Beyond the Dusk

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

(William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury)

With August comes an awareness of summer, summer no longer mid-, but in decline, on its long, slow way out, burning itself up as it goes.  There is a great nostalgia in it, wistful sadness for the waking glory lost, the potential more than likely unfulfilled, fading and making-do begun.

As I have said before, to me The Sound and the Fury captures the feeling of summer as nothing else can, the quintessence of summer.  So I must either read it again now, for the umpteenth time, or try Light in August for a change.

image:  James McNeill Whister, Nocturne, Grey and Silver

Menu de mes jours

Recipes I'm giving up on, sadly or otherwise:

. Leek & Goat's Cheese Picnic Loaf, which sounds delightful for a shady afternoon among the hedgerows quoting P.G. Wodehouse, with its Dijon, thyme sprigs, and double cream.  I copied this out by hand one afternoon not long ago in London, but find it by far too labor intensive for me, now, already, after all.

. My mother's Dilled Salmon Patties, which go way back to childhood ("and can go back right away, as far as I'm concerned"—as the old quip says).  They always sound like a good idea, as do salmon burgers, but somehow I need my salmon whole and brooking no nonsense instead of flaked or ground or otherwise deconstructed.

. Amish Friendship Bread, the very idea of which even now, almost thirty years later, makes my blood run cold.  My life was given up to Amish Friendship Bread for what felt like eons, ruled and confined by the obligation to deal with its continual and relentless demands, making travel impossible or even the odd stolen weekend out of town.

  Day One:  Stir and cover.

   Day Two:  Stir and cover.

   Day Three:  Stir and cover.

   Day Four:  Stir and add 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, and 1 cup cold

         milk.  Stir until smooth and cover.  Transfer to 2 quart container.

   Day Five:  Stir and cover.

   Day Six:  Stir and cover.

   Day Seven:  Stir and cover.

   Day Eight:  Stir and cover.

   Day Nine:  Stir and add 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, and 1 cup

         cold milk.  Stir until smooth.  Place 1 cup batter in three

         separate containers (total 3 cups).  Cover and give to two

         friends, keeping one for yourself to start the whole process

         over again!  (**&*!xx%?!*)

         To the batter remaining in the bowl (from which the three

         cups have been taken) add 2/3 cup oil, 1 cup sugar,

         1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, 1 1/4 tsp. baking powder, 1/4 tsp. salt,

         1/2 tsp. baking soda, 3 eggs, 2 cups flour.  Stir in 2 cups of

         any of the following, or combination thereof:  blueberries,

         strawberries, raisins, dates, nuts, mashed bananas,

         applesauce, pineapple, dried fruit, granola, etc.  Use your

         imagination!

         Pour into two buttered and sugared loaf pans.  Bake at

         350 degrees for 50-55 minutes or until tests done with

         a toothpick.

         ("Starter purchased at an Amish fair in New York and

         brought to California by plane in the summer of 1989.")

. The jaunty (gentille) Herbed Bluefish Flamed with Gin.  In another lifetime, maybe I would make this for a dinner party after work, one snowy February.  In that parallel lifetime where I'm living in Boston as I almost have three times, walking a French bulldog along the Charles River, working as assistant curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in the Fens, or at the Map Room in the Public Library.

image:  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party (The Phillips Collection)

A tribute today to some of those whose birthday this is.

For William Shakespeare—two favorite of innumerable favorite quotes.

Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

—Sonnet 116

I see a voice.

—A Midsummer Night's Dream

For JMW Turner, painter of landscapes and seascapes and skyscapes and light—this Norham Castle Sunrise, with its radiant cow.

For that prose stylist supreme, Vladimir Nabokov, who I discovered at an early age and loved first for his writings about chess (not yet having learned about his butterflies or way of hearing colors)—a few typical quotes.

. . . and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates.

“I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.”

(from Ada, or Ardor:  A Family Chronicle)

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

For Ruggero Leoncavallo, Italian opera composer—this performance of his "Mattinata" by Beniamino Gigli.

For Ngaio Marsh, my favorite mystery writer from New Zealand, creator of detective Roderick Alleyn and his famous artist wife Agatha Troy—this account of her cottage outside Christchurch and her fascinating life.

For John Hannah, who so movingly read it in Four Weddings and a Funeral—this poem of W.H. Auden's.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;


Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

And for Roy Orbison, the singer-songwriter, this performance by The Traveling Wilburys of "Handle Me With Care."

