January 24, 2010.
With bad weather now upon us, Cavendish seems to be taking up permanent residence. (The plaid fold-out couch in Dash’s playroom, on the NE corner first floor.)
Beside his bed, his scarred muddy laptop and his boxed “household gods”: books and magazines, vegetable oil, flashlight, pancake mix, potato chips, old rusty chrome ratchet-and-socket set, whole-wheat Fig Newtons, duffelbag – all are stacked up before the drawers of Legos, Tinker Toys.
His large, long shoes by the kitchen door, with their associated puddle. His health drink in the fridge. His different (better!) brand of coffee beans. His question at the cupboard Where does this go? His dependable yeomanly contributions of cottage cheese, wine. He makes a trip out for potable water in this power-outage emergency.
I ran into him tonight in town. Before the little David Lindley concert, I’d stopped at a café on Broad Street where Luke and Maggie have a regular dinner-music gig – and there was Cavendish at the counter, wearing heavily swagged scarf and tam-o’-shanter beret. Picture Andrew Jackson in tam-o’-shanter. (Or Samuel Beckett, more like.) He took the stage for a while. It seems to be the season of Robert Burns’s birthday, and Cavendish “Can Sometimes Be Prevailed Upon” to recite Burns’s poems. Which he’s committed to memory and delivers in an astringent Scottish burr.
The “wee sleekit tim’rous cow’rin” mousie made his appearance, and also a fine poem – “An’ a’ that” – about the dignity of the lowly common fellow compared with the transparent tinsel vanity of the superior folk. People, to applaud, put down their knives and forks. He lifts his arms in a harp-shape at the end of a poem, presses one heel into the other foot’s instep.
Much later that night I’m home from the David Lindley show and Cavendish is still up. He says he’s had “a transcendent evening.” Around the corner from the café, they’d all gone to Friar Tucks, he and the musicians. There, he was again prevailed upon to recite (this time the entire long one about the Cutty-sark, which he’s got by heart), and the very old scotch whiskey was brought down and passed around in salute to the great soul Robbie Burns.
(It’s true. There aren’t many great souls that pass among us. Burns was one. Cavendish another.)
Time for bed. Time for Cavendish to go to work on his laptop all nite composing emails. Time for me to join Brett in the cottage, where she’s keeping her mother company. Cavendish says goodnight, but he has to pee first, and heads out the backdoor into the storm. I tell him, “Wait, the power is on. The pump is working. You can use the toilet.” But he says no, he prefers peeing outside. Always has. More environmental.* * * *
February 1, 2010
Found some bricks! On the Ridge across the river, the gold-mining enterprises left behind a brick mansion which today is in ruin. Vigorous cedars stand in its center. Bricks can be dug out of the forest soil, to come here and pave a footpath I’m building. Irregular, manufactured on-site in 19th C., fired in Chinese-built kilns at the riverside, now they’re eroded in little loaves, muffin-textured, they’ll be tender under bare feet.
The forgetful, unlettered West. Memory persists in mute artifacts. I built the bookshelves in the mud room out of old three-by-eight timbers from the falling-down barn at the end of Cement Hill Road where the legendary Antonio used to sit and drink red wine, contemplating his one beloved cow, dreaming of Jalisco and Sinaloa. (Whence finally he vanished again.)
This week at A.P.P.L.E. (Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy) Neighborhood Readiness workshops are being offered, teaching “easy low-cost ways to package bulk foods in nitrogen at home,” so that when the peak-oil apocalypse arrives, we in the mountains will still eat.
* * * *
Tad’s Stocking-Cap Takes Shape
Brett has been knitting a stocking-cap for Tad. He’s living in Albany, where it’s cold, under the care of his new woman, no doubt chain-smoking, talking brilliantly, happily, at leisure all day every day. (Tho’ his old translation of a Jarry play will be performed! By a puppet theatre-troupe in Albany!)
It turns out the stocking-cap Brett has been knitting was emerging as a Möbius strip. (This can happen easily to an amateur knitter. It happens through an error in the first row.) So she’s going to pull out all her stitches.
