Alan Sondheim

Why I can't sleep

I begin by thinking about my being a very old man; I continue by thinking
each day might be the day where a lump or pain becomes something else,
where the body turns its course against me, and that day will be a day of
division. Or perhaps there will be a night from which there is no
awakening, and this remains deeply unimaginable. I continue by thinking
about my family relationships, how I have to permanently sever ties with
people who were dear to me, simply in order to psychically survive. This
leads to a recent article on post-traumatic stress syndrome, the obdurate
circulation of memories which become a permanent part of the psychic
landscape: something to trip over. After death they're meaningless, just
as memories are only stories that fade. I worry deeper into the body,
wondering about arthritis and stroke, when I'll no longer be able to play
music live, to cohere with the muscle memory that governs me, renders me
ecstatic at times - when I'll only be able to listen, when my fingers and
hands won't do my bidding. This leads to thoughts of speed, always working
to create something new, to continue probing, until probing is no longer
possible; at least I won't have wasted any time. This leads darker and
further into thinking about my cross-posting, my incessant production, so
that there's no breathing-room, and this then couples with what I see as
my lack of success, always on the verge of 'making it,' always on the
verge of collapse, and how unfair that is to my partner Azure, what she
has to put up with on a daily basis. I then wish I could burn that part of
my mind out, I think of the Higgs boson and the nonsense over neutrinos
and whether I'll live long enough to even have an inkling of some
unimaginable truth. I then think of one of the books that discussed my
work, and my appearing a nuisance on various email lists and other places
of encounter, and further my letters begging for work, which I no longer
send out since, at my age, I'm already excluded from the possibility of
hire. I think of my diminution, the extraction of two teeth, the original
lenses from my eyes due to cataract, and when and where this will end or
prove fatal or result in a loss of mind. This last is of most concern, and
every bit of forgetting is seen as a sign of dementia on my part, as if
I'm waiting for proof of closing down. I worry about getting addicted to
too many sleeping pills or pain pills or stress pills or depression pills
and keep jumbling them up or refusing to take them, hoping that original
mind will manifest itself. I curse god and gods because I can't believe
and the result is sinking into absolute annihilation. I worry about the
short dreams I have rummaging around childhood or sexuality or unknown
seas, and I hate waking from them, which happens almost immediately,
throwing me back into the matrix of these thoughts, this almost
catastrophic thinking, which dominates me, while I listen to the cat and
Azure sleeping and worry about them, their health, the stress I must put
them through. I wonder whether my friends who were over the other night
would want some guitar or other instrument cases, or laptop cases or even
laptops, and whether I should trade the hasapi and guzheng instruments in
for something smaller, since our place is crowded. I keep hoping I'll live
long enough to move to a less-polluted part of the city, and worry about
the appointment I have tomorrow morning with the pulmonologist to get the
result of the chest x-ray, and whether I should start trading in, or
selling, larger quantities of books, since I may not have that much time
left to read. I worry that my reading The Diary of a Late Physician from
1832 might be affecting me negatively, and I wonder how my friends deal
with their own at times extremely depressive reading. I keep thinking I
should awake quietly, leave the bed, turn the computer on, and start
typing this out. I worry about making too many typing errors, and whether
this too is a sign of dementia. I try to decide whether lazily to leave
the errors in, or correct all of them, and still haven't reached a
conclusion. I worry that my tinnitus might finally get completely out of
control, since the other day it took a turn for the worse and is now
really quite loud with changing, not steady, pitch. I worry whether the
minor infections and fevers I seem to have mean anything, or whether
they're a sign of psychosomatic problems related to the usual traumas. I
begin to fear what will happen next week when my Eyebeam residency
formally comes to an end, whether I'd still be able to do anything as an
'alumnus' or some such, or whether they'd be glad to get rid of a nuisance
with his despairing and disparate work. I worry that somewhere along the
line on Facebook I was called a 'troubled man,' and I wonder whether I'm a
man at all in fact, and whether my neurotic behavior is so severe that I
won't be taken seriously as a 'thinker,' or 'musician,' or any one of a
hundred identities I aspire to. I worry that people find me a dilettante,
and that even my oud playing is so grotesque that I'm humored at best for
my clumsy attempts at playing. I fear that my few friends will become
fewer still and will leave me, or that we will settle in another city
where I'm seen as a freak or monster, and I wonder whether other people
lead lives of continuous regret, or how other people justify the horrors
they, too, must inflict on the world. I worry about the end of megafauna
and the inhumanity of our species, its deep commitment to slaughter and
torture, and those images of battered and wounded animals gracing PETA and
National Geographic publications, and I don't understand why we don't all
rise up in fury at the injustice of it all. I'm scared I'm technologically
falling behind, that my graphics or still too sexual or too crude, that
people would despise me if they looked closely at my work. I worry I'm too
arrogant or appear too arrogant, too selfish, too self-absorbed, and I
wonder if my father was right in what he said about my relationship with
my daughter and for that matter the rest of the family, and what made him
so psychologically violent against me. I wonder if thinking that way is
nothing more than an excuse. I continue to think perhaps I should take yet
another pill to try and fall back asleep, keep the gremlins away, and I
worry that all the early happiness I had writing into my characters has
disappeared - where are Nikuko, Jennifer, Honey, Travis, Clara, Alan, and
Julu, when I need them and their brightness just to think through the day?
I wonder when the construction noises are going to begin again and I'm
embarrassed and saddened we never were able to stop the pollution of the
arena going up across the street. I think it's probably time to leave the
computer which is now carrying a complete and true account of my thinking
for the evening on a typical night, hoping that a philosophical remnant
might remain here, wanting to just email this, cross-posting to everyone's
misery and horror, before the dawn comes and I have to awaken, if I fall
asleep, filled with the chills that usually accompany me in the early
morning, as if I had a severe flu, and so forth. And I worry that this
'and so forth' carries nothing with it but self-pity, that it's another
example of 'the troubled man' and his 'neurosis,' going nowhere, saying
nothing, an exercise in futility and the imaginary of illness, philosophy,
and the dead.


