greetings from the northeast

well guys. it's been a long summer.

autumn in new england is a totally different phenomenon than any other autumn any other where. colder, possibly; more beautiful, definitely. but boston is—a city of ghosts. it's rich: it's rich with history and people and lives upon lives, with the trees and the water and the seagulls on lazy wings above the streets and squares. boston wears autumn like a favorite old coat, and her pockets are full of stories.

the geese flew over my house today "trailing their legs and crying". I was shaken by it for the first time ever. something about the actual cold; the banging piece of siding on the house; the popping heater and the creaky floor; I suddenly had the idea that the geese fly out as the ghosts move back from their summer at the cape.

we also! we also, in the spring, my brothers.

...sutcliff is not for the faint of heart. I grow schmaltzy in my old age.
and I am getting old, too: I look forward to bedtime at 9.30 and tried to make a grocery list this friday night. was it for this I uttered prayers, and sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs?

growing up has been fun, though. a little stressful: there are a lot of big decisions to make that will only pay out later 401(k) I'm looking at you so I'm never sure if I'm doing the right thing, but living in the moment sure is a ride. last night I ate two kinds of gelato because I could.

this is going to be a really disjointed post because that's the way this whole summer has been, and I saw someone else do it, so now I have permission. another perk of being an adult: you can do whatever you want, you're like 21.

growing up. I keep using this term; I do not think it means what I think it means. what I've only been able to articulate to myself recently, trying to figure out why the heck I feel so old and young and lost, is this sense of disconnection to the familiar. some of that is moving; some of that is what I poorly tried to describe like a year and a half ago, when I said childhood felt like the same year circling with minute variations. I never felt different at each birthday, and so I never felt like much changed: my core life was the same, and our family did things how we did them, so I knew what to expect.

it's been weird and disorienting to realize I will never live at home again. it's weird and disorienting to hear my sister in delaware talk about her new life and things that I can't relate to—for kind of the first time in our lives, we have more different about us than we have in common. growing up we had that sister language that comes from sharing DNA and life and a ridiculously battered copy of mara, daughter of the nile #homeschooled, but we don't have that undercurrent of sameness anymore.

that's healthy. it's also weird and isolating. I've only just realized it. I've only just realized we'll never live in the same house together again, and it made me cry. I'll miss sharing so much life with her.

sharing life with people. so it's been a real three-hanky, but have I mentioned I love boston? I do. I love this city like I have never loved a city before, and I love hosting people here. please visit. I had friends last weekend and a sister flying in tomorrow, and it's been a thrill to show them my favorite places and explore new ones. there is always more to discover and more people-watching to do on the train.

people-watching on the T. everyone complains here period about the public transportation. well, k, but if you come lately from a city where you've had to drive yourself, it's kind of the cat's.

- there was the time a guy sat down next to me wearing a hat that said "TIM" in big scholastic letters. I studied him in the reflection from davis to central before I realized it was indeed a reflection and I was reading it backwards. this is why I did not go to MIT.
- there was the time I watched the woman next to me crop a photo of her wedding day for a new background picture.
- there was the time I watched the woman next to me furiously text her newly-ex-boyfriend. the argument wasn't winding down, but they were in the middle of deciding the relationship was over. (I wouldn't have read it but she was about a foot shorter than I am and standing underneath my arm.)

that's what people always complain about: the rush hour crowd. (pro tip: it's miraculously thinned out by 5.15, so don't rush out the door after work and you'll get home a lot faster.) I get it, because I too have had to stand uncomfortably near men who misconceive the power of their old spice.

