'Mozart and the Gray Steward'

 Thornton Wilder experimented with “three-minute plays.” He wrote a bunch of them in college.

After The Bridge of San Luis Rey, publishers were eager to see more of his work. In 1928, Wilder collected 16 short plays in The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays. The longest is “Mozart and the Gray Steward,” which is about the commission for the Requiem.

The Gray Steward has this line about grief:

 

Only through the intercession of great love, and of great art which is love, can that despairing cry be eased. 

I first read Wilder in high school. I can’t say that I love his work, but I do find a lot of it interesting. I would like to see more of Wilder’s letters and more of his short plays.

• Source: “Mozart and the Gray Steward” is in Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater; Library of America, 2007, pp. 43–47. Library of America has included the play in its wonder Story of the Week catalog, which is free. It’s here:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/04/mozart-and-gray-steward.html

Indigenous people

 Vine Deloria Jr. gave a working definition of indigenous. He used the word in the sense of people who “live properly with the land.”

This country destroyed many of its original indigenous populations. Could it create another, at least in Deloria’s sense?

A rugged individualist can’t really be indigenous. A person or a family is indigenous by being part of a community.

People of Old-World ancestry have been here long enough to come to terms with the place. Some individuals know how to live properly with the land. Some families live properly with the land. But as a community, as a country, we don’t have that down. Even today, we choose representatives who favor exploitation and destruction, rather than conservation.

One of the recurring themes of this collection of online notes is place. What kind of place would this country be if it had an indigenous people, a people who lived properly with the land?

• Source: Vine Deloria Jr.’s essay “Reflection and Revelation: Knowing Land, Places and Ourselves” is in The Power of Place, edited by James A. Swan; Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1993, p. 40.

Resisting the prevailing trends

 Cornelius Eady will read a poem at the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York. I like to see people resisting the prevailing trends in American politics with poetry.

At the end of the first year of the current occupant’s first term, Eady chided poets who simply wail like Geiger counters. We need more: new ideas, inspiration and encouragement.

I’ve mentioned Eady before. I like him. I like his collaborator, Toi Derricotte. I like their foundation, Cave Canem. 

• Sources and notes: Cornelius Eady, “All the American Poets of Titled Their New Books ‘The End,’”; Poetry, December 2017. It’s here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/144825/all-the-american-poets-have-titled-their-new-books-the-end

Cave Canem is here:

https://cavecanempoets.org

For an earlier note on this poet, see “Eady: ‘I’m a Fool to Love You,’” May 10, 2025. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/search?q=Eady%3B

How places are known

 My grandfather’s farm was a place. It included many places, each marked by a story.

There was the place where the Joe the birddog killed the enormous rattlesnake. There was the place where my grandfather drove the tractor off a ledge overlooking the creek. It was not far from the place where he  found a grinding stone, marking a site where ancient people had lived.

Vine Deloria Jr. said that it’s natural for people to have an aesthetic feeling for a beautiful place. It’s natural for families to have stories about land they live on. But in our culture, those connections between land and people rarely last.

Tribal histories are like my family’s history — they are based on place. Every feature of the landscape has a story about it.

The difference is that the tribal stories evolved over countless generations. They are not the reflections of a poet or someone who has an eye for natural beauty or of a family with a gift for drama.

The Native American stories don’t reflect personal or family wisdom. They reflect communal wisdom.

• Source: Vine Deloria Jr.’s essay “Reflection and Revelation: Knowing Land, Places and Ourselves” is in The Power of Place, edited by James A. Swan; Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1993, pp. 28-40.

A character for the stage

 I wish a playwright would take a shot at Andrew Jackson as a dramatic character.

Marquis James began his “Andrew Jackson’s Famous Duel” with this:

 

On Thursday, May 29, 1806, Andrew Jackson rose at five o’clock, and after breakfast told Rachel that he would be gone for a couple of days and meanwhile he might have some trouble with Mr. Dickinson. Rachel probably knew what the trouble would be and she did not ask.

