June 21, 2011
Brett has left these cooler elevations for the day, to tinker with irrigation back home.
Here, Dash and I hike as high as the third waterfall.
Beyond, deep snows would deter us.
We sit in the cataract-mist and share our candy bars, then go back down.
All night the roar of the melt comes from the canyon in the dark, remarkable volume of snowmelt, a constant freight-train of water plunging over cliffs in that delicate meeting of slopes where bare aspens’ distorted knees and elbows are just beginning to stretch themselves after snow crush.
* * * *
First week in Squaw:
Three cords firewood ($800 from Bushwhackers, free delivery)
Shade-structures over both decks
Oakley’s front gate, with cowbells, can be repaired for another year (sagging toward parallelogram)
Steel doors on both bear-proof garbage houses must be bent back into shape, as they won't close properly
Install Brett’s office in Olympic House
Summer's provisions at the Truckee Safeway: two shopping-carts-full
Unproductive mornings, picking at Response-to-Hawking essay, unwilling to reenter the novel
(Bit of good news: Newsweek and the Times will notice "Radiance")
* * * *
June 12, 2011
Arrive in Squaw.
Bear damage in the Annex:
1) Shattered double-pane in door;
2) Cabinet-fronts torn off neatly. Looks easy to nail back up;
3) The expensive flip-top trash can still works fine. But he
seems to have sat on it, or stepped on it, while living here, as the cylinder is
flattened in the middle and I'm unable to pop it out fat again.
* * * *
June 11, 2011
From earliest youth, a love of the desolate, the insensate, the dilapidated, the dust.
Because intimacy always characterizes eternity, it can be seen right here, in gutter litter sunbleached and rainwashed (cigarette butts and oakleaf veins), total asperity. Or in some common thing like a lost gum wrapper in the dirt -- this was at a becalmed Sunday-afternoon construction site --or a 2-by-4 mill-end leaving its print, in dried-white mud that no one, not anyone, has ever turned his regard to. Nor ever will! Such a sight is of course equal to a Himalyan peak.
(Nor, even, am “I” regarding such a 2-by-4 fully)
( I suppose if “I” had complete cognition I might be able to.)
Thoreau it was who noticed the prefix “crab-” (in crabapple) (and I, too, in crabgrass, suburbanly) and who wished for such wildness in himself, crabbedness's sturdy adaptive survival qualities. To be crabbed.
Blackberries conquering a fence.
“Poverty” is the aesthetic. "Poverty" really is the essence of an elegance. The leanness and brokenheartedness and good-humor. A hut, but tidily swept. And with a flower-arrangement on the table of deal.
For instance garlic and rosemary are effortless: they thrive on neglect.
The word Simplicity would be the preferred popular “branding” of such an asperity, supposing any Martha Stewarts of the future were to try to interest housewives (or other or our aesthetic arbiters such as housewives) in, say, flattening an old tin soupcan to nail over a hole in the floorboards. Let housewives think of it as “zen” if they like. It’s coming anyway: a general peace-and-quiet.
* * * *
June 10, 2011
1) More soil shoveling. Another cubic yard is heaped in the pickup.
2) Dash helps spackle the woodbox fascia.
3) Mesh (galvanized gopher-wire) floor of second raised bed, stapled down with bent-over nails.
4) Brett’s trip to Squaw, to do battle with the CEO of the ski corp.
5) Fettucini. Canned tomatoes, basil wilted and singed and holey, a whole head of the volunteer garlic. And salad of wild sweet-pea tops? (Abundant in west meadow.)
Barbara:
At dinner (w/ Sands and Tracy) we talk of Brett’s meeting with the ski corporation. They’re so big-time now, at the ski corp, they’ve hired a high-powered New York PR firm, and they want us to meet with them, because we’re a cultural asset. “These are the kind of people,” the CEO says, “who can get ‘Sixty Minutes’ here to do a story on us.’” Barbara, pulling despondently at her artichoke’s leaf, says, “We’ll have to wash our hair then.”
* * * *
June 8, 2011
Finish Stephen Hawking essay
Attend Dashiell’s fifth-grade “graduation ceremony”
Fill corrugated-iron troughs with commercial soil
Brett’s Toyota is flushed and drained of transmission fluid.