***
***

Jose Padua

Baudelaire

Was it poetry that ate my desire to succeed,

and through failure that I succeeded in thinking

only horrible things, things so horrible that

poetry could never grasp, much less control them,

and out of chaos still leave nothing but chaos,

measured accidentally in words? These nights are like

Antarctic nights in short sleeves, the sound is nice but there

is no aroma, no touch before throwing down

the dice while tangled pieces of string dangle from my

fingers like theories that cloud one’s mind on sleep-

less nights. No poetry can lay its hands on this

to heal it, my lack of tone and the muscle that’s

required to lift a dark stone from the bottom

of a running river; this is the task of mud, this

is the sealed entrance, the leftover shell and

mirror. Before my life of horrible things, desire,

to me, was a hyena that stays just out of

reach of the lion’s teeth; it made me take big steps

ahead. I left jackals and wild dogs behind me,

any animal who could not understand me. My

bags were packed before I even knew I was moving;

the words I used led me to construe that the animals

and I are alive, living in separate worlds when

I am high, feeling my veins as gusts of wind and

my mind a snow-capped Everest. Before the horrible

things there was desire, the ambition to move

about the stage, stepping softly with my silver clipped

wings to keep me calm, on these my days of rage.

***

Electrolite

I must have been nine or ten when I first

wondered how I would leave the world when it

was time for me to leave the world. Would everything

be flat like glass in the future? Would the curves

on buildings disappear like the airplanes

that flew away from me to the world until

they were too small to see and I was too

far to catch them? When it was 1965

the 21st century seemed far away,

seemed not exotic but more like science

fiction or a Thursday night film like

The Island of the Killer Shrews or

The Hideous Sun Demon. When I was

young I had weird pains in my chest and one

night I even woke up shaking. And even

before all that I sometimes thought about

the end of the world, like at the New Year’s

Day party we always went to when we

were kids when I would have rather stayed home

than see that old guy with the big forehead

and the age spots on his nose. Now, going

into town for Christmas my daughter asks

for the song she calls “Twentieth Century

Go to Sleep,” as my wife feeds our son from

a bottle then puts it in her purse when he’s done,

and they all fall asleep as the winter sun goes down.

***

***

Alvin Greenberg

 He Gives Things


      He gives his best friend Nathan a large, black, twist-tied, plastic garbage bag full of lawn clippings.
      “Here,” he says to Nathan, “I want you to have this.”
      Nathan is underwhelmed:  “Wha’?”
      He wants Nathan to understand that what he is giving him is an essential part of his life.  These are fresh green clippings, of course, from this very morning’s mowing, but he has been mowing the lawns of houses where he’s lived since he was ten years old, first at his father’s insistence with a rusty old reel mower, once with a riding mower (ah, so much lawn then!), lately with a small electric Sears Craftsman.  Mowing has been an integral part of his life–his spring, summer, and early fall life, at least–for nearly six decades.  What else has he ever done so consistently over such a long period of time?  He’s not just giving Nathan a bag of fresh clippings, he’s giving Nathan something almost as central to his very being as a kidney.
      Nathan still doesn’t understand.
 
      Even though it costs him a fortune to ship it halfway across the country, he gives his ex-wife an antique oak armoire, which he thinks of as a shifferobe, a term from his parent’s generation that he suspects no one knows or uses any longer, including his ex-wife, who is none too happy when the delivery truck pulls up in front of her house on a rainy morning when she is just getting into her car to go to work.  The driver explains that refusing delivery is not an option; if he and his helper can’t put it in the house–anywhere in the house she wants, he emphasizes, signaling to the kid in the cab to get down and lend a hand--they’ll just have to leave it on the sidewalk.  Ten minutes later she is on the phone, staring at this huge thing sitting in the middle of her living room and demanding to know what the hell he thinks he’s doing, sending her this piece of furniture that was nothing they ever owned together, no family heirloom–where the hell did he get it, anyway?–and nothing she has any use for, certainly no match for the rest of her Danish modern furnishings, and not even particularly attractive.
      “I just wanted to give it to you,” he tells her.  “A simple ‘Thank you’ would do.”
 
