The house when ugly
devises serenity
shod in gaffes to
uphold the pillars
--Medieval Italian foundation-stone inscription
In the 'fifties, a lot of things would go down that couldn't be categorized. This was in the era of my father's relative youth, when he would drop by the local sanitation union and demand higher wages, for the conversation. This was when Judy Garland was refreshing herself with Italians, underscoring everyone's urge to know Italian. This was a time of radical decisions, urgent news, and the flare-ups of hostility we have come to categorize with almost alarming perspicuity.
The 'fifties were a time for many men to examine themselves. A lot of examination went down then, a lot of interesting knowledge came shuffling out of the necks and chests of men, a lot of wives grew dusky wearing their best for a possible chat with the man who, we know now, was engaged in definitions of the Other that only such as we can unravel. These definitions clustered around the great moments of our enlightenment and strangled them or helped haul them up into the bad air of the shipyards: the Cleopatra, apparently, had a disgusting prow.
How, how, how could the moments of our enlightenment, caught by definitions snaking out of the necks and chests of men, survive the apparently awful butt of the Cleopatra's prow? Is the Cleopatra to indict, or are the definitions snaking out of the necks and chests of men and hauling up the moments of our enlightenment, during an era whose wives grew dusky thinking about their men and the possible conversations with these huggers of the synopses, blasters through the wherewithal of negative combines, stumblers foot by foot through the matchless disgrace of existence to the chair of their wives' melancholia?
Are we to blame the men, the definitions, or the Cleopatra? If we do all three, are we not asking for a profusion of recoil? If we indict one and only one, are we not asking for the failure, with possible catastrophe, of yet another system the source of whose confidence, by spring or recoil, must be seen as the definitions so dastardly changing the moments of our enlightenment by their hauling into the lusty air of the shipyard?
May we blame nothing, sleep with the awesome correctness of each moment's redaction, live for the scrupulous as we reject all scruples, and have lives of pure scruple as the scrupulous fades? Is this allowed?
Are we?
Irrelevant! This is a story of the 'fifties, when I was zero to four, already in possession of my parents' houses, which numbered eight. I was betrayed by three nursemaids. In the morning I would refresh myself with the bloom of the canvas, my elder brother being a sculptor who painted his sculptures, as so many did. I laughed it up with the corner grocer, the pathetic young barmen of my father's enterprise, the nursemaids who failed me. I called for pistachios--pistachios were brought. I ate through the safety of blinding, I lip-synched to buffalo. In every way my life resembled that of a monster.
Except in one. Still, there are many questions. And was it really one? Only one? As many as one? Will I return? Will we?