Arthurian Legend - Where Are Knights In Shining Armor And Fair Maidens When We Need Them?

Amanda Parker was not exactly looking for a knight in shining armor but she would be delighted if one came along.  Here she was still single and unpartnered, not unhappy but still missing that one piece which would complete her life. 

 

Yes, she was a liberated woman who did not need men and for whom children were an inconvenience; but still there was that nagging originalism, that sense that women are unique not by their intelligence, artistry, or competence but in their ability to bear children.  

The Catholic Church didn't help.  'Once a Catholic, always a Catholic' was the age-old refrain that still rang true. What Father Brophy preached about The Holy Family, the sanctity of marriage, the loneliness of marital exile, and the joy of children was still nagging at her, niggling, irritating, and there every morning when she put on her makeup.  'Get on with it, Amanda!', she shouted at herself in the mirror. 

At the same time, she refused to settle for second best - the men that her friends were marrying out of desperation were good providers, attentive, subscribers to the feminist canon, and all the rest but uninspiring to say the least, nothing to sweep you off your feet, make you swoon with desire, carry you away.  No, these men were pedestrian, uninspiring, and a sad commentary on men in general. 

Amanda had always loved to read about olden times, especially the days of Arthurian knights and their fair maidens, Rapunzel in the tower, jousting, a sprig of flowers, love poetry, and dashing good looks.  The women of knights' reams were virgins, innocent, still childlike but mature in their desire, stunningly beautiful, wealthy beyond measure, the prize for the best of the best. 

 

She remembered the story of Anastasia, princess of the north, beautiful beyond imagining who was promised to Sir Galahad who first had to travel to a foreign land to slay the dragon who threatened the land of their birth, whose hunger was insatiable and whose legions were strong.  Anastasia waited and waited as the months and years passed and refused the intentions of all other suitors who begged for her hand.  Galahad would return, she knew, for love conquers all. 

He did return, and knight and his fair lady were united in blissful matrimony and lived happily forever. 

Amanda thought that she had gotten rid of these childish fantasies when she locked all her princess outfits in a basement trunk, kept only one tiara as a memento, and moved on as an emerging talent in her own right.

She abandoned - or so she thought - all thoughts of knights in shining armor, Mr. Right, and The Man of Her Dreams, and went on to star at Harvard, Berkeley, and Wall Street, a woman of agency.  She ate well, travelled well, was looked up to, congratulated, and paid handsomely, but she could never shake that virus, that insidious, bothersome, ineradicable sense of female destiny.  What was Senior Vice President of Lockhart, Finch & Ballard without a husband?

Not just any husband, mind you, but a stellar one, one who stood out, a Colossus who stood astride the world.  Here she hated herself for such thoughts.  It was bad enough that she was mired in this treacly, retrograde fantasy of wife and mother; but far worse that the man who would be part of the story would have to be a Sir Galahad. 'Goddamn it!', she said. 

 

There was Peter, a comer, a man on the rise, a financial talent if not genius who had made his millions before he was out of diapers, a man of confidence and sexual interest; but he was irritating, balky at the wrong times, prolix when the situation demanded few words, exuberant when it was time for reflection.  In short, for all his appeal, she was indifferent. 

Aidan was more emotionally settled.  He seemed to have balanced his professional career with a good sense of enjoyment and empathy; but this quality hid a sexual timidity and a kind of toadying that was off-putting at best. 

Roberto was a Latin lover out of fictional romance, a throwback to her princess in the tower days, but he was an empty suit, a cavalier for all intents and purposes, but an airy, insubstantial zero if you had the patience to look beyond the silver buttons. 

By this time she reminded herself of Portia, Shakespeare's heroine in The Merchant of Venice, a woman who laughed at the advances of one suitor after another, snickering over the pretentions and obtuseness, all the time waiting for her one true love to come forward and declare his love. 

She didn't like being Portia, too picky, too taken with herself to choose wisely and well; but she realized that was exactly who she was, so why fight it?

Yet, that's what womanhood was all about.  It still after all these millennia revolved around fidelity, prosperity, and security, a man who would be faithful, a good earner, and the guardian and protector of her and her children. 

Of course women had come a long way and were quite capable of all the above, but they were still the weaker sex, vulnerable especially during pregnancy, and given to hormonal demands that affected mood, manner, and outlook. 

Laura, the main character in Strindberg's The Father is either the prototypical feminist saga or a vixenish, hateful, and destructive woman.  She sows seeds of doubt in her husband, suggesting that he might not be the father of their child as she watches his descent into jealous madness.  Ibsen's women - Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, and Hilde Wangel control men to such a degree that they unconsciously seek their death. 

