Springfield -- Lincoln's tomb

The little "Field trip! Springfield" seems to have been, in hindsight, a sort of severance package for the end of a marriage. He wanted a room with a relaxing Jacuzzi. A month later, he wanted to leave. As we say in the vernacular, who knew?

Lincoln's tomb: note the young boys' faces, present in all the sculpture groups around the monument. We still sometimes call soldiers "boys," but in the Civil War, many of them really were children, and serving in the thick of it. Lincoln's face, too, is sculpted differently here at his gravesite from the way it is made now in the many representations of him all over Springfield. In majestic nineteenth-century bronze, he is leonine, heavy-featured, fearsome, all black. In the new depictions of him -- including wax, or whatever dioramas are made of -- his face is thinner, blander, and of course happier.

And speaking of new ways of looking. I had forgotten to note that, in the Lincoln Museum in downtown Springfield, the tourist is guided through a series of floodlit dioramas showcasing lifesize wax figures of scenes from the President's life. In one, a slave couple are shown in the act of being forcibly separated and sold away from each other at a slave market in New Orleans. "This is something the young Lincoln might have seen on his first trip to New Orleans," the plaque beside it says. We are naturally invited to think how it might have affected him.

Ah, but what did happen to him on his first trip south in 1828? David Herbert Donald quotes him.

" 'One night,' as Lincoln remembered, 'they were attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob them. They were hurt some in the melee, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat, and then cut cable, weighed anchor, and left.' " (See Lincoln, p. 34.)

But that story is not to be thought of when making dioramas nowadays. Political correctness is so much more useful in them than the truth.   

Looking at this massive monument, at the entrance to an otherwise obscure nineteenth-century cemetery in an Illinois town that would have been completely obscure were it not for Lincoln's own presence here, one gets a sense of the emotions, the shock and disbelief people must have felt at provisions having to be made for President Lincoln -- Lincoln -- to be buried here within days of Union victory in the Civil War. Every place where his body rested before final interment in the great crypt is noted: below, the small house-shaped structure cut into the hill is the public vault where anyone's body could be placed temporarily. Once it happened to be used for him, in May of 1865, it seems rarely to have been used again.

Inside this quiet barred cell, there are dignified, nineteenth-century curlicues of stone and metal gracing the plain metal doors of the vaults, now forever empty. Ladies in black hoop skirts and gentlemen in stovepipe hats looked at them and were comforted, perhaps, not just in May of 1865 but in earlier seasons when mourning other dead. Last year's leaves nestle in the corners, as no doubt they do every year. Farther up the hill to the left, a mute stone marker stands where Lincoln's body was moved again (in December 1865), from the public vault to a second resting place before the real, giant's tomb was finished. Construction on that took nine years. For nine years he lay simply in the side of the hill.   

When at last the tomb was finished and dedicated, it must have been a point of great pride and honor, as the years went by, for other Springfield veterans to be buried one by one in Oak Ridge, almost at the feet of the Emancipator. Below, veterans' headstones lie in concentric circles around a monument made of (ersatz?) cannon balls, the circles rippling out, the death dates of old men falling later and later. The 1880s, 1890s, and so on into the 1900s.

Here we are looking up at the back of the tomb from behind its hill, the obelisk framed in a graceful tree. Behind us in turn, on a warm if barren-looking April morning, the rest of Oak Ridge rolls and stretches, in softly shaded, quiet wooded hills, into an oblivion of unvisited Victorian American graves. 

And then, the trip home. Why need there be so many very 21st-century-looking windmills outside Odell, Illinois?

They whirl and spin, and the trees turn green, and life goes on. It's blazing hot summer there now.

It's raining sheets

There are certain situations in life that call for the purchase of new, bright pink bedsheets. Like after he leaves. It's not a celebratory thing. You just want something new on the bed.

Then it rains. Again.

Then the sun comes out. Might there be a rainbow? You rush to take a picture.

So does he. The door to the upstairs apartment slams.

Why now

Why is it that now, of all times, people seem to come at me with gems like this? --

"That Skinny Girl margarita. Did you know Bethenny Frankel sold the rights to that drink mix to some big company for millions of dollars? ... And her dad left her and her mom when she was, like, three. She never forgave him for it. "

"No, I can see why." 

