s age, and a friend of his.  She had silver-blond hair and a pleasantly trim figure; her skin was smooth and unwrinkled and her smile and the warm humor that accompanied it gave her the appearance of youth.  But on this day she did not smile and wasn’t warm, and suddenly and permanently to me she was as old and cold as a cackling, bony-nosed witch.  For the first time I noticed the wart on her neck, and it would stand out every time after that.  I noticed the way her dishwater gray hair was never combed.  Her humor, I began to realize, was full of secret sarcasm and based largely on hate.

  It was two days after my friend Adam accidentally killed my friend Roxanne.  Adam was messing around with a shotgun at a party.  He had forgotten to check the chamber, and when he playfully grabbed Roxanne and put the gun to her temple, when he jokingly pulled the trigger, ready to say “bang” in verbal mime, the noise was suddenly real and there was real, red blood, and she really collapsed to the ground in a slow motion you never see in the movies.

  We were all there to see it, and for a long time it was a very traumatic memory.


08/02:
  
  One Summer : A Song

  She rode on a beautiful horse, rode up the hill and across my lawn.  Roxanne!  She smiled bold and shy, beaming the bold-shy age of thirteen years.  Roxanne, 1979: there was a Top 40 hit that year, but she was a different tune.  Beyond the pure, but in the days before mature, she was not so grown up as a red light song, and none of us were as old as we pretended.

  We used to laugh at her: she had what Matt used to call a “cute duck butt,” and what Jim called a “ski-jump nose.”  We drank beer in the dark —she never drank, but she stayed out late with us; she teased us all, and she smoked Salem cigarettes and she swore.

  And one day she rode that beautiful horse up the hill of my lawn and smiled, and said, “Hey, Sol, want to go for a ride?”  I looked up at her on her big beautiful horse and smiled back, and Sugar took the opportunity to munch on my lawn.

  “Ro-o-0-OX! Anne! —that was another tune, by the Police, and Sting sounded like a reggae rooster on the radio.  We crowed that song all summer, thinking we liked it before we knew what it was about, knowing only that we too knew a girl named Roxanne.  Then we learned, learned to understand every word, and for a while that summer we sang it louder, and then in the fall we didn’t sing it anymore.

  She rode Sugar up to me —bold and shy —and asked if I wanted to ride with her.  And I smiled, not ready to answer, giving Sugar time to chew the grass.  Nights later, in the fall, I’d try to write a better song for her: “Roxanne, sweet thirteen, before she knew the world was mean...”    “Those days are over,” I might have added.  Nights later, we would turn the radio off.

  She smiled, bold and shy.  Sure, I said.  Great, she said, jump on.  We rode down the street and into a field, Roxanne and Sugar and I —we broke from a trot to a gallop, and I, sitting in back, clung on to Roxanne, held her near me, felt her warm and sweaty against me and felt safe in the saddle.  We were still closer to pure than mature, and I still remember Sugar munching quietly on the grass.  But then we were both well aware of where we were, on this beautiful horse galloping swiftly across the field.

  Another tune began playing on the radio, and we turned the volume higher.

  One night we all went to a party at Adam’s.  His parents weren’t home.  We drank beer in the dark, but Roxy still wouldn’t drink.  “Ro-o-0-OX! Anne,” squawked Adam.  She never did like that  song.  Adam took out a gun and started playing with it, as if it were a Saturday afternoon and he was shooting at beer cans on fence posts.  Wait, said Matt, let me set them up again.

  Sugar munched quietly on the grass —a big horse, with a big saddle.  Come on, said Roxanne, there’s room for both of us.  And I jumped on, fitting snugly into the saddle behind her, and we trotted off my lawn and down the hill, down a country road and across a field.

  She lit up a cigarette, while Adam started playing with his shotgun, shooting it into the air.   Come on, said Adam, Come on, bitch, or I’ll kill you.  He laughed.  We drank more beer.  She never did like that song.  And Adam started fooling around with his shotgun, holding it up to her throat.  Wait, said Matt, let me check the chamber.

  We used to laugh at her, and she teased us all, and she swore.  And she rode on a beautiful horse, up the hill and across the lawn, and she asked if I wanted to go for a ride.

  I held her near me.  She was warm and sweaty, and I clung to her.

  And we turned the radio off.

  Adam started playing with his shotgun, pulling the trigger, and the shot went into her head.

  Wait, said Matt, it was supposed to be empty.  Someone called the police, and we turned the radio off.

  We had been singing another tune, beyond the pure, before the mature.  And Sugar broke to a gallop from a trot.


08/03:

  The Farmer

  I

  There was once a farmer who with a smile endured
  The test of memory and in time inspired
  The stuff of legend: once a man became
  The hero and the villain and the dream
  Behind the smile became the memory
  Of someone else.  There was once a farmer, and he
  Worked hard to plow his thousand acre field
  Each spring, preparing someone else’s food
  With modern tools.  Allow this tale to start
  With shares of metal dragging through dirt
  And give the man a toil hardened grin
  And a severed hand; then let this truth be told
  Of every farmer whose every smile reveals
  Defiance, grit, survival, victory,
  But leave it there: a hundred stories end
  Where one begins and all of history
  Breathes the air of every once upon a time.


  II
 
  There was once a time when smiles disappeared
  Throughout the county, turning to a hard
  Reality: the cruelest of crimes
  Came to their world and crushed the quiet dreams
  Of an adolescent girl and of the whole
  Community.  There was once a time when all
  Work stopped to hear the echoes of a gun,
  And it felt like everyone who heard the sound  Had pulled the trigger.  Oh dear audience
  Expecting simple songs and sweet romance
  Imagine you were there holding the gun
  That fateful Friday night; and picture this,
  A steadfast smile suddenly replaced
  With emptiness, then guilt, then rage and blame,
  And there you were, the gun still in your hand
  Above your victim, for the rest of time
  The final breath of a thirteen year old girl.


  III
 
  She was once a summer smile that never feared
  Forever, thought forever was a word
  That didn’t end: she smiled like it was summer
  All the time, and by persistent dreams
  And distant memories her ghost pretends
  That nothing’s changed.  There was once, and there remains
  Worked in the weave of our surviving souls,
  The strand of innocence of teenaged smiles
  On summer nights.  Forgive us, farmer, for the blood
  We can’t unspill, collect the tears we’ve shed
  But let us smile that she may live again
  To find forever; let this be her truth,
  The ultimate discovery of youth:
  Not liberty, not passion, not abandon
  But innocence: accept this first and final
  Plea, the strand of our salvation and
  The breath that gives us immortality.


08/04:

  Moleskin 4.3: For What It’s Worth

  I should say, too, that I don’t actually know you. I may pretend to know exactly who you are, in order to relate to you, but you, my other, are a stranger to me; I will believe I can see you in a mirror, as I have seen my parents’ faces (or maybe more arrestingly, the other way around), yet I will admit to only imagining there is even a glimmer of their faces in mine or mine in yours. But I am speaking to you all the same, hoping you might get something out of my story. As I write this I’m fairly certain you aren’t even listening, barely noticing me scribbling away, or maybe years away from hearing me at all. But this story is for you, all the more, the point for my point: to show you, dear other, that beyond birth and life is more life, more than you might expect; to share some of the river secrets that can help you pass the time; not to tell you who you are —you know that more than I ever will— but to tell you an “other” story, for all that it is worth.