feb 5.
Two more afternoons pruning. Dash and his mother go to a movie.
Finally the old pruning-hook of George's breaks irreparably. Resort to the newer one. But keep the old one for parts.
* * * *
Feb. 2. Cold. Clear, dry days, perfect for fruit-tree pruning. Low sun of winter flickering in the pine branches.
Pruned apples severely, cruelly. Maybe I’ll regret it, but I remember the advice of the Anderson Valley apple man in the San Francisco Ferry-Building market: a real fruitgrower prunes with a chainsaw only.
All afternoon, on the truck-dashboard radio (parked beside me), all the news is from Egypt – of riots, euphoria, revolution. The perpetual betrayal of the poor seems essential to the cosmic drama. As if the poor themselves colluded, in their own vindictive satisfaction-by-betrayal.
I’m hacking at branches, not bothering to preserve nodes and buds providentially. Let this tree have a whole new life in April. Meanwhile the two housecats – really the same cat in two incarnations leading Schrodinger-parallel virtual lives, Bag-Juice and Aplomb – follow me with friendly vigilance. Get underfoot. Tangle in my ladder-footing. Recline in the meadow exactly where branches will crash down. Bag-Juice is the kind of obese housecat who, when he drapes himself over a sawbuck, engulfs the entire thing.
* * * *
Something essentially American: homemade engineering skills.
It's a homesteader thing: I can set out on an afternoon construction project without any kind of plan or blueprint or even a thought in my head, yet, and just start banging things together.
I begin by simply dragging the old scrap-metal sheets out from behind the shed. So I learn as I go along -- about materials' tensile strength, load distribution, bending moments, stress points, etc. This kind of luxury is available in the American economy. The guy on his acre.
(and without a single trip into town for hardware!)
* * * *
“Position and momentum do not commute”:
This (the predicament of a subatomic particle) seems to sum up the predicament of Time Itself.
Position and momentum do not commute.
* * * *
January 29, 2011
No work on novel again today.
Fixed the stove’s clogged propane orifice.
Fixed Dashiell's shorted-out bedside lamp.
Used oil-based primer to paint window-glazing putty (pantry south window).
Wrote sketch of novel for publicity.
Walked the length of the irrigation, checking for wintertime problems.
Watched another exciting episode of Quantum Mechanics.
Framework for raised garden bed.
* * * *
January 23, 2011
Barbara: It’s still going on, the process of her getting younger every day, at eighty-seven.
On her own, she walks across to our place from her cottage in the morning to get coffee. She makes dry remarks about the television news. She doesn’t lie in bed all morning any more but gets up earlier and earlier. Eats big meals. Yesterday she seriously wanted to plan a trip to Greece.
* * * *
January, 2011
More fine weather. Still trying not to write, not anything serious. Watched another classroom lecture of Susskind's quantum mechanics. Worked further on raised planting beds. Took a shot at proofreading the Squaw brochure for Brett. Chelsea the beautiful au pair comes "back home" for dinner. Her same old funky car w/bumperstickers.
* * * *
Jan. 23
TODAY:
First of all, didn’t write.
- 1) -The good coffee and empty stomach. The dark before the dawn
- 2) -Watched ninety more minutes of Susskind’s YouTube explanations of quantum physics. Wonderful. He skates back and forth before the Stanford chalkboard, happy and scowling, enraptured.
- 3) - Started “Cheap Meat” in the pantry slow-cooker thing.
- 4) - Went to church. The guest sermon was delivered by the departing Junior Warden of the church, whose name is Rich. (I think a Warden in a church is the fellow who patches the leaky roof, replaces the defective toilet-flushing mechanism, gets keys duped.) His sermon was anecdotal, sentimental, and in the end hortatory. As usual I sneaked out.
- 5) -Ran two miles. (No twinge of angina during the entire run. I’m fine.)
- 6) -At the top of the meadow, I did some more sawing of old corrugated iron’s rusty panels, for raised garden beds. Miserable work. A special metal-cutting blade is necessary for the Skilsaw. Sparks fly. Excruciating, ringing screech.
I don’t want to incur hearing damage, so I went looking for cotton to stuff my ears.
No cotton. None to be found anywhere. Shall I destroy 40 Q-Tips to harvest enough cotton? No, I find Brett’s Tampax supply, of course, and disembowel one of its fluff. On my headphones as I work, I’ve got Joanna Newsom’s pixilated wonderful sing-songs, performed on her big harp.
* * * *
Jan. 12, 2011
Now our little mountain town has the distinction of being the only place (perhaps in the nation!) where you can bring in your empty winebottles [to the old abandoned storefront next to the smoothie place, where one of the former mayors, Paul, has set up three big vats]: your empties get filled for $4.99, with local wine that tends to be pretty good – good in grape, if uneven in vintage – the local vintners want to be able to, at least, show their faces around town. It’s just like France! That’s what people like to say. It’s like being in the Rhone Valley!
The disadvantage of the system: to be driving a muddy old Mercedes jalopy with winebottles audibly clanking in the trunk: picking up the kids at school, hard to chalk it up to just one more of the indignities of the literary life.
* * * *
Extravagant trip. Great dinner at Macondray Lane: Glen and Alice walked over from Pacific Heights; Jason and Patricia from Sausalito; and Andrew and Lisa had driven all the way up from LA, bringing Louis to play with Dash. Andrew and Lisa and Brett and I shopped at the Ferry building for dinner ingredients beforehand. Drinks on the roof, looking out at Alcatraz. This is all good luck.
