ARTHUR, ARTHUR,

 Franz West, untitled, 2009

"...'As things went, I had, on the whole, a pleasant time. Only, I understood that you sang; and I was rather hoping to hear you.' 'I do best with my regular accompanist,' I returned--meaning you, of course. I hope you don't mind being degraded to that level. 'And your regular accompanist is not-- not--?' 'Is miles away," I replied. 'A hundred and fifty of them,' I might have added, if I had chosen to be specific. Now, if he had wanted to hear me, why hadn't  he asked? He would have needed only to second Mrs. Phillips herself; and there he was, just on the other side of me. In consequence of his reticence I was driven -or drove myself- to blank verse. And that other man, the one in the chair; he may have had his expectations too. Arthur, Arthur, try to grasp the situation! You must come down here, and you must bring your hands with you. Tell the bishop and the precentor that you are needed elsewhere. They will let you off. Of course I know that a village choir needs every tenor it can get--and keep; but come. If they insist, leave your voice behind; but do bring your hands and your reading eye. Don't let me go along making my new circle think I'm an utter dub. Tell your father plainly that he can never in the world make a wholesale-hardware-man out of you. Force him to listen to reason. What is one year spent in finding out just what you are fit for? Come along; I miss you like the devil; nobody does my things as sympathetically as you do. Give up your old anthems and your old tinware and tenpennies and come along. I can bolt from this hole at a week's notice, and we can go into quarters together: a real bed instead of an upholstered shelf, and a closet big enough for two wardrobes (if mine really deserves the name). We could get our own breakfast, and you could take a course in something or other till you found out just what the Big Town could do for you. In any event you would be bearing me company, and your company is what I need. So pack up and appear."

 -Henry Blake Fuller, Bertram Cope's Year, 1919

AN AMOROUS CATASTROPHE, AN IDEAL AGE

 

 'There was a silent moment when everything held its breath, and then the sun rose. It was beautiful.

"Golly" --Johnny's voice beside me made me jump-- "that sure was pretty."
"Yeah." I sighed, wishing I had some paint to do a picture with while the sight was still fresh in my mind.
"The mist was what was pretty," Johnny said. "All gold and silver."
"Uhmmmm," I said, trying to blow a smoke ring.
"Too bad it couldn't stay like that all the time."
"Nothing gold can stay." I was remembering a poem I'd read once.
"What?"'

-S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders, 1967.

"What is man's best age? Peter Ibbetson, entering dreamland with complete freedom to chose, chose twenty-eight, and kept there. But twenty-eight, for our present purpose, has a drawback: a man of that age, if endowed with ordinary gifts and responsive to ordinary opportunities, is undeniably--a man; whereas what we require here is something just a little short of that. Wanted, in fact, a young male who shall seem fully adult to those who are younger still, and who may even appear the accomplished flower of virility to an idealizing maid or so, yet who shall elicit from the middle-aged the kindly indulgence due a boy. Perhaps you will say that even a man of twenty-eight may seem only a boy to a man of seventy. However, no septuagenarian is to figure in these pages. Our elders will be but in the middle forties and the earlier fifties; and we must find for them an age which may evoke their friendly interest, and yet be likely to call forth, besides that, their sympathy and their longing admiration, and later their tolerance, their patience, and even their forgiveness.

I think then, that Bertram Cope, when he began to intrigue the little group which dwelt among the quadruple avenues of elms that led to the campus in Churchton, was but about twenty-four,--certainly not a day more than twenty-five. If twenty-eight is the ideal age, the best is all the better for being just a little ahead."

-Henry Blake Fuller, Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.

 

'catastrophe / catastrophe

Violent crisis during which the subject, experiencing the amorous situation as a definitive impasse, a trap from which he can never escape, sees himself doomed to total destruction'

'2.     The amorous catastrophe may be close to what has been called, in the psychotic domain, an extreme situation, "a situation experienced by the subject as irremediably bound to destroy him"; the image is drawn from what occurred at Dachau. Is it not indecent to compare the situation of a love-sick subject to that of an inmate of Dachau? Can one of the most unimaginable insults of History be compared with a trivial, childish, sophisticated, obscure incident occurring to a comfortable subject who is merely the victim of his own Image-repertoire? Yet these two situations have this in common: they are, literally, panic situations: situations without remainder, without return: I have projected myself onto the other with such power that when I am without the other I cannot recover myself, regain myself: I am lost, forever.'

 -Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, Fragments 1977.