But I wish she’d send it to him as it is. Because Tad would get it, and he’d love it, possibly somehow wear it.* * * *
From the novel:
“Fundamentally everybody always knows everything: it’s a basic working principle of society: everybody knows literally everything and instead there are just layers of self-deception.”* * * *
2-8-10
Whatever all this is, none of us will ever have the slightest “understanding” of it, though we are in constant uninterrupted contact with all its voltage every instant. Fascinating predicament. Absolutely fascinating.
Coming up from the mailbox in the cold February sun. Lots of heavy, glossy magazines for Barbara. (Or for Barbara’s demographic):
LifeExtension Magazine: Is Your CoQ10 Obsolete?
Increase Mitochondrial Support with a Newly Formulated CoQ10 – Now with Shilajit!
On a telephone pole down the road, an unusual woodpecker (perhaps an intruding species) taps with a rapid rhythm accelerating the decomposition of that particular telephone pole.
* * * *
2-14-10
My anti-film-festivals crack. It’s not the festivals themselves, nor the movies. Movies are great. So are movie-makers. The problem is: what happens to the towns over subsequent years: Park City and Mill Valley were both once quiet lovable places. H’wood injects its virus. Twenty years later you’ve got the actual panthers and cheetahs of Rodeo Drive slinking in the very streets, or rather their imitators. People think that can’t happen here.* * * *
Fruit of late-night conversation in the cottage, as endless boring luge competitions flicker on televised Olympics:
Everybody is willing to perk up and say, “Well, yes, ‘love’ as a Prime Mover, sure, I’ll go along with that. That’s my religion: God is love.”
Anybody is willing to say it. The god-is-love thing could even be considered “true,” if semantically risk-free. I.e., meaningless, in the sense of being non-referential. But how radical are the implications of the remark. Upward theological implications (suddenly you’re a mystic!) and downward practical (suddenly you’re a saint!).* * * *
The town’s movie theatre.
It’s a storefront. Flat non-sloping floor. Armchairs. Charles has only one projector, so the reel-change requires a long intermission, including reel-rewind. Charles bakes brownies, something to serve to his patrons during the unavoidable break. We can all smell Charles’s brownies baking during Reel One. Then comes intermission. All stand around out front and eat his hot brownies, while Charles, behind his velvet curtain, rewinds the first reel and threads the leader of Reel Two into the sprockets.
Charles’s big interest, personally, is in short subjects. He is a connoisseur and archivist of cartoons, public-service spots, newsreels. So the audience must be patient with his opening lecture about the provenance and significance of the Loony Tune were about to see, before the feature. He stands in front of the screen as he lectures, in his characteristic twilight wringing his hands with ardor for his subject.* * * *
End of day. Out on our road, as I drove by in dusk coming home, two vultures were courteously taking turns, pecking in the now-famous little carcass at the roadside. Early dark of winter days. Cold. I use old Squaw submissions as tinder for the stove.
(Something like a “rush hour” is audible these days, from the direction of Highway 49, now that Erikson Lumber has been selling off parcels on its tracts for development.)
On the deck railing, a plate holds rainwater and one bloated pizza crust: Brett’s yeasty homemade pizza dough. Dew on the wheelchair, even this late in the day. Brett reports she thinks Barbara may have had yet another mini-stroke in the art gallery today after I left them: an awkward moment of listlessness. However, she smiles symmetrically. Lifts her two arms symmetrically. Knows who the President is. She’s fine. At 87, as charismatic as ever, if still inconsolably sad.
As I came up the driveway, Cavendish’s truck stood parked in the grass. Always a welcome sight. Cavendish has gone in hospital today for a routine colonoscopy involving anaesthesia. But he is still living primitively out in the river canyon, so has asked if he may convalesce here at our house for one night. It’s a privilege: to serve as a lamp by the side of the road. He arrives, post-colonoscopy, looking debonair as ever, looking as usual like Andrew Jackson on the Twenty. At dinner he is very knowledgeable and informative about polyps, villi and microvilli, lipid metabolism, bile. For Dash’s entertainment, Cavendish has a joke:
“Why don’t wild animals eat clowns?” he asks Dash, and immediately tells him, “Because they taste funny!” causing delight in Dash.
