We are gathered to remember Paul Cherry, a resident here at Cascades of Tucson. As we think of Paul today, let us extend our thoughts and prayers to his daughter, Ashley Anne, who is with her gravely ill mother, Vickie, in Cottage Grove, Oregon. Vickie was Paul’s wife for many years, and our prayers go also to her.
Paul had two passions throughout his life — Shakespeare and the counterculture. I don’t think he was aware that these two passions were contradictory. We will come back to that.
Shakespeare first came into Paul’s life, as also into mine and our sister Lucy’s, through our Father, who loved Shakespeare from an early age and was one of the organizers of a literary club in his high school, to which he gave the name, the Shakespeare Club. Dad took us to performances of Shakespeare plays at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego when we were less than 10 years old. To follow the cut and thrust of a Shakespeare play, in Shakespeare’s English, at such a young age was a great challenge, and a wonderfully formative experience for all of us.
But there is more. When Paul was in junior high school, he was getting into too much trouble. I mean serious trouble. Our Mother cast about for some activity that could provide a strong focus for Paul. She got him into a sailing club for teenagers, but perhaps that didn’t work out. Then she discovered a theater group in San Diego’s Balboa Park. It was probably associated with the Old Globe Theater and it concentrated on Shakespeare. It caught fire with Paul.
But why? Acting came naturally to Paul. When he was very small, he was such a clown that our Mother called him “my Pagliacci,” after the famous opera of that name. “Pagliacci” is Italian for “clowns” (plural). Mother probably didn’t know what the singular form was.
Because Paul and I were separated geographically all of our adult lives, and usually met only at Christmas, and because we were also separated by serious differences in outlook, I never saw Paul act in a play, or saw a play that he directed. However, in the year 2000, I witnessed Paul’s acting unexpectedly. In that year, Paul brought his Santa suit on a visit to our Dad, who was then our surviving parent, but suffered from dementia. He amused Dad by playing Santa and reading to him The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, by Dr. Seuss. (Dad had been acquainted with Dr. Seuss, that is, Theodore Geisel, and Paul and I had met him.) When Paul began reading, I took a snapshot of the two of them. But in that brief moment, I realized that Paul was unfolding an act of his own devising as he read the book. So I kept on shooting to capture Paul’s changing expressions and gestures. He was very rich and very funny. The resulting “Santa sequence” is one of the best ways I can remember Paul.
I referred earlier to the contradiction between Paul’s two passions — Shakespeare and the counterculture. Shakespeare belongs to the culture of the highest art that also includes Dante; the great Renaissance painters, sculptors, and architects such as Leonardo, Raphael, and Brunellesci; and later, composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. They all belong to the culture of the highest art because they all proceed from a love for the cognitive powers of the human mind and the employment of those powers for the improvement of the lot of our species. For them, creativity is not creativity unless it proceeds from a love of the as-yet unrealized potentials of humanity. I am aware of documentation of this way of thinking for Dante, Leonardo, Mozart, and Beethoven. This goes beyond just inference. In other cases, the inference is clear, whether explicit documentation should be available or not.
By contrast, the counterculture is oriented to feelings in the here and now. It is all about my feelings and your feelings — but especially about my feelings.
The contradiction between Paul’s two passions raises the question of whether Paul’s understanding of Shakespeare was truncated by his countercultural outlook.
I remember one incident that suggested that to some extent it was. A filmed, professional performance of King Lear that Paul once played for his family in the 1990s, showed the gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes, with the benefit of the Hollywood technology that made it seem real. I objected that this graphic demonstration was akin to the ancient Roman stage performances in which an actual crucifixion (using a condemned criminal) was sometimes included to appeal to the basest instincts of the audience. Such “realism” could only distract from Shakespeare’s art by diverting the audience from the playwright’s higher realities of statecraft, the nature of tragedy, and consequences of flawed judgments. Paul did not accept this criticism of the film.