More of filling troughs with soil
Plantings:
Tomatoes
Artichokes
Zucchini
Melon
Butternut squash
Peppers
Cucumbers
Hunter and Zoey are in SF. And Barbara and Tracy are at Sands’s for dinner. So it’s just me and Dash and Brett in the kitchen eating ground-tiurkey burgers and broccoli. Dash is upset, and inconsolable, over the misplacement of a pair of black denim pants.
* * * *
June 6, 2011
Another wintry day in Nevada City. Rain and wind. Hunter and Zoey are stuck in Squaw Valley, on the eastern side, as the summit has snowed. Tracy is to arrive tonight by car. Her long journey through Nevada in Oakley’s old Subaru wagon. I will make thin soup of soba noodles, yams, scallions, salmon, snow peas.
* * * *
June 5, 2011
Mt. Shasta. Heel blister. 2500-foot climb in sun and rain.
Too cold to sleep, in high desert, at lava beds
Coffee recipe of Gerald: dump grounds into boiling water; then, at return-to-boil, pour a cup of cold water on, and the grounds all magically sink to the bottom. Coffee to be ladled.
High winds and petroglyphs.
* * * *
Back home. It’s looking like actual fallowness might be in store for our gardens this year.
Weeds poke through the mesh floors of my fresh-built long corrugated troughs, as they haven’t been filled with soil. (Rainy cold long spring. Distractions of “Radiance” publication and travel. Onset of Community-of-Writers difficulties.)
The row of onions from last year keeps thriving.
* * * *
“For heaven ghostly is as nigh down as up, and up as down; behind as before, before as behind, on one side as the other. Insomuch, that whoso had a true desire for to be at heaven, then that same time he were in heaven ghostly. For the high and the next way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet.”
-- The Cloud of Unknowing
* * * *
“Nowhere bodily, is everywhere ghostly.”
-- The Cloud of Unknowing
* * * *
May 30, 2011
Now comes summer, blinding Sierra sunlight to look forward to, the visits of many friends, the perpetual fiesta at Squaw. But I’m sure when I’m “old and grey and nodding by the fire,” the best times will have been the séance-like kitchen dinners in winter when it was “just us.” Just Barbara and Dash and Brett and me. Kitchen doors closed keeping the heat in.
* * * *
Great to have Hunter home. His only salient evidence is the closed bedroom door and the occasional sound of his car. But still.
(He's actually aiming for Yale, comp lit.)
* * * *
May 30, 2011
This rainy cold wet spring is going on so long, the Famous Clothesline hasn’t been deployed once yet this season, and all morning, wasted BTUs of heat rise in clouds from the dryer vent. I can’t paint find a dry period to prime and paint the mud room woodbox.
* * * *
May 30, 2011
Sartre’s big existential formula– (that “there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and . . . . this being is man”) – is cut exactly to exclude “god.” So, in Sartre, the human entity is stung into “freedom” and “responsibility,” suddenly towering god-like and mushroom-cloud-like.
Conversely, the religionist turns Sartre’s assertion inside out: “god,” precisely, is the existence preceding essence.
That the two points of view are identical is, unfortunately, visible only to people who have been trying to make themselves invisible.
* * * *
May 30, 2011
To be on Mount Shasta again after all these years. Thirty years ago, alone, it was where I went after New York, in despondency, I would say in despair, in futility of love, in self-pity, and, too, in vocational certainty that the book business would have no interest in the things that mattered to me. (In the 70s the book business looked different, more daunting: it was celebrity-obsessed and materialistic. Well, hmm.)
In those days you could fly coast-to-coast for $80. I woke up sleeping on the warm dust, in full sun under the blue skies of the high Cascade Range, with a cow standing directly over me, chewing its cud. String of drool. Lucky not to have been stepped on. I actually had a New York bagel in my pocket on those high pastures, one of the Canarsie bagels from along Flatbush Avenue, the old kind, the tiny chewy kind, the real kind that surely don’t exist any more, having been crowded out by the swollen puffy light bagels on the shopping malls that have, in thirty years, filled up the open spaces between New York City and the Cascade Range.
* * * *
May 28, 2011
Sands is here for dinner. Chicken soup, sweet potato, asparagus.
