A Sackful of Sayings No. 11

When the shadows of the moon reveal the corona of the sun, I see the shadow of music relax the subtle textures of silence.

Intersecting shadows create new luminous patterns, psychological rhythms, and ethereal dancers gently flowing into the atmosphere.

Evil, as it denies itself in the disguise of victimhood, reveals itself to the masked deity: it backs away from civilization and morality. Perhaps it is natural and normal in a never-ending ideology of feelings.

In the blink of an eye, the motes pour in.

Make hay while the sun shines, but don't build your castles out of straw.

A stitch in the side cannot set you straight.

Red clouds in the sky, pink spots in your eye.

If you cast your bread upon the waters, the crumbs come back soggy.

A man with a string of past spouses is a wife-beader. 

The early bird makes few friends with the worms.

Incantations, Curses and Sundry Invocations

1.  To be inscribed on the shell of a hardboiled goose egg and then fragmented into tiny pieces, boiled in water, and gently sipped:

PITOCH, Prince of Forgetting, before I forget who you are, come into my mind, and cleanse it of all bad feelings, memories of pain and pressures.  It is far better to purge the soul of rancor and rigidity than to sharpen your anger and plunge it into the back of those you love the best.  Oh, by the way, whoever you are, do that thing I asked you last week--which I cannot recall now--or I will fill you full of pins and grind you into dust.

2.  Upon reaching the age of discretion and realizing the fullness of your ego, when walking on a public street, it is advisable to wrap yourself in a white cloth tied tightly around your middle.  Beware of seeing pigs, dogs, monkeys and public consultants; and if you do, spit three times, pinch your nose, and walk backwards seven paces.  Should you have taken a shower within one hour, return home to wash again.  However, if you meet either a lawyer or a politician, you may avert your eyes and say the following: “I owe you nothing.  I will not pay by the minute.  I refuse to answer polls.”  On the other hand, it is good luck to meet a bicyclist, a man in a clown suit, or a woman pushing twins in a stroller. Upon arriving at your destination, sigh contentedly and remove the swaddling clothes.  You may relax and drink Diet Coke.

3.  Recipe for warding off depression.  Take four deep breaths.  Drink one half litre of purified water.  Turn around three times widdershins.  Knock gently on street lamps to hear if anyone is home.  See if you can find where the wind blows out of trees.  Count the first eight raindrops in a storm.  Sit silently at home without watching television for two whole nights.  Never drink diet beverages.

4.  It is said that a mother’s eyes sparkle when she looks into the face of her new-born infant.  This is because at the fovea centralis, deep in the retina, shaded by the swirl of pupillary dilation, there is a synaptic spark released at precisely the moment the infant smiles.  If possible, one may capture this instant of dyadic communication.  The room should be just light enough to move quietly, so as not to disrupt the intercortical discharge.  It is not possible to reproduce this effect digitally or chemically on a computer.  But everything we are or ever do depends on the memory of having experienced that moment at least once.

The Little Magazine Editor: in six parts

Part 1

Having a little poetry magazine was a windfall, in the sense that the original editor, who lived way down at the bottom of the South Island, just asked out of the blue, in a letter, of course, handwritten, as they were in those days, “Why don’t you take it over?”  I was startled.  Take over an existing literary journal, one whose name was known, which received a grant from the literary board, and that had subscribers and readers, so I presumed, was a tempting offer. 

               My wife picked up the letter I put down on the breakfast table, perused it at a glance, humming and slurping her coffee. 

               “Well,” I said, “what do you think?” 

               She mumbled something. 

               I asked what. 

               “If that’s what you want,” she said.

                “I don’t know what I want.” 

               She finished her coffee and started cleaning up after the kids, putting me and my dilemma out of her mind, it seemed.  Then she came back, half-hidden under blankets wrapped around her shoulders and big wooly hat pulled down to cover most of her face.

                “If it’s what you want, do it.”

               Outside the rain poured, and as it was winter, it could go on for weeks without a break.  Everything in the house was cold and clammy, one little one-bar electric heater made little difference.  It was a crazy new country for us.  We would never get used to it.  All of us were stuck, at least until the world economy that had closed down all our options for a return to civilization recovered.  I put on another sweater and boiled the kettle for another cup of hot tea.

               Since I did not have to reply at once, those being the days, as I said, of handwritten and occasionally typed letters, not of email or fax messages, when a quick turn-around between people who contacted one another beyond the reach of telephone calls, was a couple of weeks—a letter arrived, you read it, thought about it for a day or two, wrote a reply, posted it, and in three or four days the other party received your answer, read it, thought about it, and so on, so that almost two weeks would be the normal rhythm of writing, although overseas letters and communication with persons where there was no urgency might take on a pattern of six to eight weeks. 

               Anyway, though these matters of time between question and answer would become more important once a decision was taken, there was no rush to write a reply until I spoken further to my wife and to my friends.  After all, said I to myself, I had never done such a thing before, and there needed to be time to think through the implications of the offer, and to find out what the responsibilities of becoming an editor would be.  My wife agreed, I assumed, because she never brought the topic up again until the meeting was called.

               Again, let me remind you, dear reader, as all this happened more than forty years ago when there was no internet and local libraries were not equipped to answer the kind of technical questions that started to spring to mind as soon as I began to think through what was involved with editing a little magazine—not just the nice intellectual task of choosing manuscripts and setting out a number of pages, but the whole matter of setting up a business, negotiating with page layout experts, printers and binders, and a host of other details that at that point I could only vaguely  conceive of, such as contacting booksellers and subscription agencies—there was nothing I could do but seek out individuals who might have experience or, barring that, ideas.  I was still new to the country, unacquainted with people outside the university, and it seemed every day more and more alienated from the culture I was experiencing.  The only persons I could imagine contacting were my own students.

               Let the sun shine, let the rains come, in time of indecision and doubt being on your own is no fun.  So I pondered a few hours in the midst of the usual chores, washing dishes, vacuuming, preparing lectures, writing cheques on bills that always appeared in the midst of academic papers.  It was clear only that I had no friends among my colleagues to be trusted.  Aside from my wife and my children, the voices I interacted with were students, thus the university lecturer’s universal plight.  For me, the world of letters was precisely that, the world of letters—not real conversations, only scribbled notes that slowly made their way around the globe.

               However, two students, who were also friends, because as mature men with families they counted as more than callow youths and untrustworthy likely spies of the administration, seemed appropriate persons to consult and offer a chance at cooperation both by becoming joint editors of the little magazine we were going to run and directors of the limited liability company that would have to be set up in order to protect ourselves legally and financially. 

               John Pottlethorp was my doctoral student, an Englishman who had grown up in Africa, a staunch Catholic convert, and though very intelligent never in favour with my colleagues as they never attempted to hide at faculty meetings and always having difficulty finding teaching jobs in local high schools, making his life fairly difficult and awkward for his family, a wife and three children.  But he was very bright, as I said, interested in African literatures, and eager to find new projects to keep himself occupied, as though a family, a dissertation and a part-time teaching job weren’t enough.  Timoti Afioga Loani, a Pacific Islander, also a high school teacher of Biology, was an undergraduate, despite already having his BEd.  He too had a family, and was eager to do something for his people, so the idea of a little magazine that would print poems and stories about his people seemed exciting to him, and a way of building his ties for future political ambitions. 

               John and Timoti did not know each other until I brought them together over next the weekend for a strategy meeting at my house, their wives and multiple children to work together with my wife to make a picnic in the yard while the three men consulted on this interesting proposition of taking over a little magazine of poetry, short stories and reviews.  I had sounded them out enough to know beforehand that the idea interested them and both had already made suggestions that excited us all the more to go ahead. 

               John jumped with joy when I read out the letter that had arrived and I said I was thinking of accepting if he would join with me.  He jumped again and hooted: “Super and perfect idea!  I’d love to be in on this.”

               Timoti, a little more restrained and cautious, stood up, sat down, and asked for a small glass of water.  Then he announced: “Flattered, indeed, my dear good teacher, and I shall be honoured to participate in this venture with you.  Hoopla!”

               Now we needed to coordinate enthusiasm with practicality.  For a half hour we all hooted, jumped and got up and down a lot, until we had nearly talked ourselves into one of the greatest literary projects ever undertaken.  It was then time, thanks to many little messengers who ran in and pinched us, to go outside for the massive picnic the three women had put together on the spur of the moment.  For they, having take account of the late afternoon break in the weather and the appearance of something resembling the sun between the low dark clouds, had decided it wisest to organize an outdoors feast rather than everyone crowding into the tiny kitchen where our meeting would have to be terminated, the hunger and consequent whining of the children driving the domestic politics that day as always.

               That evening, several hours after the repast had been completed, our stomachs still full, and the wives and children engaged in the rituals of bed time in a strange house, John, Timoti and I gathered again around my kitchen table, to plot out the nitty gritty.  One of the key matters we all shared were our confessed sense of feeling completely cut off from, if not actually opposed to what we understood as the literary establishment of this country.  It wasn’t just that we were all now located in a small provincial town away from the cities where the literati congregated; but we sensed from the other magazines we looked at from time to time and failed to find any connection with what they were printing—the kind of hard-drinking, drug-consuming, masculine orientated mateship they seemed to affect to cancel out any implication that what they were doing was actually intellectual or sensitive to the imagination. 

               “Here. Here,” John intoned in his deep voice.  “This is a matter of deepest principle.”

               Timoti said softly, “I have been waiting for just such an opportunity.  We must unite together and battle for these wonderful ideas.  Hoopla!”

               We also all agreed without much discussion that evening that, because of backgrounds, none of us being born or educated in the country, it was they—the literary establishment of snobs, colonialists and nasty bigots—who were provincial and we, for all our naiveté, who were cosmopolitan.  So we drank to that, my wife having silently slipped in and out, bringing us glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice spiked with lemon zest.  Outside meanwhile as darkness closed in the rains came plopping down, not as drops but as huge buckets and tank-fulls, while growling thunder rode down the river and across the whole of the town. 

               Another thing we agreed on in principle as the basis of convincing ourselves to take up the challenge was that our cherished little magazine would be multi-cultural, multi-lingual and international.  I remember how we wrote out these principles, signed them, and placed the copies, one for each of us, in coloured folders we made for ourselves. 

               Though John was technically an Englishman, his growing up in on a big farm in East Africa and many years of itinerant labour  in Australia, made him wary of the kind of snobbish British colonial attitudes that lurked behind the pose of muteness and anti-intellectualism that marked the poetry, fiction and critical positions permeating the big literary magazines. 

               As for Timoti Afioga Loani, as a Pacific Islander and a traditional village elder and chief, he felt the prejudice against Polynesians, even when it came from the indigenous people who had assimilated into the in-group who drank together and seemed to share the same disdain for families and condescending attitude towards women.  He wished there were some kava available so we could pledge ourselves properly to fight the good fight together.  Barring that, he called out for his wife, who materialized instantly and gave him, out of small paper bag, a wedge of coconut, which he duly smashed with his fist on the table, and shared out the mess between us.  “Hoopla!”

               My own Jewish American background had proved almost from the first day I landed here to put me at odds with everyone around me, especially anyone in an administrative or managerial role, whereas ordinary people, though friendly on the surface, seemed to have no interests at all I could share.  “We’ll show those bastards, won’t we?  Bunch of shmucks.”

