* * * *
January 20, 2012
In pajamas writing all morning. In pajamas with hammer and saw framing the poultry run under the bare cherry trees, cooking in the same pajamas, sleeping in them, in pajamas painting fenceposts with copper napthenate, for days the same pajamas. This could be an enviable existence or a pathetic existence, but the distinction isn’t interesting, or occurs to me only when the mail truck passes.
Pajamas and rubber boots, pajamas and parka, and straw hat, etc.
* * * *
January 19, 2012
The rains finally arrive and Cavendish is back, his duffel bag in the playroom, his pickup by the shed, his place at the dinner table, his gallantry towards Barbara in her fragility, the deep-dyed cigarette-butt smell at corridor turnings, his panache, tall nodding plume in the room. (I think he’s discouraged by the long muddy road home, lit only by his truck headlights, to get to his stranded trailer in the river canyon.) In a small-town production of “Death of a Salesman,” he is playing the part of Willie Loman’s brother Ben and so is sporting a new haircut, spending a lot of time in town. In the mud room shower stall he can be heard, with a booming voice rehearsing his lines.
Work on the poultry enclosure goes on, in west meadow.
Wild sweet pea fronds dead all around, plywood scraps, Skilsaw plugged into the far-away pumphouse for electricity, Makita drill, country music on the radio on a 55-gal drum – hammer and spirit level and pencil – and Cavendish comes down along the lane, with cigarette and aluminum coffee mug. I point out to him that I’m using his “Mountain Man” method of cutting steel, by magically drawing a wire through it. I’ll always benefit by his transmission of such lore.
The Mountain Man method of using a cigarete: smoke it down to a very pebble, and then pinch the pebble itself to snuff it, with calloused fingers.
Providential good luck in Cavendish’s arrival: some salvaged 2X4s.
I’ve been sticking to my principles, building the poultry enclosure and predator-secure coop entirely out of salvaged wood and hardware, from around the place, with ALMOST NOT ONE SINGLE trip to the hardware store. The ethical stance results in an aesthetic consistency which is harmony, element of beauty. Then just as I happen to be hitting the bottom of my scrap woodpile (particularly 2x4s long-enough), Cavendish mentions that he has come into a heap of redwood two-by and four-by material, from the barn of his deceased friend. His truck has a lumber rack. Will bring it over, gratis. Plenty of it.
* * * *
THEOLOGY:
If any thinking about “god” amounts to thinking about AN ENTITY THAT IS INEFFABLY WITHOUT KNOWABLE QUALITIES, then what are we contemplating?
The Universe once began to exist (this according to recent physicists' thinking). We infer the cause’s bare “existence” in the following deduction: we think something has to exist if it’s causing anything. (And if something begins to exits, there was a “cause.”)
So, the cause’s colorless, shapeless “existence” we hold to be an a priori necessity.
(This is an a priori necessity in much the same way that “2+2=4” and all other mathematical axioms were eternally facts even in the void before the presence of any things that could be enumerated.)
Thus, mathematics and god’s bare unqualified existence are treated as necessary, a priori.
Then furthermore, from the causative (habilitative) quality of this thing flows the assumption of its puissance. This is a second quality we attribute to this supposedly unqualifiable and ineffable thing.
(Kant: Teleological Proof only another version of the Ontological Proof. Using existence as a predicate.)
* * * *
The God’s-Existence Proof.
(Silly word, the G-word. Over the years it has applied to paunchy Olympians, six-armed blue hermaphrodites, etc. Even more troublesome, it has applied to that authority who justifies our wars and hatreds, the effigy raised aloft over racism and complacency and ignorance and mental laziness.)
(If we were to change convention and always lower-case the G-word – to refer always to “the existence of god,” “the role of god,” “god’s characteristics,” etc., rather than “the existence of God,” “the role of God,” “God’s characteristics” – we might elide the residue of superstitious personal-deity worship. To call god merely “god” restores the thing, indeed, to a more numinous stature in Creation.)
“God’s existence” is not a scientific observable. (It’s not observable like the redness of Mars compared to Venus, or measurable gamma emission in radioactive decay). “God’s existence” is not seen in telescopes and microscopes.* So, rather than a datum, say god’s existence is a foundation. God is like “gravity” a foundation concept which we use without any understanding of it. (And even feel in our bones without understanding it, like gravity in that way too.)
*Except to the most delirious mystic, who will see god packed into such views.
(My mental laziness as well as thine, brother.) (Call it rather mental incompetence.)