 

Jackson had married Rachel before her divorce was final. Charles Dickinson, a Nashville lawyer and a crack shot, had accused Jackson of cheating on a horse race. When the conversation got spirited, Dickinson had said some unkind things about Rachel.

Tennessee had a law against dueling, so the men met over the state line in Kentucky. Dickinson was faster and more accurate with a pistol than anyone. Jackson knew Dickinson would get off the first shot and that he would not miss. Jackson hoped he’d survive the wound long enough to kill Dickinson.

Jackson rode to Kentucky, regaling his friends with tirades about what a loser President Jefferson was. The men stopped at an inn on the night before the duel. Jackson’s friends reported he ate a hearty meal and was asleep within 10 minutes of getting in bed. Jackson slept soundly and had to be wakened in the morning.

The duel went as Jackson imagined. Dickinson fired first, and everyone saw the dust fly out of Jackson’s frock coat. Dickinson couldn’t believe Jackson didn’t fall and temporarily left his mark until he was ordered back by his seconds. Jackson took aim, but his pistol malfunctioned. He cocked it again and shot Dickinson.

While Dickinson’s seconds were tending to their mortally wounded friend, Jackson left the field, telling his friends to pay no attention to the wound in his chest. He didn’t want the Dickinson party to have the satisfaction of knowing he’d been badly hurt.

Jackson strikes me as having the right stuff for a dramatic character. He didn’t think about consequences. Wherever he went, the wake was mayhem.

The right stuff for a fictional character isn’t the right stuff for a president. As president, Jackson took no thought of the consequences of any of his actions. He was willful and thoughtless, the kind of man who defied court orders and did things that stained the country’s reputation forever.

But as a character on the stage, I see potential. Can you imagine what Aeschylus could have done with a character like that?

• Marquis James’s “Andrew Jackson’s Famous Duel” was in The Life of Andrew Jackson, published in 1933. It’s in A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome W. Archer and Joseph Schwartz; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966, pp. 477-80.

A case of self-destructiveness

 It’s a mark of a really good book: You keep seeing things in it.

I’ve mentioned Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These several times. But I’m just now getting the point that moral people can be self-destructive, and that self-destruction spills over to family members and loved ones.

The book is about a coalman named Furlong who sees a case of abuse and does something about it, even though his action is sure to offend powerful people.

You can read it as a heroic tale. But Keegan said the book began as short story about a boy who is making deliveries of coal with his father. They find another boy locked in a coal shed at a boarding school. The father simply locks the door back up and goes on without saying a word.

Keegan thought about what it must be like to carry that burden around — the burden of seeing a wrong and doing nothing. The coalman’s point of view took over the story. Small Things Like These became a vastly different story.

People who do the right thing sometimes don’t count the costs, and some of us are slow to see and talk about the reckoning.

• Sources and notes: Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These; New York: Grove Press, 2017.

“Claire Keegan on Small Things Like These: ‘I wasn’t setting out to write about misogyny or Catholic Ireland”; The Booker Prizes, Dec. 2, 2024. The interview is here:
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/claire-keegan-interview-small-things-like-these

For a sample of an earlier note on this wonderful book, see “Anatomy of a one-night read,” July 4, 2024.

‘Having it out with Melancholy’

 The poet Jane Kenyon is telling off Melancholy: 

You taught me to exist without gratitude. 

You ruined my manners toward God …

 

Kenyon suffered from depression. Her descriptions of it — and of the remedies suggested by physicians with drugs and friends with advice — are horrifying. Her poems suggest that the response is “ordinary contentment.” She relishes the small wonders that bring joy.

Kenyon’s line about ruined manners astonishes me. Although I wouldn’t put it that way, I do see an order in the cosmos and want to be part of the way it works, rather than oblivious to it and estranged from it.

Kenyon said things about gratitude that I haven’t seen in the traditional scriptures. I want to spend more time with her poetry in the coming year.

• Jane Kenyon, “Having it out with Melancholy”; Poetry, November 1992. It’s here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=161&issue=2&page=28
Kenyon has appeared in this collection of notes before, oddly around the holidays. See “A riff on the holiday blues,” Dec. 17, 2021.