      In a long, narrow box purchased at the UPS Store, he gently places all his ties, the ties he wore to work for many years, the ties he wore on evenings out, the ties he wore to weddings and funerals, the ties that went out of style almost as soon as he bought them and the ties he got to hate over the years, the gift ties he never wore, the impulse purchase ties he only wore once, wide ties, narrow ties, knit ties, Italian silk ties . . . all the ties he has ever owned.  He wraps the box in Christmas wrapping paper, the only wrapping paper he can find in the house, tiny white snowflakes on a pale blue background, sticks a large red bow on the top, lays it on the back seat of his car and drives it to his sister, the quilter.  He stands on her front steps holding it in his arms, where except for its wrapping it would look like a box of flowers, long-stemmed roses perhaps, though she isn’t fooled for a minute.
      “Now what?” she says, taking the box from him.  They exchange quick kisses on both cheeks, a European custom they have long since adopted though neither has ever been to Europe.
      “Oh my god,” she exclaims when she opens the box, “this is too much!”
      “Too much,” she repeats.
      “It’s always too much,” he replies.
 
      He gives everything in his attic to the Goodwill:  boxes and boxes of stuff:  old LPs, cassette tapes, CDs; Christmas tree decorations; overstuffed file folders; cookie jars and toaster ovens and extension cords; he doesn’t even know what’s in most of these boxes he’s packing into his Chevy Cavalier coupe with its tiny trunk and even tinier back seat.  It takes him eleven trips across town, and by the fourth or fifth everyone who works at the unloading dock is coming out to greet him, saying, “You again!”
      “Yep,” he says, smiling, “me again.”
      “You movin’ or somethin’?” they want to know.
      “No,” he says, getting back in the car to go for another load, “not really.”
      When they’re finished pulling the last load of unboxed stuff out of the car–rolled up throw rugs, rusty space heaters, typewriters, Venetian blinds–he hands them the keys to the Chevy.
      “Registration papers in the glove box,” he tells them.
      “You want a ride home?” one of them asks.
      “No,” he says, “not really.”
 
      Almost everything in the fridge and freezer fits into three large grocery bags, which he takes next door to give to his neighbors, Derek and Lucinda.  He’s got two heavy bags in his left arm, clutching them from underneath because they’re so packed he’s worried the bottoms might give way, and the other one, in his right arm, he’s juggling to reach the doorbell when he sees Derek’s already standing in the doorway in his pajama bottoms.
      “You need some help with those?” Derek asks, taking one bag from each of his arms.  “I thought I heard someone coming up the steps.  C’mon in.”
      In the kitchen he’s carefully setting the last bag down on the counter next to the two Derek’s already placed there when Lucinda comes in, wrapped in a terrycloth robe, her hair still wet from the shower.
      “Wow,” she says, “look at all this.  Your fridge break down?”
      “No,” he explains, “not exactly.”
      “I’m not sure we’ve got room in the fridge for all this,” Lucinda  says, looking at Derek.
      The three of them stand quietly in the kitchen, staring at the three overflowing grocery bags slumping on the counter.
      “I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t realize it was so early.”
 
      When the twice-a-month cleaning lady leaves the next afternoon he helps her load her car up with the vacuum cleaner, the broom and dustpan, the mop and bucket, and a grocery bag full of things guaranteed to abolish dust, grease, smells, worry.
      “I guess you won’t be needing me anymore,” she says, standing on the sidewalk, jingling her car keys.
      He closes the trunk of her car, worried now that all these cleaning supplies might be the absolutely wrong things to have given her, these second-hand implements of her daily labors, of, in fact, one of the jobs she no longer has.
      “Wait here a minute,” he tells her.  “I’ve got a set of wine glasses for you.”
 
      Later, he pushes the lawnmower through the neighborhood, along the sidewalks, across the curving streets, to give it to Nathan.  Children playing outside in the evening, scrawling things on the sidewalk with colored chalk, step aside for him.  Cars slow down to give him time to cross the street.  Dogs follow him across a yard or two before losing interest.  Giving the lawnmower to Nathan seems the appropriate thing to do, something that Nathan will finally understand, but when he gets to Nathan’s house, there’s no one home, so he leaves it by the garage door.  Still later he returns with the rake, the edger, and a snow shovel, but now the house is dark–either there’s still no one home or they’ve gone to bed early–so he lays them on the asphalt driveway, beside the lawnmower, hoping that Nathan won’t drive over them when he returns home or when he backs out of the garage in the morning. 
      The next day he gives his toaster to a little boy pulling a red wagon down the sidewalk in front of his house.  The kid neither looks up nor stops as he places the shiny aluminum toaster, cleaned of its years of accumulated crumbs, dead center in the little red wagon.
 
      He gives that day’s mail right back to the mailman, who has just slid it through the slot in his front door.  “Please wait,” he says, opening the door to hand the few envelopes and cluster of flyers to the mailman.  He returns in a moment with a pile of old mail he’s scooped off the dining room table.
      “Let me give you this, too,” he says, “and please don’t bring any more.”
      The mailman isn’t sure he can do that.
      “It’s OK,” he tells the mailman.  “Trust me.”
 
      A dog meanders across his front lawn, a sad-looking Irish setter, its head hanging, its tail drooping.  He rushes out to give it a rib eye steak, the one last thing he’s kept in his freezer.  The dog takes it in its mouth and rambles off, looking no less sad than before.
 
