The Funeral Of Annie Cain - A Dress With No One In It

The minister began his eulogy quietly and respectfully.  “We are here to remember Annie, a woman of intelligence and good nature; a woman of particular rectitude and responsibility.  She was one of a kind, and will be missed. We are here not to mourn her death but to celebrate her life – a life like all, unique in God’s eyes, but unique among her colleagues and peers”. 

Here the minister paused and nodded his head to a woman in the front row, inviting her to come to the pulpit. “I never met a woman who worked so hard”, she began.  “Annie was never put off by anything – not John…”, smiling at an older man in the back row, “nor Delilah…”, nodding to a youngish black woman sitting under the banner of St. George, “or even Harry…” 

Annie was remembered as a whiz with contracts and fast at proposals, and her cute, disingenuous snookering of the competition was famous. “The Manila bid…who can ever forget that one?”.  Laughter, smiles, and luckily no homilies about her premature death, those she left behind, a reminder to all that the end can come any time any place like it did to poor Annie, walking down the 5th floor corridor to the Ladies Room and dropping over dead before she hit the floor.

“Annie was never late for a meeting….Tell me people, was she ever? And always the one to turn off the lights.  The Department will never be the same without her.”

And so the service went, one colleague after another lightheartedly reminiscing about Annie’s good humor, her diligence, her never-failing support and consideration; yet not one speaker went beyond Annie’s office doors.  No one talked of her in any other way but congenially and warmly.  Yes, she was all that her colleagues said; but no more?   Why had they all persisted so deliberately in casting her only as a good worker, a loyal colleague, and a model employee?

Of course she was nothing like the friendly drone described at her funeral service.  She had a real life, lovers, indiscretions, a troubled family.  She could be needy, demanding, unpleasant, and irresistibly coy – all pretty much the same, more or less, as anyone, just configured differently – but what was there to anyone other than a reconfiguration of oddities, tics and peculiarities inherited from Grandad Alphonse, her own father; or the depressing house in Haver’s Quarter where she had grown up, failure at school but trained as nurse at a time when nursing took most young women; success at her new profession thanks to a particular gentleness with patients and a dexterity which made the best out of the worst. 

Peter Townsend met Annie in a country only just recovering from a two-decades civil war.  Crime, civil unrest, social dysfunction without law and order, infrastructure ruined or in decay, and a population now made up of ex-combatants on both sides who only knew killing as a profession.



Perhaps it was because of this chaos, insecurity, and uncertainty that they became lovers – a common enough circumstance among expatriates on mission to unfortunate places – or because the time and occasion was right.  Being in a war zone readjusts morality. Deceit is not what it is back home.  Precariousness does wonders for emotional and moral liberation.  Michael Ondaatje wrote this in The English Patient:

There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.

Or perhaps Peter and Annie would have been attracted to each other anywhere.  Or elements of all these.  The romance of travel, the excitement of war, the absence of anything familiar or reassuring and the unavoidable likelihood of physical danger or death, or something fine and attractive in each of them, found like Almasy and Catherine in Ondaatje’s story.  His characters might have been together in London or Paris, but it was the desert which not only brought them together but made the relationship happen.

Peter admitted that their two years of romance were too perfect and uncomplicated to risk commitment or anything more than affection.  They knew that the relationship would go nowhere, and until the day she dropped dead in the C Building they had a particular and remarkable affection. 

After twenty minutes listening to the weird anecdotes of her colleagues at her funeral service, he left.  The woman described from the pulpit bore no relationship whatsoever to the woman he had known.  Annie Cain was not unusual, particularly unique, or distinguished.  She was indeed a poorly-paid nurse and a willing and helpful colleague; but the bits of Alphonse, the rages of her father, the moronic antics of the boys in 9th grade, a sexuality inherited from her libertine Aunt Tally, and just making it through 35 years made her whole greater than the sum of her parts.  It was this particular uniqueness that was so absurdly absent at her funeral.  The woman described could have been anyone.

John Updike in Rabbit at Rest writes of the same strange disconnect:

The Minister talks of Thelma as a model housewife, mother, churchgoer, sufferer.  The description describes no one, it is like a dress with no one in it…Harry sits there beside snuffly Janice in her policeman’s outfit thinking of the wanton woman he knew, how little she had to do with the woman the minister described…

Perhaps this awkwardly arranged, familiar scenario must be be played as written.  No one wants to get personal at a funeral.  Better to let the dead stand on their perceived or contrived merits and leave it at that.  Everyone can reflect on the departed in their own way.  Or is it that ordinariness gets in the way of insight.