               So we decided two things that evening amidst the rumbling of thunder and the pounding of rain, our excitement protecting us from the cold winds that made our wives more and more snappish with looks that kept telling us it was time to go home and put the children into proper beds: one, that we would accept the offer, or at least I would, and the other two would stand behind me until the actual handing over was completed’ and second, related to that necessary caution, we would not announce our programme or change the name of the magazine but let the first few numbers gradually make clear to existing readers who we were and what our intentions were.  We also learned a letter that had arrived that morning from the editor who made the original offer, as a way of urging me to accept, that if we kept the same name for the little magazine and its basic format, at least to start with, we would inherit the small grant he had been receiving for the past five years.  That clinched the deal for us, as we assumed the grant plus the subscription base—though we were not yet aware of how small it actually was—would allow us at worst to break even in this endeavour, or so we argued to our wives when they showed some scepticism.  In fact, the three women, standing together in the doorway as we pledged ourselves to reforming the literary world, seeing how happy the idea made us, joined in by encouraging us and promising to help out with stuffing envelopes and addressing them, something they reminded us was a tedious part of the job.

Part 2

               Monday morning came, I posted the neatly typed letter of acceptance to Dunedin, and then made an appointment with a lawyer to draw up the articles of incorporation.  Each of us pledged $50 to start off a bank account in the name of the new company, Ocean Waves Publishers, Ltd.  The name of the little magazine would remain the same Ocean Waves.  Two weeks later a large envelope arrived from Dunedin with a letter signing over ownership of the journal, a pile of thirty seven manuscripts that the former editor told us he had accepted for the next issue already, and a little lined notebook with a list of thirty-six paid subscribers, fourteen which lapsed but who might be convinced to renew, the names and addresses of eleven booksellers around the country who stocked Ocean Waves, each variously taking three to six copies each time the magazine appeared, and finally a few letters from the national literary council stating that they were granting for such and such a year a grant of $250 as a subvention subject to production of at least three numbers of the magazine.  We were elated, as all this seemed small enough for us to handle as we learned the business and big enough to make it all worthwhile.  We walked to the local post office and rented a box, so we could announce our official address, along with a street address, my home, and get down to work. 

               By this time, the seasons were shifting, and the dull gloomy days more and more gave way to sharp mornings and hot afternoons, the sun blazing down at angles fixed to blind you as you walked or drove anywhere.  The season of end-of-term marking and then the sudden repose of a lush green summer, with Christmas looming.  School ended for the children.  John’s wife took their offspring, all four of them, away to see her relatives onb the Firth of Thames.  Timoti’s wife flew home to the islands with her brood, a trip long-saved for and dreamed of, but with only enough money to pay for one adult plus three children.  So there we were, the three editors on the brink of a great new adventure, at the very time when all around us people relaxed, sloughed off responsibilities and closed their shops for the duration.  There was only a mysterious sense of disorientation for John and myself, of family holidays out of alignment with the weather, and for all of us, Timoti included, of being amongst strangers at a time when they flocked together to bond on the beaches or along the shores of the huge inland lakes.

               The real sense of shock, however, came when we met again two weeks after term ended for our first official meeting to look through the material that had been accepted and therefore that we were honour bound to print in out magazine.  It was exactly the kind of material we hoped to avoid.  There were near incomprehensible poems that seemed to glorify drugs, sex and cynicism, stories about rough and violent men and the women who passively accepted their subordinate roles, and reviews of books that mocked anyone who seemed to hold any principles dear and that praised to the skies the friends of the reviewers.  Everyone I met connected to the literary world of this small country had their tales of how  the tall lanky bearded one would slip into a house at night, raid the refrigerator, seduce the daughter or wife, and leave a scribbled poem behind, as though that would make everything fine.  Or there was a new young poet, wild and boisterous, who drove a rusty old bomb around from town to town, or rather from pub to pub, bellowing out his little rhymed rants in return for jugs of beer.  It was this kind of rave and bravado that all the other less well known writers tried to imitate, and that we were made sick by reading or hearing told the provenance thereof.  But since we were stuck with this material, we had to work out some way to make it palatable to ourselves, and to insinuate in the first issue that we were going to take a different tack.  We decided that we would make an editorial statement that apologized to the authors accepted that we would space their material through the three numbers to be produced in this first year of our new policy, as this would allow us to keep that undesirable style of literature from overwhelming and categorizing us as just more of the same old same old.  Then we decided in regard to the book reviews that we would put side by side with the most obnoxious essays our own comments on the same titles.  But now we had to find the poets and short story writers who wrote in the way we favoured.  Did they exist?  After all, we couldn’t simply fill up the magazine with our own material. 

               Part of the problem was solved almost immediately because during the next few weeks we received letters and packets re-addressed from the Dunedin editor to our post office box number.  These were submissions from a variety of would be contributors.  A short while later we also learned that that previous editor had alerted his friends and sent out notices to various writers’ groups about the change in control and our new address.  We saw from these contacts that we could also send out our own notices to schools and clubs that had creative writing groups.  In a very few weeks, as it turned out, the word had spread fairly wide.  We also noticed, as we opened the submissions that quite a few came from overseas, and though in the past it was clear none of the editors around the country ever took the time to read or react to these authors, unless they were from England, only sending back their work if they enclosed postal-return slips (which it turned out paid for surface mail and not airmail), we decided that as a matter of courtesy and principle we would respond to all of these people and beg them to help spread the word on our behalf because we were interested in poetry and stories from India, Indonesia, Fiji, Australia, Samoa, Singapore, and other countries, and moreover that we would be pleased to consider writing in languages other than English, provided they sent us translations.  We did this because each of us knew the pains of rejection on racial, national or religious grounds, and we determined never to do to other people what had been done—and was still being done—to us.  It might cost us more money to have so many stamps to buy.  But it was the right thing to do.  We could hear in our collective consciousness the sniggering of all those establishment editors in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. 

               The result of our completely unbusinesslike decision?  We were soon swamped by letters from most countries in the world and spent a lot of time acknowledging receipt of their work, enclosing more notices for them to distribute, and also subscription forms explaining that we needed their support.  Very few orders actually came, but more and more submissions did.  Much of it was terrible.  Yet we tried to find verses that were acceptable and narratives that made sense.  Our policy was soon clear to us: we wanted to include as many authors as possible, not to exclude people on extraneous grounds.  With three editors, we decided we would share the initial reading, then come back with the poems or stories we liked, and if two out of the three agreed we would accept the material.  If someone sent us a dozen poems, we would try to find one we could print.  If they sent four, we looked for a few lines we could abstract—few people ever objected.  In the same way, with short stories, since we noticed beginners and amateurs tended always add on extraneous paragraphs or pages that were really little essays and homilies explaining what they were trying to say, we deleted the empty palaver; again there were few complaints, and then we apologized for the typographical error in losing the passages—and that settled the matter.  In a few years, we also learned we could make minor adjustments, lose some words and phrases in the middle of a manuscript, and re-arrange the text, with most authors never noticing and the handful who did thanking us for the editorial help.  The more we did this over close to twenty-five years, the more we received friendly letters from overseas from writers and their family, spouses or parents who thanked us for helping the writer who now felt much better about him or herself.  Of course, the big shot editors and writers in our own country really didn’t snigger any more, not even in our heads, because they simply paid no attention to what we were doing, and in due course actually forgot we existed.  We simply didn’t care.  Except, let me tell you, since another twenty-five years have passed, once in a while I meet some visiting writer-in-residence in their middle-age who recognizes my name, stops for a moment, then asks if I am the same person who once edited the magazine, and murmurs something almost positive, and then rushes off embarrassed.

Part 3

For the first few numbers of Ocean Waves that we published, we weren’t quite sure of what we were doing.  That is an understatement, of course.  For a bunch of bourgeois intellectuals, scholars, and academics it was entering a new world of practicality and commerce.  But we made our editorial choices, arranged them on pages, gluing the texts down as best we could, and taking them to a shop that had one of the new electronic copying machines, made a hundred copies of each page, returned home, folded and stapled the book together and sent it off.  By the second number we grew dissatisfied with the appearance, and after the third decided we would have to find a printer.  In those days, there were still small shops where some old man worked a small press to produce business cards, wedding invitations, death notices, birth announcements and similar small orders.  Most said they didn’t have the equipment to do a small booklet of 48-pages.  But one printer agreed to try.  We gave him our mock-up and he reproduced what we gave him perfectly, with all the uneven lines, awkwardly balanced layout, and spelling mistakes we had missed seeing.  Since it cost quite a bit, we did not ask him to do it again in a better way; after all, he had done what we had asked.  But we decided we better find a printer with some experience with booklets and books.  We walked around from shop to shop.  By chance, someone mentioned that there was a good printer about to retire from the local newspaper and maybe he could help us.  This turned out to be our miracle-worker, Fred Worthy. 

               As soon as we met him and he listened to our story, we all knew we could work together.  Fred had long ago worked for a medium-sized publisher of books in Australia before he migrated with his new wife and family and found a job at The Chronicle where he stayed for the next thirty-seven years.  But he always longed to do real artistic printing and he collected rare books and pamphlets with interesting type fonts, layouts and illustrations.  He said he was going to open a little business to teach his youngest son the trade and would love to have some artistic projects he could produce for his own pleasure and to train young Sam.  He asked if we could leave the manuscripts with him for a few days and he would make a mock-up. 

               “Don’t worry about the costs, boys,” he said.  “If we can get along well, I will become a partner with you.” 

               Three days later Fred phoned us to come to his house.  He lived just beyond the suburbs, where the new housing estates impinged on the countryside, and his home was a farmer’s cottage from the late 1940s.  It was the kind of dwelling we would become more familiar with as we created our new literary zone outside the usual concept set by the pub-crawlers and the denizens of other immoral places.  There he laid out on the heavy kitchen table the pages he had set up.  They were beautiful.  There were elaborate borders around the margins and each page was shaded in some light pastel colours, like blue and rose and green.  The poems were set in fine old-fashioned serif-face and the stories in fine more modernist styles.  Our faces beamed.

                “Well, boys” he said, “it won’t all be this eclectic.  I just wanted you to see the different techniques.  So leave it with me and I will give you a work of art for each issue.” 

               John hesitatingly asked about the cost because, he said, “Quite frankly we have a very limited budget.  I mean quite limited.” 

               Mrs. Worthy walked in, put down a large jug of fresh milk, a dish of home-made scones, and thick glasses.  Then she withdrew without a word.

              “No worry, boys,” he said.  “My work is free.  All we have to do is pay for the ink and the paper, and I will back you up until we show a profit.” 

               “Hoopla!” said Timoti. 

               I grinned from ear to ear and beyond.   “OK, partner, it’s a deal.”

               We all shook hands and, after sharing our milk and scones, went home to tell our long-suffering wives.

               That deal with Fred Worthy was another reason we decided to rename the magazine, having gone through the three numbers of the first year and used up all the material we had inherited.  From now on, everything in the magazine would be ours, including the wonderful contribution of our own printer.  

               Well, when I look back on all those issues of the little magazine, they still look great to me, even if a little old fashioned, and I bet that in a hundred years or more when somebody rediscovers who we were and what we did they will also marvel at the quality of the production of Connecting Seas, even if they still want to snigger at our editorial choices. 