"Can you imagine doing that? The guy must have really hated his wife."

"Mmmm."

Then, Jim the butcher: "I need your husband's help."

Ah-hah.

It seems that Jim and his wife own houses locally which they rent out, and they have recently received an application from a would-be renter who claimed to work at the local fire department. They want to check up on this guy and find out if he really is employed there -- where my husband is (my daughter now calls her father simply "the Sir," and points toward the ceiling, in other words to the upstairs apartment, when speaking about him). I think Jim expected me to involve the Sir in this investigation in some way. I simply suggested he call the fire department, whose number I do know by heart after twenty-four years, and ask about the ostensible employee himself. I think he was somewhat taken aback by the simplicity of it.

The next day: "Are you John's wife?" the lady asked.

Ummm ...

She knows of him through the volunteer appearances he has put in at her grandchildren's schools. "Such a nice man. He said you worked here and that the next time I was in, I should look you up."

"Oh, yes! And what's your name?"

"Mary Costello."

"Oh, yes, that sounds familiar." So she went away flattered and pleased.

The mature garden

Most of it is a feast of green, in the bright slanting evening sun. But below, first, are last month's bleeding hearts.

Asiatic lilies wait to bud, crowded in beside bearded iris, cranesbill, and a mass of goldenrod. The robins chirp and carol away as always, whether in the dim gray mist of early morning or the long, steadily darkening twilights. This big old house with its big old mulberry tree has sheltered and overlooked much life, and many years and happiness. And I suppose there are robins anywhere. The mature garden, however, is mine. 

Guilty pleasure (I like Carla)

I can't help it. I like this woman.

Image from The Swamp


Granted, she is painted in a new biography as a "narcissistic sexual huntress." I have no idea how you go about being that and it's probably bad, but it sounds much more exciting than folding the laundry and getting dinner. Granted, all France is apparently laughing fit to die at her latest music CD. And granted, I can't imagine too many worse nightmares than waking up next to Mick Jagger, which she did for eight years. This was either before or after Eric Clapton. Then Donald Trump. Then some philosophizing French father and son in succession.

The deceived wife/mother in that menage wrote a novel about it, in which Carla figures, slightly fictionalized of course. Still she -- Carla -- blazed on with her life. Now she is well along in her career as wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy and therefore first lady of France. She looks smashing, she looks delighted with her lot, and she looks particularly fascinating in the photo above, whispering into her husband's ear at some official function or other.

Someday, I want an American president's wife to do this. Just for a moment, be young, beautiful, and distracting, and make all the other important men world leaders look silly because after all this is what matters most anyway. I will also be pleased when an American president's wife has a website like this one. Go to the English translation page and note how the drawing of the guitar strings become both the outline of a pert and adorable naked woman, seductively posed, and the water she is dabbling her foot in.

I can't help it. I like her.

For ye be villeins (another California decision)

It's the illogic of it that ought to stand out, even for those of us who have been cajoled into supporting the right of homosexuals to "marry," mostly because we want to be good-natured, and because for fifty years our civilization has accepted that no discourse can possibly be more exalted than civil rights. The illogic of the judge's decision consists in this, that at some point, gay marriage activists will have to slam the door behind them, on all the other people who will want this right too. If marriage can be expanded to include same-sex partners, a thing no human society has ever dreamed of any more than it has ever dreamed of legislating that cats shall be dogs or day shall be night, then there is no logic in closing off "marriage" to anyone. Brother and sister, adult and child, more than two partners -- who shall say any joining is incorrect? Today's activists will have to either return to the notion of human taboo in order to shut the gates, hardly a sophisticated argument (albeit enough to have trumped them), or follow through in their moral posturing, open the gates fully, and announce that all sexual behavior is good and laudable.

The first alternative would prove them self-serving hypocrites and the second, collective sociopaths. They won't want to accept either alternative. They like the here and now, and their celebration here and now proves that the point of the gay marriage drive has always been to assault common people's beliefs, and morality itself, for the sake of assault.

