Her Monument
In a strange little homestead lit by electric light
is a passing builder’s fancy floating in the neon night;
the spirit of the artisan flits by, nocturnal blue,
and shoots the moon by swooping through the ashes in the flue;
she drifts in starry glimmerings beyond the crooked room
where comet dust is settling on the folly of her tomb. O,
let lie the tools of wisdom where your little homestead rises,
and cry Hurrah! for moonlit nights
and foolish enterprises.
Moths have a potent duality of effects on me: they attract and repel with just about equal force. On the one hand, there is their Victorian opulence of velvet wings and ostrich-feathered antennae and their widely looping sweeps of flight as if borne effortlessly on air currents themselves rather than lofting on and above them under power. They can look like jewels tossed into the air or, as hawk moths can sometimes do, trick the unwary watcher into thinking they’re bright, buzzing hummingbirds on the wing.
On the other hand, that sort of squishy, bloated, heavy softness of moths’ bodies and their voracious appetites for things I’d rather have kept to myself (dry goods in the pantry, tender leaves in the garden, and favorite fine woolens) fills me with nervousness that makes the revulsion they inspire in horror stories utterly plausible to me. I can’t help but remember the sweltering summer night when I was young and my family, having been out for a happy holiday evening, stopped at the local gas station to refill the bottomless tank of our giant station wagon; since it was so sweltering, we all piled out of the car to go into the tiny, grubby cashier’s hut where an electric fan was humming and, having an uneasy sense of something untoward behind me, I turned around to see a veritable dust storm of fat moths, attracted by the shop’s fluorescent lights, throwing themselves in spongy, flapping frenzy at the glaring glass until it was almost opaque with their wing-scale dust. Oh, yes, and the fabulously nasty short story ‘The Cocoon’ (John B. L. Goodwin) has never quite left my subconscious mind (awake or asleep) once I read it a few decades ago.
On top of all this, I married a guy who had once had a small moth fly into his ear, get caught and frantic, and instead of finding its way out, worked its creepy, fluttering way right down to beat against his eardrum until a doctor could eventually get the creature out of there. Enough said. I can still look, at times, with a certain dispassionate interest and think of moths as intriguing bits of scientific wonder and visual astonishment, and then I must quickly look away again and reassure myself that there’s not something truly wrong with them. I did at least decide to write a little bit to see if, in the incident of the attack on my husband’s ear, I could imagine the experience from the moth’s point of view.
Labyrinth
I crawled the narrow halls in
Darkness ever deepening,
Thinking I might find some clear way through
But too tightly fitted in, too close,
No chance of going back or backing out,
No scent I could recognize to bring me
Back to the distant shore,
No vision, not a speck of spectral light to give
A guide around those curves crepuscular, those turns
Winding ever more toward claustrophobia, to where
The heat was growing more intense, the sound
Of a pulsing drum seeming to speak of waves, making
Me dream the ocean lay ahead—but behind me, in
The now impenetrable night, some Thing, a dragon
It seemed to me, began to drown the liquid lure
Of the drumbeat ahead with its own more frightful,
Louder noise, and then to scrabble wildly at me
With its terrifying claws, at which it seemed
The labyrinth must finally swallow me and
Draw me down into its fatal end—but then—
In a turn of events that was quite shockingly detached
From any turns my path had made
Thus far, the whole puzzling place tipped
Over on its side—there I lay, too fixed
In the halls’ constricting ways to turn and follow or
To roll, and the sea broke forth on me at last, a rush
Of saline waves tearing upon me, heaving me out
Of where I’d wedged, and in a cataract, sent me
Blasting right back through all the sightless turns
Of that preternatural dark, shot me with my sodden
Useless wings back into blazing day where I
Could lie, quivering faintly in my long-lost world,
Deciding whether it was time to die or time
To spread my fragile wings and see
If there was any life left in them.
The charms of music can, indeed, soothe the savage breast–and it can bring the terrible savage right out of the calm breast just as well. It’s a power that few can resist, love the music or not; it gets under the skin and slides on into the soul. The marvels of music are not, as you know, unknown to me and yes, I have been both incited and soothed at various times by it.