Barbara across from him in candlelight, digging her way through her polenta, chuckles grimly to herself and remarks, “Hm. We should’ve thought of that.”
* * * *
In comparison to my solar panels, my clothesline uses photons with maximum efficiency. And with the lowest-tech implements: string and clothespins.
[I continue to indulge these clothesline remarks because the clothesline is such a happy emblem of everything we’re in for. As we’ve, quite justly, exported our so-called “middle class” overseas, we will import a straitened wise frugality from the peasant villages of Mexico and China and Nigeria. This is all for the good. This is all wonderful.]* * * *
Another sweetheart: Dead salmon lay on its side under two feet of swift clear water, thick-as-my-calf, long-as-my-arm, on the underwater cobbles, its black parchment fishskin fluttering in the current lifting away in squares, its eye sockets filled with white sauce, its whole surface shivering in the current, fragile from putrefaction* * * *
Big epiphany: I don’t need, anymore, to practice my fond old superstitions. (Penny discoveries; the recurrence of 11:17 on clock faces; my lucky coffee mug; etc.) Here is why superstitious practices are fallacious: they are premissed on the notion that I have any desires, or that is, desires whose consequences I can intend and prefer.
Therein lies the traditional “error” of the astrological chart, the rabbit’s foot, the horseshoe, the burnt offering, the found clover-leaf. The problem is not that superstitions are an “idolatry.” (Such is the childish objection: that one seems to be “worshipping another or false god” – the god of pennies – or the leprechauns.) Rather the good-luck ritual involves the mistake that I might, wisely, want anything at all.* * * *
ON SUPERSTITION: The Father of the Uncertainty Principle
The physicist Niels Bohr, as an old man, had retired to his cabin on a fjord. But he was sought out by an interviewer. The interviewer asked about the lucky horseshoe nailed over the cabin door. “You’re a scientist. Surely you don’t believe in that stuff.”
Bohr’s actual response. “Oh, no, I don’t believe in it, but that's the kind of thing that works whether you believe in it or not.”
* * * *
March, 2010.
Got unstuck with my L.A. 1946 novel. Featureless characters finally showed themselves.
The arbitrariness of the process: All I needed to do was be brave and sketch on an eyebrow. Then the one little creature started provoking the others. The eyebrow was what started it.* * * *
March. Two feet of snow in a single night. Up at 8000 feet they’ll have more than three feet.
Cavendish showed up, in his tall battered truck, and we added to the spaghetti.* * * *
When, as a young man in the 1960’s, Cavendish left school and “came back West,” it was to come to Relief Hill, a remote inaccessible spot on the Ridge, once a mining encampment, where his family had owned, but at some point sold off, a tract of land with some empty cabins. He and a gang of friends rented those cabins back from the new owners – this is after Woodstock, after the protests, after VISTA in Philadelphia, after Chicago, after cab-driving in NYC. The particular virtue of the place, the thing he’d come back for, was the spring under the live-oak, whose water was sweet and abundant and dependable. Tonight here, by candlelight, taking refuge here from his unheated, snowbound trailer in the unfenced canyon, he boasted that the watercress around that spring was so lush, it was a great bog of watercress as big as this room (swinging an arm). He says some day when the roads are clear he’ll show me Relief Hill.
* * * *
March 23,24. Snow continues.
Buckets of muddy water stand on the bathroom to refill the toilet tank. (The electricity at the pumphouse is out.) Nobody’s been to Trader Joe’s lately, so we’ll be getting into the better-than-usual wine. Silently the flakes, big-as-moths, seek earth and stay. Everywhere else, the Dow and the Nasdaq will take care of themselves.* * * *
Spring, 2010 (SAN FRANCISCO) –
Driving the pickup truck out Lombard toward the GG Bridge and out of town, I’m carrying funereally the last dust of Oakley’s small empire, plaster-chunks, painting debris, rotten splintery lath, carpet tacks, the carpetpad-sponge’s stale toasty-orange dust-crumbs, the whole heap under a lashed-down remnant of carpet. It’s been two years since his death; and Brett and I spent this week working, clearing out his old office in Macondray Lane. Today that little room has two fresh coats of paint, of a shade commercially called linen. Freshly assembled furniture that was purchased by clicking on an “Add-To-My-Cart” button.