* * * *
Now that we’ve bought a generator, one thing I’ll miss about power-outages is the squalor. Candlelight’s perils and pandaemonium. People wearing the same pajamas for work or play or sleep, with different costumes pulled over. The parka I’m cooking in might be the parka I slept in. And sleep in again tonight.
Advantages of an “upgrade”: the Community of Writers won’t come to a halt. And I’ll be recharging my computer and working. All this is good. But I’ll miss the backwardness. The Sabbath. The boredom and thwartedness.
* * * *
To buy a gas-powered electric generator is to join the country bourgeoisie.
(This whole neighborhood, in an outage, used to be silent and dark under the snowfall. To leave your hectic polluted kitchen and step outside, into the cold, was to enter sacred space.
Nowadays, whenever PG&E fails, the canyons and meadows all around can sound like a Hollywood movie location with generators roaring at various distances)
* * * *
Jan. 4, 2011.
Chest pains continue. Sharp sun of January morning.
Deciding I ought to stop ignoring chest pains and ask doctor about them. It’s probably stupid to do otherwise. I take the midday trip (without mentioning it to anyone) to the Miner’s Family Health Clinic. Stethescope. Tapping at breastbone and shoulderblades. Then lie down on the table on the starchy paper, get pasted with electrodes for a little EKG. It’s a little toy EKG, just for this rural hospital, wheeled in on a busboy’s cart. Nurse tapes me up and makes me remove all metal, including my wedding band – which literally hasn’t been off my finger since June 25, 1987. It’s not that I’m all that uxorious, it’s just that over the years my knucklebone has widened or something.
Soap and a little skin abrasion were necessary, and I set the golden band on the blue formica, with its suds. The nurse smiled.
Then, “back up on the table,” I have to lie under the electric tentacles barechested, and I am asked to be totally still for a minute. In the corner of the ceiling, the acoustic tiles have circles of brown stain from an old roof leak. The news, in the end, is that my heartbeat is regular, triumphant, slower-beating than most, because I get so much cardiovascular exercise, so I am to be sent away into the world again. But that moment of lying down barechested without a wedding ring: it was an interesting ceremony of betrothal. On the way home, I stopped at the grocery store looking for some outlandish treat for myself, something really de luxe, but my imagination failed me and I got an Odwalla drink (Mango Tango) and a locally manufactured whole-wheat bagel called “Great Grains,” that has an elusive sweetness. Also paper lunchbags for Dash’s lunches, waxed-paper sandwich envelopes, Barbara’s favorite bran muffins, the usual jug of Woodbridge and the local syrah decanted from the big vats next door.
* * * *
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. A dinner of herbs, and love therewith. Than a stalled ox, and hatred therewith.
* * * *
12-29-10.
Went with the cordless phone out to the mud room, which is freezing cold, to sit in the old couch and talk by long-distance to the nice lady at “Iowa Cremation,” to make the arrangements beforehand for my mother. This is advised by the nurses at Crestview. The price, $1675, includes death certificate, medical examiner’s certification, complimentary disposable container, and pre-pays the USPS shipment of cremains to any address in the continental USA. All around the mud room stove: litter of ribbons and wrappings. Dog pee on the square rocks of the floor. I can hear laughter from the kitchen, where X-mastime visiting cousins drink beer with Hunter.
* * * *
Christmas Night. Hush. This old farmhouse sleeps a lot of people. My favorite things on the table: Brett’s braided bread, spinach salad and goat cheese, and Aleksandra’s mushroom soup (with wild mushrooms that were gathered in her village and mailed by her mother).
Nights, my chest pain is present, and I lie awake on my back. (All the prognoses in the world are discoverable by any restless hypochondriac touring websites). Calling a doctor would not only make a bore of people’s Christmastime, it would also, inevitably, involve expensive tests. So I lie on my back thinking what message I would pass on to Hunter if. I’d really only tell him that he already possesses all time and space. And that he already has faith, whether he knows it or not, and yet will never know what faith is.
-- [Such thinking makes sense only at eschatological moments]
My preference is: chest pains are only indigestion and bad posture. This particular heart attack is just a nerve-pinch of thoracic vertebrae. (Plus, a Yuletide visit from the metaphysical, rattling its long chains).
It will vanish next week when I stop eating Stilton, and beef, and fudge.
* * * *
“I just spoke to him. He asked what was possible. I said same arrangement
as last year. He said, I see. (Pause). And what was the money last year?
I don't seem to recall. And I said, I'll check with Alicia, but I think it
must have been $3500. And he said, $3500, I see. (Pause). And I said,
Maybe we can do better. I'll have to check. And he said, That would be
helpful, and, let's see, there is the matter of a car. And I said, Oh,
yes, a car. Well, you had a car last year, so I assume you would have one
this ear, but I'll have to check. I could also drive you, if you'd prefer
that. And he said, A car would be nice. And the airfare, that would be
what class? And I said, Carl, we would love you to come. I'll see how
much money we have and get back to you.
So--this may be the last go. Is it possible to give him $5000, a car,
and business class or first class travel? I would yield $1000 of my
honorarium for that purpose. Would be a way of saying thanks.”