- there was the time five of us—by us I mean women—were all holding on to that pole just inside the door, and a gentleman—by gentleman I mean large & visibly sweaty dude—pressed his way into the car and against the pole, and four pairs of hands moved in perfect synchrony off the pole and onto the horizontal bar above our heads. I just slid my hand up to be about level with his shoulder. and then, as if he thought they cleared the pole for him, he leaned in so his shoulder braced against the pole and grabbed the bar on the top: his body took up the entire pole that five people had once been using for support. and my hand went into his sweaty armpit.

but most of the time it's not bad. I enjoy watching the people with strict notions of personal space stare stoically at nothing while we all stand close enough to be accused of workplace harassment. but this is the train, and there are no rules here.

the T is an education in and of itself. between the couples and the arguments and the naps and the occasional importunate panhandler, there are also great grains of wisdom to be gleaned between stops.
- what not to wear: T edition. however, I do like to observe the really nicely dressed people and figure out what about them looks so great. autumnal earth tones ftw.
- I also do a shoe check—guys, girls. what are the youths wearing? I like to know. and what's looking particularly fly? those pointy-toed flats are joys forever. and I have lost my heart to the brown lace-up boots that reach the ankle. they're like so retro and so urban and so... gosh, classic and gregory-peck-ish.
- there was also that time when I swear I saw gregory peck's modern double walk past the doors & I texted my sister & she sent me this. now that I live in a City nathan pyle speaks to me on a whole new level. also, he was wearing The Boots.

and what are the people currently reading? the history of women voting to the kingkiller chronicles. there seems to be a pretty equal split of fiction to non-fiction, but more people definitely read on the way home from work than on the way to it. I also saw a guy reading hippie food the other day & now it's on my reading list. amazing how many people read real books here, not (just) on their devices. it gives me hope for humanity.

hope for humanity. everyone from my friendly southern town told me that "up north is different" and "people aren't friendly" as if I'd be like, ope better stay and thank you for your wise warning words of wisdom, friend who has only been to florida. also: hogwash. it's a different culture, but I kind of prefer it, actually.

in louisville, ignoring people was rude. you had to acknowledge acquaintances on the street, smile and nod to strangers, wave to basically everyone—and I didn't mind. it was great to feel like being part of a larger, friendly community. but sometimes I just wanted to freaking buy my groceries instead of having a therapy session with my cashier, you know? here, yes, it can be off-putting. sometimes I forget and smile at a stranger when we accidentally make eye contact; just this week I had an uncomfortable interaction with a server who thought I was flirting with her. it got worse when she either tried to put me at ease or flirt back, I'll never know, because I took my food and fled. whoops. my b. but the bar for pleasantries is so low that it's easy to maximize on the opportunity for pleasant social interaction—and melts my heart when I see others doing it. like offering a seat on the T or holding a door.

- no one holds doors here & that I definitely miss.

on the other hand, I love the efficiency. everyone stands to the right on the escalator—just like they always ask you to do "while on the moving walkway" at the airport: "please stand to the right, to allow those wishing to walk to pass safely on the left." people are okay with rushing. people are okay with wearing earbuds and staring out the window. it's fine to want to be by yourself, and I love that I don't have to have conversations with my commute-mates if I don't want to. ...I mean, even if I did want to, I couldn't because that is definitely #1 rule of fight club, don't talk on the train; but we do all share a moment of wonder—screens, books, newspapers go down and heads go up—when we leave kendall/MIT and come out over the water at charles/MGH.

even more about boston! because have I mentioned that it is the most amazing city in america? I did write my friend brian an ode to this place a few weeks ago.

you asked for boston news. boston is beautiful. I am so lucky to be here. I am living in the coolest part of the most amazing city in america and I could not love it more. every day is marvelous, even when the days suck—I love the cold and the leaves and the river and the crepe restaurant a few blocks away (a little farther than elizabeth warren, who lives one street over from me). there is so much history and so much style; so much brick and so much water, and beautiful gray rain and beautiful blue skies. I don't want to say I could literally be here forever, because you know me, and I'm still afraid of commitment; but figuratively, or at least for a long, long temporary, I never want to go.