Happy birthday, all!

image:  JMW Turner, Norham Castle Sunrise

Among the Angels

From the glass canyons of downtown L.A., with their sheer walls of windows reflecting the sky, we took Metro bus 487 fourteen stops through the tangle of freeways to San Gabriel, at the foot of hazy blue mountains, one capped / captivating with snow, and when the traffic signals allowed crossed two railway tracks to Mission San Gabriel Arcángel—one of the last two missions we hadn't seen.  In the city of angels, in this time of terror when we need angels more than ever (to paraphrase Rilke, below), this pilgrimage to visit the now suburban archangel was important.

Let not one god pass away.  We all need each of them now,

let each be valid for us, each image formed in the depths.

Don’t speak with the slightest disdain of whatever the heart

     can know.

(from The Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by Stephen Mitchell—who I met one year at BEA there in downtown Los Angeles)

We made our journey midmorning, after an appropriate Los Angeles breakfast of huevos rancheros, fried eggs with a corn tortilla, salsa, and pinto beans.  Not quite the chilaquiles I loved in Cancun years ago, but satisfying my sense of right-being.

It's not one of the lovelier missions, but it was a poem, inspirational in many ways.

. palms and bells and old adobe-covered stairs

. giant white clam shell basins in the courtyard, holding water with flower petals

. learning that in carpentry dovetailed means made without nails

. little blue tiles around the shrine

. colors in sacred paintings made from wildflowers, olive oil

. baked floor tiles

. cistern, millrace, aqueduct

. soap and tallow vats

. Our Lady of Sorrows

. many charming signs, as below. 

"No longer do caravans of traders come lumbering up to the gates of Mission San Gabriel as in the days of the Franciscans.  No longer are fiestas and siestas the order of the day.*  But Mission San Gabriel Arcángel continues to enlarge its niche in the hearts of all, be they casual visitors or members of the Parish, which it has served for these many years."

*(again, recalling Rilke's "When everything we create is far in spirit from the festive, / in the midst of our turbulent days let us think of what festivals were.")

"The five fire circles are original and once held large iron kettles, such as the one seen here, wherein daily 'Pozole' or popcorn soup was made over the fires.  Upon the sounding of the 'Angeles' bell at noon and the prayer which it commanded, the Indians came to be fed."

"One of the original church doors stands (retired) here.  Made of California redwood.  The bronze bosses were brought from New Spain, Mexico.  If the door is closely observed, it will be noticed that rain-storm and sun have worn the wood away from the bosses.  This door swung on the south side main church entrance.  Look . . . its mate is over yonder."

And more than anything, I loved hearing the native guide playing what he called the River Song on a flute in the mission church, for his small group of visitors.  Explaining that the notes trickled, as did the sacred river, water vital in that dry land, and the music perfect for the day.  (Tellingly, I've learned, the erosion of the San Gabriel mountains, into and along the river, provided gravel, sand, and rock for the construction of the modern city:  all those roads, freeways, and parking lots; coliseum and harbor.)

The visit was evocative, reminding me of

. visiting the mission in the desert south of Tucson, Tucumcacori, the winter after my father died; the mission and nearby spice shop

. visiting the San Diego mission other years, when I was selling books at the Asian Studies conference, and drinking genmai cha I'd brought along to ice, in afternoon sunlight, the luxurious warmth of a southern California early spring

. finding the paintings of our birthday saints (Eliseo, by Tintoretto; and an Annunciation by Titian), another February, in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice

. our class making a film in a canyon with a little private adobe church one rainy day in high school, before we went our separate ways

. coming across the father of the California missions again back in his home church in Palma de Mallorca one September, orange trees in the cloister

. the artist in my Bonnard novel, Charles San Gabriel Girard, named for the mountains his mother came to from Quebec—the beloved San Gabriels of Eugenie, matriarch of the reclusive Girards.

Gabriel was, as it happens, the angel of the Annunciation.  Clothed in blue or white, he carries variously a lily, a trumpet, a shining lantern, a branch from Paradise, a scroll, a scepter.  He is patron of telecommunication workers, radio broadcasters, messengers, postal workers, clerics, diplomats, stamp collectors, Portugal, ambassadors—so, clearly, much needed today. 

I hope we have made friends.  Though as Rilke (surely among the angels himself) writes at the beginning of the Duino Elegies:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'

hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me

suddenly against his heart:  I would be consumed

in that overwhelming existence.  For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us.  Every angel is terrifying.

And, in the next:

But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars

took even one step down toward us:  our own heart, beating

higher and higher, would beat us to death.  Who are you?

images:   Christie B. Cochrell, Mission San Gabriel

Archangel Gabriel, Hagia Sophia