PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Because this year's days and dates---between March 1 and December 31---synchronize exactly as they did in 1976, the most important year of my adolescence and of my life prior to the year, 1994, in which I became a Christian, I have been giving much thought to the events of this time in 1976, as I do not expect to live long enough to see the next time the pattern synchronizes exactly; which will be in 2027.

     At this time in 1976, I was a freshman newly admitted to a small, liberal arts college, a dorm school, forty-five miles (by interstate 70) from my hometown, and my Beloved; and I felt the separation most intensely.  While this separation had immensely pleased my parents, who did not approve of my adolescent love affair, it tormented me most intensely---and the first four nights of my residence on campus I had wept myself to sleep.  I alsol intensely missed the community of c.b. channel 22, the community who had welcomed me---an awkward, clumsy, shy, nerd in my mundane life; who shed all of these aspects when speaking on the c.b. as Starwatcher (which would be a loose English translation of the word, Seryddwr, which will appear below); a serendipitous defect in the manufacture of my c.b. allowed it to broadcast far more powerfully than the legal wattage limit (a condition that my Beloved called "running barefoot"---a metaphor that never failed to provoke a very pleasant reaction from me), to which we added a device called a "power mike," so that the voice of Starwatcher was so different from my actual voice that some members of channel 22, upon meeting, seemed to be surprised that I was, actually, Starwatcher (and sometimes my Beloved had to resolve the doubt for them).  The c.b. had been central to our weekend dates---especially on Friday and Saturday evenings:  our routine was to visit the Melody 49 drive in theater for whatever they happened to be showing, and talk on the c.b.; then pizza and salad bar at a very elegant dining establishment, high end, that kept very late weekend hours; and then a long slow drive on the many rural roads of which our township consisted, all the time talking on the c.b.  This I was compelled to leave behind on the morining of Thursday, September 9th, 1976; and though my parents ardently hoped that this separation would fully sever both the love relationship and my participation in the c.b. community, it only strengthened my resolve to resume it when the long (six weeks or so) Christmas break began just prior to the Thanksgiving holiday.

    Two aspects that my parents could not separate me from were my interest in poetry (especially, at that time, the poems written by John Milton), and my interest in the life, and the novels, of George Sand.  She---George Sand (whose mundane name was Aurore Dudevant)---had found tremendous liberation in the assumption of her pen name, or appellation; just as I had been liberated from my nerd-existence when, on Saturday, July 10th, 1976, my Beloved (whom I like to imagine as shoeless, feet sheathed in midnight blue socks, shirt unbuttoned and hanging open suggestively; although this was not the case for that particular moment in time) and I happened upon the word Starwatcher for my handle, on that second night of our ownership of a c.b. radio.  Having already read Curtis Cate's biography of George Sand earlier that year, I was aware of the pen name's liberation, although Cate only implied this (as I recollect: the following summer, in June, 1977, Joseph Barry's biography of George Sand would explicate this aspect in detail).

    Because of the BBC's six part series, Notorious Woman, as well as other scholarly treatments (including Cate's), George Sand was a "hot" topic on campus.  Of especial interest was her nine year relationship with Frederick Chopin and its tumultous disruption (which, I believe, was somewhat distorted by the BBC series).  Undergraduates usually have axes to grind; and, on this campus, a dispute had already been established between the music majors, whose believed that Sand was the main culprit in the breakup, and the literature and French majors, who believed that Chopin was, in fact, the cause of it.  I was very candidly in sympathy with the latter group, and it actually cost me the loss of some nascent friendships with music majors that had begun more pleasantly than they ended; all because of partisan interpretations of a love affair that had ended badly, and, admittedly, could not longer be fully explained given that all the witnesses to it were long dead.  My own Beloved and I would separate in the summer of 1978---more by attrition than acrimony.  But that event also caused me to begin to doubt my rather sternly negative attitude toward Chopin.  This attitude would be further eroded by hearing, in full, the second movement of his 2nd Piano Concerto---which, due again to the BBC series---I, as well as others, associated with Chopin's feelings toward George Sand.

     During their affair, Chopin acted as a substitute father figure to Sand's children, Maurie and Solange, whose own father had virtually abandoned them.  While Maurice bore a seething resentment toward Chopin, Solange essentially worshipped him.  They tell me that he showed her more attention than she received from either parent, and that he accepted her for who she was, with no expectations with who she should become---which was a habit of thought that both her natural parents had engaged.  When Solange developed a passion for the somewhat "wildchild" sculptor, Auguste Clesinger, Chopin advised her against a marriage with Clesinger, expressing an intense dislike for the sculptor.  Solange defied this advice, and her mother's, and eloped with Clesinger, who apparently satisfied himself, sexually, by slapping her around from time to time and, possibly, even sodomizing her.  When she left him and returned home to Nohant, her mother's country estate, her mother refused to offer hospitality and shelter.  Only Chopin's intervention softened, somewhat, this response; but it also began his downward slope to breakup with George Sand.

   After Chopin and George Sand parted ways, she became somewhat insistent that their mutual friends choose whose side they were on and which friendship they wishes to retain.  Maurice and Solange were forbidden to have any contact with Chopin.  Maurie, who had long hated the composer, had no problem complying with Momma's resentful demand; but Solange blatantly, and publicly, defied her mother and continued to have face to face contact with Chopin who, himself, continued to regard her as his only daughter.  When he passed away in 1849 (October 14), Solange was not only present at his deathbed, but was holding his hand; and she was one of the principal mourners at his funeral which her mother infamously and notoriously refused to attend.

    And Solange's estranged husband, with whom she would never be reconciled, sculpted the huge, mournful figure which now marks Chopin's grave in the Parisian Pere Lachaise Cemetery.  They tell me that Morrison's grave is so close to Chopin's that the shadow of Clesinger's sculpted figure passes, daily, over Morrison's tombstone as the sun moves through the sky.

    And, unlike the penultimate scene of the BBC series, George Sand did not suffer a fatal stroke while visiting Chopin's grave:  it is unlikely, given her ongoing attitude (toward both Chopin and toward her daughter's estranged husband), that she ever visited, and she died from complications of intestinal cancer, at Nohant, in June, 1876. 

Seryddwr