Dune grass, wooden fencing, horses.

… said UD as she returned to her rented beach chair yesterday afternoon. She’d been away from it for two hours, first cooling down in her building’s nearby pool, then having lunch with her sister, and she’d worried that someone might have snatched the chair.

Or, far worse, someone might have lifted the big black hardback she’d set on its seat: Hitch-22, the memoirs of Christopher Hitchens.

But no, everything was here, including the book, its yellow spine blazing away in the sunlight as a high tide nipped its heels.

Having carried a headful of Hitchens to lunch, she’d burbled to her sister (who would have preferred to discuss Morrissey) about his virtues… “Dismal. Why don’t Americans much use that word? Hitchens uses it all the time, and it’s a great word… Recondite. An absurd word! I don’t use it because it sounds pretentious. But he uses it and it’s fine… Grog-blossom!

I once had a drink with an Express veteran, his face richly veined and seamed with grog-blossom…

Phrases too: One cannot be just a little bit heretical… And endless hilarious invective which always feels accurate — unlike Gore Vidal’s, which is also hilarious but feels vindictive…”

******************************

I didn’t go into the deeper affinities I feel reading a man who adores Auden and Larkin (“I think that if I take, say, my two favorite English poets,” he said in an interview a couple of days ago, “the ones I most often recur to, are Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden. Both of them have a great understanding of tragedy, and a keen feeling of, you know, in some ways, the absurdity of the human condition. But it’s also from the absurdity that they draw things that are quite mordantly funny as well. I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.”) and quotes Cesare Pavese…

Actually there’s a striking and immediate affinity there, because my first week on the beach I’d reread A. Alvarez’s book about suicide, The Savage God… Beach reading à la UD… and Hitchens not only begins his narrative talking about that book (his mother killed herself); he even pulls some of its quotations from Pavese (“No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.”). If you’ve read my latest Inside Higher Ed post about burqas, you know that I begin with a Pavese quotation pulled from last Saturday’s Alvarez reading. (“Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.”)

UD and Christopher Hitchens: Two literary-minded children of suicides.

*********************************

To be sure there are more obvious things to interest me in Hitch-22 — people we know in common, like Peter Galbraith, praised on page 300; a love of obscene limericks; a love of Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary and the Mamas and the Papas; Jewishness; a slightly louche interest in the outer edges (“I think I wish I had not been introduced so early to the connection between obscure sexual excitement and the infliction – or the reception -of pain.”) — but what rivets UD is this odd life-and-literature affinity.

***********************************

Well, let’s bring it all together. It’s far from my favorite Larkin poem (I think the last line is weak), but anyway.

To the Sea

The rocks, the rusting soup-tins, till the first
Few families start the trek back to the cars.
The white steamer has gone. Like breathed-on glass
The sunlight has turned milky. If the worst
Of flawless weather is our falling short,
It may be that through habit these do best,
Coming to the water clumsily undressed
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.

… Rehoboth Beach this morning.

… soon, for two weeks. She’ll be there with her sister and her daughter while Mr UD is in Boston at the Tufts University Institute of Civic Studies.

Her blogs, University Diaries, and University Diaries at Inside Higher Education, continue, in the salt sea air.

UD‘s earlier stays in Rehoboth are chronicled here.

Here are few lines from Rehoboth Beach.

******************************

A Few Lines from Rehoboth Beach

intricate moves across the March ice-water. I thought
he must be painfully cold, but, I hear you say, he had
all the world emptied, to practice his smooth stand.

******************************************

An elegantly outfitted seaside poem. The writer sends a few lines to a friend, presumably a rather concerned friend, since the writer seems to have gone to the beach off-season in order to recompose herself after a trauma.

The engrossing drama, power, and simplicity of the setting distracts her from herself, and clears her head. She wants to be like a surfer, alone, balanced upright on troubled waters, and concentrating on nothing but balancing, on nothing but negotiating the waves. She’s after a brave and redemptive form of simplicity, one that gathers up the fragments of the self into one “smooth stand.”