Part 4

Another thing happened that we hadn’t expected.  At first, the submissions from around the country were from the big cities, many from familiar names of the authors we had decided we were opposed to, but there were also a few other writers in small towns, villages, districts with names but no streets or clusters of houses, places we had to look up on the map and were not always there.  We noticed a lot of the names signing the letters were of women.  When we wrote our acknowledgments, even before we read the poems or stories, we enclosed our notices, and where the addresses were not too far away we suggested that the editors would be happy to drive out to meet them and their friends and talk with them.  A few invitations dribbled in, and we drove to little hamlets and country districts that only had community halls in the middle of nowhere.  We occasionally found ourselves in tiny fishing ports with no more than a half dozen buildings clustered around a single wharf. 

               By that time we had read a fair number of these literary submissions—they were more often handwritten rather than typed—and were ready to announce that we would be printing a few of their verses and tales.  The meetings we arranged were in beautiful farm houses, patched-up garden sheds, out-of-place town dwellings, modernistic lifestyle blocks, unpainted district halls, tiny granny flats, relocated fishing huts, converted and rubbish-filled garages, tacked on and separate sleep-outs, microscopically tiny sun-rooms, cleaned-up and not-so-cleaned dog houses, glassed-in verandas in tiffany-styled and impromptu manners, former pubs, kilns, bakeries, and four-square shops, not to mention all sorts of shearing sheds, docking shelters, milk storage huts.  We also met in rusting bobby calf cages, redecorated cat litter boxes, kayak and rowboats turned tip over top and linked by canvas sheets, guard houses, shepherd’s lean-tos, comfortable telegraph posts, uncomfortable post-office containers, unpainted wooden crates from ice-boxes, wooden stoves and baby grand pianos.  Mostly women showed up, ladies in their late middle age or older, all having variations on the same theme: that they were isolated intellectually and needed to write down their feelings and experiences.  We all listened sympathetically and offered advice.  Stories abounded: war brides from Britain and Holland, abandoned children forcibly transported, girls who had embarrassed and shocked their staid bourgeois parents, failed actresses, adventurous and bright young females persecuted by an unyielding sexist society, would-be stage artists and acrobats, women who continued to mature long after their husbands settled into adolescent mentalities, widows of professional men who were stuck in rural ignorance, painters and sculptors who longed to live in Paris or London but could not afford to leave Wakakino or feared to abandon their own children in Frankton Junction, brave veterans of the War that ravaged their lives and had sought a few years of quiet isolation now caught in a web of poverty and family tragedies, middle-aged women stuck with senile husbands who could no longer do the chores and who feared their own children’s greed, in a word: a world of human interest waiting to be tapped.

               It was in these isolated rural areas that our subscriptions started to grow, very soon outnumbering the list we had inherited.  So that when our first number came out and was followed by many letters of complaint from the old subscribers and authors, it didn’t matter. A few people demanded their money back, either the full $5 per year they had paid or two thirds of that for the remaining two numbers.  That pleased us, in the sense that it wiped us of the obligation to please such folk.  By the second number a few months later we felt bold enough to write a new editorial statement explaining the policy we planned to follow.  Multi-cuturalism, multi-lingualism and international.  The country women easily understood that we would be providing them with a world-wide audience when we put their work next to writers from Mexico or Yugoslavia or Tonga.  The people submitting from Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe were happy to get published in a western magazine.

               We also made it clear in our notices and in the statement of policy we started to print on the page with the masthead, alongside the editors’ names, the production manager and printer, and the price schedule, that writers would not be paid—that we were, at least unintentionally, a non-profit company, and none of the editors were paid.  The only people making money out of all our work were the printer and the post office.  The more subscriptions we gained, the more pages we could contain, and the more often we could come out.  In all the years Ocean Waves existed, including after we changed its name finally to Connecting Seas, only three people ever made a fuss about not being paid and withdrew their submissions. 

Part 5

What also happened was that John Pottlethorp, who seemed to enjoy more than anything the visits to the little country towns and villages and conversing with farmers’ wives, shopkeepers and retired nurses and school teachers, decided to expand into a supplementary publication.  He started to produce a little supplementary magazine he called Rolling Hills, something he typed up himself and then mimeographed, bound with staples, and often delivered by hand to places near enough for a few hours’ drive when he went to visit with his new circle of friends.  Sometimes Rolling Hills would have a hundred pages or more, and thus thirty or four different writers, authors no one ever heard of until we came along and who are still unknown; although the truth is, and today some of those women don’t like to recognize what happened, John’s encouragement spurred them to send their manuscripts out to the bigger magazines and to publishers overseas, and then they made it.  They often left their husbands and children, adapted to the bohemian culture that was fashionable, and said in interviews on radio or in slick periodicals that they had never received any encouragement but had fought their way out of rural poverty and depravity on their own. 

               Something similar happened when Timoti Afioga Loani visited Islander communities in the towns and cities around the country and he had a good rapport with church groups, and especially young students just starting to venture into the universities.  He talked to them for hours until they hesitantly brought out little notebooks with their stories and poems.  He read these texts with them, helped them make changes and deletions, and then promised he would see the new work into print.  Of course, we backed him all the way, though we let him take all the credit.  Soon enough he was making a name for himself, and then, on the excuse that he was appointed a head teacher in high school very Polynesian in its intake and progressive in its views, he moved north with his family, and gradually he stopped driving down to our editorial meetings, no longer needed us, or the writers he had inspired, though a few who went on to literary success always thanked him in their interviews and their dedication pages.  A few years later on, we learned that he had moved back to his own island, took up his chiefly titles, and entered politics.  Though he was gone, we kept his name on the masthead, and tried as best we could to bring in new writers from Samoa, Tonga, Vanua’tu and other islands. 

               The rural people we met loved the opportunities we gave them, and though we only sent a dozen or so copies of Rolling Hills overseas to authors whose work we all decided could go there because of the content, it was something we all approved of and enjoyed.  We found that we could express ourselves in very experimental ways in it, assuming a long list of pseudonyms to match the different voices we tried to assume.  Someday a graduate researcher will have a great time trying to figure out who were the real people John was publishing and who were the fictitious authors we created.  WhoThey might also discover that occasionally we created literary debates wherein we wrote letters to the editor complaining about one or another of our mock contributions and then answered back and forth over several months, thus playing out the different schools of theory that were plaguing the main literary journals in our own cities and overseas.  In a way, then, Rolling Hills was also a very cosmopolitan magazine and it allowed the retired old men and women who lived in Tokoroa, Palmerston, Ohope , Eureka, and other wee places to be part of these great ideological currents sweeping the world thirty and forty years ago. 

Part 6

John’s departure came a few years after.  He moved across the Tasman, having found a small parish where the old Latin mass was kept up and where other eccentrics like himself congregated.  Though he had not really contributed to the magazine in a long time, the whole project gradually falling on my shoulders alone, and I negotiating more and more with overseas writers and critics to produce special numbers on all sorts of what I found very interesting combinations of topics—The Other Chinas: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and San Francisco; Islands without Neighbours; Native Traditions  in South, Central and North America; Arctic Poetry; Little Lands of Europe: Lichtenstein, Monaco and Andorra; Muslim Literature in Sub-Saharan Africa—his migration made me realize that our original great adventure was over. 

               What finally made me terminate the magazine was my own illness, serious enough to keep me in hospital and then in bed at home for many months.  When I could I sent some letters around to ask our oldest contributors and subscribers if there was anyone willing to take over the magazine.  A few women from a farming community not too far away arrived to say they were very interested.  They asked me to provide them with the details of our sales, our production costs, and the salaries we paid.  I looked shocked, since these were people we had dealt with for close to twenty years.  I told them that our sales other than subscriptions were often less than ten copies an issue, that our costs were such and such but that it would be higher if they used a different printer since Fred Worthy absorbed so much of his labour without charging us, that postage was high—and getting higher as the government kept increasing overseas airmail costs—and that no one ever was paid.  The women did not receive this information in a friendly way.  They said they wanted documents.

                “Soon,” their spokeswoman said. 

               I replied that I would do my best but, as they could see, my health was not all that great and it might take several weeks. 

               They walked out with surly looks and seemed to mumble something about hearing from their lawyer.  After they departed, I had a very bad feeling in my stomach, and tried to sleep, but kept thinking about what had just happened.  A few days later, a handwritten letter arrived from the same woman who demanded the information.  It hadn’t been posted but slipped into our mailbox at home.  She said the group would perhaps have to sue me for leading them on and trying to take advantage of their long service to the magazine.   I stared in disbelief at what was written.

               “Have they gone out of their minds?” I asked aloud.

               After grabbing the letter from my hands and perusing it, my wife told me to forget what she said, to not respond, and to just get on with my own writing.  It was sensible advice.  But it didn’t comfort me at all.  I would sit at my desk, pen in hand, waiting for an idea to come to me.  Some days I would draw circles, other days long squiggly lines, and some days nothing at all.  Then it came into my mind that the way to surmount this depression, to crawl out of the slough, was to do what I used to do in the old days: find a long complicated book, preferably in some language other than English, and take careful notes, virtually copying it all down by hand.  The intellectual atmosphere, along with the mechanical reproduction of intelligent discourse, helped.  Days went by, then weeks, and in a few months, I found the ideas starting to take shape again in my head, then the words on the page, and by the end of the year there were articles to be sent out, later collected and smoothed out to make books.  I hardly thought about the threatening message. 

               So though there was no follow up to that letter and I never saw any of these people again, it actually took more than a year to get rid of the anxiety, and the fear that any day a notice would come from some small town lawyer with a real threat to sue.  The whole business came to an end but with a bad taste left in my mouth.

               Like the loss of my closest friend, my former students who had become fellow editors and founders of the little magazine we shaped out of the strange publication we had inherited.  The whole dream of transforming the local literary scene into something that had never been tried here before faded away.  How could it have been otherwise?  How could three eccentric intellectuals, each with a different view of the world, with only the shared feeling that whatever there was out there among the drinkers and drug abusers, the arrogance and the selfishness, was not right, how could we have succeeded?  The very people we thought were our supporters, the salt of the earth, the people on the land, hard workers, honest citizens, they had finally betrayed us too.  I don’t think they knew why they did—or even that they were betraying us.  This is just the way it is down here at the bottom of the world.  It will never change.

New Book on Dreyfus: second volume in a series

In the Context of His Times:  Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet, and Jew

By Norman Simms

From the very moment Alfred Dreyfus was placed under arrest for treason and espionage, his entire world was turned upside down, and for the next five years he lived in what he called a phantasmagoria. To keep himself sane, Dreyfus wrote letters to and received letters from his wife Lucie and exercised his intellect through reading the few books and magazines his censors allowed him, writing essays on these and other texts he had read in the past, and working out problems in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. He practiced his English and created strange drawings his prison wardens called architectural or kabbalistic signs. In this volume, Norman Simms explores how Dreyfus kept himself from exploding into madness by reading his essays carefully, placing them in the context of his century, and extrapolating from them the hidden recesses of the Jewish Alsatian background he shared with the Dreyfus family and Lucie Hadamard.

Academic Studies Press

(Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History)

Published: 15 May 2013

Hardback 400 pages

ISBN 13: 9781618112361 

ISBN 10: 1618112368

A Sackful of Sayings No. 10

What is the real difference between indolence and indulgence?  One says it is a certain balance between unworthy laziness and self-conscious luxury; another sees the tension between a pleasurable hesitation and a guilty leaving go of self-control; still another suggests a playful overlapping of a necessary rest between great bouts of sleep and a  lively enjoyment of  extravagant dreams.