The room feels bigger now. One thing you miss about a man when he’s gone for good: everything he knew. (That he knew what a “shibboleth” is; or a decent restaurant in Reno; or Bob Dylan’s real name; that he knew Henry James’s invidious remark about the size of Wharton’s advances; that he knew what an “objective correlative” is; that he knew the point-of-view tricks in Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” and Miriam Makeba, and Keith Richards’s solo albums, and the treacherous coast road to Hana; that he knew the clever left-turn strategy off Newport Boulevard; that he knew how to be patient and forgiving.) All of it is gone, gone with him. “Everything he knows” is an element essential to a man, more essential than the heartbeat, or the 98.6 F degrees, or the characteristic smell, or the misshapen old chair, or the Subaru that went to Tracy and lives now in Arizona. Everything a man knows is a quantity hard to enclose. It’s a vanished, immense, galactic genome. Twenty-five boxes of books came out of that cramped room, freckled with mold, histories of San Francisco and the West, accounts of the Mormon migration, cowboy tales, biographies of eminent Californians, the Iliad and Parsifal, John Wesley Powell, “Men to Match My Mountains,” Wallace Stegner, Ambrose Bierce, “Champagne Days of San Francisco,” “Resumés of the Great Operas,” maps of European and Mexican towns, books by his old friends whom nobody would find collectible anymore, gold-rush anecdotes and accounts of the Dakota range-wars, all the scholarship of a serious writer of historicals and westerns. On Lombard Street, afternoon traffic is fast and orderly, and my heavy-laden pickup truck fits into the flow. Near the GG Bridge ramp-up, among motels and tourist-seafood dens, a towering billboard displays a photograph of a baby, a gigantic beautiful infant girl, rosy and alert and warm, with the message (the work of a pro-life group): “HEARTBEAT: THREE WEEKS AFTER CONCEPTION.”* * * *
April 15, 2:30 am: A late spring frost. The temperature has been sinking all night, while outside, the pear and apple and peach blossoms are at their most vulnerable. This year I pruned and composted them and hung out pheromonal traps for coddling moths with particular care. Now that we have a heavy-duty centrifugal juicer, I’d planned on actually trying to have a big harvest of cider this year.
4:00 am: Found a website at a Michigan State ag school with a chart showing “critical minimum” temperatures for fruit trees at various stages of bud or blossom ar risk of frost damage. The lowest among the various categories is 27 degrees. Now already tonight, the temperature has hit 24, and still sinking.* * * *
In my fifties.
How I’m a hobo. How I practice my so-called “hunter-gatherer” lifestyle, bringing in only occasional trophies, but mostly depend on my wife, her steady work, her good will in the world. Old story: poor boy marries classy girl. Brett’s father was always a good breadwinner (and as for good will in the world, he had a vast network of it). He always had a great-paying job. Barbara never did work. So Brett has no experience of improvident males but yet is patient and forbearing and quite non-judgmental and also (here’s the thing) unfailingly joyful.* * * *
Have located a hand-crank coffee grinder ($4.50, at a Goodwill in China Basin). Little wooden drawer below with dovetailed joinery. An S-curve in the wrought iron crank handle, with porcelain knob. Not only for power outages, but for the practice of ever-more-perfect Environmentalist Kashrut/Sharia. (In case I ever get serious about that.) (It's extremely slow in creating its black powder in the drawer.)
* * * *
May 10, 2010
Winter’s gone. Balmy days. Nico and Aleksandra are living in Dash’s old playroom, trying to get a foothold and green-card legitimacy. They’ve displaced Cavendish, who has gone back to his blind. But he’s obliged to come out of the woods every day, dressed and groomed, because he is providing his technical help to an amateur Sondheim production in Grass Valley.