However, I also remember a different experience during Christmas 2012. It had to do with Homer, rather than Shakespeare. Earlier, in 2010, I had found a recording on CDs of a reading of the entire Iliad by George Guidall, a Broadway and off-Broadway actor. Guidall’s reading of this and other works demonstrated an unusual degree of mastery of his material. Most of us who had the opportunity to study the Iliad as undergraduates, remember struggling with the text, attempting to master the story line, the geography, the use of multiple names for the same person, and the features of a very different culture, a culture of three thousand years ago. But when Guidall reads the Iliad, all of these problems fall into the background, and the nuanced beauty and greatness of the Iliad is immediately before us — the emotions and pathos of war, the tragedy of men failing to rise above their selves, their passions, and the conventions of their culture. Homer is indeed a great and powerful poet.
At Christmas 2012, my wife Lydia and I, our son David, and Paul gathered to listen to the first of these CDs. Paul was struck by this reading. It so impressed him, that he asked that I give him a set of these CDs for his upcoming birthday. When I was dilatory, he reminded me. And I sent it. When I arrived in Tucson after his death, I found one of the Iliad discs in his CD player. There is a significant degree of vindication of Paul in these events. He was indeed drawn to great beauty, regardless of what distractions he was enmeshed in.
Paul was one those few who know Shakespeare so well that that they can weave him into their discourse. Paul used Shakespeare in a story he wrote about one of his own experiences, entitled, “Lakeside Man Haunts Night on Mount Baldy.” His title resonates with another, “Night on Bald Mountain,” a fantasy for orchestra by the Russian composer, Modest Mussorgsky, about a witches’ Sabbath on St. John’s Eve. We are about to see that the resonance extends beyond the titles! Paul does not mention “Night on Bald Mountain”; the resonances are for those who already know it.
So, then, what is Paul’s story? In the year 2000, he climbed Mount Baldy in northeastern Arizona for the fourth and last time. The summit of Mount Baldy is on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation and hikers must obtain a permit to climb to it. I suppose Paul climbed to a well known sub-peak that is open to the public. That is a vertical climb of eight tenths of a mile, but the winding, upward trail is 7 miles long. Its elevation above sea level is just over 2 miles, so the oxygen is significantly rarefied. As Paul explains, he was supposed to rendezvous with friends for the climb but, as usual, he was late. When he arrived, they were not there. He supposed that he might catch up with them, and started his ascent. In fact, he never found them, and made the climb on his own. He seriously underestimated the time it would take to reach the peak — perhaps partly because he was older now, 57 years old. As he climbed, he encountered hikers coming down the mountain. At least one showed serious concern that Paul was hiking alone, and yet planned to go to the top. “Are you all right?” he asked. “‘Don’t know,’ I said with a sunny smile and a twinkle, and I resumed the ascent.” Paul did go to the top.
Then, after descending part of the way, he reached a junction and realized that he didn’t know which way to turn. He took the wrong turn, and walked for an hour before he was sure of his mistake. Darkness would soon be upon him. At this point, he thought of camping where he was for the night, but that would be an awfully long time without food or water, and he might be too cold to sleep. So he set off in the right direction and kept on walking.
Darkness descended, and with it came fear. The U.S. Forest Service did make clear that this was Bear Country, and then, there were also other carnivores. “As the light began to fail, crouching in the undergrowth to my right, mouth snarling, claws clearly extended and ready to spring, I saw or thought I saw in my peripheral vision, a mountain lion. As I looked directly at the spot in which the cat had hidden itself, it instantly vanished into the night air. My breath caught in my throat. I swallowed hard. I picked up my pace a bit and hurried on. Soon thereafter, Paul’s imaginings became hallucinations.
“I passed a two-foot tall grasshopper waving its antennae at me. I passed large, spherical land mines with numerous, projecting metal spikes. I passed porcupines of every imaginable size and shape. And of course, as before, every bush did become a bear in my mind’s eye.” (He says earlier that “It was common to see bears and other fanciful beasts as I turned each corner. Theseus’ words in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream leapt at me from every shadow: ‘In the night imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear.’”)