Thornton Wilder in Our Town says just this.  Grover’s Corners is an ideal place to live, to grow up, and to raise children.  It is ordinary, but polite and respectful.  There is nothing shameful about the butcher, the grocer, and the pharmacist, nor anything to criticize for sameness.  ‘Uninspired’ is not a term to describe Grover’s Corners.



As the townspeople of Grover’s Corners die and look down on the town the left behind, they realize that this ordinariness of which they were so proud, kept them from an appreciation of life itself.  Before they knew it, their short lives were over, and they could barely remember what they had done or how they had felt.

Peter never got over the funeral of Annie Cain.  He got over her death, but not the way she was remembered.  Did so many people really only see an empty dress? An ordinary, unremarkable life? An invisible person?

Like most of the rest of us, Annie Cain left few remarkable traces, forgotten by all but our closest families and except for amusing anecdotes at Easter Dinner, erased from history.  Peter thought himself particularly fortunate for having loved a woman no one else understood.  It was his own perennial Christmas gift.

The Greatness Of Empire - Fear And Loathing Of Kings, Shahs, And Emperors

 In these days of ‘diversity', ‘inclusivity’, and historical revisionism, it is easy to lose sight of where we came from – our collective legacy of Persian Shahs, Roman and Chinese Emperors, Mauryan Kings, and Russian czars. While we may not be descended directly from them, we are the privileged beneficiaries of what they built and did.   We have the Romans to thank for bringing high culture, language, public works, administration, and governance to the tribes of Europe. Thanks to the influence Constantine and his successor’s proclamation that Christianity was to be the official religion of the Empire, it spread quickly throughout Europe.

French writers like Moliere and Racine grew in reputation and renown thanks to the patronage of Louis XIV who provided funds and commissions for artists, musicians and composers whose contribution to European culture was seminal, historically important,, and culturally influential.  He founded the Académie Royale de Danse, the first dance institution established in the Western world, the Académie d’Opéra from which classical ballet arose, and institutes for the arts and sciences.

Under the guidance of King Louis, the modest residence at Versailles was transformed into the architectural and garden complex still seen today.  Every detail of construction was overseen by Louis who supervised the work of his select team of architects.  Charles Le Brun was responsible for all interior decoration, and landscape artist André Le Nôtre created symmetrical French gardens and elaborate fountains.  A visit to the Great Hall of Mirrors alone suggests the power and influence of Louis and his importance to European and world cultural history.

Louis governed well and was responsible for the reform of antiquated legal codes, medieval practices in trade and commerce, and incoherent taxation policies.  In short his reign was one of the most influential in Europe building on the traditions of antiquity, the entitlement of the divine right of kings, and intelligence, insight, and a unique national and European vision.

The Winter Palace was an official residence of the Russian sovereign from 1732 until 1917, and the last, perhaps most influential ruler and the most like Louis in terms of architectural vision and patronage of the arts was Alexander II, who ruled from 1855 to 1881.  During his reign he acquired many new works of art such as the ancient and archaeological collection of the Marchese di Cavelli in 1861 and Leonardo da Vinci's "Madonna and Child" in 1865.  A walk through the Hermitage Museum, the Winter Palace, is to walk through two hundred years of Russian imperial history.

Long before European high culture and civilization and at its apogee, the Persian Empire extended its reach far beyond Persepolis.

The Shahs of Persia were as influential as the European monarchs who followed centuries later and extended cultural influence, art, literature, architecture, and science.

The Tang Dynasty is considered a golden age of Chinese arts and culture. In power from 618 to 906 A.D., Tang China led by powerful emperors like Taizong and thanks to Buddhism, spread its culture across much of Asia, and is remembered for its contributions to poetry, art, and calligraphy.  Laozi who lived shortly before the Tang Dynasty was perhaps China’s greatest philosopher; and along with Confucius and the teachings of Buddhism influenced not only Asian but European thinking.

