October Sixth, 2011
Dark days of constant rain. This is just about the season when the salmon will be thrashing uphill in the shallow fast clear Yuba, and I think of these days as salmon days, because even up here in the breathable troposphere, everything is wet and slimy and cold and churned-up turbid. The females (the underwater ones) will be bashing their noses against the cobbles at the riverbottom making nests for their eggs. I’ve watched this. They succeed in making shallow trenches, at the cost of a lot of nose-skin shredding.
* * * *
October 3, 2011
Northern Pacific storm system approaches. Today dawned clear, but with a saturating dew. All is drenched. Direct sunshine may never dry the dew. Distances are misty.
Midday, dimness closes in.
Did my duty. Walked the whole irrigation line in the silence of an overcast afternoon inspecting for swampy patches, stopping to listen for air-leaks’ sucking underground. All is quiet.
Came home with one little forest artifact. A raccoon mandible (the rest of its old dry carcass lay at a distance). Had been attacked and dined on by some coyote or bobcat. The jewel-like tiny incisors and canines and molars, still set firm in bone, polished to purity by the cruelty and greed of the ecosystem.
* * * *
October 3, 2011
Another Hortatory Sermon (like the clothesline thing):
This is about “biodiesel” (i.e., actual vegetable oil) (not that Iowa “ethanol”):
A regular old Mercedes-Benz 240D can burn 100% Biodiesel. (Or, if you like, any admixture with fossil-diesel.)
Such an old car can be had for 2 thousand bucks on the Internet. Look on CraigsList. Some are in pretty great shape (I find we Mercedes owners seem always to have been a certain fussy type).
Because listen, you obese, complacent, lazy, narcissistic Americans, you really have to do something. You’re the problem. You’re it. You’re the beast.
What good will be all your rueful, wise insights into the usual evening news report if those insights are to have no consequences? Try something. Do something. One-by-one change our poisonous little lives. Or our poisonous “magnificent” lives, if that’s how we prefer to see ourselves. We think we’re not the problem maybe ‘cause we watch PBS or voted democrat. But we are.
A) The old diesel engines don’t require conversion. Just pour in the biodiesel. Mix it in with the regular gas-station “fossil-diesel,” if you like.
B) Biodiesel is made from any old (otherwise discarded) vegetable matter. Soybean, sunflower, canola, non-food grade nuts or seeds, waste cooking oil.
B) Biodiesel is biodegradable. (If the Exxon Valdez had spilled biodiesel, there’d have never been any problem, on that overcast day in Prince William Sound.)
C) We don’t have to use up important food-crops for its manufacture, like corn. (In this way, it’s unlike so-called “ethanol,” whose production is causing starvation worldwide while profiting Iowa farmers. And which causes additional environmental wreckage).
D) Burning vegetable oil, Americans won’t have to systematically kill people and squash beautiful ancient cultures in far-off countries, just for the wherewithal for an errand to the store. Burning vegetable oil, there might have been no need for “Shock and Awe” over the ancient city of Baghdad.
E) Vegetable oil burns 78% cleaner than regular fossil diesel (EPA figures). The smoke that does come out of a diesel tailpipe is “attached carbon” (sequestered carbon). It’s soot, not carbon monoxide, and it settles to earth.
F) Biodiesel has higher lubricity, making for longer engine life. (Also, better gas-mileage, and competitve prices per-gallon.)
G) A Mercedes-Benz is a famously unkillable, dependable ride, and also a famously swanky ride. (Some may require ascot.)
Cost of an old CraigsList Mercedes: $2400
Cost of cosmetic upholstery renovations: $ 320
Cost of minor bodywork: $ 160
Cost of complete brakes overhaul: $ 500
Cost of complete wheelbase overhaul: $1800
* * * *
October 2, 2011
(Where’s Cavendish? Haven’t seen him all summer. Haven’t had any lively conversation around here since “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.” Maybe bad weather will bring him around.)
* * * *
October 1, 2011
The space heater is kicking in, for early AM hours, but I’m still working in the trailer in the woods. Despite charnel-house smell of some dead mammal under the floor.