He continues: “Several minutes passed. Then to my right, and at what seemed a considerable distance, was a glow. It seemed most likely that it came from someone’s camp fire, although at this point I saw no flames. A woman’s form appeared above the glow. She seemed to be performing some strange ritual. (She was probably only washing dishes from the evening meal….) I continued to stare at the far-off image to try to capture some clue as to what this strange woman was doing at this unlikely hour. It did seem to me that maybe she was performing some unworldly, mystical, and perhaps demonic magic.
“Then, fantastically, the glow began to move a few feet in one direction, and then a few feet in the opposite direction. And this back-and-forth movement continued. Then, to my utter disbelief, amazement, confusion, and horror, two spirals of flame arose symmetrically, one from each side of the glow, and spun away to become lost in the surrounding forest. This vision was in no way like the others.”
He explains that the others were, in varying degrees, possible or could have some basis in reality; a bush and a bear could indeed be mistaken for each other. But, he says, you can’t have two spirals of flame out there without setting the countryside on fire, but that hadn’t happened. So he knew it was a delusion. (That was helpful!)
In the end, he got down off the mountain. It took a long time — 7 hours. He got home and thought about his amazing experience as he prepared to sleep. He concludes his story in this way: “As I drifted into sleep, shortly after this wonderful odyssey ended, Prospero’s words from Shakespeare’s Tempest came to mind:
“… We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
I don’t know Shakespeare anything like as well as Paul did. I had to look up these lines to discover their context. To my surprise, I found that in The Tempest, the speech that ends with these lines is also about imaginings and fantasies, albeit of a different kind. Paul must have known this. Here is the speech of Prospero:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack* behind. We are such stuff *A rack is a cloud
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.146-58)
Thus did Paul use Shakespeare most subtly.
This, then, is the way I remember Paul.
Paul’s fate was to die shortly before he was to move to Oregon, to be reunited with his daughter Ashley and to meet and enjoy his two grandchildren. At least, at the moment when he was taken so very suddenly — presumably unaware that he would die — he was still cherishing that prospect.
But now, from beyond this life, he could say with Dido, Queen of Carthage,
Remember me!
Remember me!
But ah!
Forget my fate!
(I have put a link at the bottom of the page to Dido's Lament.—Eric)
Revised by the author, August 2015.
Remembrance of Paul Cherry by Jan Geddes
I have known Paul for 40 years. He taught a course called “When the Mode of the Music Changes,” a study of the music and poetry of the Sixties and early Seventies. He also coauthored the two-volume book for the course, which has the same title. I still have those volumes today. That expression, “When the mode of the music changes,” is from Plato. I will read to you, from the opening of the book, the quotation from Plato:
Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state and ought to be prohibited. When the modes of the music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them. This spirit of license, finding a home, imperceptibly penetrates into the manners and customs. It invades contracts between man and
man, and from contracts, goes on to laws and constitutions in utter recklessness, ending at last by an overthrow of all rights, private as well as public. [The Republic, Book IV]
Under that —and I know Paul interjected this — is a quote from Shakespeare, which reads,
The man that hath not music in himself,
Nor is not moved with the concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
. . .
Let no man trust him. [Merchant of Venice, V.i]
Paul’s course was wonderful, insightful, and fun. Paul made the course both fun and serious. He also taught Shakespeare and drama classes. Paul was an incredible instructor — he corrected all errors on all papers that his students turned in, from spelling to grammar. Participation was very important in his classes, and he graded accordingly.
My home was near the college, and Paul would often drop by unannounced. I think he liked the energy of my four children and their friends. He knew how to engage them in serious discussion. He could get them talking about things you’d never expect teenagers to be talking about. They would get into some really good, intelligent conversations. It was wonderful. I also stopped by Paul’s home, and mostly we laughed and listened to music and lyrics, and smoked pot. We got so angry talking about politics.
Paul and his wife Vickie adopted a baby girl, Ashley, and I think Paul was the happiest man on Earth. She was Paul’s heart throb. When Paul and Vickie divorced, I think that was the beginning of a depression that lasted the rest of his life. Vickie and Ashley moved out of state.
Through the years we cried and laughed. We often played on words so ridiculously that we cried from laughing so hard. Although he was sad, he was still fun to be around.
