Bearing Witness

The graduate student who had a major crush on Ward liked me for myself; she was kind to me in an authentic way that was better for me then my too tight cleaving to my former best friend, Susan Davison. Susie-- I made Sue, and then her sister, live for me, because I did not really venture forth and take risks. With B---, the graduate, it was of a gentler tenor of mutual appreciation, and I got caught in the middle, between her and my philosophy professor, because she and I bonded, and she got hurt, with Ward and his open marriage rationalizations. I am not saying anything illegal occurred. B--- was of age, but I became the shoulder on whom she wept, and for that, I cannot forgive the not so spectacular instructor at Widener in his sinecured cocoon. Living his theories was a convenience which disregarded young adults like B--- and I were stupid. Though I no longer wear it, I still have the beige windbreaker she gave me before she departed. She had to go back, as she fell in love with Ward. I knew myself better. I was saturated with Jerry, besotted, obsessed in an unhealthy and dangerous manner. He and I are both circling the drain and I'm still writing it, flavors diminished as they may be, but I knew it was closer to intellectual rape as opposed to being Fallen, as B--- had fallen into a desire David was irresponsible to encourage, and I cannot forgive him. In anger, forgetting my rancor toward John for not seeing the woman I wanted to be for him, I told him in anger what Ward had wrought, and Tassoni and I were not so dissimilar in indignation. Tassoni threatened to go to the tenure committee. I attempted to dissuade him as I did not want to be involved and the woman was my friend. What happened after that?

John heads his own department in Ohio. I am a genocide survivor who pisses off Poets & Writers, the philosopher has a goatee, his protege an unfinished rite of passage, three television series rolled into one.

Epithets of the Ruling Elite

Over two million Russians went into exile after 1917 to escape persecution under Bolshevik rule. -- Anna Horsbrugh-Porter, Memories of Revolution

Lenin no doubt wouldn't have dared to forbid Maria Alekseyevna Ouspenskaya from remaining in New York once she landed on US soil. Her role as the little grandmother to Charles Boyer's dandy in the original 1939 Love Affair withstands a century of scrutiny as a revelation of what Europe lost through the destruction of class hierarchy. Such a grandiloquent magnificent woman whose noblesse  oblige would never be stripped away by Philadelphia Corporation for the Aging, which, when all is said and done, is a peasant and slave lineage lawn mower. The film is an artificially sweetened romance bracketing Irene Dunne's glamour disrupted by the sudden shadow of mortality, but those episodes with Maria, like Proust's diplomat, whose name I am not going to chase, reinstates the arguments for peerage, irrevocably lost to the world. This is not to indicate that Boyer's cosmopolitan appeal no longer exists, only that the grace of pedigree is basically an historical heirloom of no consequence.

At its best, caste systems left functioning societies in their wake, and the subtle passage of the baton between Maria as a woman who embodied her station, to Irene Dunne, as a theatric diva, is the beginning of all modern evil.