Dash’s friend Joe stays for a “sleep-over,” and they insist on erecting the pop-up tent in the far meadow to sleep outside. The pantry-drawers’ supply of D batteries is plundered so the boys can reproduce their form of civilization, out in that wilderness. The older brother opines that they won’t last till ten o’clock, and by ten o’clock they’ve come shivering inside. The following morning, when the sun is just coming up, they appear from the playroom in pajamas and go back outside, scamper in dawn light, down to resume the camp-out, yanking their pajama-legs up high to keep them out of the heavy sopping dew in the grass.
* * * *
[I used to pity people who ate together without conversing, at a corner restaurant table, say.
I supposed that an endless stream of wit and information was the desirable norm. I resolved never to be that habituated, that senile, that destitute of entertainment, no matter how old or how married I might be. I supposed that people eating together without talking were impoverished of the spirit.]
* * * *
May 30, 2011
Barbara:
Sitting at her place at the kitchen table, in the warm corner with wineglass and pills dabbing at (miniscule-or-imaginary) tabletop crumbs. NPR is blathering along, and I’m stirring the pot on the stove, and Dash is dribbling a little rubber ball around the floor. Brett has disappeared into the bathroom and Barbara pipes up convivially, “Any word from Brett?”
* * * * * * * *
May 21, San Francisco
The Subjectivity/Truth equivalence. The vocation.
* * * *
May 11, 2011
The entire day mowing meadows.
* * * *
Mother's Day
Back from SF great radio appearance. The mower is still broken. The engine roars, but tractor won't get in gear. Nowadays Pearson Small Engine is charging $50 to send out a trailer for pickup-and-return. So for the first time in decades the equipment on his place will be disloyal to Pearson's. An enterprising guy named Don makes housecalls -- will drive out in his truck, spread his tools, work in the shade of the pear tree.
Nice dim cool day. A sign of spring, like the finches nesting under the eaves: the manila envelopes accumulating in heaps, submissions from ambitious writers applying to Squaw. All must be "processed" and sent on.
Will recommence work on mud-room woodbox.
Skipped church, kept home by Mother's Day the series of Mother's Day Breakfasts (first here in the big house, then in the cottage) and by general accidie. Melancholy, post-publicity, (while I work outside) cloying remorse and futility/mortality intimations are the blessing of the day.
---
Because it's Mother's Day and we have extra mothers here, we get a call from the our beloved village poet laureate, who lacks a mother to telephone.
She has had two occasions for getting in touch lately: to borrow Tad's Truck (which will always be "Tad's Truck" even though his ashes in their cookie-tin have sat for a month or two now on the mud room piano), a perpetual entitlement of hers because she and Tad were sweethearts once, and lived in a barn-red house on Nursery Lane, and they even planned on getting married briefly, so whenever she needs to make a dump run or a greenhouse errand, she'll always have use of the truck; and to talk to Barbara, to have a mom for a day.
---
Guitar lesson with Dash. A hendrix-like riff in major pentatonic scale. Which he takes to "like a duck to water."
* * * * * * * *
May 5.
Back from L.A. publicity trip. A pleasure to have soluble problems, here on a few acres. The meadows are all unmowed, the mud-room woodshed is only half-built, just as I left it, and the swamp-cooler is colonized by paper wasps. The mower too, indeed, is colonized by paper wasps. Then, moreover, the mower's transmission gives out altogether, halfway through the job; so there it stands tonight, tractor stuck in the front lawn in the dark.
I wasn't liking mowing the meadows, slaughtering buoyant levitating choruses of blue daisies and soapwort and Johnnie Jump-up and meadow-bell. I also wasn't liking making the little furry bright-eyed things zig-zag in the path of my tractor, driven from their established homes where I was slicing away the grasses' tallest forests.
Dragged the tractor up on slope, to examine its underside, and was eventually rewarded with confirmation of my own incompetence. Went inside. Phoned "Pearson Small Engine," in Grass Valley, and made an appointment for trailer pick-up and mechanical overhaul, then gave up on all problem-solving pretensions and put on sneakers and (wearing an ipod that filled my ears with Alan Watts disquisition on Buddhism) went running through the roads of the doomed new subdivision in the old Erikson Lumber Company woods.
* * * *
Easter Sunday
Bears in the Annex. Two, this time.
It's raining and I don't want to make the trip up there, where snow will be falling at the summit. A neighbor has chased them out and secured the doors, but of course, now they know where the food is and they may be back this very night.