* * * *
Xmas is coming. The shivery crackle of K-Mart polyethylene in the back of the minivan. The desk-calendar in the kitchen is illegibly crowded. The weather has halted all painting on the south wall. At least all the priming is done. The Community of Writers bank accounts are empty, and the printers didn’t get us our thousand begging-for-money postcards in good time, so the whole bulk mailing plan may have to be scrubbed, says Brett, if we can’t get it going fast. The transfer of rescue money went awry in the bank. The deep-freeze weather is “spalling” my brick patio, popping chips off the top surface as big as scabs or (once or twice) as big as cookies. The chandelier remains on the coffee table. The roll of duct tape – which this morning was useful in mending Dashiell’s sneakers for school, while his carpool-ride waited out at the road – has fallen into the remote cat-box diarrhea [and for an instant I actually contemplate whether to rescue it and frugally wash it]. Then Brett has to go to the bank but she is in a panic because the necessary document (containing routing numbers, etc., to get us out of our financial tangle) can’t be found. “Here it is,” she says. “Under the tortilla.”
* * * *
Average Critical-Thinking Skills:
A) Folks who throw religion away, citing the Spanish Inquisition and Islamic terrorism and the popes’ forbidding birth control. (If you want to watch yourself erase a "god," first chalk up on the blackboard an old bearded human male on a cloud peering down at earth watching for forbidden sex-acts.)
B) In SFO, at the semi-regular “symposium” (where mostly the wine, not the philosophy, is featured), one old guy at the table raises his countenance and announces the old conclusive piety, “Well, the fact is, no war has ever accomplished any good.” And around the table, all the guys hang their heads in assent. I sit there thinking of a few wars: the American Civil War, which got a real start in accomplishing one of the proudest miracles in the history of mankind; and of the Nazi concentration camps that were opened in WW II (a personal friend of mine, an elderly gent now, was a sergeant who walked up to the gate at Matthausen and lifted the hasp on that padlock while people watched from within in total silence); and the American Revoltionary War, which even the English seem to have oddly countenanced, and not fought with much ardor, looking on in an avuncular way, ambivalently, at the ambitions of the new people. A “war” is a paroxysm you can’t take a simplistic attitude toward.
* * * *
[The wars I’ve seen in my own time do seem to have been ignoble; but they have brought me gasoline and prosperity, and rattan furniture made by simpler people. Here I sit, implicated in that.]
* * * *
My new book has a jacket design that is very sexy and brilliant but I know it should be impenetrably black. It should be the Beatles “White Album” in reverse: the title is “Radiance” but its package should be black. And plain, too. The text, inside, is basically in nirvana throughout: readers shouldn't expect the entertainments and diversions of "plot." I don’t want an author photo either. I am aware that it would be poor marketing to have no photo. So I’ll have to have an author photo. But it’s just too bad. A good book has to outlive its cover. The way "the classics" do, so they finally get to be published in undistinguished separate little coffins, Salinger, Fitzgerald, Austen.
* * * *
Patience, patience. Last week I ran into yet another agent who is bored by certain of her famous client’s writing, and also coolly chagrined about it. Client has a huge reputation with young hip readers. Voice of a Generation, etc. Agent doesn’t even read the manuscripts in full, when they come in, says she finds them boring and repetitious. She just moves them on – as with a pitchfork – to a publishing-house editor; and presumably the editor in turn moves the manuscript on, pitchfork-style to the printers. Such blockbusters often don't show a lot of scrupulous, loving editing, and a number of the highest-reputed popular writers seem to be treated this way in NY. All this in turn perhaps invites a reader (a readership) that isn't reading closely or lovingly. This is a strange atmosphere to be working in, but I know it's always been thus, in the book business, maybe since Gutenberg.
* * * *
December 9, 2010
Back in Nevada City. Back in my uncomfortable mucking-boots. Behind the house the light is failing fast, dark at 4:30pm, while I split kindling to replenish the mud room woodbox. At such a time, the most luminous object in the universe is the garage wall, in the meadow beside me, old clapboard, painted last summer from a paint-bucket labeled “Brilliant White, Low Lustre.” (Just plain white, at the moment, is blue.)
Last week I was at Nion’s harvest party in Marin, and during a break I was talking to a, maybe, thirty-year-old hedge fund manager who perhaps didn’t belong at that party, standing all by himself in an Italian-looking suit, leaning on a guyline cable that supported a tent. He had drunk too much wine but was happy. His girlfriend was sitting with her friends at a table, and for a while he and I waxed philosophical in conversation (and geopolitical, and socioeconomic), all in about ten minutes.
From his vantage point, “Everything’s pretty much shit-fucked out there.” He meant the economy and the global problematique, though at that moment he was looking out over Nan McEvoy’s pretty new groves, rows of young olive trees multiplying over the sensuous hills of Marin. He swirled the red wine in his glass. “I’m about ninety percent in commodities, I’m in copper, oil futures, lithium and zinc and shit. And gold. Gold, gold, gold,” he spoke with distaste for gold. “Everything’s going shit-fucked. We’re not facing the population thing, and we’re not facing the global-warming thing. The food thing. This is what I tell people in my letter, too.” (He publishes a bulletin of investment advice, expensive to subscribe to.) He again swirled his wine in his goblet, and almost took a sip, but an ankle buckled, so he got a better grip on his slanting tent-line in the sunset. This is a guy from Maine who went to Harvard and Wharton and devised a certain kind of dream-life for himself in California – the German sports car, the bunker on Nob Hill from which to publish his financial letter, the girlfriend, the ski lease. Now I here I am back home in the blue light at end of day, clatter of cedar kindling, and I wonder, was he only saying things he thinks I’m used to hearing? Or prefer to hear? Because I live in the country? He can’t sincerely believe what he was saying, can he? Is it possible he got back to Nob Hill from Marin with his girlfriend and went back to his routine telling people to invest in Duke Energy and Chinese Internet start-ups? Yes.