But she’s not there yet – the tired jetty, the frail egg sack, these convey the writer’s exhaustion and frailty on her first dark March day at the beach. In the darkness, she walks off – tries to walk off – her suffering, all the while deriving some sense of inner order from hymns. Singing to the waves, like the singer in The Idea of Order at Key West, she tries to generate a kind of counterpoint to her inner discord.

And indeed the next day is much better; the sun’s come out, and the gulls don’t even need two legs to stay upright. making / intricate moves against the March ice-water is a gorgeous line, with its alliterative M’s and its use of the greatly poetic word “intricate.” (“Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring / In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring / Intricate rented world begins to rouse.”) And it carries the point of the poem as well, this line, the idea that her emptied, simplified, calmed self is the start of her mending, and that eventually she may become, like the surfer, capable not merely of simple balance, but intricate moves over the perilous surface of life.

****************************************

I like everything about Rehoboth, but
especially, as longtime readers know,

its beach stones.

… of a striated stone from Rehoboth.

I found it this morning on
the beach, which was very
windy and chilly.

Most of today’s stones have been
tossed all the way to the dune
grass by the heavy waves, so
you don’t get the pleasure of
moving in and out with the tide
as you follow the stones’
snaky mosaic.

I like the roughness and the
complexity of this stone, with
plenty of white lines that go
all the way around the piece,
and with the mismatch of
that burst of pure white
at one end.

But there’s much to be
said for the classic purity
of the flat black stone
with the strong white line.

Not dipped in M&Ms. Not flecked
with coconut. Not a caramel apple
martini, cheesecake, or crumble.

A classic, as it’s now known,
a classic Granny Smith
caramel apple.

It’s a quiet high point of UD‘s
Rehoboth Beach stays. Her one
classic Granny Smith caramel
apple.

She felt ready for it today,
though it meant walking in
serious heat down the
boardwalk to Dolly’s and
then standing in line —
just for a minute,
but the heat was hellish —
and then convincing the
Belarussian woman
behind the counter that
the classic Granny Smith
without anything on it
was really what UD wanted.
And a bottled water.

Even in its clear plastic
bubble, the apple’s caramel
had begun to melt in the
sun.

On the way back to her apartment,
sipping the cold water and
swinging the bag holding the
apple, UD, from under her
wide-rim hat, thought This
really isn’t too bad. There’s
a breeze.

But she was happy to
be back in the air conditioning.

Mr UD was on the balcony,
reading, and gazing at the hot
beach and the blue umbrellas.

UD felt a little sad, looking
at the beach, because this
morning she’d watched twenty
or so lifeguards swim from
pretty far out in the ocean
to shore — one of their many
training exercises — and she
was rooting for a woman to
come in first but not only
did a woman not win but
all of the men got to shore
before any woman finished.

So the women were all losers
and this put UD in a bad
mood — made worse by
Mr UD‘s crowing.
What? You thought women
were stronger than men? You
thought that? You thought
that?

No. I guess what I thought
was that one freak woman out
there with enormous muscles
and brilliant strategic
instincts would come in first.

I settled myself by the view,
cracked open the caramel
apple container, and began
swatting away flies. Quite a
bit of the caramel stuck to
the plastic as I struggled to
get the apple out of its
holder, but this was fine,
because part of the pleasure
of eating the classic caramel
apple is scraping the pure
caramel out of the container
with your fingers.

I’ve now finished eating
the apple, which means
I’ve finished this post.

And NOT Dover Beach!

********************

UD (to Mr. UD, who just this moment returned from sitting on the beach for two hours): Why are there no good beach poems?

Mr. UD: There are many good mountain poems.

UD: No there aren’t.

Mr. UD: Name a bad mountain poem.

UD: “The Mountain in Your Butt.”

Mr. UD: Our daughter is absolutely wonderful, but the day she taught you to end your sentences with in your butt was not a good day.