* * * *
Barbara's Progress
No more sleeping-in all morning (a tendency I understood as a sign of depression).
She gets up early, dresses herself, uses her walker to come over to the big house, enterprising and girlish, looking for coffee.
She goes everywhere with us, to every social occasion and entertainment.
[If we'd had our canoe trip on the Little River in Mendocino (tho' trip which in the end we couldn't afford), she would have ridden in the canoe with us. So would've the little white dog.
In peaceful days here, with Brett and Dash gone, it's me and Barb. Morning pills, evening pills. She's reading the Jennifer Egan book.
--
April 20, 2011
Brett is in San Francisco.
Intermittent rain. I have to keep stopping work, tarping things over, building the woodshed between little rains. Unplug drill and saw. Till showers blow over. Come inside and kill twenty minutes maybe playing a guitar, poorly, or bringing up email to check on my burgeoning celebrity.
With return of fine weather, Cavendish ends his tenancy here in Dashiell's playroom.
Return of fine weather also brings bears to Cavendish's (as he calls it) Woodland Redoubt. Starting in springtime, there, he keeps a heavy chain belted around the fridge, as bear deterrent. Also, starting in springtime, he has to plug it in. (He has electricity, from dormant construction site up the hill.)
* * * *
April 17, 2011
Fine weather.
Built footing and floor of new woodshed outside mud room
(This particular piece of plywood has served as lid for Hunter's sandbox, in the nineties, then tabletop for writing workshop and a platform covering parking-place mud,
today perhaps reaching its final resting place)
(or who knows, this Recession may triumph, and 30 peaceful years from now, this shed will be disassembled for further uses)
pandora.com radio plays "The James McMurtry Station" all afternoon. Alison Krauss sings "I need you at the dimming of the day," and all the sunny afternoon I hammer and saw and I dwell on all the ways I've been inexcusably remiss, over the years.
Women lie out on the little lawn in the sun, on dragged-out couch cushions.
Liz and Jackson stay for dinner of sausage and polenta.
I notice that Brett directed the two hired hands to fill in the old Toaster Graveyard in west meadow.
I'm going to miss the glimpse of chrome in that hole, from the days of manufacture
when Chrome Was Still Chrome.
* * * *
April 14 -- Drove into town. Avoiding book-biz fuss.
[This is my 4th time around and I've got news for amateurs: being published isn't "the reward," it's the penalty, a natural obligation incurred]
(Draw a card from the "Chance" pile. It reads, "CONGRATULATIONS Your Novel is Published. Skip One Turn and Pay Ten Thousand Dollars.")
-
The P.O. to get Barbara's taxes off. The bank. School for Dash.
Sad errand: at the Wells Fargo Bank, I deposited a check for $93.90, royalties from amazon.com, made out to Oakley Hall III, deposited it into Tad's "Special Needs Trust" account.
Tad must have spent forty years writing, every morning, stacks of pages. At last this year we got a "novel" edited and published. A month after his death I'm depositing the first remission from amazon.com
He was alive to see the book itself, its glossy cover, its blurbs. Dozens of boxes of them. Now all stacked up in his NY apartment, in towers around the couch and kitchen, where now Hadiya is their only broker.
* * * *
April 12, 2011
Weather is fine but nevertheless, Cavendish is back sleeping on the couch in the playroom. (He says he had to do his taxes -- it's tax-time -- and so, needed a place to stay for a while.)
[Dash solicits Uncle Cavendish for a commitment of fifty-cents-a-lap in his school's fundraising jog-a-thon.]
* * * *
April 2011
"Radiance" will be published next month, and now begins the publicity, short siege of self-aggrandizement, an author's unavoidable fugue of vanity. All very uncomfortable. Now, as in years past, I'll be hearing my own voice on the radio hemming and hawing, whining, finding interviewers' questions too complicated for simple answers.
It's not that the process of bookselling is inherently meretricious, nor that the Author is "shy." (hardly!)
The paradox is, a writer works against having "a personality" all his working years. To suddenly be a personality, for a month onstage among entertainers -- it's a costume that ill consorts with the writer's vocation as Reader's Quiet Friend.
* * * *
April 2, 2011
Spring. Overcast day without precipitation.
On the woodpile, a colander full of wooden clothespins.