* * * *
A Particular Unmentionable:
A novel about someone like Cavendish with a certain unfortunate compulsive habit. Observable by all around a dinner table. Never spoken of, nor even looked at. But incessant. (Might make a child snicker – or more likely worry – but all polite debonair grown-ups look past it and pretend it isn’t happening.)
* * * *
Dec 1st
Beautiful day. Home from travels. Tired. Garbage and recycling are out at the road. Dry firewood is in. A warm storm will be coming up the slope, a weather system arising in a warmer South Pacific fetch (meteorologists’ term) rather than a Gulf of Alaska fetch.
Ignored work and, instead, answered misc old emails, wrote the begging-donations letter for Squaw, assembled the new elecrical generator out-of-the-box, raked the lane to keep sodden leaves from killing turf, wrote and sent four letters of recommendation. Dinner of sausage and potatoes. (This is the day the Lord made! exult the faithful, and they’re right.)
* * * *
November 26
Bought a generator at last. $700. I’m ashamed of expenditure, but the power outages are irksome and make for inefficiency, and with Barbara here in delicate, declining health, we have to be responsible.
* * * *
First good storm of the season, 11-23-2010. In two days, there’s four feet of powdery snow. Then after a few hours’ break, two more feet are added on top. We arrive and I have to swim through this to get, in semi-panic, to the shovels stowed under the deck. And then use the shovel to make a channel to the woodpile.
I’m reminded of Paul Radin, the wild “Jewish Indian” who lived in these hills all his life, mistrustfully and shyly, wearing the same greasy brimmed hat in all seasons, a frail-looking figure, Bob Dylanesque in heeled boots, to be glimpsed sometimes walking on Highway 89. Bear-claw and chamois pouch of "medicine" tied at his throat. Paul in wintertime used to keep a rope strung between his house and his barn, so he could make his way out to feed his horse during blizzard conditions. And not get lost in the forty-foot gap. Out at Ramparts, where the cold came fast.
In summertime Paul used to ride that horse over the mountain to visit the Writers Conference, and to insist on reading his shamanistic poetry, hijacking the Follies stage, mistaking the audience’s derision for warm encouragement, going on and on, until beautiful Sands had the inspiration of coming onstage and embracing him to get him off.
Name of that horse: . . . ? . . . Zumgali!
Horse died. (Died a couple of years before Paul himself died.) He buried it directly before his cabin, shallowly, amounting to a big mound there. I was one of the few who ever went out there. He used to sit before the mound smoking in the evenings. Ornamented the mound with rings of stones. Eventually he took to sleeping beside the grave, nights. Then a bear moved into his house and displaced him. This went on for the last year of his life. If ever he wanted to go into his house to get something – a poem or a book or a cooking pan – he first gave a blast of his loud air-horn to scare the bear; the bear would pour out the back-side and scramble disconsolately up the slope (I was there to see this happen, once); and Paul , on the front side, would pry back the loose plywood and go in.
In his dying days, Andrew Tonkovich and I used to bring him marijuana that we could scare up from some friends, as a balm for his cancer. He would sit by the horse-mound and smoke, his little air-horn alarm at his side, in all weathers setting up propane space-heaters in the outdoors. After he died, we explored the cabin and found that the bear over the months had pretty much leveled everything to a knee-high rubble: Paul’s bedding and furniture and cookware and sheaves of poetry and books, all tossing together to make a bear’s-nest. Now his brother the Boston banker will be trying to develop Paul’s property. Putting condos by the river.
* * * *
Thanksgiving. In the tall snowbank outside the window, bottlenecks stick up in a row, Two-Buck-Chuck pinot grigiot, chilling there. Henrik and Barbara Bull are reportedly stranded on the summit, held back by a CHP road-closure in the blizzard, in their backseat twenty pounds of cracked crab from the North Beach wharves. Cavendish does arrive, in a hazardous truck because it lacks heat. Lacking heat is a privation which, ordinarily, he wouldn’t mind; he’s got a scarf and gloves; but the problem is, moisture condenses on the inner windshield, then freezes to a glaze of opaque ice.
Cavendish has brought Cassy, the Nevada City poet laureate. She is the feckless attractive artist whose car broke down permanently, and who therefore began borrowing friends’ cars, eventually to take up sleeping in them, upon being evicted from the apartment she’d stopped making rent-payments on. She arrives looking beautiful.
Various tables are lined up, and candles located. The lace tablecloth must be withdrawn from archives and spread out. The old oil painting of Brett, nude, must be stashed in a closet. When the Bulls do arrive, they have a Norwegian method of cleaning the white flokati rug from before the fireplace: spread it face-down over a snowdrift, and whack at it with a broom handle: you really do leave a grey rectangle.
The table is at last all seated, with no one excluded, always a few new faces, a couple of bluegrass musicians, one cancer-victim on short lease, still wearing hospital bracelet and hospital smock, one visiting software-designer’s family, Cavendish and Cassy and others, the several with their rows of prescription pill bottles amber-plastic and child-proof. Outside, in the rest of the world, North Korea has begun shelling South Korea, Haitians are getting cholera, the Israeli Knesset has just voted never to give back any of their settlement areas in the West Bank, and Washington is gridlocked and somewhere a glacier is shrinking. How apocalyptic is every instant!