I was so impressed by the high level of art to be found in little galleries and shops in the backwater towns of Victoria—the painting, sculpture, architecture, along with linen table cloths from Paris, woven paper from Paris, and intricate novels from Sydney and London.  There were also marvellous, unexpected fine restaurants.  If I were young, a hundred years ago, I would still have been a stranger to this rough-hewn wilderness.

Hour after hour we drove through the countryside, trees blackened by last year’s fires and others overthrown.  Then the signs to beware of kangaroos and wombats, none of them to be seen.  The paddocks dotted with sheep and cattle, occasionally a horse or pony, and suddenly a flock of emu in a paddock.  But never any children. 

Not so long ago, a young student asked the difference between Charles I and Charles II and which one of them was Charlemagne.  Now students do not ask because they cannot hear the difference.  Tomorrow  no one will be there to give the lecture.

The convent in the hills is labyrinthine, with small twisting staircases and tiny, unimaginable cells for the sisters, who slept there without material possessions.  Above, in the narrow infirmary on the floor closest to heaven, there are now works of art, and everywhere the displays of canvas and wooden statues.  During the war, when Japanese submarines harassed the coast, children were sent here for safety.  They are gone now, like the nuns, only memories amidst the modern art.  Outside once, in the beginning, immigrants clambered over the hills searching for golden nuggets close to the surface.  They too are gone, the seekers and the riches.  None of these ghosts intermingle, as we climb the steps and listen for the echoes of eternity.

In the Chinese grocery, as I go to pay for my weekly portion of sunflower seeds, a young woman dressed in bright crimson cape and hood, smiles at me.  I tell her she looks like Little Red Riding Hood.  She smiles again and takes my money.  An uncomprehending smile.

Slow-cooked goat and duck, cups of saki, subtle flavours of a Parisian restaurant in the dusty outback Australian town.  Now that the gold’s all gone, immigrants carry other treasures with them, tastes and skills of many cuisines.  What do the ghosts in the charmed landscape see when they peer in at night?

Nine Tips for Would-be Time-Travellers

§  Don’t tell locals they have strange customs or accents; you are the unknown factor.

§  Eat as little as possible, drink even less, and leave quickly; you never know where you will be next.

§  Control your urge to laugh when listening to jokes at the next table; wait until you are alone before reacting.

§  Pay for all services with a cheerful smile and never haggle or question taxes; the exchange rate will be determined after you have left.

§  When you see your own childhood on display in the local museum, do not exclaim; complaints will appear on the next best-seller list.

§  What you assume to be a fun house may be someone’s home.

§  All goods on sale have been imported for your benefit to make you feel comfortable.  Anything you do not purchase will be returned at the airport at your expense.

§  Never plan ahead.  Do what you did the last time you passed through.

§  Keep your feet firmly planted in the present, and lean back as far as you are able before you start to yodel.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus in the Phantasmagoria
Editor: Norman Simms
Date Of Publication: Aug 2013
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-4899-2
Isbn: 1-4438-4899-9

Alfred Dreyfus saw himself caught in a phantasmagoria, a great complex enigma that needed to be solved, but all the clues seemed to be an hallucination, a will-o’-th’-wisp or what George Sand called orblutes. This book examines how Dreyfus and his wife found a powerful new kind of love through Jewish themes at the same time as they were forced to conceal their true identities. To see how Jewish Dreyfus was, the book explores his background in Alsatian culture, in the cosmopolitan Judaism of Paris, and in the customs of Mediterranean Jewry. A close reading of the Court Martial in Rennes shows Dreyfus as more than the “zinc puppet” he was called; the scenario emerging as a variation of horror fantasies popular in the fin de siècle. The book asks two questions: why did Dreyfus prefer Meissonier’s paintings to the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists we admire so much; and, why, although he appreciated Zola’s efforts on his behalf, did he not refer to his novels?

American-born Norman Simms taught for more than forty years at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand and was editor of Mentalities/Mentalités. He has written scores of books, articles and reviews, often about the phenomenon of Crypto-Judaism, and, most recently, two books on Alfred Dreyfus.

Price Uk Gbp: 59.99
Price Us Usd: 89.99

On Your Own and Going Batty in Saint Louis

There is a certain madness that comes over you when you are lonely, far away from home for the first time, and suffering from a cold that never seems to go away.  It is like you are floating through a thick fog, heavy and oppressive, with no end in sight.  A person leaves the place where he has grown up, not for the first time only but so far away and for so long, that he finds himself in a city that is strange in almost every way imaginable. Not Conrad’s Sepulchral City, all gleaming white, but something more mysterious and confusing.  Not the Heart of Darkness, luring and attractive, though what I am going to tell you has some of those qualities of seduction and mind-stealing.   Everyone says, since you are over twenty-one, you are a man, a college graduate, it’s time you made an independent life for yourself.  They are right, but that does not make it easier to bear, especially when you live in a small room in a boarding house, when you do not have a telephone of your own and hardly know anyone well enough yet to call up anyway—and who would telephone you? 

You live and study in that musty room on the third floor by yourself.  The other rooms seem to be for storage.  One is a shared toilet.  You eat breakfast there sitting on your bed and also most nights dinner too.  What is breakfast?  A piece of sliced white bread or two with some butter and maybe a piece of cheese and then a cup of tea.  What is dinner?  Since you have a hotplate and a pot, you cook up popcorn, wash the pot, then heat up a can of chilli and beans, and from that you call a meal and evening snack combined.  You usually go out after breakfast, walk briskly down the few streets to the university, crossing those big boulevards and the smaller streets with their chains to control unwanted traffic and you go to classes.  Later in the day, you sit in the library, and after that you eat something in the cafeteria for lunch, where you try to cram in vegetables and meat, so you can truthfully write home about your healthy habits, then more classes in the afternoon, and again time in the library.  Even in the evening, whether you return to the little room or stay and eat a sandwich in the cafeteria, you go to the library.  No matter what, at the end of the day you read at home. 

In the library, as a graduate student, you have a carrel. It is warm and stuffy in there, surrounded by stacks of books and scholarly journals.  Because of that, you sometimes fall asleep on your folded arms, and then, with your eyes glued shut, you wonder where you are—at home in bed or in the library?  Some deserted island in the midst of a deep, dark sea, far away from everything?  For a while you are afraid you may be exposed to public view, to ridicule, and put off opening your eyes.  Then you give in.  Does it matter?  Sometimes it is best not to know where you are.

            But if one is sick, it is not so easy to make existential choices, and life is not regular—or maybe it is too regular, too propped up in bed by books and studying.  Then one day, you wake up in your little room in the boarding house, but when you try to get up, it is not easy at all.  You feel a heavy pressure on your eyes, the world starting to spin around you, your legs too weak to bear your own body.  You force yourself to wander dizzily down the hall to the shared toilet, and then coming back it is worse than ever, you feel the vertigo down deep into your stomach, you barely are able to open the door, and then nothing.  Furniture flies around the room, around and around. All goes black.  Empty. Maybe an hour later you wake up, and somehow you have managed to fall across the bed.  You still feel sick, heavy, encased in some thick dark atmosphere.  The world is still spinning, though slower now.  Huge birds of prey zoom in towards you and then soar away into the revolving heavens.  You can do nothing.  More hours pass.  You feel a little better and make it to the toilet again, then into bed, and in a matter of seconds the whole day has passed. 

Night is falling.  Dark creatures drop out of the sky, crashing against your eyes.  A little glass of water, and then you sleep away the night and the next morning arrives.  You can read a little and eat a slice or two of bread.  Mostly you sleep.  Is it a dream?  Another day is gone and the night is a void. 

            And then the third day comes.  You think, perhaps I should phone someone.  But the instrument is three flights of stairs down in the entrance hall.  Too far.  Maybe call out if you hear the manager walking in the hall outside your door.  If she does clean the carpets, you don’t hear.  It happens while you are asleep.  Hours of blankness, sleep, and a little reading.  Only as far as the toilet.  A few slices of bread are left.  No more popcorn.  No more chilli.  Something will have to be done.

            Then out of the stultifying blackness you hear something.  You listen again inside your dream and then outside it.  A knocking on the door.  Silence.  Then it comes again.

You say, “Come in,” but you can hardly hear your own voice.  Then you sleep again for you do not know how long.  But the knocking starts again.  This time you use your strength so that your voice can be heard.  Someone opens the door.  

“Hello,” she says, “can I come in?”

“Who is it?” you ask, not recognizing the voice or the face.

“I’m in your seminar, do you remember?”

You cannot remember.

“We were worried because no one has seen you for days.”

“I’m not well,” you say.

“Do you need anything?” she asks.

You don’t know what to say.  The darkness still fills your mind, or is it an emptiness?

“Have you eaten recently?”

You try to answer “A little” but the sounds don’t form themselves into words.

“Better get you to a doctor,” she says.  “Can you get dressed?”

You are not sure what is happening but the next time you can speak and see anything, you are sitting in an office at the university medical center.  Someone is talking to you.  He is taking your pulse.

“A bit of a flu,” the doctor says.  “Bed rest is what you need.”

Then the other one, the mysterious woman who came to your room speaks.

“He hasn’t eaten in days, I’m sure.  He’s all alone in a boarding house.”

The doctor doesn’t think it is a good idea.

“Someone should look in on him, feed him, be there.”

She says she can stop by during the day between her classes and her part-time job.

I try to say something but the thick mantle of darkness remains around me, hardly pierced by these voices.

Then somehow I am back in my room, in bed, and she is there feeding me soup.  The heavy weight of darkness is lifting.  I am able to sit up.  Night, day, no way to know still.

The next day, she is there again, and she has brought more food, made tea, and wipes me down.  I try to say thanks, and ask her name.

Somehow a few hours later, when she comes back, I know that her name is Minrva, that she comes from western Iowa, and that she is a part-time teacher in one of the area’s many private schools.  She is also in my seminar on medieval French literature, along with about six other people.  Minerva, when I look at her out of a disappearing fog, seems to be in her mid-thirties, a hard-looking woman, but with not even a wisp of a smile whenever I speak to her.

A whole week seems to have gone by since she first thumped mysteriously on my door.  By the time I am ready and well-enough to return to classes, she has become a friend, and she offers to stop by to drive me to university if I am not feeling up to it.  Each time I have seen her since I was able to get up and do things for myself, it becomes clear that she has spent a lot of time with me—and a lot of money getting me food and driving me around parts of Saint Louis I had never seen before.  Each time I have seen her, too, her face has seemed softer and more attractive to me.  Maybe she has smiled.

We have started to talk about our backgrounds, and everything she says seems exotic and confusing to me.  A little voice whispers to me that she is the classical older woman, the kind we read about in nineteenth-century novels, who initiates young men into life.  I have a nagging suspicion that I am too naive even for that, and that she only sees me as a helpless Jewish kid from New York, and that she has no interest in me except as a homeless waif. 