Bright cool quick days of October! The temps are down, suddenly twenty degrees, shoals of scalloped clouds in the sunset are attacking the (fingernail-paring) moon over the Great Old Madrone tree.
My west mudroom door is now so heavily shellacked with molasses-colored coats of “Man O’ War Marine Varnish,” it will look like a cinnamon-sticky-bun for years. For dinner tonight, linguini with clams. (One of Oakley’s old favorites and so we’re all soft-hearted about it.) Seasoned with ground-up red peppercorns from Tracy’s Arizona bush.
Deep twilight. Amy Goodman’s radio show in the kitchen. The little white dog, Frightener of Bears, sits up in Sphinx position keeping an eye on the uneventful meadow outside in the gloaming.
* * * *
That he may be courteous to all his contemporaries and wish them well, but in the end won’t be measured with the same spoon.
* * * *
September 30, 2011
Next week, rain system coming in.
Temperatures to fall and stay there.
The tomatoes are looking great in this morning’s blazing warmth.
Nine-in-the-morning. The hour when some things are just commencing. And when other things have been hard at it for a long time already. I come around the corner and the almost-empty clothesline is swaying, trembling, Brett disappearing into the backdoor, shoulder mounded with dry sheets.
(Question. Don’t kittens get bee-stings? Mornings in the clover, they pounce and bat.)
* * * *
September 24, 2011
Setback. Sales of “Radiance” have been low. So while “Innocence” will be published, it will have no hardcover edition. Goes straight to paperback. However, “Radiance” will have a paper edition of its own. So I’ll get my wish: Uniform editions of that pair of metaphysical efforts, Radiance and Innocence, so consonant, assonant, in their innards.
A first autumn coldfront from the Gulf of Alaska makes Sierra weekend cool and sprinkly. I pull in lawn furniture, decide to return 4X8 lattice to Ridge Feed for refund, pessimistic of the book business, harvest all the apples from that one veg-garden appletree, to keep them from tempting the bear, move firewood into dry shelter for winter.
(In this last effort, I used my new tractor-cart with trailer hitch. The right wheel fell off after fifty feet. Literally fell off. It’s new. From Sears. I transported the wood instead with Tad’s dependable truck.)
* * * *
September 23, 2011
Irrigation conduit repaired. Two long days of digging and tree-root-chopping in the woods across the road and uphill. (Big roots were the cause of the break.) In ninety-degree heat I’m wearing the tall sweaty boots because I’m afraid of rattlesnakes.
(Not without cause. I see them sometimes. Muscular-looking diamondbacks of these mountains. That they’re “just as afraid of me as I am of them” is a truism, and unhelpful.)
I had not been looking forward to the uphill hike, packing in the tools of excavation. But with Tad’s truck I was able to come close via fire-road, by just barely squeezing under a fallen pine that lay over (above) the road. Tad’s radio-antenna flexed backward under the treetrunk and sprung back up free.
* * * *
September 22, 2011
No work this morning. Or at all today. Rather manual labor.
--- 1) redwood lattice for the doors of the old Merrill woodshed;
--- 2) irrigation line. (Deep in the woods, uphill toward ditch, the forest floor is making a gurgling soda-straw-sucking sound, about eight inches underfoot); for this I'll have to pack tools in, as the fire road is half-mile distant;
--- 3) sun-damaged mudroom door: quart Marine Teak Oil
--- 4) Tad's truck, to Foothill Small Car for oil and lube
* * * *
[RE: bearshit. Again I’ll never be a Real Mountain Man, because a Real Mountain Man would have stuck his finger into the heap to see how warm it was.]
* * * *
September 20, 2011
Fine day. Run through goat-escape chapter all morning, swim in river alone, play guitar (loud), pesto-and-butternut squash.
* * * *
My little dobro concerts in the evenings, which for me are just practice, or something to do while dinner cooks, are for Barbara hugely sentimental. She loves that droopy sound. Sits out on the brick verandah with moist eye, great sighs, cheered and talkative.