I don't know what the upshot will be. If I were a fiction writer I would notice the current trend of young men and women living together without marriage, and put into my books something about youth no longer sullying itself with a polluted institution. Or I'd think about a futuristic tax revolt -- about some enterprising software engineer starting work, this very moment, on a computer program that would enable retail stores to bypass the automatic collecting of state sales taxes, for example. Cheaper goods would mean a satisfied and surging customer base, that is, until the authorities noticed and came with their handcuffs and their jail sentences. Then there might be the plot line of the mass of ordinary citizens simply choosing not to file. Why willingly pay the salaries of our oppressors?

Would a fiction writer think also of sketching in some details about violence -- revolutionary violence? Is there any logical precedent, would it feel emotionally right and in keeping with characters, motivations, etc.? What if army units abroad should begin to decide that events at home, at the highest levels of leadership, are totally unacceptable?

I suppose for the maker of fiction it all depends on fictional characters and fictional motivations. The Jacquerie rose, you know, and lots of other peasants at other times and places. And who was it who made an agreement with them and then broke it, sneering, "for ye be villeins, and villeins ye shall remain"? "Whether you like it or not" is the modern translation. It was some king, I think. 

Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin


The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy by Thomas Sowell

No, they can't "marry"

Luncheon in Fur, Meret Oppenheim, 1936. Museum of Modern Art, New York

Working at a wine shop is not quite like being a bartender, but one does hear stories, and one does get a chance to observe human nature. What I notice more than anything else in my customers across the counter, it seems, are the love troubles of an aging Baby Boom generation. To be fair, I do see them at a certain time of the day, and when they are soaking up a certain kind of influence on their emotions and garrulity. One man, a widower nearing sixty, is frankly "trying to meet women," but he's an anomaly. More often, I see women coming in, in groups of friends, not necessarily admitting that they are looking to meet men but certainly free, dressed to show it, -- and wounded. Divorce, not death, is where they come from.

Among these Boomer women I've seen more drawn faces, stiffly composed blonde hair, and half-exposed, shrunken breasts than I ever cared to. I look at them and, in my mind's eye, I strip away the makeup and wash the hair gray. The resulting image is often that of an instant seventy-year-old. This makes the words coming out of their mouths still more jarring. "My boyfriend," "then he asked me out," "we broke up," sound odd and artificial. "My grandchildren" would be more dignified, and would make these women sound, and probably be, more happy.

I don't require them to go home and knit booties and be old. We get our share of plump, or wizened, graying grandmothers in the store, who look every day of their age and who are not necessarily therefore better people or more pleasant customers than the anxious, bejeweled blondes. But the anxious, bejeweled blondes have an insurmountable problem which the forthright grandmothers don't seek: they cannot hold a candle to young women, as far as looks, sheer scrumptiousness, are concerned. They simply can't. And yet, with the hair and the decolletage and the makeup, they are obviously choosing to compete for men's attention on fields of battle where the young must win. There is a whole opera about this, isn't there? At the end of Der Rosenkavalier, young Octavian is paired with young and lovely Sophie, exactly as his former mistress, the nobly fascinating -- and aging -- Marschallin knew he would be.

All this has led me to think about marriage, and especially about what our society is now compelled to call "gay marriage." Of course it's an absurdity, but unfortunately the very bored and childish people who control large chunks of our public discourse have plunged the absurdity into everyone's lives, and so require rebuttals where, properly, they should not even deserve the dignity of a hearing. (My grandmother would spin ....) No, homosexual men and homosexual women cannot "marry" each other, and the reason why parades before me in the wine shop, in the faces and bodies of these rejected, mature women.

I've come to the conclusion that marriage, at its crudest and most fundamental, is a promise from a man to a woman and to society that he will stay with this woman even as she grows older and un-nubile. Infertile. "While girls are growing up in neighboring fields" (I quote the nineteenth-century teen diarist Marie Bashkirtseff, who I think used to be rather popular in college Women's Lit courses). Oh, he'll grow old too, but not necessarily inevitably at the same pace and that's a fact.

Therefore a man cannot promise another man and society anything like a marriage vow, because men age at the same rate and because, by their choices, homosexual men show that there is no logic in their looking out into society at their opposite, the fleshly ideal of nubility who has vanished slowly and naturally from the home. A woman cannot promise another woman and society anything like it for much the same reasons. Women also age at the same rate, and -- by their choices -- they too show there is no logic in their being tempted away from respect for a sacred union, maybe decades on, by any personal concerns to effect anything on a stranger's nubility.