Other voices begin to whisper to me, too, but they aren’t  dreamy, romantic voices in my head shaped by archaic literature.  They are other people in our seminar and people who I don’t even know who have seen her paying a lot of attention to me.  Sometimes they merely say, in a low, casual way, I should watch out for her because she has a reputation.  The word has a greyish tinge to it.  Sometimes they say with more intensity, that I should take care of myself because Minerva is known to beguile young men, tease them, and cause rather unpleasant scenes.  The words may not have been used but the intent was there, and I feel squeamish to listen.  Some of the stories oozing around my consciousness suggest she not only likes younger men, such as myself, but also younger women.  Other circulating rumours  are more insidious and come when I look troubled by what is being said, as though it were necessary that I be properly warned and wakened from a bad situation: that she has been seen going around with young students at the high school where she teaches part time and that parents have started to complain.  Week by week, the innuendos and the gossip become cruder and more obscene. 

The way I start to defend her and myself makes these other people angry, and some classmates simply stop talking to me and shake their heads.  A few people who had started to become friendly tell me that if I go on seeing her, they can’t waste their time with me.  The innuendo and the threats mount.  But though I really have nothing to do with Minerva in the way these remarks suggest, I cannot dismiss them altogether, and suspect myself of being really quite stupid when it comes to women, especially these mid-western types, older than I am, and so alien to the nice Jewish community I grew up in back in Brooklyn.  Yet I keep reminding myself that she is a person who saved me from what could have been a very serious situation, was kind when others were indifferent, and has remained friendly and helpful.  To be truthful, my naiveté also played its part.  And my loneliness.  I simply could not accept those nasty stories about her and what they implied about our relationship.  They didn’t match my experience.  Though I could not point to any single inappropriate word she said or gesture on her part, in regard to sexuality, neither could I completely deny the feelings I had which had already changed from mere thankfulness and appreciation of her as a good Samaritan or a friend into something I hoped would become more: my fantasy of her leading me into knowledge of those things that men and women reputedly did with each other in passionate moments.  Since I had no experience in the reality of sex, but only knew about it from books read furtively and from my own dreams, I held firm to the idea that she was gently introducing me to a relationship that I would never have known how to initiate or pursue on my own.

In the second semester, Minerva and I found ourselves together again in another seminar, this one on the theories of courtly love, fin’amor.  For all her supposed experience and hardness, she started to ask me to help her understand the books we were studying, such as Andreas Capellaneus’s De honesti amandi, The True Lover, and Guillaume Machaut’s and Jean de Meun’s La Roman de la Rose, The Romance of the Rose, and a lot of shorter lyrics and tales by Chaucer.  We started to meet alone in the evenings at a small restaurant near the university to discuss these ideas, and after a while she invited me to come to her apartment on a Sunday afternoon to listen to her first draft of a paper she was going to read the next week at the seminar.  I felt both flattered to be seen as an expert in the art of love, realizing that what I knew was based on the scholastic and rational games that these medieval authors were playing, not at all on any real understanding of the physical or emotional intimacies, and also excited by the anticipation of some sort of closeness that might transcend the relationship we had, far more chaste than any of the whisperers could imagine.  I doubted any of them really knew I was still a virgin and had never seen a woman naked in front of me.  But I intuited that Minerva realized this and that she was planning to introduce me to such knowledge.  At the same time, all those terrible stories came back to me, so that I was afraid of what she might do, and hoped deep down that she would only talk about her seminar paper.

Minerva picked me up late in the afternoon that Sunday, early in February, a dark and dreary winter’s day, as they can be in Missouri.  Not much talk in the car as we passed through the more dangerous neighbourhoods of Saint Louis, but then she crossed over into Forest Park and off into a very pleasant middle-class neighbourhood, hardly one where you would expect students to live.  Big houses, wide lawns, clean streets.  Everyone else I was getting to know in the university lived in the small rows of brownstone buildings that were near the campus.  She drove into a small cul de sac, parked part way down a driveway, and said, “Here we are.”  The house was set on a small rise, surrounded by bushes, all bare in February, and already crossed by shadows making weird patterns on the walls.

“Do you live alone?” I asked, looking around the rather clean and tidy front room she ushered me into, just off a dining-kitchen alcove.  These were not qualities I expected, as again my room and the tiny flats shared by other graduate students I had started to visit was a hodgepodge of cheap chairs and cushions, make-do bookshelves, and saggy beds.  Her house was like a Doris Day movie set.

“No,” she answered, “but the others, my room-mates, are off for the weekend.  They won’t be back until late tonight.”

I am not sure I wanted to know more about who they were, particularly whether they were male or female.  In those days, still, mixed flatting was not common, even frowned upon.  But then Minerva was much older than the rest of us.  As I didn’t ask any questions, she didn’t proffer any further information.  I was afraid of what might happen and what I wanted to happen.

“You sit here,” she said, pointing to a table with five chairs around it, ”and I’ll make us some coffee.  Or do you want tea or anything else?”

I said I would prefer tea, and wondered what “anything else” could mean. 

I sat down.  There were books and papers on the big oaken table. Not strewn about, but nearly placed in piles, along with several coloured pencils, erasers, and paperclips.  There was also a rather ashtray containing about half a dozen butts and some broken wooden matches.  Even given those times, I found it odd that people still smoked.  As I looked, I could also see rings stained on the table top probably from glasses of wine or liquor.  The stains bothered me.  The rings were omens of something mysterious.

“Drinks will be ready in a few minutes.  Have some cookies meanwhile,” she said, placing a small platter in front of me.  “Home baked,” she said, ‘from my mother.  She sends them to me every week .  Try one.”

It flashed into my head that these might be made with illicit drugs of some kind.  I had seen a movie about that a few weeks earlier.  I wondered whether I should give them a try.  But I hesitated, and she said, “I’m not trying to poison you.  Or they not good enough for your sophisticated New York pallet.” 

“My what?” I said.

She laughed.  “I’m fooling with you, silly boy.   Don’t get up on your high horse.”

A funny pain went through my chest. 

When she brought a cup of tea for me and coffee for herself, we got down to work.  She started by reading me the opening of her seminar paper written in pencil lines on a long yellow pad of legal paper.

Courtly love is something new in the western world.  Until about the twelfth century, the term for love meant three different things: (1) the power in the universe that binds all things together, and both Plato and Aristotle had variations on this, with Plato’s notion including homosexual relations between men and men and boys, but not between a man and woman, while Aristotle thought of love as something like the attraction of objects to one another in gravity; (2) the sexual energies of procreation amongst all living things, including plants, animals, heavenly bodies and abstract ideas,  and it could also refer to the social bonds in a society, particularly in feudal relationships where different degrees of power meant that subjects loved their liege lords, their king and their God by feeling the attraction of the higher beings as giving them reflected strength and protection, while those in the higher positions condescended in their love in a paternalistic manner; and (3) Christianity saw in love a moral force of forgiveness, salvation and control over the world.

 What happened when writers began to write about refined love, fin’amor or doucie luf, was that they added new dimensions to these older concepts.  Thus the classical concept of natural love now was personalized and given the power to make the participants more spiritual.  As in Neoplatonism, abstract ideas became conscious and volitional creatures, so that the universe was a kind of family, with all the tensions between care and jealousy.  Then the ideal paradigm changed from that of the classical city, the polis, to that of the feudal court, with aristocratic participants, and with women treated as though they had the power once thought to exist in men alone but yet imagined as grammatically feminine entities.  Moreover, what had been acceptable in ancient Greece, homosexual love, was frowned upon by the Church; and rejected as sins, just as the mythical masks and metamorphoses that played with copulation between various species, including gods and humans or humans and plants or animals also was anathematized.

 Yet despite the Christian emphasis on love within marriage and moderated passion for the sake of procreation as almost a necessary evil, courtly poets, to please the newly empowered women, transferred into their relationship the ideals of classical friendship, a relationship, however, made spicy and exciting because it was adulterous and furtive, and very often unconsummated.  Finally, the rules of courtly love were also superimposed on the ideals of chivalry, and the lover sought to win the attentions and the ultimate favour of his Madonna by performances of bravery, dancing, singing, story-telling, and love-talking.  Rather than entering the game of love as a warrior, he sought to be a gentle man, soft and sentimental. 

“That’s as far as I have gone.  What do you think?” Minerva said. 

She handed me her draft of the paper.

As I read it over, I hummed approving noises, sipped my chamomile tea, and stole little looks at her as she observed me perusing the script. 

“Well,” she said, is it going in the right direction?”

She said it in a way that made me feel she didn’t really want adverse or constructive criticism, only approval, and her look actually made me think she might throw me out of the house—and pretty far from where I lived—on my own. 

“I like it.  I do.  Only...” and I hesitated.

“Please, tell me if there is anything you don’t like.  After all, that is why I asked you over.”

I still sensed something hostile in her voice, and I couldn’t help thinking about the awful things people had said about her at the time she was looking after me and going out of her way to help me feel comfortable in Saint Louis.  Nor should I neglect to say that I was also hoping this visit to her house would be more than a study session.  The more I had been with her, the more I felt something growing inside me that was quite different from the callow crushes I had for other girls.  Minerva, after all, was an older woman and she seemed to emanate a kind of sexual allure no one else had ever had around me.

“To be honest,” I said, “there are a few little tiny things here that you might want to sharpen up a little bit.”

She leaned towards me.  Her breath was warm and sweet.  She put her hand on my arm.

“You see, for one, I think you have to distinguish between what someone like Capallaneus the Clerk writes and what the troubadours and trouvères sing, and that, too, from the guys that write the long romances, I mean like Chretien de Troyes and that from Guillaume Machaut and Jeun de Meung with... with....”

Manuscript illumination of the Roman de la Rose

 “Hold on,” she said.  “Don’t just throw names at me.  I have only read some of them.  In fact, most of the time I just read the editors’ introductions and some of the  critics.”

Yes, I thought, that was it.  It now seemed evident by the superficial slickness of her style, the huge generalities or banalities, and the lack of subtlety in her writing.  But it was not something I wanted to say to her myself.  The fog was almost lifting.  Each time some defect in her character rose to the surface and confirmed the stories I had been told about Minerva, the more I had to admit that my intentions became increasingly dishonourable, if I may put it that way.  No one would have noticed, if they were casually looking on, and you would need to check my pulse and blood pressure to measure the changes. 

“Let’s put it this way,” I said, trying to sound at once natural and pompous, “you are dealing with a couple or maybe with three centuries, with different rhetorical genres, and even with different languages, like Latin, French, and English.  So you can’t clump them all together as variations of one another.”

I held my breath, waiting for the explosion of anger, just as barely an hour before I anticipated some kind of sexual advance on my virginity.

“Oh, Amos,” she said, “you really are a clever boy.”

I just didn’t know how much sarcasm she dripped into those words and hoped she was covering her own embarrassment.

“Maybe you better have some more of this nice soothing tea before we go on, or would you like something else, like a glass of wine.  It would smooth over the rough spots we have to deal with, won’t it?”

There it was.  I knew it.  She was on the attack and I wouldn’t be able to resist, unless I collapsed into a silly bundle of giggling. 

“Tea’s fine,” I answered.  “Let’s try to concentrate and finish as much as we can this afternoon.”

Well, I think that’s what I told her.  Perhaps I was much less coherent and mumbled in a way that made her think I was slipping towards an encounter she didn’t want at all.  She also probably said things, partly encouraging, partly teasing, partly seductive, but in all events, she refilled the teapot, poured me another steamy cup of chamomile tea, and leaned more closely as I gave her my critique.  Now, more than just her sweet rhythmic breathing and her hand pressed on my arm, I could feel her heavy rounded chest rubbing against me.  Or was that also a dream?