But I haven’t lived the life of total immersion. That is, as are most fully engulfing passions, left to the titans of the art. Not necessarily people known and celebrated by a large and laudatory world, indeed, but those who, whether in that pop-culture celebrity way or from deep in the dark of the behind-scenes action or somewhere in between have shaped history in whatever bold or subtle way their particular art could do.
I said I was going to be a bit dark and Halloween-ish these days, but I was reminded that this day deserves a different kind of recognition, being a memorable date of another kind altogether: the birthday of one of those titans of musical arts aforementioned. So you get a break from my grimmer humors while I bow to a great musician and a lovely man.
My husband, you ask? No, I would surely call him both as well, but I refer just now to one of the musicians who helped pave the way for my spouse, inspires him in his work, and befriended him both professionally and personally in ways that made it more possible for my partner to be quite the accomplished musician and artist that he himself is. I’m talking about the man sometimes known as the godfather of Swedish choral music, Eric Ericson.
He is celebrated by far more than just his family and friends, more even than his numerous choirs’ members and his almost countless students, because he stood at the center of an almost unbelievable burst of musical art flowering in the little Scandinavian nation of his birth and spreading throughout and beyond Europe quite immediately after World War II, sooner than it should have happened by rights except that his own country remained neutral and mainly untouched by the physical depredations of the war, and enough so that a number of outstanding leaders in culture took refuge there during and after the war, creating a remarkable hothouse where those fertile minds could put their restless art to work, and often did so together.
He is celebrated also because, as one of the central figures in this new bloom of music, he helped to shape the whole modern state of choral music, both in the church and in secular circles, in Sweden and to foster its wide spread via his own work and travels, via that of his artistic and intellectual partners and rivals and colleagues, and especially via the many, many young musicians that between them they all trained and sent off into the wide world. Their collective influence, expanding at the virtual rate of plant cell division and sending tendrils around the globe, is a rich and vital gift that will long outlive them all.
Thankfully, Eric Ericson, for one, is going to give that theory a run for it, as he has attained more than ninety years already himself. And his artistic offspring will undoubtedly keep the music sounding and growing for a very long time too, and for that I am happy and grateful indeed. We who love choral music today owe him thanks.
With that, I will say that the gracious and generous kindness that he and his dear wife have shown on a personal level to both my husband and me makes me as glad as anything to think of him on this day with great admiration and fondness. I hope that every note I have seen him conduct, heard him play on the piano while conducting and discussing the finer points of music or listened to him hum under his breath as he recollected another bit of his own fascinating and incredibly complex history as a musician will linger in the atmosphere for many years yet to come, and that in turn, no matter where on that spectrum of artistic or intellectual accomplishment any one of the rest of us happens to perch, we too will make our own kind of music echo happily in the hearts of all those whose lives we touch.
Happy birthday, Eric Ericson, may the music you hear always soothe and delight you.
Even though Halloween itself has never been a huge event in my life, you may, just possibly, have noticed a rather dark tinge to my humor (if such a thing exists) that pervades the year regardless of its official celebrations. So I’m hardly above taking advantage of the approach of a publicly sanctioned excuse for some of my own cheap brand of funereal jocularity. I plan to shower you with gloomy silliness as the holiday nears, so if you’ve any fearful tendencies, pull up the covers and plug your ears.
A Grackle
May cackle
Creeping down into October and its necromantic nights,
thrilling, chilling masqueraders revel in the season’s frights,
both imagined and uncanny, sweets in surfeit, pranks and scares,
work to raise each other’s hackles, catch out courage unawares–
And the bat and spider, ghostly visitors and ravens reign;
even crows can briefly boast the power to enchant the brain
with a Halloweenish horror, freeze the unsuspecting nape
the suggestible door-knocker turns to sky while dressed in crape–
All a-cower, cowards wander in the dim light of the moon,
hold hilarious their hauntings lest they all prove true too soon,
everyone immersed in darkness, celebrating cyclic fear
as the month and season trickle, bloodied, off to end the year–
All this rampant spookiness, however, leaves the Grackle cold:
black and iridescent bird, she perches, watches, and of old,
knows the crows‘ and ravens’ moment passes, quick as life, is gone,
and her rule o’er earthly foment, like her tail, goes on and on . . .
What’s that sound? Is’t the alarum-bells? A cry for aid? Say what, you texted me??? Sorry, wrong number!
