Capriccio: Flamand's Love

The composer Flamand and the Countess are alone. The Countess seems to be bending toward Flamand's music. But then, haven't we all seen how our gracious host can make each of us feel as if we are her Favorite?

FLAMAND. Decide! Music or poetry? Olivier or me?

COUNTESS. At first I was so captivated by your melody that it seemed to conquer the dry words of Olivier's sonnet, waking them to singing life. But your two arts are so passionately bound! Everything is a jumble—

FLAMAND. You yourself are the source of this—

COUNTESS. Poems sing, song speaks—

FLAMAND. Countess, how I love you! My love was born on that afternoon when you entered the library. You did not see me. You took a book in your beautiful hands. I sat hidden in a corner. I made no sound, held my breath, and did not dare to move. Page by page I watched you read, even until the sun began to fall. Enchanted, I drank the picture of you and closed my eyes. Music rushed through me, inextinguishable in the tumble of my emotions. When I opened my eyes, you were gone. Only the book that you had read remained. Open, as you had left it. I took it up and read in the twilight:

"In love, silence is better than speech. There is a conversation in silence that penetrates more deeply than words themselves."

Long did I stay and feel the closeness of your thoughts. Until it grew dark. I was alone. And since that moment I have been someone else entirely. I breathe only out of love for you.

Death in Venice as problematic, briefly

Death in Venice is troublesome, of course, whether in its own day or in the days of Michael Jackson and worldwide priest scandals. The fact is that an elderly man says "I love you" to a fourteen-year-old boy. The fact is that this elderly gentleman dyes his hair, rouges his face, and wears a jaunty neckerchief to "impress the beloved." All love, all passion, may lead to the flesh, to its destruction or creation, but Aschenbach's interest in Tadzio begins as a love of his form.

Conceive in your mind your own son in the prime of his childhood. See how perfectly his hair curls at his forehead, see how deep and dark his eyes, how the marble of his perfect nose yields to the healthy ruby of his lips. See how gracefully he stands against the apple tree, how his limbs are the inspiration of weightless ballerinas as he somersaults across the lawn. See how perfect your child is. Now imagine a child even more beautiful: This is Tadzio, through Aschenbach's eyes or any others.

(There are other realities: Aschenbach, like Mann himself, has the capacity of lust for the male form. Aschenbach's love is not paternal. Whatever inner beauty or perfection Tadzio may possess, it does in fact leave its mark on the outside, on "the blue-veined hollow of the knee," the "curls at the nape," the "sly smile." And this is where Aschenbach's passions must center. Given the chance (an abandoned Venice, a world where "all were dead and we two left alive"), Aschenbach would devour Tadzio and, in so doing, corrupt the boy or ‘remove from him his innocence.' Why must perfection appear so early? We must believe that aging—sexual maturation—leaves a gray mark on the body, and a body marked by gray is imperfect.)

I was, as mentioned, still relatively innocent at 14 (though the gray mark was already visible under my eyes). I think I was also, more specifically, unaware of the age difference. I identified equally with both characters. With Aschenbach, foremost because he was presented as the protagonist, but also because he was sad, misunderstood, and engaged in the struggle of meaning. What was he to do? Continue his academic pursuits (my homework), the rigors of social norms (smiling at teachers), his lineage (my conservative family)—or follow his heart, his passion (my best friend, my schoolmates, my time alone in my room)?

Tadzio, on the other hand, was the same age as me. Also sad, misunderstood, mysterious, and different. An outsider. I saw him and his body not as a minor and an innocent, but as the boys I sometimes dared to dream about at night. He was the perfect sublimation of the schoolmate I sat next to at assembly and who I hoped—oh, hoped!—was pressing his shoe against mine intentionally, a gesture of confederation, of secret love and understanding.

Kitties

"Hello?"

"Hi, sweety. Just wanted to let you know that there are two surprises here when you get home."

"Oh, goody! Did one of them come in the mail?"

"Nope."

"Oh. Well, is one of them a cat?"

"Nope, they both are."

"Two little kitties!?!?