--
Here’s the a priori reasoning, in favor of God’s existence:
Evidently there is such a thing as “being,” as it’s all around us. Before the possibility of any being, how does the possibility of possibility originate? “The Possibility of Possibility” is the divine fiat and the beginning of metaphysics. This is strictly a priori.
Furthermore: If the “possibility of possibility” arises ex nihilo (though to phrase the event thus is to make assumptions about chronological time and palpable measurable space that pertain only inside this our humid, foggy little sphere of subjectivity), then another precedent has been invented there, an attribute of this "god" entity which you might call “positive.” The possiblity-of-possibility takes a “position.” It “posits.” This divine fiat takes a position in inaugurating “somethingness,” rather than defaulting to “nothingness” more naturally. That seems to be an impulse. And it would be a positive impulse.
And this knocks on, directly, to the popular and attractive "God is love" equation.
A SUITABLE NAME, TO REFER TO THIS A PRIORI PHENOMENON?
“HABILITATION”?
- - - -
Now Stephen Hawking would point out that I’m using temporal terms: I’m suggesting that this possibility-of-possibility thing must have “preceded” (in chronological time) all other things. However, it may be rather a logically “prior” assumption, as opposed to chronologically. Making it contemporaneous and perpetual.
Inside our epistemelogical bubble, “time” serves as a metaphor for the teleological sequence we think of as “Creation.” Time is not pertinent outside our subjective experience; but as a metaphorical tool, the idea of a “Before” points outside the epistemological bubble, points toward this “God” premise. That is, the premise of God as the agent of “the possiblity of possibility” before all things. (Meaning, logically prior to all things.)
[Interesting logic-vs-temporality conflation:
Whether “god” is chronologically antecedent or logically antecedent are questions that share some semantic characteristics. God can “precede” the universe IN TIME (in the case that we think we can make guesses about that singularity the Big Bang) or god can “precede” the universe in terms of LOGICAL NECESSITY. We call it a priori reasoning – that is, reasoning prior to empirical observation – as if there were a chronological sequence.]
* * * *
January 14, 2012
Dashiell’s Birthday.
For his party, treasure hunts are ruled out. No pinata. No games.
Now girls are invited – half the guests are girls! – and the only activity is “hanging out.” Little boom-box on a milk crate in the meadow.
Campfire, built by dad, who remains invisible.
* * * *
Infinities we are knitted into:
- space goes on outward forever
- space is also inwardly divisible without limit, infinitesimally knitted
- time extends forward and backward forever in both directions
- time too, inwardly, is infinitely divisible by interpolation
* * * *
Concert with Sands in Eric Tomb’s book store. Randy McKean on reeds, me on dobro, Luke and Maggie.
* * * *
In the year 1961, the Swedish Nobel Prize committee considered the following candidates, on the short list for the Lit prize, and rejected them:
Robert Frost
J.R.R. Tolkien (nominated by C.S. Lewis)
Isak Dinesen
E.M. Forster
Graham Greene
Those were the losers. The prize that year went to a Yugoslav, Ivo Andric, whom the committee preferred for the “epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies.” (The novel “The Bridge Over the Drina” seems like it must be a worthy book, but it’s amusing to contemplate the also-rans.)
* * * *
January 5, 2012
The old “Ontological Proof” of God’s existence doesn’t seem to be dead yet. Stanford website is taking it seriously; premissed as follows: “A proposition that has a POSSIBILITY of being necessary must BE necessary (for instance, “that six is the sum of its divisors 1,2, and 3” can POSSIBLY be a necessary truth; therefore it is!)
So, in the same way, God (whose necessary existence is admitted as a “possibility”) must exist necessarily.
I can’t believe my contemporaries with respectable academic jobs can be such lazy thinkers. I mostly envy them their great health-insurance packages in those institutions where they lie low sending up such gas.
A.J. Ayer said, speaking of all religious propositions, that (according to the rules of logical positivism): An assertion will be true if either (A) it’s analytic like a math equation or (B) it’s supported by evidence from the world.
Religious discussion is meaningless discussion, says Ayer, because it satisfies neither condition A nor condition B.
Well, yes, agreement would come from the mystic as well as the theologian.
This Ontological Proof makes of “God” an analytic proposition: God exists by definition – in the same way that “three” by definition equals “one plus one plus one.”
Well now, God does have a lot in common with mathematics (that shining castle of analytic propositions). This reprise of the old Ontological Proof makes god an arithmetical statement (God exists, because he is defined as a thing that exists).
exiles God to the place where A.J. Ayer banished him: undiscussability.
(Ayer, atheistically, made the mistake of adding that, because God is undiscussable, the thing doesn’t exist.)