The list of kings, queens, emperors, czars, and shahs is long; and the empires they helped create, extend and rule are the foundations of both Western and Eastern civilization.  Not all rulers were great and some were destructive, harsh, and punitive, but in the main the emergence of kingdoms and empires of power, wealth, and influence enabled rapid development of the arts, science, and governance.  Without the collective intellectual wisdom, artistic vision, and political purpose of these rulers, the world would not be the sophisticated, intellectually enlightened, and spiritually endowed place it is

To those who appreciate this long sweep of cultural history, the current move to ignore it, demean it, and worst dismiss it for its irrelevance seems barbaric – no different from the tribal world of Northern Europe before the Romans, the Middle East before the Persians, the Subcontinent before the Aryans.

The defiance of history and the purist demands for removing all characters and events except those that embody current political philosophy is even more misguided.   The Iron Age tribes that wondered Europe before the Romans living a basic subsistence existence knew no better.  Those who today choose to revile history as a whole, throw out grandeur, glory, achievement, merit, and brilliance in one great revisionist housecleaning should know better.  They should be able to understand the dynamics of cultural relativity – the impossibility of ascribing guilt to entire generations based on current convictions.  They should know that colonialism may have been exploitative but that it was also the vehicle for the extension of a more evolved, developed culture.
They should recognize that slavery has been part of human society since its beginnings, and that ancient Romans, Greeks, Persians, Aryans, and Africans kept and traded slaves.  That it was an institution, reviled only since England forbade slavery in the early 18th century.  It was not the make-or-break consequence of civilizations.

Those who look at society only through the narrowest lens possible – to see current life as the only existential reality, devoid of antecedent, bare of influence, and stripped of historical relevance – are no different from Pol Pot who declared Year Zero, a moment before which there was no meaning, and after which would only be a Communist Utopia.  Pol Pot not only intended to reform Cambodian society based on his radical Maoist principles, but to destroy it, level it to the ground so that a new, pure, untainted society could emerge from the ashes.

The American revisionists of today are no different.  They are intent on first creating a Year Zero – a complete expungement of the American past; a derogation and complete erasure of all those historical figures who do not complete conform to their authoritarian criteria; and the creation of a society without class, without origin, without historical determinants, without ancestry, and without culture.  The new progressive society is to be as deliberately primitive as the pre-Roman Iron Age tribes of Northern Europe.

The toppling of statues of American heroes – Jefferson, Washington, Jackson, and others – is only the first step towards Year Zero, a thuggish reactionary move at the most obvious targets.  Before long the leaders of the Cancel Movement will realize that historical pollution is everywhere.  Every name has retrograde connotations.  Every remembrance of historical events must be suspect and inadmissible.  Western civilization is not, for these cultural renegades, the best expression of human nature, spirit, and ambition, but totally corrupt, devious, and destructive. It must be forgotten, entirely, completely, and with no reservations.

Will this anti-historical, revisionist cancel culture juggernaut be stopped?  Doubtful, since there are few institutions equipped, ready, and committed to do so.  The Catholic Church, the central, universal cultural institution of the last thousand years, responsible at least in principle, for promoting and enforcing Christian moral values, is but a shadow of its former imperial self.  No secular institution is there to take up the slack. Historians are intellectually self-sequestered in universities, either fully supportive of or intimidated by woke, cancel culture of ‘inclusivity’, ‘diversity’, and ‘identity’.  Politicians looking for votes are afraid to offend, and since progressive watchdogs have hair triggers, they say nothing.

The leaders of China, Turkey, and Russia who understand the importance of history and hope to restore the imperial tradition to their countries, are reviled in the United States; and yet in their implacability, their fierce determination, savvy, and economic power refuse to give in to the demands of an increasingly inarticulate United States.  We don’t get it, and they do.  Before long we will be ungovernable, and they will have arrived.

Puritanism And The Marriage Trap - The Buttoning Up Of America

Sex is everywhere in America except in the right places.  The crotch-grabbing, booty-shaking Super Bowl halftime shows might suggest that Americans have finally shaken off centuries of Salem witch-hunting, Victorian prudery, and the sexual ordinariness of the Fifties, come into their own, and returned to the ethos of the Sixties when opportunity was taken for spare change, but no dice, for despite all the titties and pasties, America has returned to its Puritan roots. 

Gay men liberated and proud, have come out of the bathhouses to marry. Drag queens are happy to walk up the aisle, and girls and boys once postponing the inevitable, head for the altar, the suburbs, and pre-schools.

Any man knows that love with many women is the way life should be; and regardless of MeToo they want to be Pashas, kings and courtiers, men with a thousand and one women, a hundred thousand sexual delights, and want a life of happy, guilt-free sexual license.  