***********************

Rhode Island, by William Meredith, is the best I can do at the moment.

***********************

Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over
again, like the rented animals in Aïda.
In the late morning the land breeze
turns and now the extras are driving
all the white elephants the other way.
What language are the children shouting in?
He is lying on the beach listening.

The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels.
He tries to remember snow noise.
Would powder snow ping like that?
But you don’t lie with your ear to powder snow.
Why doesn’t the girl who takes care
of the children, a Yale girl without flaw,
know the difference between lay and lie?

He tries to remember snow, his season.
The mind is in charge of things then.
Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic,
all that openness and swaying.
No matter how often you make love
in August you’re always aware of genitalia,
your own and the half-naked others’.
Even with the gracefulest bathers
you’re aware of their kinship with porpoises,
mammals disporting themselves in a blue element,
smelling slightly of fish. Porpoise Hazard
watches himself awhile, like a blue movie.

In the other hemisphere now people
are standing up, at work at their easels.
There they think about love at night
when they take off their serious clothes
and go to bed sandlessly, under blankets.

Today the children, his own among them,
are apparently shouting fluently in Portuguese,
using the colonial dialect of Brazil.
It is just as well, they have all been changed
into small shrill marginal animals,
he would not want to understand them again
until after Labor Day. He just lays there.

******************************

Eh. I don’t say it’s great. Drifty thoughts of a middle-aged daddy lying, laying, lieing, alie, on the beach, his kids nearby. The bit about eroticism is sort of okay, all that openness and swaying. Gives you a sense of the guy’s orientation, summer for him being perturbingly messy and bestial, an out of joint season during which Yalies misspeak and his own kids sound Portuguese.

The speaker, Hazard, looks at his own, what, tenting little erection or something, “like a blue movie.”

He doesn’t like summer, in short. Can’t wait for Labor Day, when we go back to work. Summer creatures have morphed from sandless serious citizens to shrill marginal animals, and he doesn’t like it.

He ends with a joke which links him — drily, ironically — to the gibberish world around him: He just lays there.

I lived here, at the beach, all winter, writing on my blog last October, November, and December about the empty beach and the cold water.

Mornings, a few runners in black sweats appeared on the sand, their backdrop huge container ships and contrails.

Afternoons, I scoped out beachstones with calcite lines around them for my collection, now piled in a glass bowl near the piano in Garrett Park. Nights, I trained my binoculars on big orange moons off the balcony.

The quiet was absolute. Somewhere in it, intermittently, I became aware of the tides. Aware of the way I wasn’t aware of them, and of how they calmed me.

*******************************

Everyone’s here now, and it’s hot. The smoothed winter sand that made the beach look, from above, like an almond cookie, is pocked with shoveled wells and wetted sculptures. The wind ruffles not only the dune grass, but flags on lifeguard stands and the edges of blue umbrellas.

From our second-floor balcony, we hear constant little inrushes of speech on the boardwalk.

I’m forty-two. I’m done dating. I

He’s not my blood cousin. We can

Everyone’s here, but there’s still the same propofolic effect — calm, just this side of sleep.

UD just asked Mr. UD this question.

After the Summer Institute in Civic Studies was over, Mr. UD met an old friend, David, at the Red Barn Grill and Tavern, in Summit, New York, and from there they drove to our house in the hills (take Bear Gulch Road – if your car can handle it – and you’ll eventually get to our hidden lane) for a little male bonding in the wilderness.

As these results show, there’s not much to do up there, so a lot of people — including college students — get drunk or high. You can, in season, go hunting. Hiking. Berry-picking. Swimming (lots of ponds). But drinking’s big all year round.

“Sure we drank,” said Mr. UD, glancing up from a piece of paper headed A CIVIC INTELLECTUAL DISCIPLINE. “Water.”

“This is THE week,” says Syd, our landlord. “Every school in America is closed. It’s wild around here. Get ready to stand in lines.”

… you have to be into build-up and aftermath. The event itself — thousands of people racing into the Atlantic Ocean and racing out — takes three seconds.