("Undiscussability" is the same place Moses put Him, on coming down from Sinai)
* * * *
New Years Eve
The rib-bones from Christmas dinner’s roast have come into my possession. And so, with beef stock, am making French onion soup. Nico and Aleksandra to arrive New Year's Day.
It’s ten-thirty on this twinkly night, last of 2011, and I go out to the compost heap with a full bucket of onion skins, to pour them out upon the heap – and have to pee, out in the open meadow, making heaps of steam in the vastness. Silence of New Year’s Eve in the boondocks. No fireworks out here. Quarter moon. Piercing stars.
* * * *
Patriotic, but still ashamed of my country sometimes.
At our local tennis club, the caretaker kid – a strong healthy young man – uses a loud gas-driven, wheeled machine to air-blast fallen leaves across the lawn.
And I think of the enormous oil-spill now spreading in Nigeria (though censored by western media).
And I think of the news in today’s Times:
“SOUTH AFRICAN FARMERS SEE THREAT FROM FRACKING: A plan to drill for natural gas in the Karoo region of South Africa would use millions of gallons of water in a drought-stricken area.”
The caretaker kid doesn’t even, himself, like the blowing machine, dragging it up and down the slope. A rake would be so elegant. And quiet. And simpatico to his nervous system.
So here go Dash and I, to practice our serves with a basket-cart of tennis balls, while the engine roars in the distance and the lazy overweight teenager drags the machine up and down.
* * * *
Xmas vacation.
Hunter, with friend Adam Haight, both home from college, lie around sloppily in the mud room with stove ablaze, idly Googling misc. oddball videos and music. They stay up till all hours, heat microwave junk food, talk endlessly in their rumbling voices, on the muddy purple couch, pick up stray guitar and twang it, cook escargots from of a tin can. Butter and garlic and shallots.
I’m home from rehearsing with Luke and Maggie.
* * * *
December 27, 2011
Barbara will have surgery on the thirtieth. Needs an artery in her neck unblocked of plaque. She’s not being very brave about it. We tend to try not to bring it up at all.
* * * *
December 26, 2011
An affluent Christmas. Like everybody, we’re spending money we don’t have on stylish black boxes with demonic inner embers with power-cords that will bring more of the audiovisual into our lives, and absorb time and added expense in maintenance, their phantom-power pilot-lights marring the darkness of the midnight while we sleep, raising the energy bill and the global temperature. The usual sexy delusions will now be announced by the persuasive boom (triumphant boom) of THX Dolby. It’s all pollution. We are pollution. THX Dolby doesn’t make the cliché any more tolerable, it just makes the cliché loud, booming, swirling, bristling.
* * * *
The absurdity of thinking about “god” at all.
Any Prime Mover must have been “caused” or must have “originated”. . . . . !
Infinite regress.
(Also, acc. to Kant, the cosmological argument is just another ontological argument but in disguise.)
What we can know is that (a) things exist; and (b) that fact has a positive aspect. [That second assertion is the theological part.]
* * * *
December 22, 2011
Hunter is home from college for ten days. It’s good to hear the deep voice in the house, a pacific voice. In rooms where I’m not present! A deep voice!
* * * *
9:30 in the morning, Brett makes an appearance outside the kitchen door in the cold morning light barefoot, with last night’s tablecloth on her forearm. She gives it a big shake, the whole banner of it, and goes back inside.
Slam of screen door.
Soon to appear: the finches and sparrows.
* * * *
A Tuesday. Few days till Christmas.
Spent another entire day not working. Always a dizzy condition.
In the morning, finished a computer-recording of a version of “Shendandoah” (to be my homemade X-mas present). Which after three days’ work disappoints me summarily, and I’m going to have to re-do it.
Then cleared the far deep-woods meadow of Scotch broom, pulling seedlings up by their roots. (Member of the pea family. Cousin to the wild sweetpea I love to munch elsewhere here. In italian “La Ginestra.” Meaning “the broom.” Invasive plant here. The Plantagenets’ family crest bore an image of a sprig, because “planta genesta” was its emblematic flower.)
Then (back-breakingly, on knees, under the fig trees) dug and extirpated almost all blackberry vines, by their ancient roots – really venerable underground wrists, and hard fists, and witchy long dusty fingers.
Tilapia w/ chile-lime butter. Asparagus.
Hard freeze expected tonight. Went out and flushed irrigation to empty it and not freeze pipes. The firehose explosion of muddy water thundering from the old rusty, seldom-opened hydrant into the ravine.
* * * *
December 11, 2011
Sunday morrning.
