There have been no others.
That’s not what I called her, my muse. That's not how I thought of her. And perhaps that’s not what she was, not quite. But, in retrospect, it’s a good approximation to how I needed/used her.
At the time, I thought I was in love. But, considered as a love relationship, it would’ve made a strange movie. For the love was mostly in my mind, not in the relationship.
It started in the Fall of my freshman year at Johns Hopkins University. She was a student in the Master’s program of the Writing Seminars and had a job in what was, at the time, the Hopkins chapter of the YMCA, run by Chester “Chet the Jet” Wickwire. Later on, through some arrangement or another, the University bought out the YMCA and Wickwire became Chaplain. But that was a couple of years later.
At the time the YMCA at JHU was, effectively, the student union. There was no student union as such, but the Y, and its building, Levering Hall, served that function. Chesley, that was her name, was one of a number of assistants who helped Wickwire run the joint. One of them helped with the film series, another with the tutoring program, and so on. Chesley helped with the coffee house.
Which is where I met her. It was, I believe, simply called The Room at the Top. Folk music was big at the time, which was about the time Dylan went electric and when the anti-war movement was cranking up. The civil rights movement, of course, was in full cry. The Klan burnt a cross next to Levering Hall to protest a speaking engagement by Bayard Rustin.
Those, as they say, were the days.
I don’t know how or why I ended up volunteering to help out with The Room at the Top. I wasn’t particularly interested in folk music. But, as I said, folk music was happening at the time. I suppose I just wanted to do something and that was something to do.
I don’t remember just when I met Chesley or what I thought on first meeting. Lights and music and fairly dust and all? Probably not. But somehow it worked out that Friday or Saturday night would be the high point of my week. That was when I’d see Chesley at The Room at the Top. She did whatever she had to do to actually run the joint for an evening and I helped out, maybe waiting tables, or whatever.
Come Sunday my mood would take a nosedive and I’d return to my studies. My mood would rise during the week, not steadily of course, but up and down, up and down, more up than down. And then Friday, Saturday, one or the other, perhaps both, I don’t remember, I’d fly into at The Room at the Top. Volunteering. Seeing Chesley, chatting with her. Listening to the music, which was often quite good.
And that’s how it went for the school year. I don’t know whether or not Chesley realized that I had a crush on her. I suppose she must have gotten some vibe. I remember that one of the regular singers there, a bluesman, dated her a couple of times. Have no idea what happened, though I was probably intensely interested in it at the time.
I didn’t myself dare approach her. I could say that was because she was an Older Woman—though the idea that a 22 or 23 year old woman could be an Older Woman seems a little silly to me now—but I wouldn’t have asked her out if she’d been my age. I was way too shy to do such a thing. But such thoughts did I have!
* * * * *
Then came the summer. School let out and I returned home. During the day I worked a summer job. But, no Chesley. Well not quite.
During the evenings I would write letters to her. Type them on my electric portable. And keep a copy for the files. I suppose I wrote two, three, four letters a week. Long letters. Somewhere along the line I must have confessed my love. And said the sorts of things typical of love letters. But mostly I just wrote and wrote and wrote.
About what? you ask. That was a long time ago and I don’t really remember. But I’m pretty sure I wrote about anything and everything I felt like writing about, including Chesley, of course. I even played a game with language, which involved creating complicated sentences by embedding parenthetical remarks within parenthetical remarks. It’s easy to do with word processing software as you can write a sentence through to the end and then go back over it, inserting the parenthetical remarks wherever. But I didn’t have a word processor. So I sort of had to guess where I wanted the base sentence to go and then embed the digressions as I went along.
I have no idea what Chesley thought of that game. But I quite enjoyed it and did it a lot. Probably thought I was crazy. Which, I suppose, I was in a way.
The thing is, I knew that this was odd behavior. I wrote these letters and wrote and wrote, and she didn’t write back. I wanted her to, I hoped she would. But she didn’t. And that didn’t seem to make any difference in my determination to write. I just kept writing.
And then one day I got a letter from her. Handwritten, I believe, two pages long or so. She was kind. Confessing she didn’t quite know how to respond to all this stuff from “a junior Marcel Proust”, an obviously flattering phrase. She suggested I read Dante’s La Vita Nuova, which I did, eventually.
As you may know, La Vita Nuova, The New Life, is Dante’s first book. The new life is that into which he entered “when the now glorious lady of my mind first appeared to my eyes. She was called Beatrice by many people who did not know what her name was. . . . At that moment, I say truly that the vital spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the least pulses of my body were strangely affected”, and so on and so forth. From that moment on, Dante’s life was changed. Beatrice became his muse; she led him to god. And god made him a great poet.
The peculiar thing is, Dante never had a real relationship with this woman, this Beatrice, this muse. As far as we know, he only ever saw her once or twice in his life. He married a different woman, Gemma Donati, and had children by this woman.
But what does this mean “real relationship”? If we take Dante’s words a face value, his relationship to Beatrice is, in some sense, as real as any relationship he had. It was Beatrice who guided Danto in the Paradiso, not his wife. With his wife he had children. With Beatrice, Paradise. Is the one more real than the other?
* * * * *
But this is not about Dante and Beatrice. It’s about me and Chesley. Sometime after mid-summer I went back to Hopkins for a weekend. And I saw Chesley. That is not why I went back for the weekend, but it happened. That was after she’d written that one letter to me. And after I’d sent her the enameled earrings I made for her.
We chatted just like we had back at The Room at the Top. We may have mentioned my correspondence once or twice, but we certainly didn’t discuss it or anything in it. That, whatever it was, that was one world. This was another world. The two were connected, obviously, but the relationship between them was obscure.
When I returned to Hopkins in the Fall Chesley wasn’t there. She’d finished the MA program and had gone off somewhere in the Midwest to teach writing. We corresponded a bit. But my attachment to her was over.
I found another woman, Christel, on which to hang my need. The longing in this relationship—can we call it that? I think not, but I don’t know a better word—was perhaps not so intense. The letters I wrote during the next summer were not so long, nor quite so intellectual, and they were wittier and more playful. But the one-sidedness was still there.
It was as though I had this need and I had to hang it on someone, like one hangs a coat on a hanger. Any hanger will do as long as it can support the coat. While it is not the case that any woman could have served as muse—Chesley and Christel were quite remarkable, and not only in their generosity toward me—it is the service I want to emphasize. Hence the crude metaphor, hanging a coat on a hook. The hook has little choice in the matter; it can but serve.
* * * * *
I have never again written with such ease and fluency as I had in my correspondence to Chesley and Christel. I didn’t have to work at writing those letters. I just sat at the typewriter, and the words flowed though my fingers onto the page.
Where did those words come from? And the fluency too? They came from me, obviously.
But I could only produce them by directing them to Chesley, to my muse. Whatever they were about—literature, philosophy, politics, movies, the world, life, you name it—whatever they were about, they had to be directed to her. Without that direction the words wouldn’t come. I had to go through her, through my muse, to get to those words.
Those muse-born words were not, of course, the only words I wrote. I was a college student; I took many courses where I had to write term papers. Those term papers did not come out of my muses. They came out of me. The writing was hard work. On occasion it was even good work.
I sometimes think that in the decades since I was blessed by those muses I have been, among other things, attempting to actively and deliberately write my way into to the space they afforded me through an odd grace. Doing so requires that I develop my craft, in ideas and in prose, to the point where it can sustain that ease and fluency.
That new space, I can almost see it there ahead of me. But it probably doesn’t much matter whether I ever get there.
No comments:
Post a Comment