I spoke to her, waving my arms about as much as I could,  about how the courts of love run by beautiful princesses and queens in Provence and in Catalonia, then about the other kinds of courtly societies in northern France and into the Rhineland, and how different they were from the small fairly primitive households of kings and barons in England, and why the English lords brought over French poets and singers, and what was important about the small Italian towns and cities, all the way from what is now the French Mediterranean region around Avignon to the aristocrats and middle-class elites on the Peninsula,  playing with the ideas of  these new sweet sounds, la dolce vita nuova  As I spoke, I found my own breathing difficult and un-rhythmical, since the whole idea of the naive lover approaching his superior lady was analogous to my own situation.  Minerva, I was sure now, was playing with my emotions, heating me up, then pushing me away, making remarks that seemed innocent in themselves but in context undermined my confidence, little as there was of it, to let me know she was in control of the whole game of love.

“Can I ask you something, Amos?” she said, pronouncing my name with a drawn out first vowel and a voluptuous hissing at the end.

I nodded my assent, and my head’s motions seemed to gently stroke her body by some kind of magnetic power.  I could feel goose bumps on the back of my neck.

“You say that a lot of these poets really didn’t believe what they were talking about and the whole thing is a kind of joke.  So was there any foreplay and then bedding in these sessions?  I mean, did the ladies like these songs and get pleasure from pretending to cuckold their husbands, or did they want more, you know, the real thing?”

“Well, people in those performative games were on display, not really carrying on secret trysts, and the husbands were in on the tricks, even when they really were away, like off to the Holy Land for the Crusades, or dawdling with their mistresses out in the woods in their hunting lodges.  The lovers, that is, the young men singing these ballads and sonnets, and the ladies, perhaps ten or fifteen years older, a lot more experienced, traded jewellery, bracelets and rings, had hearts made of gold that they broke and shared between them, and I think maybe, for God’s sake, the young men found it very hard to control themselves and couldn’t really channel their passions into sweet games of love but sometimes begged the women for some, you know, touching and stuff, and—”

“You are such a funny, fellow,” Minerva said.

I must have looked very troubled.

“Yes, you are.  I think you want to touch me, don’t you?”

I wasn’t sure I hear what she said, or understood all the words, or even heard anything at all, but I so much wanted to that I sat there expectantly.

She gave me a little kiss on my cheek.

“But I am not interested in you that way,” she said.

I blushed horribly.  The heat burned my face.  It was what girls always said.  They liked me as a friend, but as a boy friend—No way, José.

“However,” she said, “if you finish helping me with this essay, I may give you a little reward.”

I stammered something that made no sense to me.  Did she really say that?  She laughed and said I should proceed, please, as it was getting late, if we were to complete the assignment and have time for the present she had in mind.

It took about a half hour for me to plod through the rest of her essay, making pedantic remarks on the tone, the texture and the tensions in the various romances, both the Arthurian characters and adventures in Chretien de Troyes and the two kinds of allegory in The Romance of the Rose, the light psychological analytical view of how to seduce the rose-bud demoiselle and the heavier social commentary of the war of the sexes.  As I was reaching the climax to my peroration and discussing the way the Lover (Amant) confronted the Danger (Daunger) of the Rose’s self-protection and finally broke through the wicker fence that surrounded her rosary to rob her of her little budding flower, Minerva started to blow into my ear, tickle my neck, and wind herself around me.  I could swear she did, at least at the time.  Then I heard her speak further.

“You see, for me it’s not about whether I am love with a man or not, or even, as you probably have heard our dear class-mates whispering behind my back, the occasional young female, it’s the pleasure it gives to me.  If it can relieve you of some of your uptight New York and annoying Jewish prudery, Amos, well, that’s just a bonus for you.  Now all I ask of you is that you keep quiet for the next half hour, and then shut your silly mouth for the rest of your life about what is happening here.”

So it happened.  Or did it?  It was like a dream. 

She was straightening out the pages on the table, looking at her watch and signalling to me that it was time for me to leave her place. 

“Thanks for all your help.  I didn’t take a lot of notes, so I will sit down right after dinner and write out what you said.  Then we’ll have to see what happens in old Grimshaw’s seminar on Tuesday, won’t we?  Help me out, then, too, please, in case anyone starts to ask embarrassing questions. “

I am not quite sure of what she said then.  It was all so banal. 

“And we better keep all this a secret.  Don’t want the professor saying I didn’t do my own work.  Now, Amos, let’s get you home.”

*  *  *

I don’t know exactly how it happened, or rather how it started.  But sometime after midnight, I suddenly woke up and felt a panic of cold shivers up and down my body.  Had someone broke open the window and let the last blasts of winter in?  A silent scream, mouth distorted like a Edvard Munch painting.  Maybe it was something someone said in class earlier in the day or a conversation overheard two or three days before.  But there it was in my head, flashing up like a bright, blinding neon sign: “You better go to Kansas. “ It seemed an absolute command.  She had helped me in my time of need: now it was my turn. Not my turn, my duty.  An obligation.

Within moments, I was dressed, racing down the stairs, and entering the car I had borrowed from a friend in order to do some errands the next day.  After winding out of the small, closed streets, showing my resident pass to the sleepy guard at each gate, I moved into the broad streets of Saint Louis.  There was hardly any traffic at this hour.  A bus, a taxi, and then nothing. Without a road map, unfamiliar with the highways leading away from the city, I realized I didn’t even know which way was west or north, let alone which road to take.  Where did she live?  The name of a small town came into my mind, something she mentioned months before in a conversation in the student union building when we were still getting to know one another.  The words of an old song went round and round, the names of a railway line, rhythmic, insistent.  Odd, until that very moment it had not struck me that the name of the town in the song was also her family name. 

There was a large service station ahead, fully lit up though it was the middle of the night.  I drove in both to buy a map and to fill up with gas, since it would be a long ride, probably hours and hours on those notoriously straight and mesmerizing highways that go out into the prairies.  Overhead I could hear some flapping, like a flock of birds of prey, gathering, homing in for the kill.  As the attendant filled the tank, I walked to the counter, asked for a map that showed the way from Missouri to Kansas, and also mentioned that I was looking for a specific place.  The girl passed over the map but said nothing about the town. On the counter, there were shadows now.  It was not birds, the girl said: “Bats.  They like the bright lights, though it confuses them.  They’ll be gone soon enough.  But watch out,” she said.   

I paid for the map and the gas, and then asked again if she knew how far it was to that place.  She said she never heard of it.  Then she said perhaps I meant another town, one that sounded somewhat like what I asked for. Overhead now, hundreds, maybe thousands of black shapes, flying around, flapping and flapping, around and around, not dipping or soaring, a tornado of weird whirring bats.  Then there was a crash, one, then two, and another smashed into the huge sign on the service station, and the whole contingent suddenly zoomed into the sky, whirled about, and were gone.  The silence sank down again heavy on the street.  It was past 2 a.m.

Back in the car, before turning on the ignition, I opened the map to check the list of towns and cities in Kansas.  It took a while to find, but there they were, two towns at opposite ends of the state with names that were fairly alike.  Not knowing what to do, I thought it best just to get going, at least go in the right direction and when I crossed the state line stop again and think it through.  But instead of that, what happened was that I drove fairly slowly around and around the big traffic circle in which the service station was located.  Round and round.  Like the bats a few moments before.  I opened the window on the driver’s side.  Down on the ground were a few dead bodies: ugly flying rats, their white teeth glinting in the light from the service station.  The cool air seemed to clear my mind a little. I continued to drive slowly. Round and round.  I started to wake up, as though out of a long, mad dream, the kind that seem to last for hours but really just take a few seconds.

As my head cleared, the whole feeling of panic was gone, the sense that there was deep bound of obligation to go to where Minerva had gone, perhaps home, as it now seemed, where her father had died, or so the rumour had travelled through the seminar when she failed to turn up twice running.  Maybe this obligation was something like love, an instinctive  bonding that had taken place when she cared for me during my illness and gradually made me feel more at ease in the strange city and in the strange university.  Maybe a mad passion to show her up, to do something that would make her realize that, while I was grateful, intensely so, for all she had done, I was more angry at her for trapping me in a relationship beyond my comprehension, when she invited me to her house and made me think she was going to seduce me.  Maybe I was more angry with myself for being so naive and never realizing that all the stories told about her were true, though not exactly in the way I had imagined, because my own imagination was shaped by such different experiences than she had known.  The students who whispered those scandalous things about her had not exactly said what I thought they did, though, as I would later find out, what she was said to have done was bad enough.  Maybe I misconstrued the whole situation, expecting things that were really quite ridiculous, and so missing the clues and signs of her own pain, her own need to have me as a friend, someone who wouldn’t be like the men she had known—and the women, or younger boys she was known to have been too friendly with—because she thought she could trust me, and therefore had to test me more and more, never knowing exactly how to approach someone with my background.

Suddenly, the bats returned in their thousands back to the island of light, coming in at top speed, as though on the attack, and swirled around the service station, round and round.  They were on a level as though fragments of a disintegrated moon, one of the unknown rings of Saturn, with the scream of their excitement somewhere between a whirling rush of inanimate objects and the silent danger of unknown creatures.  I pressed on the accelerator and broke out of the zone.  

There was still no traffic on the roads, and only a few articulated trucks racing down the highway, out of the suburbs of Saint Louis and off into the darkness that was the rest of the state of Missouri.  I kept the window open and the cool air calmed me down more.  I was no longer driving to find my way to Kansas, somewhere out there, far beyond where the stars dipped down and rolled along the western horizon, but to find my way out of this mad dream, this compulsive passion to pay back a debt of gratitude to someone I no longer felt attracted to in any way.  By four in the morning, I was back in my room at the boarding house, curled up in the bed and trying to get warm.  At last, a comfortable, soothing sleep covered me, and I slipped into a healing oblivion.  

            Then out of the stultifying blackness you hear something.  You listen again inside your dream and then outside it.  A knocking on the door.  Silence.  Then it comes again.

You say, “Come in,” but you can hardly hear your own voice.  Then you sleep again for you do not know how long.  But the knocking starts again.  This time you use your strength so that your voice can be heard.  Someone opens the door.  

“Hello,” she says, “can I come in?”

“Who is it?” you ask, not recognizing the voice or the face.

“I’m in your seminar, do you remember?”

You cannot remember.

“We were worried because no one has seen you for days.”

“I’m not well,” you say.

“Do you need anything?” she asks.

You don’t know what to say.  The darkness still fills your mind, or is it an emptiness?

“Have you eaten recently?”

You try to answer “A little” but the sounds don’t form themselves into words.

“Better get you to a doctor,” she says.  “Can you get dressed?”

You are not sure what is happening but the next time you can speak and see anything, you are sitting in an office at the university medical center.  Someone is talking to you.  He is taking your pulse.

“A bit of a flu,” the doctor says.  “Bed rest is what you need.”

Then the other one, the mysterious woman who came to your room speaks.

“He hasn’t eaten in days, I’m sure.  He’s all alone in a boarding house.”

The doctor doesn’t think it is a good idea.

“Someone should look in on him, feed him, be there.”

She says she can stop by during the day between her classes and her part-time job.

I try to say something but the thick mantle of darkness remains around me, hardly pierced by these voices.

Then somehow I am back in my room, in bed, and she is there feeding me soup.  The heavy weight of darkness is lifting.  I am able to sit up.  Night, day, no way to know still.