      He flags down an old woman driving down his street in a white Cadillac, wanting to give her the two pillows off his bed.  She rolls down her window and looks at him long and hard.
      “Put them in the back seat,” she says. 
      For several days he sits on the bare wood of his living room floor pondering the question of who to give the electronics to:  the computer, the printer, the copier, the fax machine, the cell phone, the DVD player.  In the end, he simply puts them out on the sidewalk in front of the house.  In the morning, they’re all gone.

 
      Days pass.  He gives time its due.  He gives the house key to the garbage can and the garbage can to the garbage men, who shrug their shoulders and toss it into their giant compactor of a garbage truck.
 
      And then he’s at my own door, and even while I’m thinking it’d be a bad idea to let him in, he slips past me and just like that he’s standing in my living room, holding his empty hands out in front of him, insisting on giving me his story.
      “No,” I tell him, “I can’t take it.  If I take it you’ll have nothing left, nothing at all.”
      “I know,” he says, dissolving into a puddle of tears in the middle of the room, “I know, I know, I know . . . .”


***
***

George Bowering

The World, I Guess 

If you don’t write it down, the poem will go away again,

back to wherever it came from, maybe a dead person

or Mars.  Even if you’re doing something else, like trying

to have a bowel movement, as is often the case with me,

not meaning to be vulgar or comical, but

a planetoid is another possibility, if that’s the right word.

Think about all the poor mute Miltons who had something

else to do; they could have changed the world,

or at least the poetry world, or North America.  But

even if you write it down, here’s the problem, you will be

mis-writing, because you are mis-reading.  You have to accept that

if you want to spend a life at this job.

***

***

Laura Young

Dark Sea XXXI


***
***

Mary Kasimor

the future is in Barcelona

The pen works. See. It makes up ideas; later pictures fall off the wall. The ideas could be found in any cereal box. I fell into a dream & then I fell off the earth & kept falling. The building held important drawers to my lives; unraveling the addiction & falling out of the air, the government’s image aided my vocabulary. I was a speculative fool more so than others. The nation leaked pious families & mickey mouse’s ears were the future’s deception. But we gamble with deadlines. The future is clear in Barcelona. There were two trillion protesters from the next decade, & little churches grew refugee camping; anti-hierarchical the dancers gave birth. To comply with the sun everyone gave arguments to exist in prophesy, but grassroots sprouted monkeys. Stop the alarm. Why mess with shipping? The equipment embraces the wrongdoers & someday everyone will know 

***

the western

the east tastes of vinegar tight-

lipped &

sour apples

no woman need apply

scientific oppression approached

each

beauty

from a bounty of speed

the galloping

horses frozen in steel

she vanished for good

she argued

for width

in the movies she climbed out

windows claimed herself

a heart warm

slovenly morning

out the window to

the west she left

a sense of space she

left a witness

walking on sand & swamp

& lakes

& cornfields

to the furthest

place to the fabric torn

the continuity

of any

herself

a pattern to the west paper-

doll shadows

with north poles separating each

piece of her

she grew

antennas & a force of

nature she disappeared

into a digital

heart

the edited movie of the west

***

black swans in rain

if so          dying    the

smudge         is

objectified       and falls

rain     against      blank

faces a                 city

travels through       air

not       trees but    many

bodies left      fragments

rain                      clusters

forgotten     light    black

swans and             gray

order                   forced acres

if                pollution stars

and      wings           let

go      to fall         wet

like      word smears

simultaneously       luminous

seasons in         overnight heavy

doors                  and laws  

forced               between needing

more        we meant

more pronunciation       more we

chose                like     gods

to         die in       triangles

like dogs           heaps

from these              meanings of

co-habitation       out from

life      to dwell   through     

symbols and          windows 

we        pressed       for

distress        of       what was

never found         in    an absent

train      seats             coins

and        rain soaked

***

***

Lars Palm

(on the road to san augustin)

three persons

three dogs

along the roadside

walk when cool

seek shade when hot

who are those

shadows walking

behind?

***

(fighting the glorious cockroach revolution)

on the street

     a single brown leather shoe size 9 or so

the thought that it might come in handy some time

a bit later

     an easily accessible building site sporting an opened sack of cement

shoe filled with cement he goes down to alcaravaneras & mixes water into it leaving it to dry in the sun

thus he has a weapon fit for fending them off

***

(driving for football)

these hardcore bosnians on tour having driven from tuzla to paris to watch their national team 

beat france in the final european qualifier were slightly less expansive when we returned to the 

hotel at about 1.30 a.m than when we left earlier in the day

***

***

Paul Charles Howell

Manipulating Hans Arp

 “Greta Garbo had a favorite old puppet she used to keep in her dressing room. I think she called it Kasperl.”

                           -- attributed to Anita Loos

I was clearing out the Old West Mission

but wanted to be frivolous and elsewhere

so I made up a tale about Stravinsky to keep me going

for Petrushka was ringing in my ears.

I leaned on the conversation between me and the old

county-fare Casper I had picked up at a flea market

in a miniature armchair in a marionette theater

hanging from a rusty four-penny nail.

He must have been there since the Spanish American War

so I flung him onto the bonfire with the Pole in her Dirndl

and the dark Argentine with her flashy castanets and sharp

brown teeth and worn-out pin-ups of Greta Garbo

I don't know what other silent movie stars

and a trunk-full of letters and tugged at Hans Arp’s

eulogy for it’s the only written record

of the great entertainer’s demise.