Clink glasses. Nobody will “say grace,” as this crowd is too agnostic. But Cassy has a fresh substitute: she will sing the Kiowa Death Song. (The reasoning, of course, is that Thanksgiving commemorates the decimation of Native Americans.) So, while all others’ eyes respectfully fall, Cassy lifts her face in an agonized contortion and belts it out in a very convincing Indian style, Hey-Yuh Hey-yay-yay-Yuh, with yips and shouts and sobs. It goes on forever. I catch Dashiell’s eye and the merriment there is so contagious, I have to bow over my plate, taking deep slow breaths.
* * * *
“Charisma” in Xian philsophy was simply a “talent.” A gift of God, to be put to use
In contemporary usage “charisma” technique of seduction and aggrandizement.
* * * *
Nov. 14 –
The “lyricism” of the big-bang or creation myths: a hymn by John Marriot of the 1700’s:
Thou WHOSE al-MIGHT-y WORD
Cha-OS and DARK-ness HEARD
What an image.
* * * *
Nov. 14 –
A joke from a sermon: “The sin of 'evil speech' is the one sin you could do all the live-long day and never get tired.”
As a novelist well knows.
The delight of evil speech is vocation. Practiced indeed all the live-long day.
* * * *
Nov. 12
“Advice,” for a writer, is abundant. Epecially from those closest to you.
I’d rather drink muddy water / And sleep in a hollow log.
* * * *
Nov. 7
Week-end. After way too many hot, dry days, a winter-style rain is coming. Brett has been up in Squaw alone – hemming curtains, re-covering couch cushions – stays in touch by phone to get my redactions of the NOAA weather predictions for snow up there. On my prompting, she makes the trip back down here just in time before the storm arrives and they close the pass. As she comes over the summit, the Highway Patrol at Truckee is beginning to set up the orange cones, to start turning people back.
Here, Barbara and I have been making sure we take our pills, watching British-produced situation comedies on TV, getting the laundry in before the onset of rain.
* * * *
You can write to advance a notion, you can write to be admitted to a “canon” of “literature,” you can write to revenge yourself against your parents or schoolmasters, you can write to please the judges of big prizes, you can write for the critics’ approval, or for academics’.
But can your work withstand the scrutiny of a reader's love. I don’t mean adulation. (Which does not look so closely.) Or even respect. I mean the reader’s love. A most penetrating critic.
* * * *
Our friend the realtor, whom I see around town, has emotion welling in her eyes at all times. She’s an illustration of the medieval theologians’ scholastic principle (a not-very-well-known principle) that “Realtors” are the lowest of the Ten Orders of Angels, Seraphim and Cherubim at the top – down thru Principalities, etc – and at the bottom the Archangels, Angels, and, lowest, Realtors on their errands cruel or providential.
I run into her by the dairy case (the yogurt, the cottage cheese, the artificial creamer). She’s a pretty woman of about 65 or 70. Freckles. Grey hair in short braids. In a two-minute chat, I make her tear up sentimentally in various ways. “How’s Barbara?” she says, “I’ve been meaning to visit.”
I tell her Barbara keeps getting younger – (not kidding, either: it’s not exactly untrue) – that because of her diet or just her natural recovery from stroke, she’s getting younger every day.
This makes happy damp shine in her eyes, in IGA’s fluorescent dispensation. “ How’s Hunter?”
Oh, he’s great. He’s so busy with his studies, we don’t hear much from him. He’s living right in the middle of Amherst (her husband’s alma mater is Amherst) – got a girlfriend – studying Greek playwrights, physics – and all the maples on the quad are changing color.
That last detail especially – as I knew it would – makes her eyes brim the more. So I think I ought to let up on her, change the subject. Do a little healthy griping. About the abandoned septic tank I had to unearth and nobody would help. Easy thing to gripe about.
* * * *
In fact, though, Barbara is still speaking very little. At meals only very quietly.
Tonight, post-Halloween, Dash brings his entire pillowcase of candy to the table after dinner and dumps it out in candlelight, to sort, to spread it out, to fondle. I kid him about Buddhism (The Life of Buddha used to be a bedtime story), telling him while he gloats over his candy, “Remember what the Buddha said: Desire causes Suffering. Suffering can be overcome by overcoming desire.” Since the boy has been inoculated against irony over the years, I tell him I’m personally not tempted by chocolate, because I’ve long since overcome all desire: the only thing keeping me on earth is my one vice, wine: this glass here: keeps me from levitating w/halo. Barbara then perks up, grins in relief and hoists her glass to mine and says, “I’ll drink to that.”
* * * *
(Mu-shu-pork lunch special at Fred’s on Broad Street)
I tell my friend the Episcopal minister that, it seems to me, anyone who takes an ‘inordinate’ interest in religion has ‘something pretty basically, deeply wrong with him.’ It’s surely an imprecise and misstated idea, the kind regrettable to blurt out in vague half-baked condition.
But in pleasure he puts down his chopsticks: “Exactly!” (This from a graduate of the seminary.) In his wink, leering fraternity: I’d just veered near, yes indeed, the nice, awful, little secret.