Her favorites:
“Battle Hymn of the Republic”
“Downtown” (a la Petula Clark but very droopy and slo-mo)
“Shendandoah”
“Stand By Your Man” (Miss Wynette)
* * * *
SORGE:
A) Long hot days in the foothills. Mornings are cool.
I’m about two miles out from home and I come across a small bearshit in the middle of the road, very fresh, still wet, surely less than an hour old – which I realize I’d been smelling as I approached – and furthermore that it smelled sweet, like, say, a pie had been left out in the long heat of day. Hot fruit-sugars in sun. Half-digested seeds and pits, cherry-stones with red flesh, the little wet heap in my path would be frankly appetizing, if I were some creature much lower on the food chain. It smells like breakfast. But I walk on. Not feeling experimental.
B) The older I get. Greeting a stranger’s newborn baby (as in a Starbucks in San Rafael this week) is a topmost peak life experience, wherein boundaries of self dissolve – (under the pram sunshade the little grouchy Churchill-face wadded deep in the depths) – Greeting a baby is an experience that, for sheer purity of exaltation, is getting to be way up there among or above the top two or three, way above skiing the Prospector run as a fifteen-year-old in Park City in the sixties, or getting great book notices, or making barrooms-full of people dance playing in a band. The inner storm of joy: Whence comes this fantastic “empathy”? I am evidently a separate person from that baby in Starbucks; moreover, as a consistent, definable “person,” I am a separate political and legal entity and biological competitor here, so why am I so delighted with strangers’ babies, or the yumminess of bearshit? Why take any interest, at all, in loss of “self”-boundaries? The phenomenon “empathy” feels like not only an evolutionary accident but rather central, dominant, originary. It’s a huge learning tool, for one thing. Empathy would evolve, in a species, with some survival-advantage pay-off in natural selection, socially. But also, in the case of this “spiritual” creature “man” (i.e., evolved with the new ability to see itself seeing itself; and to see how it sees itself seeing itself), empathy opens a window back to ontology. We envision “the love that moves the sun and other stars.” It puts a spring in your step that you may feel you were meant to have.
* * * *
September 15, 2011
By a little Googling, I see I did lift the word “Sorge” from the Blockhead Meatphysician. An unconscious theft. A print was left in a student’s memory decades ago, now at last filled with mineral matter.
[However, I think I’m spreading the concept “Sorge” around in ways the Meatphysician never intended.]
* * * *
September 11, 2011
Visit to Mill Valley. Ghosts of dead friends wherever I go these days. I treat myself to opulent breakfast at the still-central bookstore The Depot. Pretty moms accumulate at a table on the patio, parking their empty strollers outside as they’ve just dropped kids off at daycare. Or their luxury cars at curb. The talk, at their table, is of how Burning Man was this year.
* * * *
September 4, 2011
Hot days in the Sierra foothills. A long string of days in the nineties. People are staying inside in their dim back rooms.
Only the sound of Rainbird sprinklers in the meadows, insects in the hollyhock spires. Brett, who in Squaw during June and July sat at her computer under fluorescent lights in windowless rooms, is out in the vegetable garden barefoot in the last strike of afternoon sun. I sent her out to get summer squash for soup, but she’s been out there for half an hour, plucking and pruning and watering and tying up messy vines. Tomato plants rage around her as tall as her head. Corn stalks way taller. Slap of hose-water on dirt, and bare feet.
* * * *
Sept. 1
Artichokes fail. They are inexplicably stunted and fruitless.
Asparagus, in raised beds, has a strong foothold and is at last flourishing.
Corn (from commercial nursery seedlings) has done well in raised beds, as if pests don’t find it up there.
Unhappy event: It turns out that the leaves of the butternut squash (big as dinnerplates, spiky with bristles) are suddenly delicious to the grazing deer at night. Never again plant squash outside the fence.
* * * *
August 25, 2011
Back home in the foothills. Again in the grip of wetter thicker air. The woods – its paths – are tinseled thick with cobwebs. The overgrown tall meadows are so busy with bees – the humble little brown European honeybee – it makes a roar in the morning. If you stare at the grass and let your eyes glaze, the grass everywhere is glittering with motion. Get the mower going. Mow the meadows, murder the standing Queen Anne’s Lace and lupine and Shasta daisies and orchidaceous sweet-pea blossoms. But refrain from mowing the west meadow, to leave something for the bees.