Every woman is different, a dazzling, delightful kaleidoscopic of sexual ambitions, desires, and marvelously intricate fantasies; and sex with them is like stealing into the Kabbah or climbing K2 - inimitable, unforgettable; one of many discoveries in a long series of adventures.  Women are wonderful, ceaselessly fascinating, imponderable, insatiable, and every man wants them all. 

So what has changed?  How did men let this censorious state of affairs happen? How, after the epiphany of the Sixties did men allow such a reversion to the two-tone, white-walled propriety of the Fifties, an era which was supposed to be over and done with, dead and buried, forgotten and dismissed? Do any of them really want to come home bored and tired to the same woman, the same rambler, dog, and bedtime stories?

The Age of Woman has come, but not the one men expected.  This one is a determined, suited, defiantly aggressive one, a cross-dresser, man-inside-Chanel skirt overachiever who has given up on Petrarch, the Sonnets, and Emily Dickenson for Milton Friedman, Hayek, and the Chicago school; or who has bitten into abortion, equal pay, and sexual abuse and liked the bitter taste.  Sex? Perhaps and under contract, with codicils, caveats, and proscriptions.

The bare-breasted, love-the-one-you're-with hippie is dead and gone, disappeared, a vapor.  Something so far-fetched that maybe it never happened; maybe this particular sexual rectitude has always been and always will be. 

 

Of course this all is an American thing.  Putin, Macron, Mitterrand, Sarkozy, even Kim Jung-Un have all the women they want as quickly as bed tea or a closed door; and while American men desperately want what they have, they are in look-but-don't touch territory. No Thousand and One Nights for them. 

Of course it used to be.  Martin Luther King was a sexual madman.  LBJ's Secret Service pimps procured for him night and day.  JFK's paramours were legion and the delight of the press corps who kept his dalliances quiet, prerogatives of power.  Kissinger, that fat, ugly, jowled old man had sexual favors whenever he wanted.  'Power is the greatest aphrodisiac', he said and took advantage of it. Even  Bill Clinton had his share of trailer trash as governor and blow-jobs as President.  

Today, of course, such adventures would be unconscionable, impossible, and revolting.  Even if President Biden could chase women, he would be slapped and censured for his obtuse, typical male behavior.  He, like most men in America have become pussified, pussy-whipped, and complaisant. 

Tolstoy in the character of Konstantin Levin noted that God's greatest irony was to have created Man as a sensitive, intelligent, funny, perceptive, and creative being, then to consign him after only a few decades of life to the cold, hard ground of the steppes.  A greater irony, however, is to have created men with a lifelong sexual desire but with only a few years to satisfy it.  

Women at least have dime-store romance novels to feed their desires and remote ambitions; but men in this age of the feminist iron maiden, sexual rack, surplice of the rat, Spanish spider, and fork of the heretic have nothing but ogling left to them. 

Women of course have their sexual bastinado - a self-enforced peculiarity of Virgin Motherhood, the be-all and end-all of femaleness once the boardroom and corner office have been discounted.  Marriage is right and important for all kinds of devious reasons - social legitimacy, a footnote to paternity, tax breaks - so lovers are to be considered but not taken.  

Somehow in all this female liberation sex got left out.  Women have freed themselves from patriarchy and male abuse, but still have to resort to the vibrator.  There is such a thing as universal morality, they argue, and although they could go out and have a rutting good time to get back at men for millennia of male deceit and oppression, they have bought into the middle class ethos.  

So America, despite the heady promise of the Sixties, is back to Salem 1692.  Not only is it a sexless place but a censorious, humorless, castigating place.  It is not enough to be abstemious and celibate; but we have to suffer for our impertinent desires. 

There are ways for the independent man to satisfy his sexual needs.  Washington has always had its high-class, secretive, air-tight security call girl services; and rube Congressman from the Midwest are always the first to jump in, damn the torpedoes, and rut until they're caught; but in the light of day they have to appear with their wives and act the part. 

There's hope that this progressive sanctimony will soon be put to sleep after the election of Donald Trump, a man of machismo for whom marriage only plays well if you have a trophy wife.  Progressives will fret and worry about the erosion of immorality, lack of integrity, and dishonesty that Donald Trump always brings with him; but the rest of the nation will breathe a big, deep sigh of relief at the end of sanctimony, righteousness, and moral authority. 

Sex without marriage, outside it, before it, and after it again; and it will be a rootin', tootin' pleasure.