Barbara is in the corner of the kitchen, next to the heater, feasting on the entire Sunday paper, not saying much. All around her, noisily, the three 12-yr-old boys frolic and punch and quarrel, post-sleep-over, crowding around the “ipad,” Dash dominant, tapping and stroking the little pane. Buttermilk pancakes are made, syrup poured, then the boys including all housepets are sent outside. I’m not writing today, I’m responding to interview questions on Internet, then fooling around with home-made music, recording a version of an old public-domain tune. On Brett’s ipod down in the kitchen, while Barbara reads the paper, the “folk music” stack is playing Tim Buckley, Judy Collins Leo Kottke’s Tacoma album. Later today, as it’s warm and sunny, Brett will be out with loppers and shears.
2:00 – afternoon – Dash, very grown up with $10 in his pocket and knowledge of a crepe place to spend it at, needs a ride to town, where (with my cell phone in pocket), he is to meet a certain “Ciara.” I drop him off, but he insists on being let out three blocks too soon. Then with wings on his fleet he runs at top speed, sweatshirt-hood flying, down Spring Street. I linger in the intersection to watch him, flying down out of sight.
4:30– Give up my Sunday music-making and set out with two mousetraps (brand name VICTOR, printed in red and blue ink dyes, on the flat cedar wafer that is to be the mouse’s last touch of material Earth, and spiritual threshing-floor.)
Brett is working on her huge quilt in the cottage.
Barbara with the newspaper by lamplight. She complains that (according to the newspaper) the director of the San Francisco zoo outfits herself in clothing of wild-animal prints. This is in poor taste.
Very dim at 4:30 in the woods’ edge, baiting my traps with peanut butter and oatmeal, in the potting shed where there’s a big woodrat nest, and in my trailer in the woods.
* * * *
December 4, 2011
12:16 midday. The silence of the whole house, midday.
A creak in the 150-yr-old floorboards.
Brett: “Louis, I’m going for a walk with Toby.”
Me: “Oh. Okay.”
The floorboard creaks travel away again.
* * * *
December 3, 2011
In the depth of the night, sparkling frost on grass, how glitzy-glamorous is death.
Dash is away at a friend’s house for a sleep-over.
Barbara and Brett are in the cottage watching, on television, “Anything With English Accents.”
Happiness of seeing the big Angel book come into perspective.
The merry clothesline all day, scalloped, bouncing. All afternoon, while the denim dried toasty, last night’s ice stayed intact on the shadowed bricks of the patio.
Dinner of polenta and pork loin with sauce of last year’s little plums from the freezer.
(This year, through my own negligent inattention, all the little Italian prune plums were purloined by The Bear before I could get to them.)
(This is a surmise I reach from having observed The Bear’s pie-sized shit in the woods beyond the chestnut trees, wherein are mostly the pits of my plums.)
Sour local wine.
* * * *
December 3, 2011
Up early. Coffee brewed. Heat started. Softly on the radio: NPR’s well-regulated, easy ironies and poignancies (the valve of intervening segue music.) Saturday morning.
Dash went to a party last night (at a girl’s house!) and was delivered here after my own bedtime, by some mom, or dad. And this morning I can hear him singing to himself while he lies in bed. He still has a girlish fluting voice. And he is exploring this melody only by guesses, before he’s even lifted his head from the pillow.
* * * *
December 2, 2011
“Crazy pretty” ------ Today is the kind of sunny, windy day that will, in the sensitive, bring on migraines or epileptic seizures. The trees churn and shimmer, the grandstands in the Roman coliseum. This American language: Our weekly cleaning lady – (really a girl, not a lady, herself a poet and blogger) – pauses with lunch-spoon halfway to mouth, standing and looking out the small pantry window, out to where the low winter sun makes tinsel of the grass, and she says, “I’n it crazy pretty out?”
* * * *
November 30, 2011
Big winds are predicted for tonight, and we’ve brought in or lashed down everything loose. Consequence of atmospheric turbulence: I have spotty connection with the internet and can’t bring emails up to see what agreement my agent Joy in New York is reaching with my editor Jack in Berkeley. I guess that’s exactly fitting, I in turbulence.
* * * *
A great novel I’m finally getting around to: John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.” It has all the artless ineptitude of a great novel. A clear surface through which to see deep.
Myself, I don’t do that. For better or worse, I tend to contrive a hard glittering “artistic” surface.
* * * *
Insomnia, I love it, I alone glimmering high up, hours of ultra-alertness,
and the inevitable nearness-of-god monkeyshines, always unfailingly interesting.