Wasps in the mailbox, as in other Springtimes.
Today is the day of taking down storm windows.
* * * *
April First, 2011
The thing to remember when I'm old and gray and nodding by the fire:
Dash and I were in the pick-up, pop music on the dashboard radio, the truck-bed full behind us, and I said, "I know what let's do. Let's go to Alice's and get a burrito."
* * * *
March 31, 2011
Found 150 old rusty iron balusters, cheap, in Black Bart's rear wilderness. Most are plain posts with wrought-iron twist, a few with ornate treble-clef added. Will bring to SFO to create balustrade on roof of Macondray, where presently everyone drinks and cavorts with no railing.
* * * *
Everyone was sleepless last night. Brett in particular worries about the financial insolvency of Squaw Valley.
Where we used to thrive beautifully for not much cost, now we pay high prices for lowest-quality, in the new corporate environment.
* * * *
March 28, 2011
A fifty-foot accumulation of snow above Donner Pass.
Surely, at 6200 ft. it won’t be so deep, but we are warned by email bulletin that roofs need shoveling, or old cabins will collapse.
Here at home in the foothills, I'm the Responsible party, but I'd rather be reading Roger Penrose by the stove's warmth, and I’m betting on the coming thaw, to save me the trip up there.
* * * *
March 28, 2011
Peach blossoms in abundance. How lyrical after snow.
Ground-cover seeding. The raked-off sweet-pea vines make a great kind of “straw” for hiding the seeds from the thrushes and robins who will peck the seeds up.
* * * *
March 27, 2011
Silly Sunday afternoon. I come inside and deplete what’s left of the day watching Susskind’s Qu-Phys lectures while drinking the sauvignon blanc left over from Tad’s memortial service, getting a bit smashed, in fact, trying to focus on Diracs and Hamiltonians. (Brett, all the while, is spending the Sunday in Barbara’s cottage planning in detail a visit to Spain we can’t possibly afford.)
* * * *
Thinking of Tad and his exit.
The old expression There, but for the grace of God, go I doesn’t apply, as much as “There go I.”
Because I was almost of that generation. And of those aspirations. I look around and see how much suicide has taking my fellow writers, to the left and right of me. Tad was three years younger than I in history. He was given a particular epoch. I think of Jim Morrison and all the Romantics. I, in my envious loneliness, just barely escaped the romanticism. All my foolishness has gone unpunished, unstoried, my skating on precipices, my stupidity, it was just "stupidity," it wasn't in some way ennobled.
Also, there’s one blessing I’ve had. I never was very interested in being myself. “Being oneself,” "expressing oneself," has always been for so many of my confreres an imperative, but I always found it uninteresting. I always wanted to be everything and everybody else. Thus I perhaps -- pretty ambitious here -- had already started living in death without caring. I always knew writing is death, which I embraced instinctively from the start, packaging up my personal little coffins for padded-mailer envelopes, and (more pious sentiment!) I can hope only that to learn to love death the more.
* * * *
March 24, 2011
It's bitter cold when the wet sleet is driving sideways. Then at last the storm-front arrives, and when the fat snowflakes are falling, it's balmy, it's warm, and you can open your jacket, it's terrifically silent.
* * * *
March 20.
Tad's memorial this weekend. Plenty of family has arrived, plus the Old Guard of Squaw Valley, plus Bill is bringing up a DVD of amusing outtakes from the documentary.
This house is full like a hotel. Crepes have been promised to all, this morning. (Last night until two in the AM, the old minivan sat in the driveway thumping with gangsta rap, three reunited friends inside the smoke-filled car.)
The whole weekend, a festive atmosphere. Wicked stories of Tad are unearthed, enormities and betrayals yet unguessed. This is what happens when we die, the worst gossip about us has been aching to come out. The weather is tempestuous and the windows this morning are steamed up.
* * * *
March 13, 2011
Sunday morning, rain coming in, thrushes in the grass.
Rather than episcopal church, I'm staying in and watching more of Leonard Susskind's many hours of quantum physics lectures at Stanford. The YouTube display page has a "like/dislike" button below the video window, and invariably the dialogue captions have an entry: "37 christians don't like this."