* * * *
Nov. 2. Voted. Got Roto-Tiller going. Restrung the good guitar in prep for Olive Harvest. Went to the store. (Where I lurked, not wanting to be associated with the minor porcini mushroom insurrection of last week, in the produce department, tho’ I do harbor sympathy with the partisans.)
On the meadow are heaped tomato vines. Brett has cleared and raked the enclosed garden. Scoured of stubble and stalks, the soil is bare, a sight which always pained me. They and blackberry cuttings must all be carted off into the woods somewhere.
* * * *
Oct. 30. Saturday. Quiet and Sunny. Dash will instruct Aleksandra this afternoon in the art and method of pumpkin carving, so tonight (out on this road where no one will see them anyway) we’ll have three Jack-O’-Lanterns flickering tonight, one for Nico, one for Aleksandra, and one for Dash.
* * * *
October 27, 2010
Started sunny. Got colder and darker all day.
Put up all storm windows.
Dug matted leaf-detritus out of all gutters and downspouts.
Covered and drained swamp-coolers at our house and at Barbara’s.
Cavendish is still sleeping here, living in the playroom, peeing into a strainer, expecting crystals to come forth in his pee. (Boasting post-operation that indeed he will produce a small dune of crystals.) Tonight is the first game of the World Series, and because the SFO Giants are to compete, the event is important around here. Cavendish’s laptop is on the kitchen table while I cook, competing with candlelight, bringing in the pictures of the game, and he exults over base hits. Giants are taking the lead and holding it. Chili is on the stove. Barbara stays away from loud baseball, in her own cottage with the PBS “NewsHour” and her stemmed glass of non-alcoholic white wine.
* * * *
Re: The "God' whose existence is affirmed below:
It's not much of an affirmation. To affirm the existence of any cogent divinity involves subtracting, from it, all its qualities. The thing exists only in its unknowability, and is affirmable only to the extent that it stays invisible. As a proof, it's like saying "Existence implies existence." Or, "Look! Zero equals zero! And one equals one!" (The divinity appears there as placeholder, either as the zero or the one.)
So, subtracting "God" (as an unnecessary unknowable), the only left-over quantity is that odd emotional addition, the "love" motive of Creation. The rational part self-cancels. And the only remainder is the irrational afterthought. The anthropomorphism. The mythological. The "caring."
In the metaphysician's lab, after the explosive poof, the retorts and beakers are suddenly empty and sparkling-dry. But there's a scent in the air.
* * * *
October 27, 2010
Sharp october sunlight. It’s 9:55 AM. I’m waiting for the morning frost to thaw on the slopes of shingles, so I can climb up there with heavy storm windows.
The most interesting news recently, meanwhile, is that a galaxy from 13.4 billion years ago has been photographed by Hubble. 13.4 billion was almost the “beginning of time.” The blurred pinpoint-fleck of orange light, as reproduced in the NY Times, is a signal from the early period when light itself hadn’t existed long. Those photons started their journey 0.5 B after “big bang,” so they’re bringing an eschatological minute right back here for our inspection. In the photograph it appears as faint, red-shifted, and it’s upstaged by newer closer stars, but it’s still out there, hanging out where the Big Bang continues as a present-time event.
The Big Bang of course probably wasn’t the first thing. A singular, unique “Big Bang” is a suggestion we in the West favor, as “our” special origin story. The scientific likelihood is that before our own little “Big Bang” there were bazillions of Big Bangs, over trillions of Kalpas.
I do continue to be interested in “Rational Proofs” of God’s Existence (cherishing particularly St. Anselm’s so-called ontological proof, for its clever gimcrack fake-out abracadabra.) There’s one obvious logical problem in positing a “God” as an ultimate First Cause. It’s a problem of “infinite regress”: What preceded Him, or created Him? What were the prior sufficient conditions for the existence of a “divinity”?
Nevertheless, a kind of ultimate theism seems necessary, because, from all I see of cause-and-effect in the world, I infer that something initiated this endless cosmic inhalation and exhalation of fireworks. Surely it was a “something” never to be limned by myth nor by science, nor even in the liveliest hallucination.
Yet, let me suggest furthermore that if something “caused” existence, then something “cared.” That additional bit of anthropomorphism seems inevitable. Something had to care. That’s how we must imagine events’ teleology. Oddly, this emotional (!) premise of “caring” seems even more axiomatic, more deeply, logically originary, than the cause-effect nexus. So it is that we are inclined, helplessly, to capitalize this Something. At the beginning of the “temporality” that provides the matrix of all subseqent epochs, a certain Something must have “cared,” “cared” to do something. Or had a “motive,” or an “impulse.”
On my five acres life, meanwhile, seems comprehensible. That a nutritional material is formed in soil; that it enters my mouth; that it sustains this trance I think of as objectivity, before exiting “my” body (me being, in this case, the 165-lb collation of cells that, during a period of a few decades, has foamed up temporarily and mostly held its shape), all these principles are treated routinely around here, with no special astonishment. My coffee in the morning. My red wine at the end of a day. My eyes’ thirst for color and distance. My absorption in lust/gluttony/envy/wrath/pride. My endless dissatisfaction. I see that “I” am an illusion, yes. But one thing seems clear. It seems clear that “I” wasn’t the thing doing the necessary caring back at the “beginning” of “time.”
* * * *
Beef stew: a bay leaf, shitake mushrooms, soy sauce, port, black pepper. Cavendish arrives, on the eve his big “lithotripsy” operation, to spend the night here. We have agreed to give him a six-am ride to the “Surgery Center,” a storefront in a mall. And pick him up afterward at ten-thirty groggy. As for the scab on forehead, he has no explanation.