Thinking of my great good fortune in Brett beside me.
* * * *
On Not Having a Career:
It’s a blessing, really. I’ve seen people get picked up so they’ve got a “career.” I’ve seen, over the decades, what’s in The New Yorker, and what’s getting big print runs and publicity budgets – and in the end, it’s liberating out here.
This is not “sour grapes.” (One is always on the look-out against that!) It’s just a fact, that the good things can grow far from commerce, and from fads’ expectations.
* * * *
November 27, 2011
Sales of Radiance are VERY disappointing. The offers for Innocence will be humbling.
But a letter from New York is in the mail pile. Sharon Olds is so crazy about Radiance she wrote a three-page, handwritten fan letter. If one or two fond, discerning, close readers are out there in the gloaming, that is reward enough.
Home now, for one full day, Sunday. The weather tender and warm.
A soup of chestnuts from under the tree at the edge of the woods, plus Thanksgiving’s old roasted root vegetables.
* * * *
[It’s later that same night. I’m making beef stock. Brett, in putting Dashiell to bed, has fallen asleep, and all lites are low, and I’ve got our local small-town radio station on. The Sunday-Nite literary show is broadcasting a “staged reading” of a conversation from the last (the posthumous! the thousand-page!) David Foster Wallace novel. Three actor-voices bicker about consumerism, existentialism, American political parties, Romanticism, communism, post-modernism, late-stage capitalism. These three voices braid so rapidly from –ism to –ism, the spine of the conversation is lost. It’s just a kalaedoscope of Wallace’s opinions and knowledge. (Onion, bay leaf, bones of rib roast, some semi-slimy parsley, old shriveled carrots.)
Then, because I need a sprig of fresh thyme I have to desert the lucha libre of Mr. Wallace’s philosophical characters – (right at the existentialism part!) – to go outside by the back mudroom door, and in starlight find the thyme. It’s cold outside. On my knees on the bricks: spongy moss presses dew into the denim. Totally silent. Neither the smell of my soup-pot nor the rattle of the radio is out here.
* * * *
Thanksgiving in Squaw. No snow. Warm sun on decks.
On "Black Friday" I climb alone above all the waterfalls in canyon, where nothing moves, no animals, no sounds. Cold sinking along creek bed.
* * * *
Consequence of scientists’ new Multiverse* Theory:
(*that there isn’t just a single universe; that ours is one of a billion trillion possible universes that have existed, from a billion trillion Big Bangs foaming up through eternity, all generated randomly.)
Scientists suggest that the “miraculous” existence of our unique, improbable universe is explained by sheer trial-and error probability, in the Lawrence-Welk-bubble-machine Profusion of “Big Bangs” in eternity: an inexhastible variety of universes is always spewing forth into time-space; so eventually one of these random-trial universes would have contained, accidentally, a lucky bit of carbon and a few other ingredients (the right kind of gravity, the right proton mass, etc.) to come up with a livable planet, in what we feel to be a logical, geometric space, a stable space. This idea nicely reduces the supernatural component of a designing “god.”
This is an “anthropic” theory. The further, interesting possibility is of a RADICAL anthropic theory: that I alone, personally, am the existential focus, among billions of dismissed universes and merely heuristic universes. I’m in the only possible universe: the one containing ME. Call this “Anthropic Solipsism”:
It’s natural and inevitable that I should exist, because this is the universe “I”happen to exist in, and be conscious of. All those billions of “possible” universes, no matter how outlandish, were also “INEVITABLE” universes. (It’s an axiom of multiverse thinking that anything possible is inevitable, in the logarithm of infinite trial-and-error.) In this particular universe, “I’ myself am, like God, the sine qua non.
Such an Anthropic Solipsism is a cousin to the “atman” of Hindu thinking, the Self who is the entire Web of Indra stretched glittering through eternity. Also it’s cousin to Niezsche’s “Eternal Return.” (Nietzsche, he was ahead of all this.)
Two difficulties of this Anthropic Solipsism are (1) the autonomy and consequentiality of the sensed world, and (2) the stubborn, and fascinating, problem of the existence of others. Are those pedestrians on Columbus Avenue just spear-cariiers in my own personal opera? Figments of my imagination? No, they evidently have autonomy. And consequentiality. In the summary above, the pronoun you, gentle reader, could be substituted for every I.
(This is assuming I have a reader out there, in the Internet’s cold starry spaces. A you who is more than “me.”) (That there’s “Something Besides Myself” is the faith that leads to all others.)