So. Displaced from his bedroom here, what does Cavendish do for his dinners? A Grass Valley supermarket has a “Deli Café” which offers, among the buffalo wings and macaroni salad, two soups du jour, plus chili, in lidded stainless-steel dispensaries. The place also provides wireless internet, so he can labor over his magnificent emails in the evenings. And his appraisal of the chili is: “It’s dependable.” He was sighted this week at one of those Fiberglas-resin picnic benches out in front of the place, working at his filthy old Apple Powerbook in the twilight, beside an untouched paper bowl of chili – but dozing over his laptop – his forehead coming to rest at last in the keyboard. At this point Cavendish is approaching seventy, though wiry and tireless, and is pretty-much famous in this town.
Then, yesterday we were having a party here, and he showed up. He carried a supermarket bouquet (awarded to Brett as hostess), and a potted supermarket orchid (for the Mother Superior, Barbara, as it was Mother’s Day) and took sovereignty of his end of the table, full of happy boasting about Sondheim, interviewing his table-mate neighbors in his usual way, condemning as crap the wine we serve here chez Jones and recommending highly, instead, the bottle Sands had brought, making observations about Sondheim’s use of the story structures of fairy tales, even the grisly, gory old chestnuts, especially those ones. The fairy tale, Cavendish says, is all the education we need, as preparation for life. Call kids home from their colleges, retire the liberal arts and sciences, put away the Torah and the catechism and the 3 R’s, and just study fairy tales, squeeze those little turnips for their drops of blood.* * * *
With Aleksandra here from Krakow, we get a break from my cuisine. Beets and potatoes and cabbage. Bitter rye bread. Mysterious tall ceramic jars with fermenting, souring processes going on. She puts on an apron, ties back her hair.
She immediately took to the garden, too, having arrived at the right moment of spring. On the window sills stand old egg-cartons, each carton containing a dozen dollops of black soil, with sprouts expected, destined to be cucumbers, expected in turn to become pickles.* * * *
June 6, 2010
A few little teleological observations (occasioned by the wedding, here at home, of Nico and Aleksandra):
We mortals believe that our deeds have (A) discernible origins and (B) discernible consequences. That is, our actions have “causes” in the past and “results” in the future. It’s how we feel anyway. We feel that we are enmeshed in a teleological (cause-effect) net.
But truly, moment-to-moment, our “consciousness” – our intentionality – is in fact a chip tossing in choppy currents, deep oceans. Or our consciousness is just a sequin of reflected light on the surface. Our so-called “reasons” swell and press from outside ourselves. Likewise, the inward “intentions” of our actions are flooded and swamped by creative accident. Many “ad”-ventitious “ac”-cidents were actually born inside ourselves. And grew inside ourselves. We have only a deluded grasp on the causing reasons and caused results of all our deeds. And so we ought to relax. Each of us is an apple hanging on a tree. It’s easy to fulfill one’s appleness.* * * *
The veg. garden’s elaborate Maginot Line to defend against gophers: galvanized mesh goes three feet underground, ringing the vegetable garden. However, I seem to have walled in at least one gopher, who now lives there, in gopher heaven, dining on the most succulent roots, fresh ones continually transplanted there for his delectation. Brett takes comic pleasure in this fiasco, while I begin to see real insolvency in all my operations.
* * * *
Couplings for 1” poly-pipe
Hose clips
Patch copper feeder tube: evaporative cooler
Insect repellent* * * *
Now a plague of drowned mice in the irrigation system. They pop out slick and bloated at the lower gate in system-flush. Or they meet their end as paté grotesque, squashed into sprinkler head, or hose-bib valve.
So I hiked up to the weir and found somebody had left the springbox’s iron lid up. I closed it over and weighted it down with a big stone.* * * *
Yesterday: a great day. The mysterious irrigation clog has been cleared.