But there’s the rescue boat doing tight circles and spewing jets of water, and there’s the little boat alongside it blowing its horn, and there’s the man dressed as a polar bear.

As if today weren’t exciting enough, it’s the Polar Bear Plunge out there, thousands of people in bathrobes and Cat in the Hat hats stripping down (though chilly, it’s sunny and pretty comfortable) to jump in the water.

A Lewes Fire Rescue boat floats offshore, and wet-suited divers gather at the waterside, in case anyone needs to be saved. Little airplanes buzz the beach.

“Ten minutes!” someone calls out. The mood’s euphoric, silly, excited. Everyone’s taking everyone else’s picture. The Lieutenant Governor’s somewhere in the crowd.

Les UD‘s lean over their balcony, stoked.

… in a week — the day after Mr UD and I watch La Kid sing with Springsteen at the Super Bowl.

The plan is to follow her to Florida. Not to Tampa (actually, her group is staying in Orlando), but to Key West.

I’m ready for some warmth. A swim. Definitely some snorkeling — around Key West, but also, I hope, in nearby places like the Caymans and Cozumel. So some cruising too.

***************************

When I was young my parents escaped Christmas every year by taking their four children on a slow car trip to some part of Florida, where we went camping. One year the Everglades; another year, somewhere along the Gulf coast. But we never went to the Keys, and I’ve always wondered about them.

***************************

Here’s James Merrill’s house in Key West.

And here’s a little literary history.

I laugh at the way I hunt stones at the beach, but tonight I really look at them, fifty of them laid out flat on a fold-out table in my apartment on the Atlantic.

I’m sitting up in bed, my little laptop on a pillow that rests on my legs, the only light in the room a spotlight on the stones. They’re just to my left. They angle into one another on top of a white kitchen cloth, their striations making them — as I’ve learned to call them — graphic stones. Also lucky stones. Lined stones, graphic stones, lucky stones. Lucky if their white stripe wraps itself all the way around the stone. A lot of mine are like that.

I have my own names for their variants — the white stones with yet whiter lines I call Tres Leches; the tan stones with tangles of raised lines I call Hot Cross Buns; the rare black stones with pale veins I call Cy Twomblies.

One stone – a large gray
oval with concentric white
lines up and down – I call
Pere Ubu, because
it reminds me of this picture:

And really, though I laugh,
stones are sacred, and have
been sacred, to so many for
so long. Mine aren’t sacred
stones, but I handle them
a certain way, seek them
out with a certain seriousness,
and find their texture, heft,
shade and shape — and what
the water and the weight and
the calcite have written on them
— moving.

***********************

A lot of it is the ritual. The special green gloves for brushing the sand off so I can put them clean in my pockets. The afternoon departure, when the sun is just so and the tide washes over the stones and makes them shine. I dart back and forth like a sandpiper as the water approaches and recedes. I cast my eyes quickly over twisting paths of stones as I walk (I keep a good pace — this is a walk), noting only stones of a certain size and smoothness and presence, and then lean down, pick one up, and hold it to the sun.

I marvel at the mosaic shapeliness of the beach itself. The sort of beauty I’m seeing in the long tossed up curving paths of granite and basalt provokes a satori… Roland Barthes, writing about Twombly’s painting and artforms like it, describes a satori as a moment of blissful astonishment at a seemingly negligent, random gesture that somehow becomes supremely aesthetic.

And of course there’s everything else around me — The cold rush of the ocean, the sky’s graphic contrails, the colonies of motionless gulls. My pockets become heavy with stones, and I keep my hands in my pockets and move them over the stones as if the stones are worry stones.

Now I sit on a boardwalk bench and examine each stone yet again, tossing back onto the beach one that’s too small, another whose lines are strong but whose surface is rough, and another which looked beautiful wet but lost its looks in the sun.

Back in the apartment, I wash each stone again and then consider its seams and its quartz alongside the pebbles already there. It’s lyrical.