* * * *
Nov. 20. McEvoy Ranch harvest party. The day is blustery and cold in North Marin, and the long table is merry. That every instant of life is woven of “Dissatisfaction” is the Buddhist principle of Dukkha. One notices it even at the banquet table.
The Aryans who invented the word Dukkha were a nomadic people, arriving in history on ox-drawn carts, and their word -kha was the name for the axle-hole in their cart. A good (su-) axle-hole gave you a smooth ride; a badly shaped (du-) axle-hole gave you a bumpy ride.
[so: sukkha is contentment and a comfy ride, dukkha its opposite]
A “kha” was just an empty space, or socket or hole. [The crucial thing, if you’re inventing a wheel.] Later in Sanskrit, “kha” meant not just hole but the entire “sky,” “space,” “heavens,” this vast socket we’re vouchsafed.
All of life is “dukkha” because it’s a bumpy ride. We don’t fit smoothly into this space.
Driving home from the harvest party. On Highway 49 is a sign of the season: the “DRIVE-THRU NATIVITY” placard (with arrow) at the roadside.
* * * *
Wed, November 16, 2011
11:07 AM – I’m working and Brett calls, “Louis? It’s a gorgeous beautiful day out there. And they’re predicting snow is coming, and I wonder if we shouldn’t spend a couple of hours in the garden, getting everything ready for winter.”
So it does turn out, and so the entire afternoon goes, with Barbara set up in a canvas chair outside our deer-fencing, the pick-up truck parked beside us with its dashboard radio keeping us informed of the Dow and the Nasdaq and the Middle East, I wearing the same thermal underwear I slept in last night, the cats capering, the shadows growing long over the meadow, both of us slipping and sliding on the slick of fallen tomatoes and rotten pumpkin guts in the mud, hacking at vines and stalks and dragging them to the compost heap, or to the edge of the woods if they’re weedy. Tonight, now, the candles are blown out; I made calamari with capers and lemon for dinner, and the recycling is out on the road, and the animals are all in.
* * * *
November 15, 2011
Cavendish leaves a return message on phone machine, regarding Thanksgiving invitation: Yes, he does have other invitations for that day, but he would gladly prefer ours, and to spend the day with us, because we are his “home team.”
* * * *
Dash and Mortality:
Dash in the past year has seen his dog die in an accident and be gently laid down on the grass outside the backdoor; his cat Scout vanish as coyote-snack; his other cat JuiceBag disappear as either coyote- or bobcat-snack; his Uncle Tad vanish while in the far-away state of New York, swept away by this thing called Heart Attack; his grandfather Oakley die in a long hushed process of degeneration offstage.
At the dinner table tonight, an anecdote from 1975 was being told, involving the death of a seven-year-old boy. I was watching Dashiell’s eyes shine in the candlelight as he listened.
The speaker remembered the news of the death arriving, how she was playing with her friends in the alley when she heard the news, “But I was young and I didn’t know what death is.”
The only question Dash asked was, “How old were you then?”
Oh, eleven or something.
Kids of course encounter death right away, first thing, in their earliest stories and rhymes most colorfully. Anyway I wanted to interrupt, at the I-didn’t-know-what-death-is, to tell him, “Dash, everybody knows what death is, no matter how young they are. But also, nobody knows what it is, no matter how old they are.”
* * * *
Death has been so much my study; so much my special friend; so much my specialty, my medicine, my bailiwick, my sweaty pillow, my rehearsal. It’s interesting that “the actual thing” can’t be anticipated, even by somebody who thinks he’s the most diligent philosopher. It’s an absolute incalculable.
* * * *
November 11, 2011
Dash, class clown.
His new thing is to go around the playground “asking for sugar.” He comes up to people with open arms, and pleads, “Gimmeh some sugah, Pawmpkin,” in a moaning whimper.
Some do give him a hug. Most, he complains, squeal Ick. Get away from me.
* * * *
November 6, 2011
The village economy:
Cinder-block hut behind the Chevron station, the spot where the old video-rental place failed, a new “Oriental Health Massage” has opened and turned on its little magenta-neon OPEN sign.
In a town where Caucasian college-grad masseuses want eighty or ninety dollars for a massage, this place is offering – for $19.99 – an hour full-body massage with foot-soak and shiatsu “reflexology.”
Redecoration of the video store has been minimal. They’ve put in a black carpet and painted the room black, but it’s just an old video store, with perforated acoustic-tile ceiling. Paper screens are the partitions separating customers. For atmosphere (since it is always necessary to play Pachelbel’s Canon in G, as performed on a Mellotron synthesizer) they’ve set up a boombox on a black vinyl barstool. I, as is routine, fell in love with the devoted masseuse.