The next day, she is there again, and she has brought more food, made tea, and wipes me down.  I try to say thanks, and ask her name.

Somehow a few hours later, when she comes back, I know that her name is Minrva, that she comes from western Iowa, and that she is a part-time teacher in one of the area’s many private schools.  She is also in my seminar on medieval French literature, along with about six other people.  Minerva, when I look at her out of a disappearing fog, seems to be in her mid-thirties, a hard-looking woman, but with not even a wisp of a smile whenever I speak to her.

A whole week seems to have gone by since she first thumped mysteriously on my door.  By the time I am ready and well-enough to return to classes, she has become a friend, and she offers to stop by to drive me to university if I am not feeling up to it.  Each time I have seen her since I was able to get up and do things for myself, it becomes clear that she has spent a lot of time with me—and a lot of money getting me food and driving me around parts of Saint Louis I had never seen before.  Each time I have seen her, too, her face has seemed softer and more attractive to me.  Maybe she has smiled.

We have started to talk about our backgrounds, and everything she says seems exotic and confusing to me.  A little voice whispers to me that she is the classical older woman, the kind we read about in nineteenth-century novels, who initiates young men into life.  I have a nagging suspicion that I am too naive even for that, and that she only sees me as a helpless Jewish kid from New York, and that she has no interest in me except as a homeless waif. 

Other voices begin to whisper to me, too, but they aren’t  dreamy, romantic voices in my head shaped by archaic literature.  They are other people in our seminar and people who I don’t even know who have seen her paying a lot of attention to me.  Sometimes they merely say, in a low, casual way, I should watch out for her because she has a reputation.  The word has a greyish tinge to it.  Sometimes they say with more intensity, that I should take care of myself because Minerva is known to beguile young men, tease them, and cause rather unpleasant scenes.  The words may not have been used but the intent was there, and I feel squeamish to listen.  Some of the stories oozing around my consciousness suggest she not only likes younger men, such as myself, but also younger women.  Other circulating rumours  are more insidious and come when I look troubled by what is being said, as though it were necessary that I be properly warned and wakened from a bad situation: that she has been seen going around with young students at the high school where she teaches part time and that parents have started to complain.  Week by week, the innuendos and the gossip become cruder and more obscene. 

The way I start to defend her and myself makes these other people angry, and some classmates simply stop talking to me and shake their heads.  A few people who had started to become friendly tell me that if I go on seeing her, they can’t waste their time with me.  The innuendo and the threats mount.  But though I really have nothing to do with Minerva in the way these remarks suggest, I cannot dismiss them altogether, and suspect myself of being really quite stupid when it comes to women, especially these mid-western types, older than I am, and so alien to the nice Jewish community I grew up in back in Brooklyn.  Yet I keep reminding myself that she is a person who saved me from what could have been a very serious situation, was kind when others were indifferent, and has remained friendly and helpful.  To be truthful, my naiveté also played its part.  And my loneliness.  I simply could not accept those nasty stories about her and what they implied about our relationship.  They didn’t match my experience.  Though I could not point to any single inappropriate word she said or gesture on her part, in regard to sexuality, neither could I completely deny the feelings I had which had already changed from mere thankfulness and appreciation of her as a good Samaritan or a friend into something I hoped would become more: my fantasy of her leading me into knowledge of those things that men and women reputedly did with each other in passionate moments.  Since I had no experience in the reality of sex, but only knew about it from books read furtively and from my own dreams, I held firm to the idea that she was gently introducing me to a relationship that I would never have known how to initiate or pursue on my own.

In the second semester, Minerva and I found ourselves together again in another seminar, this one on the theories of courtly love, fin’amor.  For all her supposed experience and hardness, she started to ask me to help her understand the books we were studying, such as Andreas Capellaneus’s De honesti amandi, The True Lover, and Guillaume Machaut’s and Jean de Meun’s La Roman de la Rose, The Romance of the Rose, and a lot of shorter lyrics and tales by Chaucer.  We started to meet alone in the evenings at a small restaurant near the university to discuss these ideas, and after a while she invited me to come to her apartment on a Sunday afternoon to listen to her first draft of a paper she was going to read the next week at the seminar.  I felt both flattered to be seen as an expert in the art of love, realizing that what I knew was based on the scholastic and rational games that these medieval authors were playing, not at all on any real understanding of the physical or emotional intimacies, and also excited by the anticipation of some sort of closeness that might transcend the relationship we had, far more chaste than any of the whisperers could imagine.  I doubted any of them really knew I was still a virgin and had never seen a woman naked in front of me.  But I intuited that Minerva realized this and that she was planning to introduce me to such knowledge.  At the same time, all those terrible stories came back to me, so that I was afraid of what she might do, and hoped deep down that she would only talk about her seminar paper.

Minerva picked me up late in the afternoon that Sunday, early in February, a dark and dreary winter’s day, as they can be in Missouri.  Not much talk in the car as we passed through the more dangerous neighborhoods of Saint Louis, but then she crossed over into Forest Park and off into a very pleasant middle-class neighborhood, hardly one where you would expect students to live.  Big houses, wide lawns, clean streets.  Everyone else I was getting to know in the university lived in the small rows of brownstone buildings that were near the campus.  She drove into a small cul de sac, parked part way down a driveway, and said, “Here we are.”  The house was set on a small rise, surrounded by bushes, all bare in February, and already crossed by shadows making weird patterns on the walls.

“Do you live alone?” I asked, looking around the rather clean and tidy front room she ushered me into, just off a dining-kitchen alcove.  These were not qualities I expected, as again my room and the tiny flats shared by other graduate students I had started to visit was a hodgepodge of cheap chairs and cushions, make-do bookshelves, and saggy beds.  Her house was like a Doris Day movie set.

“No,” she answered, “but the others, my room-mates, are off for the weekend.  They won’t be back until late tonight.”

I am not sure I wanted to know more about who they were, particularly whether they were male or female.  In those days, still, mixed flatting was not common, even frowned upon.  But then Minerva was much older than the rest of us.  As I didn’t ask any questions, she didn’t proffer any further information.  I was afraid of what might happen and what I wanted to happen.

“You sit here,” she said, pointing to a table with five chairs around it, ”and I’ll make us some coffee.  Or do you want tea or anything else?”

I said I would prefer tea, and wondered what “anything else” could mean. 

I sat down.  There were books and papers on the big oaken table. Not strewn about, but nearly placed in piles, along with several coloured pencils, erasers, and paperclips.  There was also a rather ashtray containing about half a dozen butts and some broken wooden matches.  Even given those times, I found it odd that people still smoked.  As I looked, I could also see rings stained on the table top probably from glasses of wine or liquor.  The stains bothered me.  The rings were omens of something mysterious.

“Drinks will be ready in a few minutes.  Have some cookies meanwhile,” she said, placing a small platter in front of me.  “Home baked,” she said, ‘from my mother.  She sends them to me every week .  Try one.”

It flashed into my head that these might be made with illicit drugs of some kind.  I had seen a movie about that a few weeks earlier.  I wondered whether I should give them a try.  But I hesitated, and she said, “I’m not trying to poison you.  Or they not good enough for your sophisticated New York pallet.” 

“My what?” I said.

She laughed.  “I’m fooling with you, silly boy.   Don’t get up on your high horse.”

A funny pain went through my chest. 

When she brought a cup of tea for me and coffee for herself, we got down to work.  She started by reading me the opening of her seminar paper written in pencil lines on a long yellow pad of legal paper.

Courtly love is something new in the western world.  Until about the twelfth century, the term for love meant three different things: (1) the power in the universe that binds all things together, and both Plato and Aristotle had variations on this, with Plato’s notion including homosexual relations between men and men and boys, but not between a man and woman, while Aristotle thought of love as something like the attraction of objects to one another in gravity; (2) the sexual energies of procreation amongst all living things, including plants, animals, heavenly bodies and abstract ideas,  and it could also refer to the social bonds in a society, particularly in feudal relationships where different degrees of power meant that subjects loved their liege lords, their king and their God by feeling the attraction of the higher beings as giving them reflected strength and protection, while those in the higher positions condescended in their love in a paternalistic manner; and (3) Christianity saw in love a moral force of forgiveness, salvation and control over the world.

 What happened when writers began to write about refined love, fin’amor or doucie luf, was that they added new dimensions to these older concepts.  Thus the classical concept of natural love now was personalized and given the power to make the participants more spiritual.  As in Neoplatonism, abstract ideas became conscious and volitional creatures, so that the universe was a kind of family, with all the tensions between care and jealousy.  Then the ideal paradigm changed from that of the classical city, the polis, to that of the feudal court, with aristocratic participants, and with women treated as though they had the power once thought to exist in men alone but yet imagined as grammatically feminine entities.  Moreover, what had been acceptable in ancient Greece, homosexual love, was frowned upon by the Church; and rejected as sins, just as the mythical masks and metamorphoses that played with copulation between various species, including gods and humans or humans and plants or animals also was anathematized.

 Yet despite the Christian emphasis on love within marriage and moderated passion for the sake of procreation as almost a necessary evil, courtly poets, to please the newly empowered women, transferred into their relationship the ideals of classical friendship, a relationship, however, made spicy and exciting because it was adulterous and furtive, and very often unconsummated.  Finally, the rules of courtly love were also superimposed on the ideals of chivalry, and the lover sought to win the attentions and the ultimate favour of his Madonna by performances of bravery, dancing, singing, story-telling, and love-talking.  Rather than entering the game of love as a warrior, he sought to be a gentle man, soft and sentimental. 

“That’s as far as I have gone.  What do you think?” Minerva said. 

She handed me her draft of the paper.

As I read it over, I hummed approving noises, sipped my chamomile tea, and stole little looks at her as she observed me perusing the script. 

“Well,” she said, is it going in the right direction?”

She said it in a way that made me feel she didn’t really want adverse or constructive criticism, only approval, and her look actually made me think she might throw me out of the house—and pretty far from where I lived—on my own. 

“I like it.  I do.  Only...” and I hesitated.

“Please, tell me if there is anything you don’t like.  After all, that is why I asked you over.”

I still sensed something hostile in her voice, and I couldn’t help thinking about the awful things people had said about her at the time she was looking after me and going out of her way to help me feel comfortable in Saint Louis.  Nor should I neglect to say that I was also hoping this visit to her house would be more than a study session.  The more I had been with her, the more I felt something growing inside me that was quite different from the callow crushes I had for other girls.  Minerva, after all, was an older woman and she seemed to emanate a kind of sexual allure no one else had ever had around me.

“To be honest,” I said, “there are a few little tiny things here that you might want to sharpen up a little bit.”

She leaned towards me.  Her breath was warm and sweet.  She put her hand on my arm.

“You see, for one, I think you have to distinguish between what someone like Capallaneus the Clerk writes and what the troubadours and trouvères sing, and that, too, from the guys that write the long romances, I mean like Chretien de Troyes and that from Guillaume Machaut and Jeun de Meung with... with....” 

 “Hold on,” she said.  “Don’t just throw names at me.  I have only read some of them.  In fact, most of the time I just read the editors’ introductions and some of the  critics.”

Yes, I thought, that was it.  It now seemed evident by the superficial slickness of her style, the huge generalities or banalities, and the lack of subtlety in her writing.  But it was not something I wanted to say to her myself.  The fog was almost lifting.  Each time some defect in her character rose to the surface and confirmed the stories I had been told about Minerva, the more I had to admit that my intentions became increasingly dishonourable, if I may put it that way.  No one would have noticed, if they were casually looking on, and you would need to check my pulse and blood pressure to measure the changes. 