come on: I get to see the charles every day as the sun rises. life is glorious. and some days do suck (though I swear, I've seen some nasty weather and the charles looks amazing no matter what, I have yet to see it ugly), but my friend michiel recently pointed out how refreshing it is when people don't complain. that has stayed with me. I want to look for more good things instead of dwelling on the bad—not hard to do right here, right now.

right here, right now. I'm settling in. I've been in my new apartment very nearly as long as I was in my last one, so I'm finally starting to let go and relax. I know I will be here for a while. it's okay to unpack.

that's been a hurdle my (wonderful) roommate eliza has tried to help me over. it's such a mindset left over from growing up moving every couple years: I think, oh, this is temporary, don't settle in. don't open all the boxes (especially the well-packed ones, gosh!), don't buy big & hard-to-move things, keep it small and simple and streamlined because you're just going to move on. I've struggled to feel like this new place was home, since I will be here for at least a year (hopefully more like two, though) and it's been good to unpack everything. everything. and get a library card. and buy a bookcase.

I did indeed buy a bookcase. this was my first furniture purchase ever. I love it. I put it all together myself, with my own tools & the requisite one direction throwback playlist. "she's not afraid" is excellent motivational music when one is assembling furniture. I can do whatever I want, I'm like 24.

and I got a library card! I feel so official: it marks me as a contributing member of this neighborhood and part of a community—more than my $115 mass DL ever will (too bad my free library card won't get me on an airplane). finally, too, I live in a world where I can walk to the library and I am so proud of myself for achieving so many childhood dreams.

and now it is time to put my many-caped trench coat on and my burnt umber pointy-toed flats (I wear them with everything) and buy some last-minute things in preparation for my sister's arrival. I am so excited to show her my city and the amazing new place that is my home—for at least a long, long temporary.

sweet thames run softly

The first time I read William Jay Smith's "London" it didn't strike me as remarkable, but I woke up next morning with the first two lines circling in my head. It feels like a sign when my mind starts memorizing things on its own.

So I went back and read it again, and that's when I decided to memorize the whole thing. It's a pretty simple poem with a straightforward structure that makes for easy recall, but as I took it in line by line, it's a pretty powerful poem as well.

"London" is rife with religious themes and inversion—destruction as judgement, the anti-paradise, myths and fate; it's almost medieval in its darkness. The repetition and odd meter give me Gregorian chant or Greek chorus vibes, channeling doom. The doom is fateful, inescapable; the city apparently exists in some kind of post-apocalypse, but is facing its final, immediate end.

The first stanza is an overture to the piece, beginning with a ghostly harbinger and a warning, that both echoes the Lord's Prayer and Weird Sisters of Macbeth. 

...Give us this day our daily bread, 

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil;

For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.

The Weird Sisters themselves (of Double, double / toil and trouble / fire burn and cauldron bubble fame) serve to warn from, while instigating destruction. Straddling the line between temporal and spiritual, the Sisters present a temptation phrased in cautionary language—which means they’re messengers of fate, but also directing it by suggestion. “You’re going to be king” is a pretty seductive prophecy.

The tone of the whole poem conveys the sense of desperate hopelessness: “all are lost.” Smith is a master of double meaning—“lost” can be both the end of hope and the darkness of the soul; juxtaposed with Banquo’s ghost, the theme of temptation and falling from grace becomes that much more obvious. Banquo, as Macbeth’s foil, is uneasy with the Sisters’ words and resists the reward they offer:

“But ‘tis strange;

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

The instruments of darkness tell us truths,

Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s

In deepest consequence.” (Macbeth, Act 1 Scene III, lines 122-126)

Banquo’s caution is his doom; but of course Macbeth’s reckless, heady greed becomes his. Banquo’s ghost presages earthly vengeance for the terrified usurper, and no quiet rest for his soul.

Rest for the soul is what salvation is to purchase: redemption from sin and ultimately man’s fallen state. But “the ribs that rose and fell were barrel staves,” lifeless wood, stark and bleached on the shore. These aren’t the ribs formed from dust and made man; these aren’t the ribs that became woman; and Adam isn’t sleeping by the River of Life in the flourishing garden, but dead by a river that only wants more. 