Going back into a rewrite of my big end-of-the-world novel is such a scary prospect. I’ve headed instead into “Cleaning My Studio” for a day. An entire afternoon. Clearing wood-rat nests out of drawers, etc.
Curious: the rodent and I have coexisted peacefully over the years (with the qualification that he keeps dying and being replaced by another, while I persist as, apparently, the same organism). And in my sweeping and Chlorox-swabbing, I notice that, as in other years, he has worked hard, lovingly, to cache all the brite green pellets of poison. The D-Con from Ridge Feed and Supply, which has reliably brought about the death of generations of his family, has been carefully saved in various favorite niches and grooves of the studio.
Getting a NY Times review used to be such a big deal. All the clippings needed to be archived. Where they could turn yellow and brown under plasticene. This summer I found it irksome just dragging myself out to the 7-Eleven at the highway to buy the Sunday Times where my own book was noticed.
* * * *
Free Will vs. Determinism:
This apparent dilemma is just the whorl you get stuck in when you’re asking a badly framed question.
Free will and determinism coexist. But at different levels of nature’s organization.
Analogy: On a subatomic level there is no “time,” while larger-scale events do take place in entropic “time.”
* * * *
August 21, 2011
Alone by myself in Squaw. I’m the last one to go.
The valley feels empty. Living on fridge leftovers. Taking a last pass at the sister-novel to “Radiance.” Tomorrow I’ll convert it to a pdf, put it in an email, and click “send.”
Minor repairs and deck-staining. Broken drawer. Broken cabinet door. The window-blinds mechanism remains unfixed, waiting for parts. The “saddle-valve” has a slow-drip leak under the house. The missing cover to swamp cooler finally turns up. Me and one dobro, in the evenings. Dinner alone at PlumpJack reading Flannery O’Connor’s “The Habit of Being.”
Happy to see the same old jigsaw-puzzle piece as in other years. It’s still under the Annex deck, where every September I store the old boards that have held down the summertime bamboo shade material. It’s impossible to tell, any more, what drama this puzzle piece completes. The laminated cardboard has been swollen in the wet frigid Sierra winters and the spring rains and thaws, and then during the summers popped unlaminated, so now in the flinty dust under the deck it stands like a little precariously-stacked petit four. Since about 1998, a child’s jigsaw puzzle somewhere has lacked a piece.
* * * *
August 13, 2011
The Truckee River sparkles cruelly. Cloudless sky all summer. Go off alone and sit on a boulder. It’s easy to be charitable toward the frail, in society, when they present themselves in the standard cliché form of the poor or the downtrodden. It’s harder to empathize when human frailty manifests itself as Lady Gaga or Donald Trump, Narcissism Victorious, The Latest Thing. This is the patience that is asked of a worker in the Culture Biz. So I’m sitting on this boulder and a small bird, with his own worries and fears and hopes and his own particular anxieties, alights on a dry creosote bush, twenty feet away (possibly a mountain chickadee but with peculiar yellow markings). As close as I come to saluting this bird is just to keep an eye on him.
* * * *
July 27, 2011
Two new kittens play on the carpet, yet unnamed, and too identically marked to tell apart.
Nobody is here, in this week of lull. Just Brett and me. Hunter and Zoey in Nevada City, Tonkovich/Alvarez in Point Reyes, Dash on a long sleep-over.
The bear somehow gained entrance and came into the kitchen last night. While Brett and I slept, he got muffins, a bag of dry catfood, and a big can of wet dogfood (which, by the tooth-and-claw method, he popped and peeled, leaving the open steel scroll on the deck).
Overturned wicker chair.
It was the brave little white fluffy dog who chased him out of the living room, making the Ursine Mass leave so fast, his weight in getting traction displaced the wall-to-wall carpet.
* * * *
July 24 -------- My annual deep, three-day flu. A day in bed. Too dizzy even to read. There’s a certain stage in a feverish illness where you get so low, you scrape with basic moral and spiritual deficiency: From the perspective of the damp pillow, all my life can look mistaken, futile, and short. Which it is, of course.
