XXI. en route

on 20th century aristocrats and 17th century poets

Exactly one year ago I was in the final month of a tour, in a strange family-owned motel in Cortez, Colorado. On 3/06/22 I wrote: When it snows here, because of the altitude, the clouds sweep almost to the ground. There’s a sliver where you can actually see the snowfall. For the most part it’s a dense wall of white above blinding banks of white piled almost to meet them…Living in a wood paneled room is kind of like living in a big coffin. Cortez is classified as a “high desert” which just means it has the freakiest weather—dust storms, dry blizzards, zero star visibility—it was one of the most surreal places of the tour, somewhere I would have never ended up otherwise. My memories of that time appear to me only in very broad strokes: here I was happy, hungry, frustrated, elated; this was my best performance, this the worst, here I had laryngitis. I don’t miss being on the road, but I do miss the clarity of purpose.

I can’t say with certainty this was Cortez, but it encapsulates a sort of tour vibe

When I arrived to Los Angeles I mainlined two and a half seasons of Downtown Abbey in about three days. The show is very up my alley. There is a lot of overlap between my fascination with 19th/20th century aristocracy and what intrigues me about religion and theater—as with theater, there is ritual and pageantry, as with religion, there is the assurance that if the rules are observed both you and the world you inhabit will be ordered, beautiful, and good. A path to follow with a promise at the end. There is a moment in many of these portrayals—Downton Abbey, The Age of Innocence, Portrait of a Lady, Brideshead Revisited—when a main character realizes that their entire life rests on the carefully constructed fiction of meaning passed down from the generations that created the wealth they now maintain. The exhaustive rules of high society are just that: exhausting, busying, dizzying in their strictures so there is always the appearance of purpose often without the substance.

In Downton Abbey, true to its form as a melodrama, Lord Grantham faces his reckoning at the onset of WWI. He is an honorary colonel armed with the idea that he’s headed to the front lines to safeguard King and Country only to end up at a dinner party with all the other landowning lords. They’re told they are to stay home, use those enormous estates to throw benefit parties, boost morale by reminding the boys what they’re fighting for. Newland Archer takes the entirety of The Age of Innocence to wake up to his inevitable conformity to the leisure class. Darling, boyish Sebastian is crushed over the course of Brideshead by the emptiness of his given circumstances. The world of the aristocracy is a stunning spectacle with the highest stakes.

I would fain do something; but that I cannot tell what is no wonder. For to choose, is to do: but to be no part of any body, is to be nothing.

John Donne and I are in a parasocial relationship. The above quote is from one of his letters. He is waiting (much of his life is spent on hold) for a powerful courtier of King James I to enter him into the clergy. After Donne becomes a preacher life is as smooth-sailing as it gets for a chronically ill, often inflammatory linguistic genius; but before he is ordained he struggles to know what to do. There is drive and undisputed talent, but no clear road forward. I’m no Donne, but I am a seeker. He thinks he has the key to the next step of his life, it slips through his fingers. He pivots. He keeps writing. He ingratiates himself to the right people and they turn out to be wrong. He is defeated and determined. He is much sadder than I hope I will ever be.

For me (if there be such thing as I)

Fortune (if there be such thing as she)

Spies that I bear well her tyranny

That she thinks nothing else so fit for me.

If there be such thing as I. There are times when I have the exact answer to the if and the who of the I in question. And there are times when I am searching. Unlike Donne, I believe Fortune has more in store for me than tyranny, but she can be elusive. I may have found her in the city of angels, lurking at the edge of my periphery. In any case, my time out West has been restorative, if not what I had envisioned (I have been cold for an entire month). I’ve regained some lost ground, found a new wall to scale.