The river is the main player in this poem. It is terrible in its presence, a force as fearful and potent as evil, and it takes. The river is Fate. There is no resisting it or swimming against it or undoing the damage it brings. It is chaos, disguised as direction.

The river is also “like a serpent”. Sinuous and sly, it infiltrates and poisons—mixing the water and sky, confusing, muddying, turning the world upside down. In the Biblical narrative, Satan disguised as a serpent came to Eve in the garden and promised great things: to know like God. All she had to do was one small act of disobedience, to take one fruit from the one tree God had forbidden. “But you will not die, as God promised,” the serpent said; “instead, you will know good and evil. Take and eat!” 

And the people ate, and they fell from grace. Not only did their souls die, they would no longer live forever, because good gifts from an evil hand lead to destruction. “Honest trifles” often do “betray ’s in deepest consequence.”

On the night of the king’s murder, Banquo—sensing that something is rotten in the state of Denmark   a disturbance in the force   just standing in the back, sensing something—says, “There’s husbandry in heaven; their candles are all out” (Act II, scene 1, 4-5). The sky is dark and quiet, before the storm breaks. “It will be rain tonight” (Act III, scene 3, 16). 

The whole setting here is dull and grim, some kind of futuristic medievalism, and using Macbeth for atmospheric context colors the poem with murder and cruelty and greed—and a certain hopelessness. With so many undertones of religion throughout the poem, does Smith use “the quiet sky” to suggest an absence of God? Here he is a silent divinity, at best, but one who perhaps never existed outside the potency of this dark river.

The insidious water, the serpent, brings ultimate destruction. From temptation to the final fall, from the weird sisters to the bloody hands, Banquo’s ghost promised and now Birnam comes to Dunsinane. I love this word picture, “Leaves from Birnam Wood were on the wind”: there is something so evocative about it. Maybe it’s the Swinburnian alliteration. Maybe because it reminds me, oddly enough, of the end of The Great Gatsby (‘leaves on the wind’ lines always make me think of autumn) where Nick says that “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” There’s also that beautiful—I’m sorry, tangent here—beautiful passage after the description of what could have been “a night scene by El Greco”:

“After Gatsby’s death, the east was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air, and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line, I decided to come back home.”

Not at all am I saying the two are related, but it’s interesting that Fitzgerald would use Fall as a time of renewal, when life starts all over (and Nick is coming home and beginning fresh); but it lives in the context of death and ending and the close of the season. The brittle leaves of Birnam Wood were in the air, and they presaged the end. Also, it’s yet another definition of the word “fall”.

Fate has come to destroy with what it gives. It’s a continued inversion of biblical themes, where the “living water” (a symbolic name for Jesus) and the “river of life” (from the book of Revelation’s New Jerusalem) now become the water of death. In Revelation, the saints stand around God’s throne and sing “Holy, holy, holy” in a praise song for their redemption. Here it is a shriek of terror as an unforgiving force begins to consume them. 

Throughout Macbeth, Banquo serves as the conscience, a constant reminder of doom and consequences, but he also has a sort of triumph over death. Whether his ghost actually returns or that’s Macbeth’s personal conscience driving him crazy, Macbeth killed but cannot get rid of Banquo’s nagging presence. There’s an interesting religious parallel (since we’re looking for those): Jesus died and then rose, although his promise was hope and Banquo’s is despair. 

Unless you think I’m taking this too far, notice Macbeth’s language in Act IV, scene 4, 138: he refers to the ghost as “blood-boltered Banquo”. He is literally crowned with blood, and this “crown doth sear my eyeballs” (128). In conjunction with all the other Christian themes, it’s a remarkable coincidence that Christ’s death followed his own crown of thorns and blood. So we can back-interpret that Christ’s resurrection as a symbol of life is again subversively paralleled with Banquo’s half-return as a warning and a curse.