For all the winter months, seeing summer coming, I’d lain awake nights, with Job-like considerations of what would happen to this place without irrigation-district water. (We’ve still got our pumphouse, for drinking and bathing. The irrigation is what’s been broken.)
It was the fire department that unclogged it. Guys from the Coyote Street stationhouse actually came out here, as if they didn’t have anything better to do on a Saturday afternoon [station captain’s response in phone call: “Well, sure, we can be there in ten minutes or so, barring an emergency”], in their big truck, hopping down and setting tire-blocks routinely under the wheels, and they unrolled their 130-psi hose, of grey fabric folded-flat, extending a quarter-mile up the hill, and they blasted the clog uphill along a quarter-mile stretch of pipe, firing brown water out the top end. Then we all stood around and watched while, in the old dry hole in the dirt downhill, clear water welled, and spilled over, and started running downhill in the dust.* * * *
June 1st
Gutter repair. Replant ruined tomatoes. New tires for Hunter’s car. Spray all buildings’ foundations with Diazinon solution. Start up irrigation to see what leaks. Sort among my kindling-pile like Croesus, restacking it.
Diazinon has been taken off the market by the EPA, but I’m using up this old brown-glass bottle, bequeathed by George and Ginny, from the cabinet in the potting shed. (I just have to keep it nowhere near meadows or gardens.)
(Regret not having sprayed pears and peaches with dormant solution, as now leaf-curl and canker are attacking leaves.)* * * *
Sands is back from her teaching job, so Cavendish has moved to her plac,e for his pied a terre, in her spare room among stacks of fileboxes. Staying in town saves him the long trip on dirt roads at night, to his deep forest fastness. (At least you’re not sleeping under the Pine Street Bridge, we josh him. Pine Street Bridge is where the orphaned, feral hippie kids from the Ridge sleep.)
Night before last, Sands called from the emergency-room to say she couldn’t come to our little dinner get-together, because Cavendish had showed up at her door in convulsive pain after a closing-show cast party. Had to be driven in there, vomiting, worrying. She had already spent some hours in the waiting room – no doubt editing some client’s novel, manuscript on her knee, cell phone at her side.
Kidney stones were suspected, but he was sent away with a handful of antibiotics and painkillers. Has no insurance, of course. Hasn’t had insurance since he dropped out of Yale forty years ago and went to Woodstock. Was put to bed among Sands’s cardboard fileboxes. Maybe it’s just a urinary-tract infection.
So yesterday I emailed Sands to ask after him, and received this response from her:He arrived at 6 this morning saying he was almost out of gas (he meant the truck) and didn’t think he’d get home. He’d been striking the “Fantasticks” set all day/night. He’s currently asleep in the guest room. I was awake when he rolled in—he seemed in good spirits.
* * * *
June 13, annual Meadow Party, the music fizzles early, but the food is plentiful, the summer air warm, the little kids rage in the dark woods all night unsupervised, far from the bonfire, with their glowsticks, like goblins. Amy Tan has brought an ipod containing reproductions of birdcalls, and the following morning she has set it up behind the cottage, driving local birds to confusion, sending amplified calls into the trees. David Lukas arrived with large pail full of morels he found around the North Fork of the Yuba. One day later, linguni for twelve, ON MY NEW BRICK FLOOR.
* * * *
June 16, 2010, move to Squaw.
Snow still in hard drifts at elev 6200ft on mountains’ north slopes. The creek thunders all night long. The paths up the creek are strewn with snowload-felled trees.* * * *
June 22, 2010
Structure repairs at elev 6200ft. It’s been an unusually stormy Sierra winter. Wrought-iron raillings have been bent under the creep of glacial snow load. Bears, during the depths of winter, have been unseen and unheard-of. A sheet of blown-away plywood lies on our hillside. In the valley meadow: the chickadee’s chirrrrr.
On the house, structural wood after sixty-one years has been shrinking. It starts losing its grip on the old hardware. However, during the same sixty-one years (esp. on the south- and west-facing exterior walls), the beauty of unpainted redwood’s grain intensifies, a red-golden toasty corduroy, a woodgrain big-as-matchsticks, scorched in the grooves, radiant-blushing from the many sunsets it has faced down.