You remember Casper I hope my old uncle?

Back in silent film days? Part of the Roscoe

Arbuckle crowd? The abduction scandal? No?

He worked with Alice Howell and Jean Guignol

Francis Ford…. You don’t remember?

Well surely you saw him when you were a kid

Him and Buster Keaton    Anita Loos

He exchanged letters with Marx and Mann

Collaborated with Igor Stravinsky, the composer,

and Hans Arp, the Dadaist. Surely you knew

of his long love affair with Greta Garbo

the greatest movie star of all time?

Casper came to his sad end here last week

at this eerie Mission in Capistrano California.

He occupied this creaky place in his twilight

and expired in the fog with the long leaded windows ajar.

I was not with him at the actual moment

Only his two young manipulators were there

the beautiful slim blonde Pole and the strong

dark Argentine, his angels without wings, to see him

Through the valley of the shadow, to witness

his obstinate spirit ascend past the flickering

chandelier. Ooh…! That night we laid him out

in precious Chinese silk on a venerable four-poster.

I had been alarmed when the Argentine phoned to insist

that I come out here to spend his last days with him.

He believes he’s going to die

and wants someone by his side.

Did you know that he kept trunks full of fan mail

and old brown and white photographs?

Him and Greta, him with Joe and Buster

Keaton, him with Stravinsky in Barcelona, Spain.

And in case there’s any doubt about his current status

with the top politicians, George

Bush père and little George fils

were both at his cremation in Santa Monica.

Sorry you missed it. They had not forgotten him!

And there she was.    I had not dared

expect her, in a black backless dress

and floppy yellow hat. She was there

In the back pew with tears in her famous

unbreakable eyes, believe me. The press

did not give the funeral much coverage but

Oh, there were the compulsory obituaries.

One remembered his ’37

tour in Peer Gynt and his appearance in Uncle

Tom’s Cabin. Another called him the Howdy

Doody of Vaudeville if you can imagine it!

But that was not all. I checked every single

paper, even Vanity Fair.

I did get a nice bouquet from Casper

Weinberger whose parents named him after Casper.

The evening of my arrival he sat beside me

on the arm of my easy chair, one hand resting

on his walking stick, his chin leaning on his hand

between puffs on his panatela cigar.

He started to move his lips, and a voice began

to sound. Boy, what diction! It resonated in the walls

comforting and confident. He said, “Every man needs women.”

We were sipping French Champagne and puffing fresh cigars.

          “They’re what put zest and interest in life.

          Now these girls over here, this stunning Argentine

          and that lithe Pole they think I don’t know

          they’re after my money.”

Casper still looked uncannily like his 1927 portrait

by Max Beckman, painted while he was playing

Fafner at the Frankfurt Opera, Kasper

im Smoking it’s called, the cigar, the monocle, the young

Manipulating Venuses of that era bent

in attendance like handles of an art deco vase.

He had my attention and spoke to me at length.

“When you hang around this long, son, it gets sticky.

“You outlive your friends and some of your enemies.

But you miss them, too. The crowd used to burst into applause

the instant I leapt on the stage. When I spoke, children

trembled. Whenever I got off a train, there was

“A throng. I couldn’t go two blocks in Manhattan without signing

a hundred autographs. The trouble with fame is

you have to pull the same head-bashing stunts

retell the same raunchy jokes

“Be the personality they expect,

or they think you’re cheating on them, as if

they owned you like a wife. So, like an old

husband in bed, you act surprised and pleased

“And all fired up. I was there at the 57^th Street

pier when Garbo got off the Drottningholm

did you know that? Nineteen, she was. Coming to conquer

America. Just a child she was when she

“Discovered me and Oh I’ll never forget

that ship, the colored streamers gliding

through the air, the fog horn, the brass band on the pier

droning Roll out the Barrel, everyone kissing

“Everyone, popping corks, the scent and sprinkle

of champagne mingled with the scent and sprinkle of the Hudson

River, arrival, laughter, tears of joy! And

What an apprehensive presence Garbo’s was!

“The stevedores unrolled a carpet down

the gangplank. And when you looked at her, emerging

like a Venus in New York, you had the feeling

that you shouldn’t, as if you’d stretched the whole

“Crazy Torah, but you couldn’t turn your eyes

away. She was right down to earth

a bit too free and modern for us righteous

Americans. She tried to sweep us off our feet

“Before we were sure of our footwork.

Funny, intractable, fragile, farouche, do you know

that word? That’s what she was. Without inhibition.

Wherever Garbo was, you had the uneasy

“Feeling: that was where an earthquake

Was about to erupt, a ten. I never loved

a woman more than her, and to kiss her tanned shoulder

was like touching the Holy Grail.

“But it was her eyes that controlled you.

In the old films it’s hard to see

the power of those eyes, but, believe me,

it was there. Ah, Anna Christie, Anna Karenina.

“Her best film was Street of Sorrows

before she ever came to Hollywood.

Ah, Greta Garbo, how I miss you.

Didn’t you meet her with me in the thirties?”

  

But I had not, alas. Casper went on

“We used to gallop around Santa Monica

together. Greta had great horses.