His presence as the ghost at the feast is the unpleasant past linked to a worse future, the writing—since we’re still talking biblical references!—on the wall. The figurative leaves from Birnam Wood, the wind as change, are excellent foreshadowing; the ghost has passed by and blighted the ribs of man. Life and hope are wrecked in the overturned garden. There is falling from life to death, and the hungry waves come closer, and the stars begin to go out.

The final verse may be my favorite, it is so powerful and ties all the threads tightly together. The jewels of Banquo’s crown, like Christ’s sweated drops of blood in the garden, have fallen—the candles of heaven are darkened.

In C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, there is a (very very long) passage describing the end of the world (that I’m going to reproduce here with no shame for the extra homework). When I was inhaling the Chronicles of Narnia at 10, this was a striking image for me that resurfaced when I was thinking about the stars “disappear[ing] above the city”:

Then the great giant raised a horn to his mouth. They could see this by the change of the black shape he made against the stars. After that—quite a bit later, because sound travels so slowly—they heard the sound of the horn: high and terrible, yet of a strange, deadly beauty. 

Immediately the sky became full of shooting stars. Even one shooting star is a fine thing to see; but these were dozens, and then scores, and then hundreds, till it was like silver rain: and it went on and on. And when it had gone on for some while, one or two of them began to think that there was another dark shape against the sky as well as the giant's. It was in a different place, right overhead, up in the very roof of the sky as you might call it. ‘Perhaps it is a cloud,’ thought Edmund. At any rate, there were no stars there: just blackness. But all around, the downpour of stars went on. And then the starless patch began to grow, spreading further and further out from the centre of the sky. And presently a quarter of the whole sky was black, and then a half, and at last the rain of shooting stars was going on only low down near the horizon. 

With a thrill of wonder (and there was some terror in it too) they all suddenly realized what was happening. The spreading blackness was not a cloud at all: it was simply emptiness. The black part of the sky was the part in which there were no stars left. All the stars were falling: Aslan had called them home.

Of course, in the context of Narnia, this is a bittersweet thing because while the old world is ending, there is the promise of one new and better.

That is absolutely not the case here. Nothing is getting better. Everything is only getting worse.

London Bridge is falling, falling, falling, 

Scaled, and crossed.

The stars are gone, the singers are silenced. Perhaps the world ends here. The Sisters, Banquo, the singers, the people—maybe they accurately predicted the end, but it’s still the end! Being right didn’t save any of them.

The Bridge falls, in an eerie echo of the nursery rhyme. … London bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down… Access to the city is now cut off. –Looking at a map of London, of course it only borders the river, but if that river were a snake, and that snake had “coiled upon each eye” around it (describing how it turns upon itself? Or circling back like the London Eye? See what I mean, the layers), the city would be stranded by the encircling snake. 

When the bridge falls, the river becomes the ruler. The bridge is “scaled”: a verb which here means an enemy action, climbing over, breaking through the defenses—but also, and more obviously, describes a snake. And the bridge is “crossed”: the city is infiltrated. This is subtle wordplay as well, since Christ died on the cross, but this ends with death; not resurrection. 

There is a distinct lack of actors in this poem: the singers narrate, the people cry, but nobody does anything beyond wail in the dark. Only the river “moves among them”. There is no power for good, only evil, and man’s fall is synonymous with man’s creation (if we take the rising and falling barrel staves to be the moment of his birth: it’s also the moment we realize he is dead). The crown—“of life,” the reward for tribulation, or in Macbeth’s case murder—brings and is a mark of death, and the cross that was supposed to bring redemption is a sign of the bitter end.

- - -

I really loved this poem when I started writing about it months ago, but it’s been a long summer and I’m kind of over it. Posting for practice more than anything else. It spoke to me where I was mentally then, and I’m somewhere else now.

…Reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot so maybe that’s not exactly a great place. My mama always told me I was special.