“Oh, hey. Would you pick up my antibiotics prescription? Sorry. I spaced it.”
* * * *
Rewards of cultural exchange. Aleksandra (her family in Krakow made seasonal mushrooming expeditions, etc., smoked their own hams) informs us, helpfully, that our lavender, out back by the garage, can be brought indoors and scattered in the cupboards to deter the moths that infest the flour.
Reciprocally, she enters the kitchen this morning proclaiming, “Brett! I googled your shoes!”
In my historic lostness while I grind coffee beans I’m thinking I googled your shoes trying to parse the subject-verb-object relationship there. Your shoes got googled. Something that happened to your shoes was googling.
* * * *
Apologies. Never do answer the phone. It rings on the wall and I tend to leave the room or simply manage to just go on doing what I was doing. Let the machine take the message. The call is never for me; and I’ve somewhat arranged things that way. (The simplicity of life here.)
I’ve been rereading these pages’ recent diary entries and noticing how the word “routine” recurs (in all grammatical cases; adjectival, adverbial, nominal). I’m not exactly living here in the asymptote where Zeno’s arrow never reaches the target, but I do get the sense I'm loving uneventfulness.
Whatever the opposite of novelty is. (Antiquity?)
* * * *
Saturday Night. Oct. 23
My worries are over, everyone got home safe to me. Brett and Barbara and Dash and the dog arrive in heavy rainstorm, driving down from Squaw Valley on winding two-lane mountain highways in the wet dark, and I’ve got pesto and bockwurst sausage and cauliflower, the windows all steamed up, and my anxiety over their routine imperilment subsides. Apron. Ladle. (Only a few flakes of snow attacked their windshield coming over the summit.) Dash with flashlight flickers in the meadow and woods, looking for the missing cat, the color high in his cheeks. Barbara by candlelight stalks the kitchen, looking for glass of wine, disgusted as usual by Garrison Keillor’s mellow “Prairie Home Companion” on the radio, a cane in each hand these days to support her.
* * * *
For subsequent use: A Jewish feminist agitates in favor of genital mutiliation, clitoridal excision for herself and her entire sisterhood, as sign of covenant equivalent to (privileged males’) circumcision.
[With reprise of Texas psychopath who kidnaps, etherizes, and circumcises and releases folk, to save their souls.]
* * * *
Oct. 20.
Dry, sunny days are back for a while.
Aleksandra is living here, while Nico returns to SFO for construction labor.
All the furniture in the living room has been pushed up against the walls to make room for quilt manufacture. Muslin backing, then batting, then the quilt-face, are to be laid out in a large loose “sandwich.” Then poke-stitching is to begin in the middle.
However, the batting material – the single great rectangular pad of it – was first fed into the washer, with the thought that it should be shrunken before being enclosed between two panels of cloth. Of course it broke up into a slurry, which in the spin cycle was pasted evenly in a cylinder against the inner walls of the washer tub, to be dug off by fingernails in scoops. Brett asked in despondency, “Do you still love me?”
* * * *
Sunday afternoon, arriving home, as I came around into the driveway, a red-tailed hawk flew low across my windshield, danglilng in its talons a loopy snake. A weird sight.
Cavendish shows up around dinner time. He has some frozen “chicken pot pies” of his own. And insists he’s only stopping by to pick up a package that arrived for him at this address and is driving out to his forest blind to heat his pies. (To power a microwave out there, I think extension cords run from old dormant building-site hookup. His trailer is just over the ridge from it).
But he is easy to persuade that my soup is preferable. Falls asleep at the table. Is put to bed in cottage.
* * * *
Nico and Aleksandra are back. Success in the Big City has eluded them, at least temporarily. Finding work and living-quarters is hard, in that (no longer so inclusive or forgiving) town. She will stay here in the playroom for a week or so, while Nico will drive back to SFO to work as a hod carrier in the construction of a strip-mall, sleeping nights in the Dodge van, subsisting on 7-Eleven provender. Both wear simple gold wedding rings.
* * * *
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Up at four. Work well.
By dawn, the first drops of rain.
Bring in patio furniture. Plug in the car (this old diesel business). Bring in summer-dry firewood from cedar split 2 or 3 yrs ago. Cover kindling with tarps. Clean up tools and materials of summer projects (the façade for Barbara’s porch overhang). Set up Barbara with coffee and Sunday paper. Dash is awake, watching TV in the mud room, with his hands clapped over his eyes, because the hero is about to kiss a girl: the two of them onscreen linger brushing slack lips, breathing into each other’s mouths. I offer Dash a wedge of pear, which (“Sure, yeah!”) he accepts with his one free hand while keeping his eyes covered.
* * * *
October 16, 2010
Saturday. Rain is predicted for tomorrow.
Lit the pilot lights in wall heaters for winter
Refrained, yet, from putting up storm windows
Window-screens go into the garage
Tarped over the stacked wooden garden furniture
Tennis with Dashiell
* * * * * * * * * * * *
First thing this morning, I stepped on – and broke – the hourglass that has been rolling around the bathroom floor. These things come into Dashiell’s hands at school as gifts from oral-hygiene demonstrations (they set a child’s two-minute standard for how long you’re supposed to brush). It’s been rolling around underfoot for some days, and now the capsule is broken, and the dose of pink sand, two minutes’ worth, will be sifting into recesses in the bathroom floor, as I didn’t sweep it up.