* * * *
March 9, 2011
Snowshoeing over Donner Pass with Dash. Leaving the sound of I-80 behind, after clearing just one ridge. Going cross-country, the creeks lie at the bottom of twenty-foot-deep soft crevasses in the snow, with weirdly sculpted cornices, treacherous-looking: don’t get too close: at the bottom, twenty feet down, narrow cold black water flows calmly.
Up in a meadow, digging snow caves.
* * * *
Dash, at school, has been assigned to condense a scene from the “mystery novel” he has chosen as his reading. Everybody is doing a mystery novel. Conformity rules in all “creativity,” as in his age-group, everybody is still trying to be pretty much the same snowflake. (True non-conformity or “individuality,” which people pretend they want, if it ever comes along later in life is in fact something of a horror.) He chose Agatha Christie, and now reads his transcription of her prose to us, by candlelight, proudly. It’s painful, his own writing used to be so good as a littler child, deep and true in its insights and freely nightmarish in its plots and ideas. Now, age 11, he treasures as “sophisticated” all Agatha Christie’s cliches. It’s hard to see him reduce himself, so hopefully, so much in good faith to adopt the standards of mediocrity.
* * * *
March 1
Post-storm clean-up. PG&E trucks and AT&T cherry-pickers all over town. "Indian Billy," Billy Kelly, was found dead of exposure under the Broad Street Bridge – grandson of Maidu chief. Rumor was, the police had confiscated his sleeping bag and tarp. The parson this Sunday will sermonize on the irony of Indian Billy's dying a hundred feet from the church's cornerstone and threshold, down the little slope with the candybar litter and the Highway 49 noise.
Here outside town, two oaks lie across the road, trunks big around as garbage cans, and in the sunny dirty thaw, unfamiliar cheap pick-ups appear at the roadside with chainsaws, people you never see in town (the social-class system of these rural places is so mysterious), gleaners, sawing them up for firewood. Often a woman sits in the passenger seat while the man cuts and stows wood in the truckbed. (Brett says, ‘Should we tell Anna, they’re her trees, after all’ But of course no.)
* * * *
February 27, 2011
Barbara tonight was about to throw away (!) the aluminum-foil swatches I keep re-using to bake potatoes in. No more boasting about her frugal habits of the Depression-era ranch. Like a pair of Flannery O-Conner characters, I and an octogenarian can compete in parsimony. (Who will be the one to quench the candleflames at meal’s end?)
* * * *
February 25, 2011
Two feet of snow so far. More coming tonight. Electrical power is out far and wide, and it’s a lucky thing Cavendish is staying in the back room, as he is well experienced with electric generators.
On its maiden voyage the new generator, bearing the brand-name “Champion,” roars like a floored NASCAR engine but remains stationary, parked under the porch roof.
* * * *
Country people: motor-oil stains on the front porch, beside the welcome mat.
* * * *
Feb. 23
Down in SFO, in North Beach.
Six AM, the only convenient “grand old” espresso place that’s open is Caffe Roma.
I’m the only customer. At this hour they’re still laying out the heavy rubber floor-mat, moving sweet rolls from delivery-box to counter display.
I pay for my double-capp with a credit card, and the guy runs the card and comes back with a pen and VISA receipt saying, “You wouldn’t by any chance be Louis B Jones the author? Who wrote Particles and Luck?”
That was fifteen years ago. He says, “I loved that book. I was just lately thinking I should read it again. That part where the two guys are frying frozen hamburger over a campfire?” A six-am coffee-shop baristo is exactly my ideal reader. He tells his partner, “See, Tony? All the celebs come in here.” Then later, after I’m in my corner, “Hey, Tony. Did you ever read a book? Like a novel or whatever?” I couldn’t be happier.
* * * *
February 17, 2011
Snow on the old 55-gal drum in the far west meadow.
Snow on the ladders under the pear tree. Snow on the compost heap.
In the cottage, the old lady is sleeping late, this morning. Her son is dead. Probably in sleep she’s forgotten that.
Anyway, she will have mostly forgotten it when she’s awake, too – w/bran muffin and Odwalla OJ and the San Francisco Chronicle.
* * * *
How "the World" Works:
Cruelty is supremacy. Pick somebody to piss on and you'll be all right. This rule holds everywhere. Simply betray the guileless.