Dash, in putting himself to bed at night, says he has piled all his “favorite things” in one big heap beside his pillow. So when he wakes up, it will all be before him.
* * * *
July 20, 2011
Cavendish is up in Squaw to hang lights for poets' performance space.
And Cavendish rescues me again. Old Mercedes diesel won’t start – engine won’t turn over – and Cavendish finds a particularly heavy wrench to bang on the metal cylinder bolted to the bottom of the engine. This is the starter motor – which is merely stuck, at a point in its cycle, and needs a clang.
(Just how he showed me, on a day when I was earsplittingly using an electric saw to cut corrugated steel for my woodshed, how a true Mountain Man knows the secret of slicing steel, easy as butter and just as quiet, with a wire drawn through it.)
* * * *
July 20, 2011
For Theological and Ontological Questions
Obviously, basically, one needs a criterion of “truth.”
What is the essential “truthiness” of something that makes it “true”?
The most conventional is the Correspondence Theory (that a true statement “corresponds to” a state of affairs in the world)
About this, Wittgenstein said something interesting. He said it amounts to “a picture theory of meaning” – that is, statements can be judged true or false depending on whether they match a “picture” representing that reality. I.e., if we say that the statement “God exists” is true if and only if God exists, then we’re saying that we have a “picture” of a state of affairs in the world, to which we compare the statement. But in the case of things unpicturable – quarks, for example, and “me” for example – the Truth Criterion breaks down.
* * * *
July 18
Poets in the valley. Galway couldn't make it and I really fear we've had our last go-round with him. David Lukas, shouldering his telescope on tripod. Western Tanagers. David magically attracts fly-over of the golden eagle that lives remotely in the crags of Granite Chief. Big eight-foot wingspan circles over us with never a flap of wings, closer than anyone has ever seen him.
* * * *
July 5, 2011
Back in Squaw Valley. Back on the novel.
Touring new premises of ski resort, trying to imagine workshop spaces, disliking the rumble of the building’s kitchen exhaust fans.
Vetting the same old welcome-letter for participants.
Purchase lumber and hardware, for repair of Annex cupboards.
* * * *
July 1, 2011
Today in a mall in the midwest, in Iowa.
I observe a red-haired girl, no doubt a co-ed here at Big State School, a typical Iowa Artemis, personifying vitality and beauty and grace, as she crosses the air-conditioned enclosed “food court.”
Since, lately, I’ve been pondering those abortion criteria of Peter Singer’s, I find I’m asking myself why this girl’s life is valuable, or worth preserving, and why I might think so. (These days, since I’ve published a novel involving abortion, it seems I need to have opinions in this impossible matter.) I think that the first consideration is: I find I oddly “empathize” with this girl.
- At what moment a fetus becomes “human”
- At what moment a brain-dead old woman ceases to be “human”
- At what moment my paranoid-schizophrenic psychopath friend goes beyond the pale and no longer merits treatment as a “human”
Here is the moment: We enter into “humanity” at the moment we enter into “Care”. Care is my banner concept, to enwrap also the intimation of the “empathy” I feel for the girl. A massing cloud of Care is humanity; humanity isn’t merely the citizenry of bodies, standing around at 98.6 degrees. The phenomenon of consciousness is a largely social organism (bodies in communication), rather than an individual soitary flickering. But, more preciesely, Care is the social organism. This thing “Care” is what we take on, when we live in spirit – slip slowly into it as embryos, slip away from it as octagenarians, in our wheelchairs in the sun.
In response to Singer:
Humanness is not “consciousness” – nor is it or “autonomy” or “rationality” or any of those desiderata Mr. Singer names. Rather, Care is the distinction we humans have, and we have it together, only in concert. We participate in it. Our bodies participate, via the media of language and society. I mean this word Care in the tone-of-voice of those earnest theologians of the sixties. (Tillich-Buber-Eliade fashion, with their Heideggerian mother-tongue.)