No English is spoken. Absolutely none. You can tip enormously, you can bow in a slight reference to the “Namaste” of Asian custom, but nothing suffices to express gratitude.
* * * *
November 4, 2011
Bright sunshine after a rainy night.
The annual ring of chantarelles encircles the birch tree, and will take all week to expand in a ripple over the meadow.
The maple tree by the pump house is on fire.
Brett and I are to meet with a notary public in town this afternoon, where we will sign our “Last Will and Testament,” and our “Living Will and Living Trust,” with Cavendish and Liz as witnesses.
The house is overrun by 11-yr-old boys today. They’ve been eating pizza, all four of them in the mud room; then they adjourned to Dash’s computer to Google things; now are back in the mudroom doing exercises. The YouTube page up on Dash’s computer is:
“GET SIX-PACK ABS IN SIX MINUTES WHILE SITTING ON YOUR COUCH. THIS WORKS.”
* * * *
October 31, 2011
Back in Nevada City.
Cold night.
Today, a county-dump trip:
Put up upstairs storm windows, light pilot in living-room stove, cover swamp-cooler with canvas, caulk leaks in porch roof.
* * * *
October 30, 2011
In Squaw:
1 - Frame for second-bedroom bed;
2 - Floor-cleats to hold washing-machine in place, keep it from creeping in spin cycle;
3 - Bedstead for rock-room bed;
4 - Get clear caulk;
Push old mattress off the deck and watch it (all in slo-mo!) miraculously leap and leap downhill, on its corners, all the way to the lower road, like a gymnast’s handsprings and round-offs.
Visit Alpine, to consider it as site for writers conference.
* * * *
October 25, 2011
Sharp frost. Taking screens out of upstairs windows, lowering the sashes.
In the garden, an abundance of tomatoes.
(All four big golden pumpkins have had voles delving in them. Total loss.)
Eggplant, peppers, cucumbers are still producing.
And late handfuls of yellow summer-squash, small as ping-pong balls, which might be tender, or sweet (or both -- or neither).
Running a kitchen out of a garden turns out to ask a lot of flexibility and resourcefulness, in the plan of cooking.
The Ag-Industrial complex (whose triumph my mother's generation is guilty of acceding to, grateful for "TV dinners") really did change our souls.
Today, if the lazy or ignorant, out there, had to make a real meal, they'd lack the heritage. (As I do. I'll be cutting open those mystery squash while the oil is already sizzling in the pan.)
* * * *
October 25, 201I
Working indoors today. Laptop on a desk, upstairs in the vacant east bedroom.
-- Intensifying the little “oedipal” section in “Assistant,” perhaps overly.
-- email from my agent: Farrar Strauss has passed on “Innocence” and I’m relieved, oddly
-- flurry of emails regarding posthumous celebrity of Don Carpenter
-- Brett has been on a long, long phone conversation downstairs.
-- She comes up, still talking on phone, and puts an envelope beside me, an insurance-bill envelope, with the following written vertically in ballpoint pen (and giving me a look, she leaves the room):
Eric
Is
Dead
(found by the
Truckee River)
in her beautiful handwriting. The message lies there beside my laptop. How I cherish handwriting. What do we have left, of each other – what do we leave behind on earth – besides our handwriting. Yes, there’s the “content” of our messages, which perhaps might seem less perishable. But there’s the lasting beauty of the medium itself, inscription. The quick, informal, ballpoint pear-shapes and cherry-shapes, the efficient little stems and pistils, as a schoolgirl was trained in the California public school system in the sixties.
* * * *
October 23, 2011
Four-thirty AM, in my trailer under the trees. Moonless night. The mountains all around are amazingly still suddenly. They’ve always been, without my noticing.
No wind. Laptop screen goes dim from inactivity, my hands floating in ready-to-seize poise, above plastic keyboard. I sitting on my squishy rubber beachball spine-saving seat, erect.
Sometimes in my head the hectic roar of work ceases. I’m at peace. Moreover, it’s perpetual peace. I realize that everything – including myself, and even including all the violence – is exactly where it ought to be, doing exactly what it should, from the Cosmic Microwave Background on in.
(There are times when I’m in the very Cloud of Unknowing, but sometimes it’s just tinnitus.)
(It’s always just tinnitus.)
* * * *
San Francisco, October 20, 2011
$40/night. The old North Beach Hotel (bathroom-down-the-hall), on Stockton above an Asian Massage Parlor.