The easiest and most profitable to betray, and the closest-at-hand, are your children of course, and defenseless innocence in general. Biggest bang for your buck there, right at hand, right at home. And of course remotest impoverished. Whom you'll never have to meet up with.
But that's only the low-hanging fruit. Move on to degrade culture, moral taste, the language, “the commons” wherever it remains intact. (Those are all, simply, other forms of defenseless innocence.) For exoneration, cite the demands of your talent, ambition. Forgive yourself but ruefully.
(Most repugnant in this ethic is: I myself have done it. That's how I know it. Winning power and comfort by easy cruelty. You don't really realize you're doing it at the time. This is why "the world" is poison. Stand far from the abbatoir and you'll find yourself less esteemed. Still, the goal is, you stand far from it anyway. It's not you.)
* * * *
Tad’s interesting half-life. It was lived out somehow in secret. And with a Kabuki-theater guardedness. How generous he was, letting me replace him in the role of “son,” in a family fascinated with celebrity. I the lower-class kid, the bad-luck kid, the survivor, the undeserving, the practical one, enemy of charisma or charm, cheapskate. Well, I would have to do. He once the crown prince. (I think he really was escaping that responsibility, in taking several leaps, in the last one half-succeeding.)
* * * *
February 16, 2011
The weather has turned bad. Cavendish has moved back in again.
* * * *
Went around the west meadow this morning in the rain and pulled out dozens of little new cedar saplings. They’re weeds, and in this wet weather they come out of the soaked earth easily. I’m catching them when they’re still less than hip-high.
(I want to keep that messy, isolated little meadow clear, as an open domain for the wild sweet-pea.)
* * * *
My trailer in the woods is far from the possibility of any wireless internet, and I can regularly go to great lakes of solitude and reading and thinking. Back up at the cottage, the ding of emails’ arrival, the literal “tweet” sound of tweets homing in, the various phones with their various clangs and ring-tones and text-message beeps. (My mind perhaps works in an outdated way, in a backward rural place.)
* * * *
February 14, 2011
Thinking of Tad. The merciful coroner says it was a massive heart attack and “he was dead before he hit the floor.” The other standard remark is that such a manner of death is “the Irishman’s Dream.” Well, it’s reported, also, that he was found with a faint smile on his face. That latter report I actually do believe. A coroner, kindly old pro, is the less plausible, while the finder of the body had neither the motive nor the readiness to make up a fib about a post-mortem smile.
I tend to think Tad wasn’t “dead when he hit the floor” but got some minutes or hours of consciousness. Lying on the boards alone. Ear to the hardwood boards, the old actor, felled. Coffee spilled. Hours or days till Hadiya is due to come back. The sounds coming through the floor from the laundromat below, of pop songs on the radio, big dryers tumbling, voices in tones of the ethnicities of the neighborhood, maybe Hmong moms down there folding clothes, and children playing. The doctrine of the Tibetan Buddhists would have the soul lingering for hours or even days, still to be spoken to, still listening inside the corpse. After bodily death there must be some interval of mental activity – enough seratonin in the synapses, enough cellular respiration – so that brain-death doesn’t happen exactly at the moment a heart stops beating or a finger stops twitching. Not at all. Tad, there, would have had some moments of contemplation after he’d been betrayed finally by his body and become “disembodied,” the body a dependable but tired old asset (“Brother Ass,” a certain Franciscan monk called it), the body a medium of self-assertion that was with Tad always, even when he was an actor on bright-lit stages of his own set-design and carpentry and lighting, even in dreams – arms and legs and volition – even in the womb before birth, his “body” was the medium of his “existence.” So in whatever nirvana there was for him, in that time lying on the floor after the departure of the sensible body, lacking that referential frame anymore, he must have had some summary thoughts. And so the smile. It’s the forgiveness part, surely.
Lazy bum, cholesterol-clogged. Cigarettes and cheeseburgers, self-aggrandizing bullshit stories, botched paint-jobs and joinery, cold coffee in moldy cups, manuscripts on foolscap in heaps. Selfless sometimes, unfailingly kind, handsome still despite everything, liar, laborer in others’ worlds. Secret pilgrim in this congelation of love. His bodily ashes will probably be scattered in Lexington, site of his old theater company, site of the legends he kept inflating and enhancing and repeating, near the very bridge indeed, basically at the place where he once tried to die. Since 1978, the extra thirty years he got were pure gravy, and he knew it.