Augusta was no Portia, Hedda, or Laura.  She was more like Rosalind and Viola who ran rings around their less than able, silly, and adolescent suitors - manipulating them in a playful but still dismissive way, but never with the devilish intent of Laura. 

'Where is he?', Augusta asked as the years wore on, her biological clock ticking, her patience fraying.  She was becoming a nitpicking old maid, saw it coming but was powerless to prevent it.  Perhaps as I mature, she thought, I will not settle for less but for accommodation - a man of stability, affection, courtesy, and good humor.  Not exactly a man to swoon over, a man who would climb the tower on the locks of my long, beautiful hair to ravish me but a man with whom I could be comfortable. 

'Comfortable! My God it's come to that', but there was still time, she was still youngish and not over the hill, plenty of time for ravishment and swooning before accommodation. 

'Have you thought of trying the other side of the aisle?', asked a friend; but Augusta had never once given that kind of sexual relationship a thought. If she was to have sex, it would have to be procreative or at least its possibility. Perhaps not a Lawrentian epiphanic sex, but something ying-yangy, not exactly Tantric but a good approximation. This meant men, and she was still looking. 

It would be nice to finish the story with '...and they lived happily ever after', but it was not in the cards.  If she couldn't have Prince Charming, Sir Galahad, or a knight in shining armor, then she would hole up by herself, make her own way. 

It would also be nice if there were such men in the world - men of grace, honor, courage, respect, and pure, unadulterated love - but perhaps they only existed in romance novels and never existed in the first place.  Too bad, for the world could certainly use more of them and the virginal, innocent, lovely and fair maidens they loved. 

The Kennedy Center Goes Broke - No Surprise, Sitting Through Brahms Is Painful, The End Of Classical Music

Augusta Potter had season tickets to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center and was looking forward to the new year's offerings.  She, now well into her elder years, had been attending concerts at the Center since its opening in 1971 and long before that in New York. 

She had grown up with classical music as a girl in Boston.  Her well-to-do parents, descendants of both the Cabots and Lodges who themselves traced their ancestry back to the days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Davenport and the Puritan colonies in Connecticut. 

Classical music was part of the patrician ethos, one of white, Anglo-Saxon legacy, patriotism, noblesse oblige, and investment high culture.  This sense of the entitlement of birth, breeding, and education was a good thing.  It was Hamiltonian in spirit and profoundly noble.  

Hamilton had argued with his populist colleague, Jefferson, that the country could not be entrusted to the masses, and that people like Augusta Potter's family should form an upper chamber of governance, one which prevented the lowbrow, selfish, and inestimably venal impulses of the majority to rule. 

This sense of anointment was bound to give way to excess, and the Potters were not immune to the kind of class snobbery that evolved from their entitled heritage.  The arts, and in particular classical music, were not only to be cherished, preserved, and promoted, they were the only expressions of human creativity that were to be so honored. Popular culture was base and uninspiring.  Its music was primitive and had never evolved from its origins in the African forest.  Its art was self-referential, hagiographic, and political.  It ethos was a mélange of racial and ethnic tribalism. 

So, it was natural for Augusta to exclude anything more popular than Leonard Bernstein in her listening repertoire.  She was an oldline, old guard, a defender of high culture and proud of it. 

What few people understood was that Augusta, despite her long, unbroken association with classical music, couldn't tell harmonics from an accented fifth, was lost in the layering of a Bach fugue, out to lunch when it came to Britten and Ives, and was bored stiff by Brahms and Schumann.  She was a patron of the arts, but her patronage stopped at the door.  Once inside, she wanted the throbbingly repetitive, featureless, routine to be over. 

She woke up to Stravinsky and Firebird and Tchaikovsky's cannonade at the end of his 1812 Overture and Copeland's Rodeo finally felt her Kennedy Center subscription and yearly check to the National Foundation for the Arts was worth it. But for all else, she was as good as tone deaf, and went to concerts because of inertia. 

She found herself switching stations in the car, listening to Country 1250 when she should have been listening to WETA Classical or WGMS, a bit of apostasy on the way to Whole Foods, and as much as she insisted that landing on salsa, country-and-western, and Emmy Lou Harris was incidental, errancy, she knew that that was where her heart lay. 

Richard Dare, former CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic put it this way in a recent article in the Huffington Post, The Awfulness of Classical Music Explained

There are a great many "clap here, not there" cloak-and-dagger protocols to abide by. I found myself a bit preoccupied -- as I believe are many classical concert goers -- by the imposing restrictions of ritual behavior on offer: all the shushing and silence and stony faced non-expression of the audience around me, presumably enraptured, certainly deferential, possibly catatonic; a thousand dead looking eyes, flickering silently in the darkness, as if a star field were about to be swallowed by a black hole.