So homosexual partners are in no danger of creating, and then fraying, any bond that society has a stake in protecting. Society, the public sphere where endless fresh new cohorts of young fertile women are off-limits to aging but everlastingly fertile married men, because the men have given their word about it, can take no interest in love affairs or inheritance problems among homosexual partners. These partners can't "marry," any more than two nations can have a "peace treaty" who have never been at war, nor two companies "merge" where there is only one company. The conditions for a meaningful contract do not obtain.

If you look at pictures of gay Hollywood "weddings," you'll notice that there is something inchoate missing (not to put too fine a point on it) in the whole look and feel of the affair. What's missing, amid all the flashbulb laughter and white clothes, is risk -- the sense of risk that makes peace treaties and mergers good but scary things, and that makes a bride and groom on their wedding day feel not only excitement and joy but also, maybe even more so, fear and palpitations. This is It, people say. This is it. A gay "marriage" is not It. There's not that thing that the husband, especially, denies himself, sight unseen and decades into the future, that all husbands have always vowed to deny themselves as condition number one of marriage. The "married" gay, of either sex, is a promiseless fraud.

Of course there are many more noble attributes to marriage, and many more sophisticated reasons, not to say religious reasons, against "gay marriage" than what I've just put forth. Of course, most men love their wives (would collapse in a heap without her) and are not seriously chomping at the bit to get out. Most women love their husbands (ditto) and aren't chomping at any bits either, and of course a woman's vows to her husband are as important as his to her. There are reasons for each divorce apart from a man's rejecting a wife -- and when marriages fail, that is irrelevant anyway to what the institution is, just as the existence of war is irrelevant to what a peace treaty is.

And of course, talking of fertility and when it ends, some couples never have children and never want any. Of course there are always excellent men and women who choose to remain single. Some men and women meet and marry, or not, happily in middle or old age. (They might even meet at wine tastings.) Of course homosexual partners love and respect each other too. Of course some men do not only age, but rush up to and topple off a cliff of frailty that leaves a vibrant woman, to her shock, either a caretaker or alone. All moot points. The sacrament of Western marriage has been always, every day, up and doing something entirely different. The root of its dignity lies in the life of man and woman, who knowingly unite their different identities as individuals and appetites and fates as male and female, say Yes come what may before witnesses, and become miraculously one.

Advocates of "marriage" among homosexuals might argue with disgust that if I think it can't be done, then my contentions are already hollow, and they do no harm to me in merely acting through the impossible. That's a straw man. Their very eagerness to pursue the charade shows the value they put on attacking the truth of what marriage is, for who knows what interior reasons, really. Possibly it is boredom, "shocking the monkey," the fact that the left's political work is done and something like this fills the vacuum. Possibly it is just the enjoyment of titillation, and that goes for all of us. I don't notice the outraged public boycotting People magazine when it puts pictures from a gay "wedding" on its cover. I looked at the pictures, too.

But we come back inevitably to the man, the husband who doesn't age. Not like a woman does -- not like his wife. At some point we women pass a barrier, and we see that what unites the women on the other side is just that they are young. What keeps them young is something that men share, too, for decades. My widower friend of sixty presumes to show an interest in women in their thirties, and is disappointed when they look on him as a father figure. "That's not what I want," he complains. But there's hope for him. When he dates a woman in her fifties, who knows? -- he may adore her. Or he may be settling and they both may know it. Whereas for her, the situation could not possibly be reversed. Marriage knows that, and marriage, ideally, protected her.

Still have doubts? Your best friend met the love of her life at fifty, at sixty -- or, European men have always been more interested in ripe, older women? Or, what about Compassion, and insurance problems?

Since Hollywood especially loves gay marriage, let's finish with a scene that they do so well. You're watching a movie where the hero is trying to rescue his wife. Let's say you're watching Die Hard 2. Silly, to be sure. You missed it back in the '90s because you were busy having babies and avoided gory films regardless. But you're watching. It's almost the end and John McClane is desperately trying to convince the helicopter pilot to fly down in front of the jumbo jet and block its escape. The bad guys are getting away and somehow he thinks that if he can stop them, the other plane circling overhead with his wife on board will be able to land safely elsewhere in the airport. (Okay, the scriptwriters didn't think this one through.)