So I’m coming to abortion. This human characteristic Care – membership in it – is a humanness that accrues over time, even long after birth. Initially, in the years from the first diploid conception to the onset of the age of reason, we have Care in solitude, almost in solipsism, rather than in community – it feels to us at first that something matters, at first that’s all we experience. Then in fuller maturity, Care becomes extended as a social phenomenon through language and custom. I propose Care as a serviceable word for this spiritual humanness because, in its connotations, it combines “worry” (care), “giving a damn” (caring), “responsibility” (care), a certain “fretfulness” (cares), and “love and desire.” These are all what we have for each other. They are the radiant nimbus around the red-haired girl striding center-stage on the mall, because she’s desirable and lovable while also of course troublesome.
In this abortion/antiabortion debate, the biggest stumbling block (the mistake enshrouding the whole debate in darkness and confusion) is the universal misconception that we are supposed to acquire a “self” when we’re born. This is construed as a legal and metaphysical “self.” The self is the most popular illusion. As we gradually enter into “Care,” we in fact enter selflessness. We lose our isolate self, in Care, when we care. Care is what I share with the red-haired girl, in the cumulate cloud. It’s why she wasn’t aborted, for one thing.
* * * *
[In keeping with nineteen-sixties theology – I found myself crossing from the mall onto the Big State college campus with the old German word rattlling around in my head “Sorgfáltig.” Derives from “Sorge.” If you’re sorgfáltig you’re “careful.”) (A good thing to be.]
Sounds like a Heidegger Noun. And I guess that’s precisely thew sloppiness with which I would mean it.
* * * *
In cosmology, too: before the beginning of time, before time-space, before the possibility of possiblity, Something seems to have “cared.”
* * * *
June 26, 2011
Little two-year-old bear, cinnamon-colored, haggard after winter, comes out of the uphill wilderness onto the road, and Tracy phones me down in the Annex to warn me. Nico and Aleksandra chase it downhill past the Annex; then we all gather on the Annex deck, like a reviewing stand, to watch it as it rambles around below us on the hill, lifting swarms of scolding jays wherever it goes, sniffing at a garage doorway, then climbing back up the hill, to the east of the house. Nico throws rocks, but bear is groggily imperturbable/nonchalant. A neighbor down the road is warned, and he comes out to bellow at it, and it shies further up the mountainside, behind Kevin’s house, then behind the Sproehnles’. Sproehnle, on his deck with garden hose, is glad to greet it, because he happens to have a gun, “loaded for quail,” and he goes inside for it. He comes back out and shoots either the bear or the treetrunk beside it, sending it scampering galumphing up the slope.
* * * *
June 26, 2011
Dashiell’s entry into summer camp.
Tomorrow I fly to Iowa City, book-peddling.
Towel on the deck railing. Jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table. Wind in the pine mountains.
* * * *
June 25, 2011
The “essential characteristics of personhood” (Princeton Philosopher Peter Singer’s criteria, for sorting which people society ought to euthanize, abort, execute, or eugenically cull) are Rationality, Autonomy, and Self-consciousness.
Of Singer’s three human characteristics, the first two – “rationality” and “autonomy” – can sometimes seem to slip away from even the most alert of us. (Or, they might be illusions, fomented by society, abetted by shared language-conventions. Really, some of us are not rational, or autonomous. I include our sovereign selves in that aspersion.)
The third human quality – self-consciousness – is perhaps the one characteristic we might feel assured we possess unfailingly and fundamentally. But under a long close examination, even "self"-consciousness can be, in fact, chimerical.
Tonight, on another of my long luminous sleepless nights, I can hear two things as I lie here: my own heartbeat and the waterfall in the canyon a half-mile away.
Of the two of us, the waterfall will have the greater longevity. Long after I’m gone, it will be admirable just in the way it is today. Likewise, in the beauty competition, a thoughtful primate loses out to a waterfall. I may be an unaesthetic and a more rickety thing, comparatively, but I am supposed to be a more subtle spectacle than a waterfall. I have virtues less visible, than a waterfall’s.
Nevertheless sometimes one would rather be a waterfall, objectively. If it were a clean trade.
(Not that one would want to hasten the day. For that is what’s in store anyway.)