What to do about this? Dare had few answers.  No one wants to sit in the confines of a music hall. Organ music has been relegated to living room Wurlitzers and no longer can we listen to the great Gothic reverb of French cathedrals.  

We listen to plenty of classical music, Dare goes on, but it is in the form of occasional musical scores and video game soundtracks.  It is just we don’t like to still for hours, sitting on our hands.

He is acknowledging what most people have concluded.  Concert hall classical performances are dead, and many suspect that within a generation record sales will be down to nothing.  Older people who have grown up with classical music will no longer be around to buy tickets; and without concerts, recordings will become far less sought after.

Western classical music suffers from many ills. Most symphony orchestra rarely play any 20th century music, and even the sprightly Mozart cannot draw big audiences for whom an unbelievable array of modern, contemporary music and entertainment is available. Secondly, the venue – the concert hall – is as formal, deadening, and insufferably enclosed as can be.  

When ten thousand fans are jumping up and down for Romeo Santos or Taylor Swift, the handwriting is on the wall. The days of soporific, painfully wrought, interminable classical concerts are over. 

'Where will I go?', said Augusta, disconsolate, angry, and frustrated when news of the closure of the Kennedy Center went public.  There was still some chance of a bailout, so all hope was not lost; but in her heart of hearts she was happy that this penitential routine, this obligation, this family heritage, this corralling insistence on doing the right thing was over.  She no longer had to dress up and fall asleep in the loge, chatter at intermission, and go to bed way past her bedtime. 

One might think that you can't teach an old dog new tricks - that Augusta Potter was far too old to make the switch, but she had been catching snatches of popular music since her early days.  What young person could not have thrilled at Jimmy Hendrix, the Stones, or Crosby, Stills & Nash?  The Beatles? Even her privileged years at Miss Porter's and Wellesley could not have insulated her from the new zeitgeist, the social revolution of the Sixties.  Enough seeped in during those halcyon years to make a difference now. 

What did Brahms ever do for her? And wasn't that the reason for listening to him? Music like art and literature was supposed to be personal.  The collections at the National Gallery or the Met were not meant to be stared it, calculated for style, period, and historical influences. Country music was not meant to be parsed, disaggregated, and deconstructed. It was evocative of a time and place, of hardship, loss, expectations. Jimmy Hendrix touched something base, primitive, and electric. Romeo Santos and Les Tetes Brulées invited you...no, made you want to dance. 

his should happen to all of us old folks - the lifting of the veil, opening the blinds, pulling the curtains.  We all live within some obligation, some anticipation forced and enforced by someone else.  We all have our Kennedy Centers where we go routinely and dutifully, fall asleep before the end of the first movement, want to go home, to a bar, someplace, anyplace other than here. 

Being Eighty - Running A Country Or A Chaise Lounge In Florida, So Why The Angst?

‘How does he do it?', said Ben Licht to his cousin, Abe. 'Me, I'm happy just to be upright and mobile'. 

The two were talking about Donald Trump, President of the United States at eighty responsible for national security, the financial and economic health of the country, and the overall well-being of the nation, when most men of his age were playing shuffleboard at their Florida condos.

Both Ben and Abe had been successful businessmen.  Ben was a furrier who catered to the women of the West End - mink stoles, ermine coats, and sable jackets - and his cousin Abe who was a clothier and had a high-end store on Main Street with couturier dresses, blouses, and skirts.  

Both men were known and respected by the town. They were honest, God-fearing, community-minded men who were model citizens.  Abe was cantor at the Beth-El, and Ben on the board of the New Brighton Yeshiva. 

They had given the best years of their lives to the town and to their families, and now at eighty it was time to close up shop, trade their spurs for a chaise lounge, relax and enjoy life for a change, retire to a condo in Miami, on Collins Avenue, South Beach, the traditional winter havens for rich Jews which is what they were, so who's complaining?

'Nah' said Abe, no class anymore. Not what it was.  Remember the Fontainebleau? Now that was a classy outfit. What a time I had there.  Esta Pilchman under a beach umbrella by the pool, a sweetheart, wife of Saul Berman, a real prick, no wonder she was a gay divorcee.'

'Don't live in the past', replied his cousin. 'That will get you nowhere'; but Abe, once started down memory lane, was in no mood to pull up. 