It was all pretty wild those days not paved over

“Like today. She was pretty wild, too.

Think what she did to that poor John Gilbert

star of silent films. Her voice worked

and his voice didn’t. She stood him up at the altar.

“I was with him at the time, poor guy.

Devastating for them both but not for me.

Then she considered Laurence Olivier

but didn’t like his smell.

“Lucky thing for him; ’cause I’d have crushed his balls.

She was too good at acting. That’s why I never

married her. Too busy acting. One hundred

ten percent business. How could you be sure she was ever

“Herself? Off camera, she prepared herself.

Greta Garbo, let me tell you, was a childlike, charismatic spirit

capricious, whimsical, sagacious, ungraspable

all the female essentials. She could be

“Temperamental, though. She could be genuinely

Indifferent, totally selfish, go on a hunger strike

get what she wanted like Gandhi, demanding as Elektra.

She was often compared to Helen of Troy, you know.

“It makes me sad even now.

Last time we saw each other was after the Barcelona

fiasco before I moved to this Mission.

Now when I see those old Garbo films on TV -

“I like the old films, but that’s not her. It’s her ghost.

She looks like a delicate flower, doesn’t she?

But when you look close, you realize that she’s made

of the sort of stainless steel it took ten million

“Centuries to forge. Now, Garbo knew how to handle

the press! She told them to mind their own damned business

but they couldn’t stop. They expounded on the

legend, and the public loved her all the more.

“After the premier of Camille I said to her

‘la Bernhardt was never half so good as you

lilla flicka’. Scared the pants off her

when I said that, but she knew I was right.

“When you have that much power, it’d scare anyone.

Women are wonderful, provided you never forget

that they’re made of barbed wire. Power

is the greatest thrill. Speaking of power,”

Casper held up his walking stick to show me.

“This old cane of Stravinsky’s makes you feel

pretty invincible, doesn’t it? A kind of scepter.

I was walking along the highway yesterday

“Listening to the squealing birds and the breaking waves.

I saw some good looking surfers on the beach.

One of them came up to admire the cane.

She was built like the Venus de Milo.

“I told her this cane used to belong to Stravinsky

the greatest composer of our time. Right away

she asked me to let her hold it.

Oh, the way she fondled the thing!

“Stravinsky said his father bought the cane

in Saint Petersburg. It has a history.

One day his father was out walking when a dog

attacked him; he used this cane to kill the canine

“And threaten its owner. You can see the dog’s teeth

marks on it here. Look. And I’m sure

there’s still blood on it. Look at that stain.

Isn’t that blood? Stravinsky said

“He got off the train one time in Mulhouse in France

to stock up on wine and cheese and baguettes and cigarettes

for the rest of his trip to Lausanne, and before he got back

on the train an ugly young man with a knife

“Tried to mug him in a cloud of steam and demanded

his money. Stravinsky, in beret and monocle

and white silk scarf, tapped the mugger

on his chest with the silver handle of this cane

“And said: ‘Aslayóp!’ It worked like a magic wand.

The thug melted in the steam, and Stravinsky got back

on the train. And now it’s attracted the Venus de Milo.

Stravinsky was an unsurpassed actor and a first rate politician.”

Casper’s enthusiasm mounted, “He was a great genius

a giant. Like Einstein, like his friend Picasso, his friend

Cocteau. He had an ego bigger than Mount Rushmore.

But the world was depressed by clouds of war.

“Stravinsky wanted to produce Petrushka in Barcelona

and he wanted me to play the marionette. How ironic

I had never played a puppet before.

I boasted to Greta about the invitation.

“‘You’re no ballet dancer’, she said

not to offend me, in fact, but protect me

from a business that could only mean

disaster. How prophetic she was.

“But I was insulted. I said, ‘I, Casper

who have played Charlemagne at Roncevalle

who seduced Margarete in the garden as Faust

fascinated the continent as the hunchbacked, hook-nosed Pulcinella?

“I, Casper, who mastered Shakespeare’s Trinculo

and Stephano, who danced the Catalonian flamenco

on my hands, who worked with Trovollo the ventriloquist

 who toured Japan as Benten Kozoh with his gang

“Of thieves and performed seppuku countless times

before packed black-haired pagodas, Greta,

you think I cannot dance the puppet Petrushka!’

I capped off my speech with a dig

“‘The stage is not the picayune cinema, Miss Garbo!’

But after jealousy, pride is man’s greatest mistake.

I don’t know if Greta really liked Stravinsky

She was more for rumba than ballet

“But she knew what she knew, and that is what

distinguishes an extraordinary presence like hers

So I became determined to do Petrushka

marionette or no. I wrote back to Stravinsky.

“Yes, he was delighted. Stravinsky had

a definite idea at first. Then he astonished you

with a new clarification. He was always positive

as his music, while so many serious artists

“Were wallowing in discouragement. And he was just

as difficult, and just as driving as his music

So cerebral. He wanted to do things no one

had ever done, and he did them. We corresponded

“About the production. He described Nijinsky’s interpretation

and told me what was wrong with it and how

I must improve it. Greta used to read

his letters, too. I’ve kept them all.

“You’ll have to publish them when I’m gone.