A few years ago, Paul’s emotions, health, and weight got the better of him. Just getting out of a chair became very hard for him. I suggested that he get out of his dark cabin — he was living like a hermit — and move to an assisted living facility in Tucson. He did!
I was so hopeful that he would attend the many cultural events that Tucson offers, especially those at the University of Arizona, where there are events every week that Paul would really love, especially the Shakespeare plays and readings. I thought that if he could purchase tickets and arrange for handicapped transportation, he would once again have a sparkle in his eye and be glad to be alive.
Unfortunately, he was not able to do these things. I often got angry with him over this, and would yell at him. He would always — even at these angry times — find something funny in what I was saying, and we would end up laughing, thus forgetting about my frustration and his inability.
I came to find out that his memory was failing and he could not even find phone numbers to purchase tickets to events. Paul was unable to makes schedules with the shuttle service; the shuttle idea was completely useless. I was unable to do these things for him as I was taking care of my 97-year-old mother who was slowly dying.
In the last year, he and Ashley reunited by telephone. She wanted Paul to move to an assisted living home close to her in Oregon. He was ecstatic. In the past he would cry to me that he would never see his grandchildren — Ashley has two children — and now all that was going to change. I was so very happy for him. When he died, he was within weeks of seeing his dream come true.
Now I ask you to send all the good energy you can to Ashley, who is 29, and to her mother, Paul’s ex-wife Vickie, who is suffering from a brain tumor. My heart goes out to them.
Paul and I were friends in the truest sense. I loved him and will miss him. I will probably continue to talk with him in spirit, because I cannot imagine my world without Paul in it.
I’ve cried in writing this, and will miss him. If you didn’t know him, well, you missed out on a lot of fun and intelligence. He was a jolly man who had an infectious laugh.
Jan Geddes
Snowflake, Arizona
Remembering Paul
by Eric R. Aitken
On a recent Friday, as I sat down to read the local paper, my wife said: “Paul Cherry died. The obituary was in Tuesday’s paper.” I don’t always read the obituaries so I had not learned of Paul’s passing.
When I read Paul’s obituary, I found out that the memorial had already taken place in Tucson, and it also suggested contacting Paul’s brother, David, if anyone had a memory of Paul they wished to share.
Paul’s leaving us deeply saddened me, and for more reasons than for the loss of someone I liked and admired. I felt I would like to attend a memorial to honor Paul, but the opportunity for that seemed to have passed. Then I began to wonder if there were others in the White Mountains who had liked Paul and who had, like myself and my wife, missed out on honoring Paul. So I wrote to David to ask if there was going to be a memorial for Paul in the area of Show Low and Pinetop-Lakeside where he had lived for so many years. I also told David that I had more to say about Paul, but I had to gather my thoughts together.
What I had found was that my thoughts and feelings were (and I’m sorry but this is the best word I can think of to describe them) nebulous. What I mean is that they were not something that can be described in little anecdotes or memories. In fact, I cannot recall any little incidents or conversation or anything of that nature that was in any way exceptional, but despite that, I can truly say Paul was one of the most influential people in my life.
He did not in any way impact my personal life. I do not mean to imply that. But he was enormously important to me in other ways, which I think I should briefly explain. Since my early teens I very much wanted to be a writer. But I soon became distracted by the affairs of everyday life. Once, I read an interview with the co-author of a book on people who had enjoyed great success in many different fields of activity, be it sports, entertainment, business, or the arts. In the course of preparing the book, the authors interviewed the parents and family of the famous son or daughter and they were amazed to learn that quite often the successful child had a sibling whom the parents felt was just as talented as their more successful brother or sister. In some cases the family felt that the unknown sibling was even more talented. What separated them was that the child who had become famous had more drive and determination.
Now, I don’t know if I have any talent or not, but my drive and determination would be a profound disappointment to a high achieving sibling, if I had one. So as the years went by I let a number of things interfere with my desire to write, while continually noting down ideas and an occasional sad attempt at doing more, until I brought my family to Show Low in 1985. Immediately after my arrival I was encouraged by an instructor at Northland Pioneer College to take a class in creative writing and that was what got me to be really productive for the first time. And this is where Paul came in.
