Usher at the Wedding – The Strangeness of a Critical Mind

It occurs to me that even when I'm fiercely immersed in something –

hmm, when am I ever that? – I can't think even of a remote example:

okay, let's say, when I opine about Henry James' 'late' writing, and try

to explain what I love about its aural effects, I suppose I look for easy

and pleasurable ways to reinforce or, en passant, add credence to a claim,

but all these observations are made in passing. What they serve is a poetic

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intent: to fashion a clarion call, not not to "make a point" (indeed I’m

almost only ever talking about One Thing), but to have it arise out

of whatever is engagingly at hand. If I find myself suddenly thinking up

an argument with a more scholarly scent (I suppose that's happened here

and there), like a flash itch to see something in terms of what I understand

to be semiotics – I play fast and loose with that, too: the aim is never

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consciously to define anything, but rather give a visceral take on the sort

of minute limited breath of a thing that tends to interest me. I love playing

just a few notes. Example: choose any two contiguous sentences James wrote

after 1910 – like this, from a letter to his niece Peggy:  “I glory in the piling

up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James

in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.”

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It’s perfect, personal and completely James. A kiss and a handshake.

I am driven by whim to find and settle on whatever caters to the whim.

But when the whim arises out of an immersion as odd and wide and full

of suggestion as mine is in Henry James, it will be a whim with a built-in

mission – certainly to underscore my view of the 'whole' – that is my overall

feeling called up by reflecting on something – someone – I love. Everything

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I write, like each photo I take of New York, amounts to a love letter. But

as with anyone I love, I really do welcome departures – upsets – incursions

of something unexpected. With whatever or whomever you love, you always

want, I think, more truth. So it's not a masturbatory return to a fond fantasy.

The thing you return to is alive, not dead, and you seek in it and bring to it

evidence of the quirk, the unforeseen, the untoward kick & slap. Actually,

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James' language gives this to me all the time. It's not some dreamy sea

of cadence; it constantly surprises; at its best it follows the mind so closely

that it recreates it. I find simply by charting my reactions to it, I establish

as much of a relation with it as I can imagine having. Not that it may not

rivet me to learn the facts about the Dreyfus Affair or Belgian soldiers

in the Great War, but they will be the ushers at the wedding. 

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