He wrote about the wig and the make-up and the costumes

and how the lighting had to be from the lower

stage left to make it ghostly and the small

“Puppet stage on the larger stage to make it

real and the Moor and wet nurses and Gypsies and the masqueraders

and the coachmen and grooms and the peasant, and movement

movement, movement, and, most of all, the bear.

“I, Casper the marionette, the hero, was to be

irresistible, seductive, symbolic. To get the gestures

right, I studied smoke in changing wind

trees growing in the rain forest, icebergs bobbing

“In the ocean. I would even have

to die like a meteor. Oh, how vividly I remember

And the music, Stravinsky said, the music must

for once, be played the way he wrote it, not

“Like his friends Monteux or Ansermet or Koussevitzky, or, God help us

André Messager, all those imposers

of inferior egos! The music…! I could hardly understand

the music at first. I had to open my ears, but once

“I did Holy Moses! Stravinsky wanted Leopold Stokowski to conduct.”

There was a sudden heavy silence complete

and black as if both oxygen and daylight had been sucked

out of the room and I feared the worst.

When he mentioned Stokowski’s name Uncle Casper’s

unchanging face became a harsh mask

of vengeance, as if his memory had foundered on a spewing

volcano, as if he had stubbed his toe on a rattlesnake.

After a moment, he recovered and went on.

“Oh, how ready I was to help Stokowski.

He had just given his last concert in Philadelphia

He had been there for a quarter of a century

“And should have stayed there. He was about my age

but prided himself in his shock of white hair

that universal symptom of musical prowess

and his goddamned physical flexibility.

“And he was planning to come to Hollywood anyway

to do film music, so au courant

Today he’d probably want to be an astronaut!

I spoke to my friends to see how I might meet him

“So prepared was I to dance Petrushka

so ready for everything to be perfect to make

our Petrushka THE Petrushka of five hundred years.

To be remembered as THE interpreter of Petrushka

“Better than Nijinski. No

the CREATOR of Petrushka, better than Stravinsky!

Oh, gold flutes, brass trumpets, wood bassoons.

The snare drum! Oh, that barrel organ!

“Stravinsky came to visit us, Greta and me

He personally checked on every detail

We sat in wicker chairs beside her

Pool in the southern California sun

“While Greta Garbo sunbathed and swam

and prepared herself and distracted us

 we went over the Petrushka score

together in silence. It was pleasant agony to listen

“To music with your eyes and see Stravinsky

tamper with his own music in silence.

Then we went inside, the three of us.

Stravinsky played each section on Greta’s piano

“Or made me play it, while he banged out the rhythm

with that silver-handled cane

Bang, bang, bang, leaving unconscionable

Welts in Greta’s Steinway. How my head

“Was spinning with new sounds.

It only took two days, but I was transformed.

The great Greta Garbo herself had never blocked

Her scenes with such alacrity.

“When Stravinsky was ready to leave

I had memorized every gesture, every note

even the tiniest nuance. That’s when he presented

This silver-handled cane to me

“And told me its history. My young friend Anita Loos

I don’t think you know Anita, I must

introduce you. She wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

and most of the great screenplays -

“Anita gave me Stokowski’s west coast number.

I called him, and we decided to meet to discuss

the Barcelona production.”

Casper dozed off.

It was past midnight, and the young Pole

and Argentine, I realized, after all the talk about ballet

were dancers. They came to entice Casper to bed

the dark Argentine from the south and the blonde Polish girl from the north.

Good night, Uncle Casper, I said. I finished

my Cognac and before I went to bed

examined the cane. Fabergé had a hand

in this, I thought. At breakfast the next morning

I asked him, How did Petrushka finally go?

I was out of breath. My impatience was showing.

“He lives as a mocking spirit,” Casper said to me

“but he dies outwitted in the end, that tragic

“Marionette Petrushka. Jealousy will do it every time.

There’s no hell like jealousy. Just listen to the music

Stravinsky conducted it himself in the end

No need for Stokowski, no need for him at all.”

Casper was savoring caviar and sturgeon for breakfast,

but I could not wait. How did the Barcelona audience

like it? I persisted. It must have been

pretty strong music to their ears in the thirties.

“Oh, the circumstances couldn’t have been worse,” he said

shoveling in gobs of caviar. “Barcelona

was a mess. The country was a mess. Traveling there and back

was awful. The civil war, you know. The theater was cold. But.

“But the orchestra was hot. The commedia dell’arte

set was perfect. The colors! No one understands

colors better than the Spanish

especially the reds of wine and blood

“Or the blacks of lace underwear and funeral shrouds

The supporting cast was the best I ever worked with

I showed them my soul, and it was raw

We gave five performances, and after each one

“They carried Stravinsky and me on their shoulders around

the Town Square, clapping, clapping, and clapping

some more. But my heart was heavy. I was suffering, let me tell you.

The reason, of course, was that bastard Stokowski.

“He had meanwhile come to visit Greta and me

in Santa Monica. He brought Greta a gift

one he’d made himself. You know how that sort of thing

can trick a fickle woman, when an adorer brings her

“A gift he has made with his own bare hands

something else she can take to her bed. Besides

he looked like the annunciating angel. Well

Greta, poor, faithless waif, succumbed to those dumb charms

“To that exceeding, nimble brain, to that feigned

devotion, and there was no one else whom she

wanted to see or hear for a while. Stokowski

catered to her every weakness.