* * * *
February 13, 2011
A quiet day of sadness, as mixed news comes in from the world.
-- Michelle’s wonderful book (at an obscure publishing house) will get the front page of the Sunday Times book review next week. So says my agent. I phoned her and left a congrats message on her tape.
-- I went down to the cottage to bring Brett these great tidings, and she said, “Bad news. Oh, Honey.” And she said, of her brother, “Tad just died.” Barbara could be heard in the bedroom talking on the phone to Sands, learning of the death of her oldest child.
Me, I’m gathering stones here today. It’s time to repair the potholes in the driveway. They’ve been getting away from me. The lore of fixing potholes in gravel prescribes laying in big two-inch broken rocks first, then filling in with half-inch roadbed gravel. (Which I happen to have a, dwindling, supply of.) On this day of muffled weather, the women staying indoors, I’m navigating these quiet acres with a wheelbarrow, looking for rocks, tossing them in. Clanks of stone on steel wheelbarrow wall. Tall pines on a windless day. Brett, in the cottage, with her many phone calls.
* * * *
February 12, 2011
The Problem of Other “Selves”:
If mysticism leads to solilpsism, then what are these other apparent consciousnesses experiencing? All these people on streetcars or sidewalks, people in the crosswalk as I wait at a red stoplight. What is their ontological status.
Well, the problem is not a problem. Such a paradox is not a problem in this (anthropic) universe, where the truth is, I don’t have a “self,” nor do they, either. Selves are constructions of society and language, organs of biological evolution, with no other ontological status.
* * * *
February 8, 2011
At last:
Finally filled the car’s gas tank with vegetable-oil ($3.45/gal) from the big polystyrene vat, on Idaho-Maryland Road behind the alternative energy place.
I bought only half a tank. Ttank was already half-full with ordinary gas-station diesel. Starting gradually on this. Want to see how the engine behaves.
The experiment is: that’s vegetable oil: will these cold mornings make it congeal. Nightly low temperatures of thirty degrees. Will the fuel in the engine behave like olive oil in the fridge?
As of today, have set a jar on the roof of the woodbox outside the kitchen window, containing a few ounces of this biodiesel (which I siphoned from my tank). In the mornings I can check it to see if it’s congealing.
* * * *
The Big Bang started right here by my kitchen door 14B yrs ago – (though that’s something you can say wherever you are, even if you’re way out around Alpha Centauri; because everything is the center.) It was fourteen billion years ago but it can still be observed in the sky. It keeps expanding in a fiery outermost shell around the visible universe. So the actual, ancient Bang, Itself, is still hanging out there, ablaze (3000º), at a distance of fourteen billion light years in every direction, a background glow behind the stars (called “microwave background”). The light it sends back gets stretched, as it takes the 14B-light-year journey back to the future, i.e., to us. Therefore the light arrives here in the longer microwave range. Astronomers say it would appear about as dim as moonglow, everywhere behind the stars, evenly distributed. If our eyes’ retinas were attuned to take in those wavelengths (rather than just the “visible range,” bracketed between infrared and ultraviolet), we would SEE the dawn moment of Creation glowing always in the night, an eternal present. Not an image of it, but the immediate thing itself before our eyes, if seeing is believing. We might cast shadows on our sidewalks and in our backyards, bathed in the ancient light of Creation. In fact, we do cast such shadows. But without seeing them.
* * * *
One had supposed that the idea of a “divinity” must come first. It’s the logical mistake: that somebody or something had to be there to pronounce a necessary shazzammm!
Rather, the primordial idea of “Love” precedes the (perhaps latterly necessary) idea of a divinity.
If one could speak algebraically of integers: “Love = Choice” That is, a Choice must be a positive choice. (A negative choice is annihilating.) Therefore, even before some mythological “god” is conceived, there exists Love. Love has always been out there as an axiom. Like the theorem side2 + side2 = hypotenuse2, or even 1+1=2, or even 1=1, love pre-existed its instantiation in matter.
* * * *
6mg of energy tingles in 260 billion cubic miles of empty space.
This is the force that is driving the universe to spread, actually accelerating it, esp. at the outer edges.
One butterfly-wing’s worth of energy per Grand Canyon.
It isn’t much but it adds up, over the light-years.