He's a husband. He's pale and dry mouthed and past tears, and exhausted and bloodied. He can't convince the pilot to do as he asks. A flight number is announced over the radio. "That's my wife's plane," he pleads. "My wife is on that plane."

Now imagine Ellen deGeneres is sitting next to him. She's pale and past tears, too. "So is mine," she says.

He turns to her.

What does he do? Why?

The California decision, part 2

Only once, a few years ago, did someone -- a letter-writer to the Chicago Tribune's Voice of the People section, I think -- ask a question about homosexual "marriage" that I have seen few authorities address, ever. (Incidentally, I prefer not to use the term "gay." It used to mean happy or joyous; who adopted it to mean homosexual, I don't know. But it is as unfair and authoritarian a descriptor as "invert" used to be. And why don't lesbians get their own special word that means happy?)

The question that this letter writer posed was, if two men or two women can "marry," why not a brother and sister? Or why not more than two people? What parts of marriage, if any, are permanent and outside human definition?

I think that the controversies over homosexual marriage will have to lead to this. One day soon, a brother and sister, or some other people whose pre-existing relations will make our flesh crawl unless flesh-crawling reactions are not themselves outlawed, will step forward in California or Massachusetts and demand the right to marry. The judges and the Hollywood stars may be flummoxed, but on what grounds could the right be denied?

There really isn't any reason for chastity, technically. One human body is built to join any other and where they are not built to join, human beings can think up all sorts of exalted reasons why they should attempt it anyway. It seems any American born after 1950 likes to think he has discovered not only sex but a new and wondrous tolerance for homosexuality. We haven't read enough of the ancient Greeks, for a start. (After the Symposium, Alcibiades tries to seduce Socrates: "...throwing my coat about him I crept under his threadbare cloak ... and there I lay during the whole night having this wonderful monster in my arms. ... and yet nothing more happened, but in the morning when I awoke I arose as from the couch of a father or an elder brother.")

So one day soon, this right will be demanded. I would venture to guess, it might even happen within the next five years. We may not quite grasp that it can happen because for the moment, defenders of homosexual marriage put their case in such dignified, gentle, we could almost say bourgeois terms. "Our type of monogamous love happens to be different from yours, that's all," they say. Because they don't realize or don't acknowledge that they are erecting the same kinds of barriers to the next group of rights-seekers that they decry now, their demands seem like the end of the road. But why should barriers exist at all, to something that is a right?

We also may not believe it can happen because ... well, it just won't happen. Nobody would think like that. But thirty years ago, gay marriage was unthinkable. Now it's a right that people have to amend Constitutions, if they can, to overturn. We may not have invented sex, but we have created a world in which everything concerning rights is absolutely and joyously (gaily?) thinkable.

A brother and sister could argue that their type of monogamous love is just a little different, too. Maybe they need insurance, and maybe they deserve the dignity of social sanction as much as anyone. As to technical barriers to such a union, well, a brother and sister might have grown up apart, and so have no innate family feeling, like Lord Byron and his sister. If geneticists leap to the argument that their children would have problems, they can simply avow that they don't want children, or will adopt. Notice how quickly the imagination falls back to these technicalities, rather than to moral or religious taboos thousands of years old. It seems only taboos are taboo, perhaps because we know -- those of us who don't presume to define marriage -- that the people who enjoy expanding all rights will not listen to taboo. We must speak to them in a language they will understand.

I will be interested to see what happens when this first couple steps forward in California. The logic of their request will be impeccable. The logic of its refusal -- for it probably will be refused -- will have to venture into territory where it seems few people are comfortable anymore, except on Sundays in church. A refusal will have to venture into territory where mankind does not and cannot define everything, in which case, who does? A refusal will have to venture into territory where the rules and taboos of our anonymous ancestors of thousands of years ago carry more weight than the most progressive thinking now. A refusal will have to venture into territory where not everything is a right and where the individual's emotional predicament bows before society's ancient, collective, and maybe reason-less No.

And if that territory proves too frightening, too intolerant, if we can't go to a place where mankind does not define all things but something else does and we lack control, -- if the brother and sister get their marriage license, -- how interesting that will be. Then what?