Death in Venice as love story

Thomas Mann's Death in Venice has spoken to me in many ways over the years. Its first words to me were an affirmation of my identity. I was a sweaty fourteen-year-old who had just discovered that his love was the love that dared not speak its name.

Having been raised a guilty Catholic, I knew very well what word was stuck in the middle of "homosexuality." And I understood that I was being naughty by just thinking the word. When I looked for information about the word in the outside word, I expected to find prurience (and perhaps saw even where it was not). And so I sought elevated, academic information.

Strolling through the reference aisles at the local library, I spied a volume of world literature. I picked it up, leafed through it. At the back was an index of themes. Naturally, I turned to H. There was a new word, very close to the word I had been looking for. This word was homoeroticism. And after it was a list of titles and authors.

Among them, Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. Thomas Mann—hadn't I heard of him? What was he doing writing about ho-mo-erot-i-cism? And it was originally German? But my uncle was from Germany, and my brothers were learning German in school! Would the public library in Peachtree City, Georgia, have such a scandalous book?

Indeed it did. Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter. Which I read, I remember, lying on the bed in the tiny sewing room/guest room of my grandmother's house in Kentucky. Though the title story was always my focus (and indeed I reread it several times in that first check-out period), the other stories had the most warming glimmers of male-male crushes and love that the book became my private treasure. (Sometimes, true, we would lay barely clothed together in bed. But such are the secrets of adolescence.)

In those first years—the years of my innocence—Death in Venice was a love story. It was a love story that spoke to me and told me that my feelings were recognized by the world and were valid. The prose was so far above me—intellectual, academic, but ethereally artistic—that homosexuality lost some of its guilty taints and became a thing of beauty.

And in my freshman English class, as we read Romeo and Juliet and watched the Zeffirelli film, I longed for a romance made for me, where Juliet is the sweet confidante and go-between for Romeo and Mercutio, who are kept apart by convention yet find a way to love each other and exchange a kiss before dying. (Two of the most successful gay romances "in the old style," Marlowe's Edward II and E.M. Forster's Maurice, I would not discover for a few more years.)

Adults who cast no shadow

I am frightened by the idea of sitting down to write a story. But I am not afraid to create a prose retelling of the opera Die Frau ohne Schatten.

I would like to think that the hesitation I feel toward creativity is the same anxiety I feel toward hallucinogenic drugs. I am afraid to lose control over the world I've created. It used to be miraculous: I had a secret identity, special powers; I could wish on a piece of pyrite and get a guinea pig; if you closed your eyes you could see the stars drop down to earth.

I could claim that all of us must of necessity abandon the oceans of childlike imagination for the dry land of adult practicality, that all of us are apples drawn to earth by physics' great laws.

* * *

I will never forget: It was 1992. I was at the movies with a beautiful oak of a boy. I was in love with love, but we were together solely because we were each gay. We had the polite respect for each other that strangers do, or perhaps the surprised camaraderie of two men from opposite continents who find themselves starving on the same abandoned isle.

He had already seen The Crying Game and wanted to share it with me. The scenes of abduction and captivity destroyed me. He nudged me. "This part's important," he whispered.

Jody is about to be executed. Fergus, the compassionate lackey of the group responsible for the kidnapping, gently encourages him to get some rest. Jody can hardly hold a cigarette in his lips. He asks for Fergus to tell him something, a story, anything. Fergus is no storyteller. "You mean like the one you told me—about the frog and the scorpion?" Jody wants something else.

Fergus breathes, thinks, begins: "When I was a child I thought as a child. But when I became a man I put away my childish things." Jody asks what that means. Fergus replies Nothing, and cries.

* * *

I did not understand then why my companion brought such emphasis to that scene. But the Author has written it, and it now has Importance and may now be Analyzed. Perhaps the Reader can see that it was at that precise moment that I, a character, let die the last few blooms of childhood—the ridiculous fairy tale of a prince in an enchanted forest, of stars that you can hold, of time that winds like a smooth path through purple mountains—and drew close my browning leaves for the winter of adulthood.

Probably it was not then, but sooner.

It was an abandonment of imagination. Where others seize the body and go off in pursuit of sustenance and pleasure, and where others seize material and pursue fame and wealth, I chose to follow a path of vague logic. I wanted to live in a world of testable theories and provable laws, where all that is observed is accountable and all that is possible is predictable.

