(Above: the view of the moon over Ken Fulk’s home on the bay in Provincetown, the view from the bedroom where I was recently staying at the Mary Heaton Vorse House.)
I call it The Curdle. It is the unexpected moment when everything that has been able to remain what I consider “good” inside me suddenly goes “bad.” I put quotation marks around those words because they are finally just concepts - either ones instilled in us early on or ones we asserted our agency over as we willed our way into adulthood, but concepts nonetheless. Yet as I get older and see 70 there on the three-year horizon, I have come to realize that being an adult is not a willful act but one of surrender. I once thought willing my way forward in life was a wily way out of the Forest of my childhood, which was the name of the little town in Mississippi where I grew up steeped in a queer orphan’s sorrow and sense of otherness. Here’s something else I’ve come to realize: all enchanted forests are themselves steeped in otherness and thus there is something sorrowful about their enchantment, but it is enchantment nonetheless.
I had a lovely few days recently in Provincetown. I spent my 50s summering there and even two winters holed up in a tiny apartment on its bay when I had no place else to turn except the turn in my life it offered at that point. Artists are attracted by its light. Writers by its solitude. Gays and lesbians by each other. I was aways attracted by its end-of-the-world quality - or its beginning-of-a-new-world one maybe. It is where the pilgrims first landed and I have always found a sense of pilgrimage there as well. It is an enchanting place but a ghost-begotten one. Fisherman lost at sea. Gay men lost to AIDS. There is sorrow sewn into its enchantment. So maybe that is why I feel at home there.
I stayed at the Mary Heaton Vorse House, which has been so lovingly restored by designer Ken Fulk, as both a headquarters for his Provincetown Arts Society and an artists retreat. I was there to interview Ken about his new book The Movie in My Mind, in the house’s garden at his book signing. When Vorse, a labor activist and writer, first arrived in Ptown, she too felt at home. In her own book, Time and the Town, she wrote about that on its opening page. “When I drove around the town in a horse-drawn accommodation, I knew that here was home, that I wanted to live here always,” she wrote about her arrival in 1906. “What I experienced when I first drove through Provincetown’s long street, when I walked through the low, scrubby woods ‘in back’ through the dunes to the outside shore, was as definite, as acute, as falling in love at first sight. The knowledge that this was to be my home forever did not come as a shock, or with any sense of surprise; it was rather as though I were invaded by the town and surrounded by it, as though the town had literally got into my blood.” Invasion. Being surrounded. The description of the town as a virus. There is violence and disease in her attempt at evoking for us how visceral her attraction to the town was - but that has always been the conundrum of the place. Danger to the body - drugs, alcohol, infection - is the companion that walks in its dunes with the deepening of the soul. Hedonism has always held spirituality’s hand there.
Vorse now is one of the ghosts of the town - she is buried its cemetery having died at her home there - but so is the man who owned the house before her, Kibbe Cooke, one of the last great whaling captains. David Dunlap, at his wonderfully informative Building Provincetown, website, writes of Cooke, “He and his brother, Capt. Ephraim Cook, owned one of the largest fleets on Cape Cod, doing business as E. & E. K. Cook & Company. They were agents of the famed Alcyone. But the advent of kerosene, among other factors, devastated the industry. In one fell swoop, on 8 April 1879, the Cooks saw eight of their vessels — four of them whalers — auctioned off by the First National Bank. Kibbe Cook lost his house at the same time. It wound up in the hands of Benjamin Lancy, who allowed Cook to spend the rest of his days there, penniless as he was. Vorse recalled that when creditors came to the house seeking payment, Cook would say he had no money but would be glad to play a little Mozart for them on his cello.” It is claimed that Kibbe’s ghost still resides at the Vorse House and some nights you can hear him playing a bit of that Mozart. That is a pretty good way of describing what I feel now when I am back in Provincetown and feeling both sorrowful and enchanted by the place. It is as if I am hearing Mozart being played by a cello that is no longer there.
After my trip to Provincetown, I stopped off at The Jane Hotel in New York City for the night. The Jane was built the same year that Vorse arrived in Ptown and got into that horse-drawn carriage. It was conceived as a hotel for sailors, the kind of place that guys like Kibbe stayed. It is now a rather down-on-its-heels once hip and stylish place where those of us down-on-our-heels who were once hip and stylish stay - i.e. it’s comparatively cheap. I usually stay at the Chelsea Hostel but there was no single private room available there for that night. I have a complicated history with The Jane but decided to give it another chance. I have discovered bedbugs in my room there in the past and once arrived there after a long and delayed flight from London to find they had given my room away; they had no other and would not help me find a replacement one in the neighborhood. I ended up at a place close by that rented by the hour. Another time I had lost my debit card - I don’t have credit cards - and they would not accept cash for my room and I was suddenly stranded. So when an issue came up when I was checking in this time, The Curdle occurred. The temper switch that I can keep turned off for very long periods, got switched on with a sudden fury. I was even told I was causing a scene, “And we can’t have that.” Being scolded, just made me madder. I hate being confronted with the part of me that can go off like that. It doesn’t even matter what the issue was because the greater issue for me when it was all over was my losing my temper over a silly situation. I even made a point later of asking the names of the two women at the desk to apologize to them personally. I wasn’t really mad about the issue anyway, I decided, but the fury that unfolded had to be about a deeper issue than this being just the latest complication in my narrative with The Jane.
I had had such an enchanting time in Provincetown and my going off had made me sad in a confusing way and usually sadness is the one thing in my life that doesn’t confuse me. It makes sense because I will always be a queer orphan with a deep-seated otherness. I even felt guilt about it because going off so needlessly had dissed the enchantment of the previous few days and the gratitude I was feeling for it. As I walked about New York City on a grey and drizzly day, I contemplated The Curdle that had erupted and came to rest at another realization: I am scared. I have been trying to will myself through the existential fright I am feeling about the instinctive change I am making in my life now that I have decided to give up my loft in Hudson, New York, sell most of my possessions, and set out on a pilgrimage for the next few years. Part of that pilgrimage - when not at my home base of London for six months - will be checking into new places for a month or so. There was something about the itinerant aspect built into the incident at The Jane that had set me off because of my fear of being an itinerant. I have claimed that this upcoming pilgrim’s life is not about seeking answers, but searching for new questions. Here are the two I found on my walk that day: Why do we fear our deepest instincts and why do I always find a way to diss enchantment? Maybe like the nature of an enchanted forest a bit of alchemy will be a part of the answers when they arrive like Mozart played on an absent cello: impossible but heard. Calmer now, I am listening.
Since the hospitality industry was my source of income for close to 45 years, I’m still curious if the advance deposit was found. And, if it was, they should be apologizing to you. If it’s a moot issue, simply ignore this post. Carry On, I’m over the moon for you that you’re giving up your current known existence to head out and explore and create adventure , resulting in meeting new humans and getting inspiration. Not a bad existence for three years.
We were in PTown for 10 days just a few doors down down from you on the bay. Great way of capturing the allure. Love the East End.