I like Claude McKay so much. I know I’ve written this before. His biography “A Long Way From Home” is wonderful. We spent the last few sections in the Soviet Union of 1922. He meets Zinoviev, he meets Trotsky while "the prophet" still runs the Red Army and he is feted and welcomed by soldiers and the sailors after Leon affords a strong introduction. And though he is tempted as anyone would be, time and time again to speak on behalf of his country, and speak on behalf of his people, he calmly and convincingly stays centered on the fact that he is a poet, not a spokesperson or an organizer. He is there to observe.
Like I did ninety-seven or so years later, he makes a visit to St. Peter and Paul’s fortress in Petrograd to see the cell where Prince Kropotkin was held and later escaped from. I let out a little gasp as our lives intersected. The great anarchist thinker, writer had only just died, the year before McKay's visit and Kropotkin's death in February was the last, legal display of anarchism in Bolshevik Russia. Only a month later the anarchist sailors at Kronstadt had rebelled and were crushed. McKay visits the sailors in Kronstadt the following year, but only mentions their buoyant revelry and unconditional welcome. We identify with him even though we are not Afro Caribbean because he is alone and centered on precisely who he is and why he is there.
After dropping my older one off in Krumville there, over Mohonk and up passed Stone Ridge, I decided to keep on Kripplebush Road until I got to Samsonville Road, Route Three, that lead back to the Ashokan Reservoir. It looked too ambitious considering it earlier on the map but when I got to the turn, I went left towards Boiceville instead of right, back homeward. You can’t see anything of the Reservoir as you travel this way. It looms beyond the woods to your right. But it is meditative to drive by all the different homes, tucked up in the woods, and imagine all the different lives busy being played out.
Boiceville has a few shops along the road. And then they’re gone. The name, it appears was to have honored a Mr. Boice, who lived there. Childish, I couldn’t help but think of the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, which consigned high school students so inclined, or so directed, to pursue a trade rather than more academics. And in my middle school, downstate in Westchester, it was a slander. To call someone a “boceee” was to suggest they were an idiot. We didn’t know about Boiceville at the time, but if we had we certainly would have sneered, derisively. I found myself imitating the tough kids I feared from that time, by yelling aloud to myself as I drove out of town: “you fuckin’ bocee.” I laughed and said it again, savoring the accent, considering how unfair and uneducated it all was.
Tuesday 08/18/20
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