“There was no way to make her see sense

no holding her back. She even

became cheerful! She went out with him in public!!

She thought about marriage!!!

“My Greta Garbo! She had forgotten

she belonged to the universe like the North Star

She belonged in the dreams of all men

not alone on some Roman mosaic with Stoky

“Sweeping up his carrot crumbs. The girl was infatuated

And me, I was fuming. The haunting idea, the gnawing

image of Greta and Stoky on the front page of every

edition. Jealousy. Worse pain than muscle spasms, believe me.

“In my work, I’ve succumbed to both. While I was sequestered

and dancing my heart out in Spain, Garbo and Stoky

were practicing yoga at the Villa Cimbrone in Italy

and I was the guilty, foolish instrument of this nightmare.

“Let the fascists reign, I thought.

Come disembowel the earth.

There could be no bleaker agony than mine.

After Petrushka I went straight to Italy

“To see what they were up to. Then the three

of us drove to Sweden, through Switzerland and Germany

The trip was well covered in the press, yet no one knows

I was with them. I even did some of the driving.

“When you have been so devoted to a woman as I was

to Garbo, as we were to each other, this extreme happiness

she and Stoky seemed to be enjoying just

leaves you numb. At her secluded farm

“In Sweden where we were staying, in three separate

bedrooms at my insistence, in the foyer

by the staircase, I met up with Stokowski.

‘Finally’, I said and raised this walking stick to threaten him.

“I wasn’t sure what to do, kill him, I think,

but he grabbed the stick from me and deftly

struck me with it instead, knocking me lifeless

as the dummy I was, the scene I had just come from mastering

“With Stravinsky in Spain. If you look very carefully, you can see

the blood. Not some real Russian dog’s, in fact

but my own. And Greta, what pain hers was.

How expertly she could suffer, look at any ten of her films.

“Of course, after that, we had to part for a time

And Stokowski, he had to leave. For years I could not

speak to Greta. Then after that vicious censorship

of Two-faced Woman, she spoke to no one, no one at all.”

A thick fog was rising. We finished drinking

our breakfast Dom Perignon and went out into the

walled-in garden to check on the orchids.

Casper said, lifting one gently with his cane

“I’ve been coddling these for that sorrowful day.

Look how lush they are and capriciously female.”

Those were his very last words. Arranging the appropriate

funeral for such an eminent figure is a challenge.

The pale lithe Pole chose the Frank Lloyd Wright

chapel in Santa Monica, and the Argentine drew up

a list of celebrities. Melvyn Douglas and Helen. Emil Jannings

Erich von Stroheim, George Cukor, Clarence Brown, Groucho Marx

And Buster Keaton. Other old friends who are not so famous.

Perhaps I should mention Jean Guignol and King Constantine.

We did not know how to reach Greta Garbo but made

sure that the announcement appeared in LA and New York.

Casper is dead. Funeral services, etc., at 11:00 on Thursday.

We cut all the orchids from the garden and filled the chapel.

It made the most powerful impression. We had a catered

bar for the press, only pitch pine for the fire on Forest Lawn.

It burns so hot and fast. The chapel is small

and felt tightly crowded. Buster Keaton delivered the eulogy

of course, since it had been written for Casper in the first place.

He recited it as well as he could remember it.

Alas our good Casper is dead

Who will carry the burning banner now hidden in the pigtail of clouds to play the practical joke?

Who will now turn the coffee mill in the barrel at the Mission?

Who will now trick the empty-headed dears out of their petrified paper box?

Who will now confound the ships on the high seas by addressing them as dada drizzle and the winds by calling them keepers of the bees ozone spindle?

Alas alas alas our good Casper is dead

Holy ding dong Casper is dead

The cattlefish in the bellbarns clatter with heartrending grief when his Christian name is uttered: Casper Casper Casper

Why have you left us? Into what shape has your beautiful great soul migrated? Have you become a meteor or a watery chain attached to a hot whirlwind or an udder of black light or a transparent brick or the groaning drum of jagged being?

Now the part in our hair, the soles of our feet, are parched, and the fairies lie half-charred on the pyre

Now the black bowling alley thunders behind the sun, and there’s no one to wind up the compasses and the wheels and the handbarrows any more

Who will now eat with the phosphorescent rat at the lonely bare-footed table?

Who will now chase away the sirocco devil when he wants to beguile the horses?

Who will now explain to us the monograms in the stars?

His bust will adorn the mantelpiece of all truly noble women, but that’s no comfort that’s snuff to a skull.

Of course, old stone face himself couldn’t recite the old Arp

without tears. It’s extraordinary how much we’re going

to miss our old Casper. During one long pause in Buster’s

recitation I turned around in my seat and looked back

And saw the characteristic floppy hat

the lady in the last row. It brought

a tear to my eye. She had actually come and was weeping.

At the cremation in the dazzling Pacific sun, it is I

Who lowered his remains on the pyre. King Constantine

was kind enough to light the match.

I almost laid on Stravinsky’s walking stick

to guide his spirit through the spheres

But he really wanted me to keep it

You see, there’s still some magic in it.

***

***