Another letter: Captain Marvell and the Danes
When are you going to write to me? You could at least tell me what is going on that you can’t put your fingers on a keyboard, that you can’t pick up a pen and apply it to a page. I could guess, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to guess wrong, or to be right.
In the meantime, I will write you. I’ll start with the walk I took this morning, which took me through many of the places you know about. I’ll begin silly! — I walked from the bedroom to the kitchen, where I sat down at the table to drink a mug of coffee and eat a cinnamon roll. And I walked from the kitchen back to the bedroom to get dressed, jeans and a t-shirt and socks and tennis shoes.
It’s a spring-like day, a bit cloudy, a bit cool; it feels as if it may rain later. Typical Tuesday weather. The rain, if it comes, will be light, and I will be inside somewhere if I don’t want to be rained on.
I walked to campus mail as if I had already written this letter and had (finally) heard back from you, so there was a letter to be retrieved and read. But I hadn’t written this letter, had I? And you are not writing (at all). So, I sat disappointed (insofar as I am allowed to be disappointed) in the first floor lounge of the Union and tried to console myself with the little Muses Library collection of Andrew Marvell I found in the hip-pocket of my jeans. I sat lonely: it was as if I were the only one in the entire building. And I read “Clorinda and Damon,” where she attempts to seduce him with the thinliest-veiled metaphor — her “little bell” tinkling “within its concave shell.” My goodness! Yet he manages to resist because he has . . . politics to pursue: the world calls him away from the pleasures of her pudendum — goodness, gracious sakes alive! (Here, I have a question: How can Pan represent the world? I don't understand that. Please, explain.)
Then, a boy came in that I know a little, a “friend” of Alma’s, Kris with a K — for Kristian, I think — who, I have heard, knew Kierkegaard, at least by sight, and who died (Kristian, I mean) in a trolley accident in København. But he only asked me if I had seen a friend of his, Søren (not Kierkegaard). They were supposed to meet, he thought, here? I didn’t know Søren, I said, but no one had been around since I had come in. At least, I hadn’t seen, or heard, anyone. He said,
“What are you reading?”
“Marvell,” I said, holding up the little white and lilac book.
He stuck out his tongue. “Ah!” he said, ending in a guttural: “Aach.” Then, “Bye.” And he left.
Soon after, unable to discern what Damon was up to exactly, I left, too. I put Marvell back into my right hip pocket, and I walked back by my house and through the park to Alma’s for coffee and paper and a pen to write the letter I had gone to campus mail to find your response to. This one.
“I ran into Kris from Denmark,” I told Alma.
“Was he looking for Søren?” She laughed. Apparently, they are acting, along with another Dane, Hamlet (I kid you not!) in an improvised, Nordic(!) version of Waiting for Godot. Alma “knows” all of them, she says. “Nice boys.”
I say, “You’re doing better than Clorinda.” She says, “What?” but as a perfunctory, if I may put it that way. She doesn’t wait for an answer but leaves me with my coffee and writing materials.
And I use them to write this letter to you about my walk thus far and my walk to come: I will go from here with this letter to you in its envelope in the Muses’ Marvell in my back pocket back to the park. I'll stop here, sitting on “my” bench, and I’ll read “Bermudas” with its “eternal Spring,” which “enamells every thing,” and where we are “Safe from the Storms, and Prelat’s rage.” What does that mean, the “Prelat’s rage”? — my notes don’t tell me, but you, the theologian/literary scholar/religious historian, will help me out, won’t you? (Yes, please write.)
Mac will come shambling by to cry on my shoulder. But he won’t know. After that, the crying on my shoulder for a little long-while, I’ll walk back to campus mail to post this in the OUTGOING MAIL slot.
And that will be that! Love,
Moira
Or, that will be that, except for this p.s.: If Godot ([God]) is God, who never comes (unless he is Pozzo, which I don’t think is the case), then isn’t Kris, Søren, and Hamlet’s play more absurd than Beckett’s, acted out here where God is both everywhere and all in all? Where God is not to be avoided!? Another puzzle for you to consider. Another reason for you to write me.
06.28.23
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