I certainly appreciate the classes that got me really writing for the first time in my life but as important as production is, what is really important are results. And that is why Paul was so very important in my life, because he gave me results.
The year after I moved to the White Mountains I took my first class with Paul. As with many classes at the local college it was a class that combined several different studies, with different students pursuing different courses. I was there to learn stagecraft. At least, that is what I signed up for, but Paul told me that was not what I was going to learn. I was going to learn acting. At first that didn’t sit too well with me since I considered memorizing lines a painful process, but in the end it turned out really well. No, I don’t mean the memorizing part, that was painful, certainly something on a par with going to the dentist—well not quite, but you get the idea. It was what it led to.
At the start of the semester, Paul had the class do an exercise where we were to sit in a circle and imagine we were roses. After we had sat in floral meditation for a little while, he asked each one in turn to tell about their brief experience as a rose and what kind of rose they were.
Paul and I had a very different viewpoint on acting. He, the college professor, and regardless of his official title he was always a professor to me, and a teacher, seemed to follow that Russian guy, Constantin Stanislavski, who believed you should really get into the character you are portraying. A famous comment Stanislavski made in his diary was “Learn in time to listen to, to understand and love the bitter truth about yourselves.” How Russian. Much as I never wanted to be an actor, I still thought it should be more fun than that.
Me, as far as I was concerned, felt acting was a game of let’s pretend and you could think of anything you wanted even if you were playing Hamlet, although I would advise against thinking of anything too funny. You don’t want to be giggling while playing hanky-panky with Ophelia or offing just about everybody at the end of the play.
While I thought the exercise a little strange since I felt that the possibility of an actor being called upon to portray a rose in a play was slim at best, I was intrigued by the whole thing and especially by the comments of the students about their rosy experience. So I wrote a little play because the idea seemed to have possibilities. At some point, which time has erased from my memory, I gave a copy to Paul.
Paul very much wanted to stage a play. The college, at his urging had purchased the technical equipment to make that possible. He was much interested in both Ibsen’s Ghosts and John Pielmeier’s Agnes of God. Paul, at least when I knew him, was not religious, but he was interested, I would even say intrigued, about religious stories, and he seemed to be knowledgeable about the Bible, at least to some extent.
But as the semester progressed it became clear that it would be impossible to stage a play with the talent available to him. This was when Paul suggested my little play, Circle of Roses, be presented as a radio play. So I reformatted it as a radio script which differs from the format of a play script.
It is difficult to explain, but this had a profound effect on me. Perhaps it is seeing something you have written actually produced and acted. But this was not all. Paul encouraged me to write pieces to be submitted to the annual publication the college published and still does, called Northern Flight.
In the second semester I took with Paul, in 1987, his plans to present a play also sadly fell through so he asked me to write another radio play which Paul produced and presented on Show Low radio station KVSL. Later, when I was no longer in Paul’s class, he was able to present both Agnes of God and Ghosts. You can draw whatever conclusions you wish from that.
As the years passed, I wanted to get together with Paul. Despite how much I admired him and how grateful I was to him, it never happened. Since he lived nearby, I thought he would always be available, and almost thirty years flew by. Because Paul was several years younger than me, it seemed as if he would always be there. I never got to tell him how much I appreciated his help and how much I admired him.
Goodbye, Paul, and thank you for all you did for me.
Eric R. Aitken
Remembrance of Paul Cherry by Kathy Purcell
I have known Paul for about 25 years. Once a year, Paul would come to New York City to visit his sister Lucy, her husband Dick, and their son Mark. I was a close friend of Lucy’s. After meeting Paul at one of Lucy’s many dinner parties, I suggested to Paul that perhaps he would like to see a New York movie and have dinner afterwards one evening with me. I liked meeting out-of-towners, especially if they were interesting, and Paul was interesting. I was trying to remember who Paul reminded me of. Oh yes, he had just a dash of Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist in that great American novel, the Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Paul had an acerbic, or salty, self-effacing humor, and he could also get nasty at times. This I found refreshing. He also had a good turn of the word. For example, he used to say to me, “I view the world out of bounds, through a plentitude of pounds” (referring to his weight).