If you came here looking for heroism, you are decidedly on the wrong front porch, knocking on the wrong-est door ever. For saintliness, try someplace down the block or around the globe. Any superhero cape I’ve ever owned was made for Halloween out of an old bedsheet (and the accompanying tights are, ahem, waaaay too tight now), and my halo’s batteries ran out when I was about four seconds old and discovered how to scream. Not out of rottenness, mind you, just out of excessive sheer humanity. If there is such thing as having feet of clay, why then I’m a virtual Swamp Thing. Believe me, I’m not proud of this; I’m certainly not bragging about such lowliness. Just stating the facts.
What I see in my mirror is a craven coward and a self-centered dilettante, one who delights in not taking responsibility for others’ well being and who has not the skills, the innate gifts, nor the desire to be a caregiver. Even when those whom I adore most are ill or suffering, I have such tiny reserves of kindness and such a short attention span that even the people who know me are likely to be surprised to be reminded of the depth of my depravity in this regard. I come from a good and kindly stock of nurses and teachers and home caregivers and pastoral and community leaders, and all sorts of people who have taught me by their shining examples how to show compassion and patience, and yet it didn’t really ‘take’.
But if I’m truly forthright, I must also say that I am very reluctant to change. There is a part of me that does participate in the festival of guilt that is so liberally sprinkled over much of humankind, those who have even the most modest codes of ethics or morals or simple consideration for the existence of others. But I do not enjoy the company of that humble and self-effacing part of me, not at all. I stare at it until I feel sufficiently gloomy to assure myself I’ve not yet lost all contact with my fellow beings–and then I hasten to hide from it as quickly as I can. My better self reviles the mean Me that, while it worries about the well-being of my family who are so very far away, especially when as now, they are dealing with genuinely traumatic things like Mom’s surgeries and recovery, is still not-so-secretly relieved that there is no easy way for me to be called upon from 2000 miles away to be physically present in a sickroom or assist with things-medical and daily caregiving tasks that intimidate and frankly, discomfit me. I am squeamish. I’m impatient. I’m afraid of all things I don’t understand and incredibly resistant to being called upon to attempt to understand them, let alone perform any helpful deeds based upon them. I am desperately fearful of seeing anyone I even like, let alone love, in pain or unhappy.
Sometimes I can suck it up and pretend to be better than I am. I embrace as best I can the skills and tricks that have been taught me over the years to overcome many of my lifelong social fears and inhibitions. Even the remove of a telephone call is sufficient to get some people through at least the emotional demands of others’ needs, but since I’ve told you I have a sizable and lifelong phobia and dread of telephones (yet another inexplicable, and not very helpful, character trait), that’s not a really big boost for me. In writing, I can pull off the disguise of a better person very slightly more convincingly.
This all leaves me with the rather bitter knowledge that I am no better than I absolutely have to be to get by in any situation. I have to direct you elsewhere if you come looking for an example of How to Do Things when it comes to generosity, selflessness or compassion in action. It’s all hard, hard work that, if anyone is genuinely predisposed or programmed to do it, failed to take root in my DNA, and has to be forced on me. Here I am, smudged face and all, and as dependent as a baby on the goodness of others to make the world a better place. Can I get around my own resistance to open-handedness and gracefulness enough to be a decent person? Only the rest of my life will tell. I’m an optimist, so I hope that I’ll turn out better in the long run. I’ll keep you posted. Meantime, if you’re looking for a Rock you can depend upon, I must send you elsewhere–but if you want to join with this paltry grain of sand to build a beachhead, I’ll gladly welcome the inspiration and the good company. As you can see, I can really use the reinforcements.
In the breathless still
of a windless night
under the powdery gaze of the moon
a skeleton sped in the mad cartoon
of a leap and a dance
in her calcined white
A skeleton leapt
from her mouldy grave
into the shivering bat-strewn air
and gave a wild toss of her grass-dry hair
one eye staring out
of its orbital cave 
The lightning flared
when she flashed her teeth
as though their clickety-clack could speak
but she gave one harsh immortal shriek
and hanged herself
with a mourning-wreath
So fled the night
of that fearful scene
with all its jittery terrors filled
its ancient horrors newly killed
the morning after:
Hallowe’en
Happy Halloween from all of us scary creatures here in the Darkling Wood!
Art-Colored Glasses 