Just don’t drink the water from the tap. And I'm not going to try helpfully mentioning the water problem at the front desk, because it’s not the kind of place where you offer constructive criticism. Those people at the front desk, they surely know all about it anyway.
They gave me a back-side room, so it’s quiet. By lamplight I’m in bed (there’s no other fixture besides a bed in the room) reading Malamud’s “The Assistant,” propped up against my pancake-stingy pillow. This particular paperback edition is fifty years old (SIGNET Books, 50¢, “. . . Good Reading for the Millions!”), and its binding liberates each page I turn. The binding-glue, fragile as the golden lacquer holding dead insects together, releases each page as I turn it. So Malamud’s story of Jews and the old racism of old New York seems an experience I can only have once, and never go back and repeat. Little harvest of loose pages on the bedside table.
* * * *
San Francisco
Another morning at Macondray Lane, hauling out very old construction debris, extracted from the eternally shady slot between the two buildings. This rottenness smells great, smells like ancient SFO.
Packing the bed of Tad’s truck, building a tall rick of rotten wood, lashing it down when the pile is complete. Lashing it fast for the gales of Interstate-80.
Soon my salade a truite fumé for lunch at the corner patisserie, big double-capp for the road.
(Tour guide leads a gaggle of auslanders along Macondray Lane, dispensing literary misinformation. “So this is the house. Can’t you just imagine Miss Madrigal living here?” I hold my tongue, haul my loads of garbage, say Excuse me as I pass.)
* * * *
The Round Table lunch. What had once been a pageant at Trader Vic’s (in the opulent secret back room, a-glitter like a museum with trophies and weaponry and shrunken heads, with an actual “round table”) has now shrunk to a side table at Capp’s Corner.
* * * *
October 17, 2011
Kitchen. Nevada City.
In late October there comes an afternoon when the cricket starts singing at midday in the glade, because he has discovered a twilight and coolness.
But it’s still summer here on the knoll, only 50 yards away.
Screen door.
Brett. With laptop at the kitchen table.
I have shown up to help her write an email persuading the Squaw ski-corp people that (like those in Aspen, Sun Valley, Park City) our little art gang ought to be viewed as a cultural asset. Like a precious mineral deposit there for exploitation. Or like the wildflowers, a tourist attraction.
Phone rings. It’s Kait Klaussen! Brett gets out of her bad-posture writing slouch. With phone on shoulder, pours herself some white wine, drops in an ice cube, and, with phone, goes to the living room.
The little white dog, who had been sleeping at her feet under the kitchen table, reckons up the change of afternoon venue, and he bestirs himself to follow her into the living room. Drops down at her feet.
* * * *
Uganda now, too:
President Obama today [10-17-11] orders 100 special-ops troops into Uganda, to help quench the “Lord’s Resistance Army.”
(Who, until now, really cared about the outrages of the “Lord’s Resistance Army”?)
Well, you drivers of automobiles, think about this:
Geologists have discovered that 2.5 to 6 billion barrels of oil lie in Uganda under Lake Albert. This is the biggest such discovery in two decades in sub-Saharan Africa. So it is. We’re now committed to Uganda. To “Uganda’s welfare.” In June we also promised drone aircraft to Uganda, so that assassinations may happen in the ‘hi-tech” manner without the present agency of a human being. All as part of a $45 million military aid package to this place Uganda with the oil.
Your casual driving – and your summertime roar of air conditioners and all the rest of it – are – also – why the ancient city of Baghdad and the Ogoni people of Nigeria have been humiliated and poisoned and decimated. And the Ecuadoran jungle and the Gulf of Mexico and the coral reefs of the Pacific and the Caribbean and the polar ice caps.
Listen: if you’re cold in the evening, put on a sweater. Don’t crank the heat and then go around in a T-shirt. This is very basic.
You drivers of automobiles, the world is in the shape it’s in because “You Actually Believe the Totally Meretricious Shit on Television.”
Madison Avenue and the marketing-business exist to “create desire artificially,” desire where there had been no desire. And they estimated you correctly.
* * * *
October 13, 2011
No work yesterday. Rather spent day alone in Squaw Valley in winterizing chores.
Left home in the AM before light.
Came back by nightfall, unpacked myself from pick-up cab, taking pleasure in aches and pains well-earned.
Take-out Chinese food for dinner.
So, for breakfast this morning, mu-shu pork cold from a white carton, standing on dewy lawn.
* * * *
October 11, 2011
Nice adjective:
Brett, in nightgown at the foot of the stairs, explaining why she wants to go up to Squaw soon, “I just have all these little diggly projects I’m not handling,” while the tips of her fingers nibble each other.