Anyway, on one New York visit, we were off to see the movie, The Lord of the Rings, based on the Hobbit book of the same name, which Paul adored and was fond of talking about. We arrived late at the theater as one usually did with Paul, because he was so often tardy. The movie was at Loew’s on 84th and Broadway, a huge theater with huge crowds. The line for the movie was very, very long, because we were so very late, and we were near the end. This jeopardized good seating. We might have to sit in the very first two rows. Paul would say that the seats should come with a massage for one’s neck, because one had to bend one’s head so far back throughout the movie. So when the doors opened, this New York crowd would always make a good push for good seats.
It was when I was coming back from the ladies’ room — and the line was even longer now — that I heard the commotion. As I got closer, I could identify Paul’s voice and unique vocabulary. There he stood, with many more nervous latecomers behind him. To my shock, he was addressing a twitch of a man who looked like Woody Allen and could have been no more than 5 feet 4 inches tall. People were staring at the two of them.
Paul was now in what I call his authoritarian New York-via-Arizona voice, saying “You certainly did jump the line. I saw you.” “No, I did not jump the line, sir. I was here, and left for the men’s room, and now I am back.” Again Paul said, “No you were not here, and you certainly did jump the line, and I’m quite surprised that you could even jump that high.” Now I was getting nervous, because I could see that the man was getting furious. Paul was picking up speed, because we could hear the people behind Paul saying to one another in loud New York whispers, “The guy did jump the line.” Oh God, I said to myself, I had better step in, because the support of the crowd for Paul could lead him to imagine he now had an army behind him against this jumping tyrant. That is exactly what happened. I heard Paul yell in a loud voice, “You are lying.” And then I heard the phrase that I will never forget. Paul said, “You, sir, are a malignant Hobbit.” (Laughter.) “And you should not be allowed to see this magnificent Hobbit movie.” Laughter broke out. At that point, the malignant Hobbit started to walk towards Paul in the darkened theater.
Fortunately, a man was coming towards us — a herculean Latin usher, employed by the theater. He was holding a little bitty flashlight. “That’s enough gentlemen,” he said, as he was trained very smartly and shone the light of his tiny flashlight in Paul’s eyes and then in the malignant Hobbit’s eyes. Silence. He stood there between the two antagonists for a few seconds, and suddenly the doors swung open for us to pass into the theater itself. The push was on now, for the entire crowd to find the best seats. They pulled off their coats and hats and flung them over the backs of seats. People forgot the little fray as they all fled back to the candy area, led by Paul, to obtain their popcorn before they missed the Coming Attractions.
Paul loved words, and I loved the fact that Paul loved words. After the movie, we would sit for hours in Café 82, which was just two blocks away, eating a delicious meal of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. Paul would always remark that New York always gave you so much food. I would listen to Paul enjoying his tales as he tossed out, like soft somersaults, his ideas on language, Tolkien, and politics from ancient Greece to Carlyle to Hillary, whom he sometimes referred to as Hillary the Countess of Killary. And there were his puns on the defective nature of DNA, meaning, it’s an insane asylum down here on Earth. Then he would get serious as the night wore on, and spoke of the loneliness of living on top of a mountain, and the toughness of the Indian woman who cleaned his house. He would always end with his beloved tales about his beloved Shakespeare. I always loved hearing about the plays of Shakespeare. That was my favorite of his subjects. One of our favorite characters was Iago, who we both agreed was a fascinating, borderline psychotic.
I could listen to Paul for hours, and we did that for 20 years or so. I could listen, because he was an original, and funny, so funny, and he had a turn of mind that made my mind turn. And that’s a gift, that’s a big gift, and I will miss his mind.
Kathy Purcell
New York City
February 2014
Link to a beautiful performance of "Dido's Lament". The music is by Henry Purcell with words by Nahum Tate. It is therefore sung in English.
This is a link to the portion of Prospero's speech that David quoted above. It is from an Al Pacino movie but I do not know who is speaking the words. It is only a little over a minute long.
For picture credits please seen credits page.
Please, anytime a link doen't work, let me know.
Email: contact@ericaitken.com
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