I think this was the only rock with handholds sure enough to hold me against the winds and rains of an arbitrary but devilish powerful religion . . .

Shadowless Woman, Hold Me

I want to rest in this perfect moment between Act I and Act II but I know that I must move on.

I am twenty-nine years old and must put away my childish things. Mahler is the one-eyed cotton bear in a far corner of my closet. Now I eat Straussmeat on Straussplates with Straussforks and Straussknives.

Die Frau ohne Schatten, The Woman without a Shadow, is the last of the Strauss operas currently available on DVD that I had not seen. Fortune seems to have saved the best discoveries for last: Capriccio, Arabella, Elektra, Die Frau.

Die Frau begins modern and magical, a vast moon, clouds moving full and gentle over the stage, a shooting star. A woman, Nurse, appears dressed in cloths from another planet's Far East. She speaks of her mistress, who has no shadow. The Empress appears, light and pale, and loves the hunter, her Emperor. Far up in a tree a red falcon reveals a curse: unless a shadow is found for the Empress, the Emperor will turn to stone. Nurse warns that the only place to find a shadow is down there, among the humans.

(Here Strauss offers a movement called Erdenflug, Earthflight, in which we imagine these now-godlike creatures descending, and their soaring melodies are overtaken by the violent rhythms of human life: tambourines, drums, the slap-slap of angry manskin.)

In a crooked house live a wife and a Dyer. He longs for a family of thirteen, makes fists at the ends of his red-dyed arms and swears that he would feed them. She does not want children; they have tried now several years, and she has resigned herself to living a life devoid of motherhood.

I say these things now to prove that I once was here . . . free to wander blind through a new world, innocent of what I or my world have said about it.

Way too up

The streets were littered with paper tubes and smelled of sulfur. The night before, fireworks had lit the sky out the back window and the sidewalk down in front. We had walked along the streets to the crackles and screeches of Roman candles and bottle rockets. It made us think of the war, and of the apocalypse: explosion, smoke, screams, dazed people in swaying masses at street corners. (I want to be with you at the end.)

I had gone to bed to read at eleven, and still the curtains would light up and a dense thud would set off car alarms. I wondered whether I should just lay and listen. When would this happen again? When exactly like this? But I read about another dimension, a place where an immense waterless sea was all that held back the nothingness that longed to devour all this . . .

I wanted to say—I wanted to say that as I was walking to work (the morning was cool and misty; the sun would not appear until midday), a woman covered her mouth and pointed at me. "Your hair," she said, splaying her fingers, "is falling!"

I wanted to say—I wanted to say that I fled past the woman, could sense her still pointing even as I reached the end of the block. Was it true? I sought the mirrors of dark storefront windows but could not see. I raised my hand to my forehead, beading now with the exercise of these two miles. I felt light wisps like insects; the motion of my hand further dislodged them and the thin strands fell to tickle my eyebrows.

I wanted to say—I wanted to say how I rushed into the building, into the elevator, and slammed heavily into the little pale square for number four, grateful that the doorman had been turned toward his TV and no one saw me enter. I could do it; I could make it to the bathroom, find the jar of product stuck under the sink with a wad of Doublemint and a few crushed sesame seeds from a persistent seaweed salad—and fix my falling hair.

I wanted to say—I wanted to say that my greasy fingers finally got my hair back up in place, that I collapsed at my desk just as my phone rang. Internal. From B. Velucci. My super. She wanted to see me in her office immediately. I took the elevator up to the eighth floor, walked down the hall past the executive cubes. Her door was open, and I knocked on the frame. She looked up. Her weary gaze roved my face, focused on a point just above my eyes.

"You wanted to see me?" I said, stepping into her office and noticing that I must have put my brown shoes on with my black pants this morning.

"It's about your hair," she said.

"Is this about my shoes?" I countered.

"There have been complaints. Numerous complaints."

"Because I have black ones, really."

She cleared her throat slowly. "It's either way down," and here she tossed her hand in a loose rolling gesture toward me, "or way too up."