“Let’s put it this way,” I said, trying to sound at once natural and pompous, “you are dealing with a couple or maybe with three centuries, with different rhetorical genres, and even with different languages, like Latin, French, and English.  So you can’t clump them all together as variations of one another.”

I held my breath, waiting for the explosion of anger, just as barely an hour before I anticipated some kind of sexual advance on my virginity.

“Oh, Amos,” she said, “you really are a clever boy.”

I just didn’t know how much sarcasm she dripped into those words and hoped she was covering her own embarrassment.

“Maybe you better have some more of this nice soothing tea before we go on, or would you like something else, like a glass of wine.  It would smooth over the rough spots we have to deal with, won’t it?”

There it was.  I knew it.  She was on the attack and I wouldn’t be able to resist, unless I collapsed into a silly bundle of giggling. 

“Tea’s fine,” I answered.  “Let’s try to concentrate and finish as much as we can this afternoon.”

Well, I think that’s what I told her.  Perhaps I was much less coherent and mumbled in a way that made her think I was slipping towards an encounter she didn’t want at all.  She also probably said things, partly encouraging, partly teasing, partly seductive, but in all events, she refilled the teapot, poured me another steamy cup of chamomile tea, and leaned more closely as I gave her my critique.  Now, more than just her sweet rhythmic breathing and her hand pressed on my arm, I could feel her heavy rounded chest rubbing against me.  Or was that also a dream?

I spoke to her, waving my arms about as much as I could,  about how the courts of love run by beautiful princesses and queens in Provence and in Catalonia, then about the other kinds of courtly societies in northern France and into the Rhineland, and how different they were from the small fairly primitive households of kings and barons in England, and why the English lords brought over French poets and singers, and what was important about the small Italian towns and cities, all the way from what is now the French Mediterranean region around Avignon to the aristocrats and middle-class elites on the Peninsula,  playing with the ideas of  these new sweet sounds, la dolce vita nuova  As I spoke, I found my own breathing difficult and un-rhythmical, since the whole idea of the naive lover approaching his superior lady was analogous to my own situation.  Minerva, I was sure now, was playing with my emotions, heating me up, then pushing me away, making remarks that seemed innocent in themselves but in context undermined my confidence, little as there was of it, to let me know she was in control of the whole game of love.

“Can I ask you something, Amos?” she said, pronouncing my name with a drawn out first vowel and a voluptuous hissing at the end.

I nodded my assent, and my head’s motions seemed to gently stroke her body by some kind of magnetic power.  I could feel goose bumps on the back of my neck.

“You say that a lot of these poets really didn’t believe what they were talking about and the whole thing is a kind of joke.  So was there any foreplay and then bedding in these sessions?  I mean, did the ladies like these songs and get pleasure from pretending to cuckold their husbands, or did they want more, you know, the real thing?”

“Well, people in those performative games were on display, not really carrying on secret trysts, and the husbands were in on the tricks, even when they really were away, like off to the Holy Land for the Crusades, or dawdling with their mistresses out in the woods in their hunting lodges.  The lovers, that is, the young men singing these ballads and sonnets, and the ladies, perhaps ten or fifteen years older, a lot more experienced, traded jewellery, bracelets and rings, had hearts made of gold that they broke and shared between them, and I think maybe, for God’s sake, the young men found it very hard to control themselves and couldn’t really channel their passions into sweet games of love but sometimes begged the women for some, you know, touching and stuff, and—”

“You are such a funny, fellow,” Minerva said.

I must have looked very troubled.

“Yes, you are.  I think you want to touch me, don’t you?”

I wasn’t sure I hear what she said, or understood all the words, or even heard anything at all, but I so much wanted to that I sat there expectantly.

She gave me a little kiss on my cheek.

“But I am not interested in you that way,” she said.

I blushed horribly.  The heat burned my face.  It was what girls always said.  They liked me as a friend, but as a boy friend—No way, José.

“However,” she said, “if you finish helping me with this essay, I may give you a little reward.”

I stammered something that made no sense to me.  Did she really say that?  She laughed and said I should proceed, please, as it was getting late, if we were to complete the assignment and have time for the present she had in mind.

It took about a half hour for me to plod through the rest of her essay, making pedantic remarks on the tone, the texture and the tensions in the various romances, both the Arthurian characters and adventures in Chretien de Troyes and the two kinds of allegory in The Romance of the Rose, the light psychological analytical view of how to seduce the rose-bud demoiselle and the heavier social commentary of the war of the sexes.  As I was reaching the climax to my peroration and discussing the way the Lover (Amant) confronted the Danger (Daunger) of the Rose’s self-protection and finally broke through the wicker fence that surrounded her rosary to rob her of her little budding flower, Minerva started to blow into my ear, tickle my neck, and wind herself around me.  I could swear she did, at least at the time.  Then I heard her speak further.

“You see, for me it’s not about whether I am love with a man or not, or even, as you probably have heard our dear class-mates whispering behind my back, the occasional young female, it’s the pleasure it gives to me.  If it can relieve you of some of your uptight New York and annoying Jewish prudery, Amos, well, that’s just a bonus for you.  Now all I ask of you is that you keep quiet for the next half hour, and then shut your silly mouth for the rest of your life about what is happening here.”

So it happened.  Or did it?  It was like a dream. 

She was straightening out the pages on the table, looking at her watch and signalling to me that it was time for me to leave her place. 

“Thanks for all your help.  I didn’t take a lot of notes, so I will sit down right after dinner and write out what you said.  Then we’ll have to see what happens in old Grimshaw’s seminar on Tuesday, won’t we?  Help me out, then, too, please, in case anyone starts to ask embarrassing questions. “

I am not quite sure of what she said then.  It was all so banal. 

“And we better keep all this a secret.  Don’t want the professor saying I didn’t do my own work.  Now, Amos, let’s get you home.”

*  *  *

I don’t know exactly how it happened, or rather how it started.  But sometime after midnight, I suddenly woke up and felt a panic of cold shivers up and down my body.  Had someone broke open the window and let the last blasts of winter in?  A silent scream, mouth distorted like a Edvard Munch painting.  Maybe it was something someone said in class earlier in the day or a conversation overheard two or three days before.  But there it was in my head, flashing up like a bright, blinding neon sign: “You better go to Kansas. “ It seemed an absolute command.  She had helped me in my time of need: now it was my turn. Not my turn, my duty.  An obligation.

Within moments, I was dressed, racing down the stairs, and entering the car I had borrowed from a friend in order to do some errands the next day.  After winding out of the small, closed streets, showing my resident pass to the sleepy guard at each gate, I moved into the broad streets of Saint Louis.  There was hardly any traffic at this hour.  A bus, a taxi, and then nothing. Without a road map, unfamiliar with the highways leading away from the city, I realized I didn’t even know which way was west or north, let alone which road to take.  Where did she live?  The name of a small town came into my mind, something she mentioned months before in a conversation in the student union building when we were still getting to know one another.  The words of an old song went round and round, the names of a railway line, rhythmic, insistent.  Odd, until that very moment it had not struck me that the name of the town in the song was also her family name. 

There was a large service station ahead, fully lit up though it was the middle of the night.  I drove in both to buy a map and to fill up with gas, since it would be a long ride, probably hours and hours on those notoriously straight and mesmerizing highways that go out into the prairies.  Overhead I could hear some flapping, like a flock of birds of prey, gathering, homing in for the kill.  As the attendant filled the tank, I walked to the counter, asked for a map that showed the way from Missouri to Kansas, and also mentioned that I was looking for a specific place.  The girl passed over the map but said nothing about the town. On the counter, there were shadows now.  It was not birds, the girl said: “Bats.  They like the bright lights, though it confuses them.  They’ll be gone soon enough.  But watch out,” she said.   

I paid for the map and the gas, and then asked again if she knew how far it was to that place.  She said she never heard of it.  Then she said perhaps I meant another town, one that sounded somewhat like what I asked for. Overhead now, hundreds, maybe thousands of black shapes, flying around, flapping and flapping, around and around, not dipping or soaring, a tornado of weird whirring bats.  Then there was a crash, one, then two, and another smashed into the huge sign on the service station, and the whole contingent suddenly zoomed into the sky, whirled about, and were gone.  The silence sank down again heavy on the street.  It was past 2 a.m.

Back in the car, before turning on the ignition, I opened the map to check the list of towns and cities in Kansas.  It took a while to find, but there they were, two towns at opposite ends of the state with names that were fairly alike.  Not knowing what to do, I thought it best just to get going, at least go in the right direction and when I crossed the state line stop again and think it through.  But instead of that, what happened was that I drove fairly slowly around and around the big traffic circle in which the service station was located.  Round and round.  Like the bats a few moments before.  I opened the window on the driver’s side.  Down on the ground were a few dead bodies: ugly flying rats, their white teeth glinting in the light from the service station.  The cool air seemed to clear my mind a little. I continued to drive slowly. Round and round.  I started to wake up, as though out of a long, mad dream, the kind that seem to last for hours but really just take a few seconds.

As my head cleared, the whole feeling of panic was gone, the sense that there was deep bound of obligation to go to where Minerva had gone, perhaps home, as it now seemed, where her father had died, or so the rumour had travelled through the seminar when she failed to turn up twice running.  Maybe this obligation was something like love, an instinctive  bonding that had taken place when she cared for me during my illness and gradually made me feel more at ease in the strange city and in the strange university.  Maybe a mad passion to show her up, to do something that would make her realize that, while I was grateful, intensely so, for all she had done, I was more angry at her for trapping me in a relationship beyond my comprehension, when she invited me to her house and made me think she was going to seduce me.  Maybe I was more angry with myself for being so naive and never realizing that all the stories told about her were true, though not exactly in the way I had imagined, because my own imagination was shaped by such different experiences than she had known.  The students who whispered those scandalous things about her had not exactly said what I thought they did, though, as I would later find out, what she was said to have done was bad enough.  Maybe I misconstrued the whole situation, expecting things that were really quite ridiculous, and so missing the clues and signs of her own pain, her own need to have me as a friend, someone who wouldn’t be like the men she had known—and the women, or younger boys she was known to have been too friendly with—because she thought she could trust me, and therefore had to test me more and more, never knowing exactly how to approach someone with my background.

Suddenly, the bats returned in their thousands back to the island of light, coming in at top speed, as though on the attack, and swirled around the service station, round and round.  They were on a level as though fragments of a disintegrated moon, one of the unknown rings of Saturn, with the scream of their excitement somewhere between a whirling rush of inanimate objects and the silent danger of unknown creatures.  I pressed on the accelerator and broke out of the zone.  

There was still no traffic on the roads, and only a few articulated trucks racing down the highway, out of the suburbs of Saint Louis and off into the darkness that was the rest of the state of Missouri.  I kept the window open and the cool air calmed me down more.  I was no longer driving to find my way to Kansas, somewhere out there, far beyond where the stars dipped down and rolled along the western horizon, but to find my way out of this mad dream, this compulsive passion to pay back a debt of gratitude to someone I no longer felt attracted to in any way.  By four in the morning, I was back in my room at the boarding house, curled up in the bed and trying to get warm.  At last, a comfortable, soothing sleep covered me, and I slipped into a healing oblivion.