with a state number, a first and family name, to the naked Adam or Eve, and vice versa,
should not be off-hand or abrupt: a stair retards it to a solemn procession.
Since my infantile entrance at my mother's bidding into Edwardian England, I have suffered the transit over forty thousand times,
usually, to my chagrin, by myself: about blended flesh, those midnight colloquia of Derbies and Joans,
I know nothing therefore, about certain occult antipathies perhaps too much. Some perks belong, though,
to all unwilling celibates: our rooms are seldom battlefields, we enjoy the pleasure of reading in bed
(as we grow older, it's true, we may find it prudent to get nodding drunk first), we retain the right to choose
our sacred image. (That I often start with sundry splendors at sundry times greened after, but always end aware of one, the same one, may be of no importance, but I hope it is.) Ordinary human unhappiness
is life in its natural color, to cavil putting on airs: at day-wester to think of nothing
benign to memorize is as rare as feeling no personal blemish, and Age, despite its damage,
is well-off. When they look in their bedroom mirrors, Fifty-plus may be bored, but Seventeen is faced by
a frowning failure, with no money, no mistress, no manner of his own,- who never got to Italy
nor met a great one: to say a few words at banquets, to attend a cocktail party in honor of N or M, can be severe, but Junior has daily to cope with ghastly family meals, with dear Papa and Mama
being odd in the wrong way. (It annoys him to speak, and it hurts him not to.)
When I disband from the world, and entrust my future to the Gospel Makers, I need not fear (not in neutral Austria) being called for
in the waist of the night by deaf agents, never to be heard of on earth again: the assaults I would be spared
are none of them princely—fire, nightmare, insomnia's Vision of Hell, when Nature's wholesome genial fabric
lies utterly discussed and from a sullen vague wafts a contagious stench, her adamant minerals
all corrupt, each life a worthless iteration of the general loathing (to know that, probably,
its cause is chemical can degrade the panic, not stint it). As a rule, with pills to help them, the Holy Four
exempt my nights from nuisance, and even wake me when I would be woken, when, audible here and there
in the half-dark, members of an avian orchestra are already softly noodling, limbering up for
an overture at sunrise, their effort to express in the old convention they inherit that joy in beginning
for which our species was created, and declare it good.
We may not be obliged—though it is mannerly—to bless the Trinity that we are corporal contraptions, but only a villain will omit to thank Our Lady or
her henwife, Dame Kind, as he, she, or both ensemble, emerge from a private cavity to be reborn,
reneighbored in the Country of Consideration.
June 1963
XII The Common Life
(FOR CHESTER KALLMAN)
A living room, the catholic area you
(Thou, rather) and I may enter without knocking, leave without a bow, confronts each visitor with a style,
a secular faith: he compares its dogmas
with his, and decides whether he would like to see more of us. (Spotless rooms where nothing's left lying about
chill me, so do cups used for ashtrays or smeared
with lipstick: the homes I warm to, though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling of bills being promptly settled
with checks that don't bounce.) There's no We at an instant,
only Thou and I, two regions of protestant being which nowhere overlap: a room is too small, therefore,
if its occupants cannot forget at will
that they are not alone, too big if it gives them any excuse in a quarrel for raising their voices. What,
quizzing ours, would Sherlock Holmes infer? Plainly,
ours is a sitting culture in a generation which prefers comfort (or is forced to prefer it)
to command, would rather incline its buttocks
on a well-upholstered chair than the burly back of a slave: a quick glance at book titles would tell him
that we belong to the clerisy and spend much
on our food. But could he read what our prayers and jokes are about, what creatures frighten us most, or what names
head our roll call of persons we would least like
to go to bed with? What draws singular lives together in the first place, loneliness, lust, ambition,
or mere convenience, is obvious, why they drop
or murder one another clear enough: how they create, though, a common world between them, like Bombelli's
impossible yet useful numbers, no one
has yet explained. Still, they do manage to forgive impossible behavior, to endure by some miracle
conversational tics and larval habits without wincing (were you to die, I should miss yours). It's a wonder that neither has been butchered by accident,
or, as lots have, silently vanished into
History's criminal noise unmourned for, but that, after twenty-four years, we should sit here in Austria
as cater-cousins, under the glassy look
of a Naples Bambino, the portrayed regards of Strauss and Stravinsky, doing British crossword puzzles,
is very odd indeed. I'm glad the builder gave
our common-room small windows through which no observed outsider can observe us: every home should be a fortress,
equipped with all the very latest engines
for keeping Nature at bay, versed in all ancient magic, the arts of quelling the Dark Lord and his hungry
animivorous chimeras. (Any brute
can buy a machine in a shop, but the sacred spells are secret to the kind, and if power is what we wish
they won't work.) The ogre will come in any case:
so Joyce has warned us. Howbeit, fasting or feasting, we both know this: without the Spirit we die, but life
without the Letter is in the worst of taste,
and always, though truth and love can never really differ, when they seem to, the subaltern should be truth.
? July 1963
87
Epithalamium
(FOR PETER MUDFORD AND RITA AUDEN, MAY 15, 1965)
All folk-tales mean by ending
with a State Marriage,
feast and fireworks, we wish you,
Peter and Rita,
two idiosyncrasies
who opt in this hawthorn month
to common your lives.
A diffy undertaking,
for to us, whose dreams
are odorless, what is real
seems a bit smelly:
strong nerves are an advantage,
an accurate wrist-watch too
can be a great help.
May Venus, to whose caprice all blood must buxom, take such a shine to you both that, by her gifting, your palpable substances may re-ify those delights they are purveyed for:
cool Hymen from Jealousy's
teratoid phantasms,
sulks, competitive headaches,
and Pride's monologue
that won't listen but demands
tautological echoes,
ever refrain you.
As genders, married or not, who share with all flesh a left-handed twist, your choice reminds us to thank Mrs. Nature for doing (our ugly looks are our own] the handsome by us.
We are better built to last than tigers, our skins don't leak like the ciliates', our ears can detect quarter-tones, even our most myopic have good enough vision for courtship:
and how uncanny it is we're here to say so. that life should have got to us up through the City's destruction layers after surviving the inhuman Permian purges.
Wherefore, as Mudfords, Audens, Seth-Smiths, Bonnergees, with civic spear and distaff we hail a gangrel Paleocene pseudo-rat, the Ur-Papa of princes and crossing-sweepers: