Greetings from the Peacock Room

I.

Recently I undertook a solo road trip to Washington, DC, one that I think aided my understanding of the country, of many things of deep importance to me, and, least importantly, of myself.

The trip to DC itself was interesting, as was the return drive, which took a different, more coastal route. Traveling often puts me in mind of the Japanese writers who perfected travel literature, as Occitan writers perfected lyric love poetry and English writers perfected the novel. Bashō Matsuo is the obvious (in certain circles) example, but we could also name Arii Shokyū, Jippensha Ikku, and Suzuki Bokushi, list just a few from the Edo period alone. I’ll describe part of the journey in a narrative mode that vaguely pastiches some of these writers:

I set off through New York down Interstate 88, through fields and hills speckled with hard snow, on a frigid evening after leaving work. Stopping at a Mirabito in the middle of nowhere for a chicken spiedie—not something I normally eat—and to fill up my gas tank, I played with the cruise control to get the mileage as economical as I could as I finished the first leg and entered Pennsylvania. I stopped for the night at a Fairfield Inn and Suites in Wilkes-Barre, in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The second day of travel, the bulk of which was in Pennsylvania, was perhaps the most interesting from a human-geographical perspective, in some ways more so than the time I spent at my final destination in the capital.

My main objectives for that day were to meet up with my friend Laurel, whom I do not see often, and to visit Centralia. Centralia, a town almost entirely abandoned because of an anthracite coal fire that has been burning underground since the 1960s, is well-known among connoisseurs of decaying, left-behind, and generally vanishing places. To the extent that the town still has life to it, that life is, touchingly, almost entirely religious; there is an active Catholic church (built on solid rock, not on burning coal) that now serves surrounding towns, and people are still being buried in Centralia’s Eastern Orthodox burying ground. (Also touching is the view from a still-active coal fire vent to a ridge on which a series of windmills stands; volvitur orbis!) The town smells about how one would expect, only the smell is so faint that it manifests as a mild headache and unpleasant aftertaste in the throat, rather than as anything that one recognizes as an odor. Before Centralia I tried and failed to get to confession at a church in Hazleton; after Centralia I proceeded to Ashland, a small town hard by where I made a spontaneous stop at a little restaurant for a fried haddock special, it having been a Lenten Friday. I had it with a strawberry milkshake; my diet that day was, in general, very bad.

Northeastern Pennsylvania is generally quite bleak, a region whose heart has been broken not only by deindustrialization but by policy choices that accompanied deinsdustrialization; there’s no iron law that technological unemployment has to end up like this, quite the contrary. It takes deliberate choices to let somewhere like this rot on the vine rather than building up new industries and new lines of work in the same general region. Reagan and Clinton both have much to answer for on this point. Also, like many other parts of my route, it’s full of overtly religious and patriotic appeals in advertising for businesses so disconnected from religion and patriotism that it gave the heebie jeebies to a New Englander like me. One small city has a “Christian Clothing” consignment store; another has a gutter cleaner whose logo has multiple separate American flags in it. It was a trip that many people from my part of the country, especially LGBT people, would have thought twice before taking. This is not to be wondered at; trans people in particular, which I’m going to define in an unfashionably objective and concrete way as “people who have a persistent discomfort or unease of some kind with the visceral aspects of what sex they are and would like at least in theory to do something about that,” are currently a political football in Middle America to a point that tends to raise real questions about one’s safety. I’ll return to this point later on in this essay.

After Centralia and Ashland, I met up with Laurel in the little town near Lancaster where she lives, no thanks to the exit I decided to take from Interstate 81. After spending about an hour with her, chatting and looking at a South-Central Pennsylvania chocolatier that she insists—correctly—is much better than Hershey’s, I got back on I-81 as quickly as possible and played a game with myself: I would drive so as to conserve gas and not need to refuel before crossing the Mason-Dixon Line into Maryland. I almost made it, but I did not want to risk getting stranded for a pride about which nobody else knew or cared; I pulled off in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, just before the Line, and refueled at a Sheetz whose pump, for some reason, did not stop automatically once the tank was full. I noticed that gas prices in the Mid-Atlantic are much higher than in New England and Upstate New York. The land was getting greener, spring rather than winter, and the sky was just turning from blue to evening-gold.

As much for the sake of it as to avoid the worst of Beltway rush hour Friday, in the gloaming I took a detour through Harpers Ferry, the first time I had ever been in the State of West Virginia. I was delighted to see that it had one of the best-preserved downtowns I have ever seen, from the standpoint of intact buildings from the period for which the town is famous. The landscape, where the Shenandoah River meets the Potomac, is craggy and dramatic even in near-dark; not for nothing is West Virginia the only state entirely covered in mountainous terrain, no matter how much Vermonters like me try to relativize the Lake Champlain basin. The John Brown Wax Museum, at least when driven past in the blue hour, looks as macabre as it should, and as inviting.

The last leg of the trip into DC—or technically into Northern Virginia, where Mary, the friend with whom I stayed for the second and third nights of the trip, lives—was not very interesting, although I did survive driving the Washington Beltway (so well-known from the phrase “Washington Beltway”), as indeed I would again the next day and the day after that.

II.

That Saturday was rainy in the morning and cloudy-to-sunny in the afternoon. This did not bother me overmuch; “rain in Northern Virginia” is an inside joke with some friends of mine, and it also meant that I was able to park in East Potomac Park without too much trouble and see the somewhat bedraggled, but still very pretty, Tidal Basin cherry blossoms without jostling enormous crowds. The last time I had been to the capital, in either 1999 or 2000—certainly before Bush took office—when I was a small child, had not been in the cherry blossom season, but I had a clear memory of the Tidal Basin and, of course, found it almost unchanged. So too with the National Mall. Some of the specific buildings and monuments that I passed were, of course, new, but nothing about the overall layout was; indeed, it had not been in 1999 or 2000 either.

This did not surprise me. DC is set up in a way that, were it an archaeological site in England, would get it called a ritual landscape without qualification or controversy. This is well-known to the point that there are conspiracy theories about it. The city is an interlocking series of gridlike, starlike, and triangular patterns, most of which are themselves relatively normal urban or suburban streets but which end up converging on the famous central features: the Washington Monument, the White House, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, and numerous other national and constitutional structures in and around the National Mall, Tidal Basin, and Ellipse. The general approach to changing anything about the setup is additive rather than substitutive; recent structures like the World War II and Martin Luther King Memorials have simply been incorporated into previously open areas of the existing layout. (The King Memorial has a distinctly Mosaic vibe, with a rock wall split in two over which artificial waterfalls course.)

One would think that this reflects an additive principle in American civic nationalism in general, and in some ways it does, but in other ways our general approach to history as a country has actually been getting thinner and poorer over time. With someone like Christopher Columbus (who distinctly lacks a memorial or monument in the capital’s ritual landscape, although Union Station has one), the current status of fodder for flame wars about wokeness is clearly a step down from the twentieth-century status of ecumenical national hero. That, too, however, was already a step down from the nineteenth century’s more complicated and realistic view of the man. When last winter I visited a preserved 1870s schoolroom at the Bennington Museum in Vermont, I found a poem called “The Discovery of America” by an author named John Townsend Trowbridge, which tells a pat, conventional, complacent version of the story until the last stanza, then cold-cocks the Gilded Age schoolchild with:

With wondering awe, the red men saw

The silken cross unfurled.

His task was done; for good or ill,

The fatal banners of Castile

Waved o’er the Western world.

This in an otherwise approving story told about American colonial history! In the twentieth century this sort of observation became a political third rail, and now in the twenty-first it has become a culture war flashpoint. In the late nineteenth it was uncontroversial enough for publishers of primary-school readers to allow it to be made to ten-year-olds. Clearly some of the texture of American history has been sanded down here, whereas the National Mall and Tidal Basin ritual landscape just keeps adding texture, as, frankly, it should.

Americans in the 1870s had quite a lot to say about other cultures as well as about our own, which brings me to the central reason why I wanted to visit Washington: a visit to the Peacock Room, an installation artwork by James Abbott McNeill Whistler that currently occupies part of the Freer Gallery at the National Museum of Asian Art. I became aware of the Peacock Room in the early 2010s during discussions about Orientalism in the Japanese language and literature major to which I have alluded twice already, and in divinity school a few years later I did a lengthy independent-study paper about Western receptions of Buddhism that touched on some aspects of its look and feel. Thus it came up in both my undergraduate and my graduate education, and, I think, reasonably so; the style and content are indeed Orientalist, and specifically japoniste, as all hell. The room is executed mostly in gold and a vivid peacock-y teal; there are gilt fighting peacocks on the wall at one end and a painting (famous in its own right) called “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain” over a fireplace at the other; multiple owners of the room have filled it with Asian ceramics to suit their tastes. Frederick Richards Leyland, the British shipping magnate who hired first the architect Thomas Jeckyll and then Whistler to design and execute the room, was unhappy with it both aesthetically and because of the enormous fee Whistler charged; the fighting peacocks represent Leyland and Whistler and are titled “Art and Money; or, The Story of the Room.”

This is one of a very few instances of this type of conflict in which I tend to side with the industrialist over the artist. Whistler did a dramatic installation in another person’s house without adequate involvement or consent either from the house’s owner or from the original artist from whom Whistler had taken on the job. This is not, to me, so much an issue of art versus money as one of hubris versus humility. But at least the Peacock Room looks astonishing. People who behave like Whistler do about artistic commissions nowadays more often than not come out with some kind of AI drivel or, at best, art that’s no better or worse, no more or less impressive, than what the commissioning party asked for in the first place.

After the Freer Gallery I parted ways with Mary for a few hours and went on a very long walk, much of it in the company of still another friend (I meet a lot of people online). I did briefly take a bus, to get from the area around the Mall to the area around Georgetown University, which is more leafy and dense-suburban and closer to a “normal” East Coast city of Washington’s rough size. The bus routes ostensibly take cash for the most part but after the COVID year 2020 there was a push to make some app the default, like for seemingly everything else these days; the driver’s machine had some problems with the cash and I couldn’t figure out how to work the app even once I had it downloaded, but the driver, kind man!, let me on anyway.

I enjoyed meeting up with this friend; we talked about things like fascism (agin’) and the architecture of the Washington National Cathedral (fer), to which we walked through Dumbarton Oaks Park and past the Naval Observatory and up Embassy Row. (I particularly liked seeing the Italian embassy, the Wiphala flying outside the Bolivian embassy, and the aggressive pro-Ukraine propaganda throughout the residential street immediately facing the Russian embassy.) After about two hours we parted ways, because I still had to get to confession—I had been trying and failing throughout the previous week, for a variety of reasons that I personally find hilarious with the long /aɪ/ in retrospect—and then to the MLK Memorial to meet up with Mary at five o’ clock. Since my phone was by this point dying, and then dead, and since I did not really have time to sit somewhere fiddling with its infernally finicky charger port, this turned into a long and almost completely uninterrupted shlep across Washington, orienting myself by a combination of street signage, the Washington Monument, and vibes.

I walked, in total, about eleven and a half miles that day, not counting however much walking I did inside the Freer Gallery. It was worth it. My right hip, both knees, and both calves hurt for days.

III.

Let me come back again to my observation about people from my part of the country, especially people who are “queer” in whatever sense I am. I refer here to what gets called gender dysphoria, which gives me a relationship with LGBT self-concept that is indeterminate in a way that pains me; I am on the side of the concrete and the legible whenever possible. A lot of people in my position would have avoided making parts of this trip. This probably includes the eleven-and-a-half-mile hauling-of-ass through the nation’s capital; this is an almost completely unfamiliar city to me, after all. Yet I went, I did all of this, and I’m glad I did. There’s a Sylvia Plath quote that I often think about:

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

My situation is unlike Plath’s in many, many ways, most of which give me more freedom when it comes to things like this than she had. I too wanted and still want to be able to do these kinds of things, and I, unlike Plath, am in a position where I actually get to make a choice about it. Or it’s better to say that I have to make a choice, maybe; as with all choices, to have this one looses in some ways and binds in others. This sort of thing is, simply put, in large part why I’ve set aside any realistic prospect of outwardly expressing my subjective sense of myself to the world. I suppose I have spent too much of my life too zonked-out on Japanese literature to find this as troubling as would many; who am I, that I would be mindful of myself?

Troubling or not, self-abnegating or not, this served me well when I was poking around Centralia, or ordering the “haddie” special at the restaurant in Ashland, or undertaking the hours-long trek across the District of Chaos. “You exist in the context,” as Kamala Harris (a resident of the Naval Observatory herself) says, “of all in which you live and what came before you.” This distinctively Californian spin on the Democratic Party’s more general “you didn’t build that ethos” seems, to me, relevant here. We are discussing queerness, closetedness, travel, and, on the other hand, the sense of having been passed by or passed over that animates a lot of the cultural and political tenseness in the fruited plain. These aren’t really matters of individual identity. They’re matters of what one can bear in order to relate to other people, and what one cannot.

The Freer Gallery currently has, in addition to the Peacock Room, another Whistler exhibit, and I think this exhibit might valuably be put into conversation, as they say, with this issue about “existing in the context.” The exhibit focuses on Whistler’s streetside scenes of storefronts and working-poor houses, many in neighborhoods of Paris or London that were about to be redeveloped. The interpretation of this material is some of the most critical I’ve ever seen in any museum, in the sense of calling attention to moral problems with the artist. If Sargent painted the élite in a way that deliberately bracketed out social and political tensions around their status (he did not, but this is the common stereotype about his work), Whistler painted the poor that way, reducing them to a closely cropped individual and thus subjective ego. The cropping, in many cases, is literal; the pictures are physically very small, unlike “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain,” which is much larger than I had realized. Divorcing the subject’s ego from his or her surroundings, from the political and economic situation appurtenant to a butcher or an ironmonger or a mud lark or a lady of the evening or whatever, leaves the élite client’s, patron’s, and audience’s egos out of it. Sargent is able to criticize his subjects on a personal and psychological level; “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” is the famous example, but I find his mother-daughter portrait of Gretchen and Rachel Warren, which is in the same room at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, at least as troubling, in a Sarah Waters sort of way. Whistler’s patrons are off the hook here because not only does he not depict them, at least not in this particular subset of his work, he doesn’t even depict the socioeconomic order that they built and that they maintain.

Whistler didn’t want to exist in the context, yet he did; I would not be able to be so critical of him otherwise. I hope if people end up as viciously critical of me and my decisions, about the world and about myself, a hundred and fifty years from now, it’ll be in connection with an achievement as impressive as the Peacock Room. I doubt it, though, and that’s okay too, because there’s no inherent virtue to either the chase after achievement or the chase after earthly memory.

IV.

After my “main” DC day I still had almost twenty-four hours before I absolutely had to start heading home. I ended up using, more or less, twenty-one of them.

A lot of what I did with that Saturday evening has to do with family history that I have around Annapolis and on the Eastern Shore. I don’t want to go into too much detail about this; I think of my family history, especially the positive parts, as having put certain deep structures at the roots of my personality that I do not now want to air out in detail. What I will say is that I had a very good and not-even-too-late dinner on Kent Island, a snapper (or bream, as some call it, such as in Sasameyuki) braised in some unidentifiable but very delicious sauce, on a bed of rice pilaf with steamed vegetables. I had all this with a glass of prosecco. It was windy and got dark faster than I would have expected, perhaps because it was so close to the spring equinox. The restaurant gave directly on the Chesapeake Bay and the lights of the Bay Bridge were insistent in the gloaming.

I also went to a Wawa in Annapolis; I did not know that there were Wawas in Annapolis. More on Wawa generally some other time.

The next morning was Palm Sunday. I took my leave of Mary—whom I did greatly enjoy spending time with; I have not talked much about my visits with the friends mentioned, or about my friends as people, but that is a matter of their privacy and not my level of interest—and went to Mass at Saint Matthew’s Cathedral, near Dupont Circle. It is a remarkable building, even though it is not a purpose-built cathedral; the Romanesque Revival art suggests somewhere like Ravenna, and there is a chapel to Saint Anthony of Padua that has beautiful frescoes of early Franciscan history. I prayed in that chapel with the text of (most of) the Canticle of the Creatures carved below the frescoes to three sides of me, then sat down for Mass under a distinctly worried-looking Saint Mark the Evangelist.

The Archbishop of Washington, Wilton Cardinal Gregory, preached, mainly, about trees. The locus classicus here is The Dream of the Rood, although one finds everything from motets to terrible Christian children’s videos on the same theme. You can probably find the homily online; it’s a pretty good one. “Pretty good” is, as will probably not surprise anybody with a quantum more familiarity with Washington than I have, unfortunately not something that can at all be said of the traffic leaving this Mass. (Incidentally, on the way out I overheard two older women arguing about whether or not “vote early, vote often” is an LBJ quote. I think I recognized one of their voices from cable news.) In part because the weather was now fair—and how beautiful the cherry trees were when I drove along the Tidal Basin!—it took me an hour longer than I expected to get out of the District for a supposedly planned-ahead lunch with my editor at a Catholic website for which I write. The lunch was in a very suburban place, which I have to say I do not mind as much as I once did. The conversation and company were good, but of course had to be cut much shorter than would have been the case had I had a more reasonable way of coping with and arranging things around that traffic.

From there on home, an adventure itself and one not necessarily as pleasant or as edifying as the drive down through Pennsylvania. Several points stick out. Before entirely leaving the Washington area, I stocked up on Old Bay as requested and required by a Marylander colleague back home. In the Eastern Shore, I listened to gospel radio out of Baltimore until the station gave out; this was a mere couple of days before the bridge collapse in that city. (One standout was a partially spoken-word rendition of the story of the empty tomb; I’d love to find it again some day but I did not look for the title and the name of the choir in time.) From the Eastern Shore on Route 301 I crossed into the State of Delaware, where the constant smoke of some kind of horrible DuPont chemical plant rises up between the branches of flowering fruit trees and the struts of white bridges. The state has been a point of amusement for my housemate Veronica and me for years now; I stopped and bought her a two-and-a-half-dollar refrigerator magnet that reads “Delightful Delaware,” nothing more, against a simplistic gradient background.

From Delaware one crosses, of course, into New Jersey, a state which is full of places of my memory. I lived there between the ages of eight and fifteen and then on and off, because my parents were still there, till the age of twenty. I owe to my time there many of my tastes and habits, a few lasting friendships, and a certain feeling of push-pull with ugly or disreputable places; this last is a feeling of which I am very protective. Once when my friend Antonio told me that I could not invoke home-state immunity-from-criticism privileges for every state I had ever lived in, I chose to invoke it only for New Jersey from then on; “bold choice,” he said, “but I understand it strategically.”

I’ll elide this, for the same reason I elided some of the stuff about my family history around the Chesapeake Bay. I will say only that I returned home very late at night, after a sparkling snowstorm with an underlayer of power-line-downing ice.