The California decision, part 1

Having either confined pieces like this to a journal, or having arduously tapped them out onto paper and maybe sent them to magazines many long, agonized months after the news in question was no longer topical, it is an odd experience now to make a draft of thoughts right here which I can self-publish -- to one reader, or none, but that's not unusual -- this very minute if I want to. In addition, the thought nags: isn't fiction, art, more dignified, celestial, useful?

It seems so, but I do have the devil of a time with fiction. Making up stories, connected surface scenarios that aren't true, and releasing them to readers who will then interpret and enjoy them as they like, is just something in which I have only the smallest and the most pained and grudging interest. I've tried. I look with wonder on those who can do it. In college I did have great fun writing what amounted to a short piece of historical fiction, incorporating all that I had learned from a semester spent studying Victorian England. But to have spun that into a novel would have been more, I think, than I could do. Anyway, its format was that of a letter, and they are chatty and plotless by nature.

What I like best is to teach through writing; hence, the wine blog, hence the book review blog. But good heavens, how is that a full use of what small abilities I have? Chardonnay is chardonnay is chardonnay; and how will I answer to my maker when I announce that I reviewed other people's novels, but didn't write any of my own? (Well, one. But not much of it is made up.) I do excellently with situations, and I think with characters. What confounds and bores me is this "plot" business. Come, come! When was the last time real people ever lived out a plot? With an ending? Truer words than this were never spoken:

Manicurist to rich society wife, as she files her nails: " 'Don't you just love to read? How do they ever think up those plots? Of course I guess anybody's life would be a plot if it had an exciting finish.' " (From the movie The Women -- Norma Shearer is the rich society wife about to start living a plot.)

So then, a "piece," as we say in the trade, non-fiction, about a very topical issue which I, as usual, won't be able to cope with fast enough to render it of use to a magazine or a newspaper. Never having been lucky enough to do that -- one editor who has published me said about an essay of mine, "It's timeless. That's a fault" -- I have no reputation as someone who should be called and asked to respond authoritatively to a topical issue while the issue is still hot. I have no product to deliver, and no name.

Oh, I'm not whining, really. It leaves me free to blog, and include quotes from The Women in an essay, which my dear lord editor would unhesitatingly pencil out. There's the problem with writing without an editor: no professional to help you do your professional best by candidly telling you good grief, No.

********

The topic is that controversial decision by four justices of the California Supreme Court, overturning a law that the people of California had approved, determining that marriage is only and ever a union between one man and one woman. The California Supreme Court, or its four justices who made up the majority for this decision, handed down that this definition of marriage is unconstitutional in that it denies the civil right of access to marriage -- the rite of marriage --to homosexuals. Since the California state constitution does not yet spell out what marriage is, the court was able, it seems, to lump this right into a kind of bundle of all rights, or any rights you like; the general concept of civil rights. Because it was asked to. What the people of California can now do, if they still wish to define marriage as only and ever a union of one man and one woman, is to amend their state Constitution to define it so. That way, no supreme court will be able, in theory, to say that a provision of the actual Constitution itself is unconstitutional.

Of course there has been a great deal of reaction, to say the least, about this. Brighter people than me, faster thinkers, better educated, with big reputations, or simply (and also) more devoted news junkies, have written reams already. (Remember what "reams" are?) Liberals are delighted with this expansion of proper compassion to disenfranchised people, and are proud to second it. Conservatives quote a dissenting justice's complaint of "legal jujitsu," and warn of a future in which little girls and boys will absolutely be taught that marriage to either a man or a woman is very much a normal part of their future. Dennis Praeger wrote eloquently (and fast!) of a basic, moral dismantling of the human sex drive, more importantly a moral dismantling of man's and woman's basic urge to love one another. What a pity if it will turn out that he is right, and if we should learn that romantic love was not invented by medieval Italian troubadours or eighteenth century English poets, but was a part of human nature all along -- and that it could not have been invented but can, under the correct conditions, be shamed and puzzled away, beginning in the hearts of children.

Now, normally this would go into a drawer, and would await revision. But this is blogging. A bit like the serial publication of yesteryear. Maybe that's why yesteryear's authors were so prolific. They let their pieces go almost instantly, meanwhile thinking out what else they wanted to say, and they cringed and hoped not to have written anything too awful. Tolstoy's poor writer-characters waited for the explosive public reaction, on changes in agricultural policy or something, that never came.