'And Bette Cohen.  Ah, a real darling, the times we had!; but Cousin Ben wasn't listening.  He was a practical man, a sensible man, and Abe's meanderings were no more than early senility or at best a flighty nostalgia. Ben  knew Esta Pilchman, and she was a cunt, pardon my language, but that's what she was, my furs and his Armani trolling for rich widowers on Collins Avenue, what else is there? 

And that Cohen bitch, a chip off her father's block, that diamond-cutter who cheated and weaseled his way to becoming The Diamond King Of New York, shyster, gave a bad name to all Jews, a man who brought up his daughter to be just like him, a conniver, a cheap con artist, and an intellectual hack.

'Back to Donald Trump', said Ben.  'I'll bet his mind's not on some Bette Cohen or Esta Pilchman', and the two men marveled at the President's energy, persistence, all-hours work ethic, macho bully, transformer, undaunted premier.

He is running the country while we're still here.  Caterers is all we are, in-between men who buy cheap, charm the old ladies with our stories of Monte Carlo and Rimini.   What were our lives worth?  What difference did we make?  And here we are at eighty stumbling our way down to Florida on the Orange Blossom Express. 

Abe and Ben were not the only old men comparing themselves to the President.  Eighty was a time for aches and pains, prothesis, indifferent children, plumbing issues and lawn maintenance and thoughts of Riverside Senior Living; and here was Trump duking it out with Putin and Xi, bombing Iran, sending storm troopers to Chicago, electrifying border fences, whooping it up before tens of thousands of adoring Americans while most other men his age were doodling and dithering their way to the cemetery. 

Take Alvin Blatter, Yale Class of ____, now well into his eighties still fighting for traction in the progressive movement, securing his legacy, leaving something behind, standing at the podium at his Class Reunion, still harping and banging away about climate change, the coming Armageddon, and the fate of the planet.  

He was just a wheezy, jowly old man pounding away on an issue no one was interested in any more since the polar ice caps were gaining ice at record rates, sea levels were decreasing, the weather was as modulated and regularly capricious as ever, but there he was, red-faced and apoplectic, his furnace fired up, steam rising in one last, gasping attempt to show the world he meant something. 

There was no vaudevillian second in the wings ready to hook him off the stage, so he kept on whaling away until the very last, his way off the stage to desultory applause and sat down. 

If he wasn't the President, he was at least somebody of worth and perennial merit; but only a scattering of alumni sat in Woolsey Hall to listen to him and were just anxious for a breath of fresh air after Alvin's bellowing bombast. He was not presidential material. 

So two old Jews and a bunch of well-to-do Wall Street, Nantucket, and Palm Beach Yalies found themselves in the same boat, struggling with old age and wondering how they failed so desperately when Donald Trump was a firestorm of agency, wit, energy, and meaning.  

'"We all end up in a pile pele-mele", said Ronsard or Villon or one of those French poets', said Ben remembering Harold Bloom's guest lecture at NYU when he and Abe were students. 'In the end, worm food, and don't you forget it, you, me, and Donald Trump in the same mouldering grave'; but Abe was having none of his cousin's morbid philosophy.  

Who cares what one did?  Only did you have fun doing it, with Esta Pilchman and Bette Cohen and all the groupies on Washington Square when he was a radical, friends with Abbie Hoffman and Mark Rudd, talking Marx and Engels, charming girls who left Vassar and Smith for the East Village and the likes of him. 

'He's closing the Straits of Hormuz', Abe said to his cousin. 'Can you imagine that?'.  Not that the President of the United States was enforcing a naval blockade, but an eighty year old man. 'What’s going on?', said Abe. 

'Don't overreact', said Ben.  'You're being melodramatic'. 

And so it went with the Licht boys, back and forth both trying to make sense out of being so old.  Vladimir Nabokov had written in Speak, Memory his memoir, that the present is but a fraction of a millisecond, an indefinable moment and the future but a possibility.  Only the past is real.  We are our past

Nabokov knew this from the very start, and spent his youth indelibly fixing memories of Moscow, Paris, and the Mediterranean in his mind, playing the tape over and over again so that the past and the present were indistinguishable.  The more memories that became as substantial as anything in the present, the more substantial he became. 

'See', said Ben. 'Take a lesson'. 

'Being eighty is no picnic', replied Abe who couldn't get the Straits of Hormuz out of his mind and Donald Trump's finger on the button while he was ready to open the Collins Avenue condo for the winter, clear the deck, get some provision from Katz's Delicatessen, run by Herman Katz, great grandson of the founder of New York's Katz's (Send a salami to your boy in the Army). 

'No point in fussing about Trump', Abe conceded as he tucked into a prelim - an overstuffed pastrami and chicken liver on rye made specially by Joe at Wagshal's.