A Legacy Project

One Sunday in the spring of 1974 we were invited to his house in Ann Arbor. He taught the aesthetics course I was taking that semester. He never explained, but I would guess that he’d had polio. He shuffled into the classroom behind a walker, sat in a chair at the desk in the front of the room, and quietly talked. He was thin. He wore black-framed glasses, three-button jackets over dress shirts open at the neck. His black hair, long and thin, swept right to left over his head, revealing his shiny balding head beneath.

For his class I had purchased a thin book of essays on aesthetics, of which I have no memory. Before this, in “Types of Philosophy” and then a course in existentialism, I’d met eccentric philosophy types, neither quite as eccentric as Manuel Bilsky. My one memory of course content is we read and discussed John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” I remember these lines in particular, which he read aloud to the class“I will fly to thee, / Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, / But on the viewless wings of Poesy.” He paused and smiled. “Pards?” he said. There might have been a footnote. We answered him with a collective shrug. “Leopards,” he said with a smile. 

A dozen of us showed up at his house that Sunday. He lived alone. He had set out soda and munchies in bowls. There was a girl, of course. In class she always had questions and comments. He enjoyed talking to her. She was sexy and brainy; more the former. She was there that Sunday. And she was one of the reasons I was there. When I asked him what we were listening to on the stereo, he said it was Mahler. He said he never went to concerts, because it was difficult for him to walk, because it was as much a social gathering as it was a performance, but also because to listen in his home was simply better.

I thought the walls of his home would be covered with art. The only framed object I remember was a black and white photo of him, a headshot, like an actor might have, with a look of surprise and joy on his face.

I thought of Bilsky recently, when I read this poem about John Keats:

ROMANTIC POET by Diane Seuss

You would not have loved him,
my friend the scholar
decried. He brushed his teeth,
if at all, with salt. He lied,
and rarely washed
his hair. And wiped his ass
with leaves or with his hand.
The top of his head would have barely
reached your tits. His pits
reeked, as did his deathbed.
But the nightingale, I said.

You learned that the art was more important than the artist. Terrible people could make great art. You remembered the art. I stayed 30-45 minutes that Sunday afternoon. When I left, Mahler was still playing and the girl was still there. I didn’t learn much about aesthetics that semester. But I’ll never forget Manuel Bilsky..