The other epochal event today. I noticed that my temporary paper driver’s license calls my hair “gray.” It wasn’t me that changed the hair color record, I would have only reapplied routinely as “BRN, BRN, 5’10”, 165 lbs.” The very friendly girl at the DMV counter must have changed it to gray, and without mentioning. She must accomplish this little kindness often, many times a day, because I’m sure most people, not out of vanity but just negligence or indifference, let their hair-color alone on official records. Also, the girl must make a custom of not mentioning it, as she makes the little change, there at the counter she occupies in the world, moving people on through the system.
* * * *
Sunday afternoon occupation. The big bookshelf culling here.
Three card tables in the garage support small towers of hardcovers and paperbacks –The Color Purple, Lattimore’s dog-eared Iliad. Light in August. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Field Geology. One small stack, on the right, is the keepers. The rest will go to the Eric’s bookstore in the coffee shop. The garage radio plays NPR.
* * * *
The man from the county comes for the periodic, routine test of the groundwater in the well. He’s only interested in the gallons-per-minute productivity, not e-coli, or trace minerals, like mercury or lead.
His equipment:
Tin cup. Short length of garden-hose. Stopwatch. Graduated beakers and plastic tubs with calibrations. Aluminum clipboard.
He kneels at the well-head in the pumphouse. He’s patient. Chats about the fish in Hirschman Pond. I see he’s got a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, but refrains from lighting one up to kill time. Anyway, the well tests out all right. Five gallons per minute. It’s fine. And he tastes from the tin cup. “Granite,” he says.
“Granite?”
“I don’t taste soil. Just granite.” And he explains.
This water is melted snow which has seeped through fissures in underground stone. It melted about 500 years ago – long before radioactive fallout, or even soot – up around Big Bend, where the “Rainbow Lodge” exit now is, off I-80, at the five- or six-thousand-foot elevation, and then it spent some centuries seeping toward us.
And my first, reprehensible, craven thought is, how can we keep this water supply out of the hands of the coming hordes?
The opening sentence of the Dhammapada: “Mind precedes its objects. They are mind-governed and mind-made. To speak or act with a defiled mind is to draw pain after oneself, like a wheel behind the feet of the animal drawing it.”
* * * *
October 11 –
Spray for blackberries with OrthoMax solution. Only the north and east property lines, experimentally.
* * * *
October 10 –
Sunday. Apples. The crop is skimpy, but enough. Dash wearing old shoulder-strap bag of woven grass likes to climb high in the limbs and flouts all warnings from the ground. In the kitchen, the juicer makes its dynamo hum. Carafes of cider stand around, with grey sudsy foam.
* * * *
Oct. 7 –
Spread “MOLEMAX” pellets (castor oil) w/rotary broadcaster.
Broken garden chair: brass screwplate, clamp, epoxy.
Oven door: purchase cable, springs, cable ties.
* * * *
Oct. 7.
The apples this year are the best ever. Largely worm-free. So I realized something. This was the year I neglected to put out the pheromonal traps for coddling moths.
Of course. Those traps attract moths to the trees. They’re enticed by the sexy pheromone, then discover apples, for their eggs to dwell in.
* * * *
The Nature/Culture thing:
Seems like every time I pass thru the cottage, in the flickering blue light of a TV set, a crime drama is playing: a bad guy is being tracked down. And at the murder scene the camera is obsessively lingering over the corpse, relishing the little lake of blood. Or by flashing jump-cuts (thigh, throat, temple), the sense of a “forbidden glance” is provided. Or the moment of the slaughter itself revolves in sick dreamy slo-mo. Or we’re in the morgue and the coroner is standing by a gurney with a cop (usually it’s a young woman cop; on these TV soundstages the lighting gaffers use the actress’s nipples as a reference to set the depth-of-focus on the cameras, which must be evidence of what matters centrally in this medium), and the coroner is lifting the naked corpse’s sheet and he winces, saying, “Sorry. Some things you just never get used to.”
I’m only the guy passing through the room, on my errands. These are channels aimed at a demographic called “women,” the ones who, if Atticus brings in the trophy of a dead vole, send me out to dispose of the little soft corpse.
* * * *
Cavendish shows up for dinner. He says a fine-looking furred mammal has been living with him in his trailer. It’s shy. Seldom seen. He has identified it as a ferret, by Internet research.
His news is, he will need an operation. His kidney stones, he says, are as big as olives. He’d always known he was kidney-stone-prone, and has passed several in his life so far. But these are too huge to pass. He says, “I’d always thought of myself as a crystal maker, now it turns out I’m giving birth to moons.”
* * * *
War on moles and gophers:
A) Castor-oil. They hate it. It repels them.
B) A product called “The Giant Destroyer.” It looks like a small stick of dynamite. You light the fuse, drop it in the burrow, and cover over the entrance. It releases a noxious gas.
* * * *
The oven door last night, revealing the roast, flopped down heavily with a clang.
A spring had snapped, and now the whole thing must be wired shut at the door-handle, to stay closed. Today, a new spring must be bought at the hardware store. This is a great old "O’Keefe & Merritt" stove, everything fixable, by any average-intelligence amateur who simply uses his powers of observation and a little fortitude. One side of the range is a skillet you can burn kindling in. We’ve never used it but it’s there to serve in our Total-Environmental-Collapse schtick one day.