So the good-as-new old brass screws lose their grip in the wood – on, say shutter hinges and door hinges. And I think of Oakley on these summer afternoons as I work, slot-head screwdriver in hand, brown paper bag of shiny new brass screws by my knee. Oakley used to say with a chuckle wherein all mortality and futility are foreseen, “You just keep putting in longer screws.”* * * *
6-21-10 – My agent calls with good news. Counterpoint Press, hardcover, lead title on spring list. This agent, of lo these twenty years, her patience and forgiveness make me think of some “Higher Power,” or is that just her?
* * * *
Barbara. Her pacemaker operation and her stroke are falling behind her into history, and she shows all the old wit at dinner with old friends. Even a new aloneness in the world is a stole one can wear with a noble bearing.
* * * *
End of June, 2010. Hunter and Nico tear down the old shed on the south side of the upper house. Little pre-fab cedar barn, a kit, purchased no doubt from some hardware store’s parking lot. Crappy two-by-two construction, the whole structure goes down in a single morning under their blows. Suddenly the view of Granite Chief and Squaw Peak returns, because of course they’ve been there the whole time.
* * * *
That “Just keep putting in longer screws” joke was, on the irony scale, exactly like Oakley’s similar remark about a novelist sustaining his career over the years: “Just lower your standards and keep on going,” he liked to say. (But the irony there isn’t quite as darkly acquainted with the deep full, liberating ocean of futility and mortality. Because I really think he half meant it.)
* * * *
On the topic of the big anti-abortion billboard in SFO proclaiming the heartbeats of embryos. (Which has been on my mind.) -------- It seems mostly an irrelevant consideration (but an interesting fact) that the embryonic heartbeat is, strictly speaking, a half-heartbeat. In utero, only two heart chambers pump blood, not the full complement of four chambers. Until it’s born and takes its first gasp, a fetus’s lungs are collapsed, as is half of the heart. So that little heart is a prototype engine.
(Something the pro-life billboard makers perhaps ought to be told, in case it influences their view.)
[Liberal tho’ I am, I find it hard to be entirely unsympathetic to “pro-lifers.” If you really believed that our louche society casually murders unborn babies en masse, then it makes sense that you might be alarmed as we think the average German citizen ought to have been, during the days when people were being removed to death camps systematically, rationally, discreetly, judiciously, hygienically.]* * * *
Suppose you want to suggest that a fetus isn’t “alive” yet, because it isn’t really human until it’s conscious. Or aware. You want to say that “conscious awareness” is what’s lacking in a fetus. The thing will continue to be only like a sort of unconscious kidney, or abscess, or loaf, until it is “breathed-into” by enlightenment, filled with ideas and perceptions.
Well, if you define the beginning of life as “consciousness” or “awareness,” then the larger question, is: Did Life Ever Begin?
Has It Begun Yet?
* * * *
Who among us (whether born or about-to-be-born) is worthy of preservation, if we accept that “un-consciousness is characteristic of sub-humanity?”
I, for example, personally, travel around inside a blinding, deafening, numbing storm of delusion-solipsism-lust-gluttony-sloth-envy-pride (et cetera). Immediate “Actuality” is something I’m seldom (or, of course, never) in touch with. The Buddhists would say I am in ignorance The old Christians would say I am in sin, as a measure of my distance from Truth.
In any case, I’m not sure I exactly possess “awareness.”
(Human “awareness” might be a merely semiotic and social phenomenon, a constant burble, compounded of inward language-rules and outward social conventions.)* * * *
June in Squaw. The book biz.
Pulled out an old book from the Annex bookshelves, and wow. The first chapter announces a great writer: Sara Vogan: her 1981 novel In Shelley’s Leg.
According to the jacket copy she was, in 1981, teaching creative writing in Milwaukee.
Only a few pages in, I want to send her a note of collegial admiration – if the rest of the book can carry on like this, then there’s another really good novelist in my generation. Or send a note to her agent, to be forwarded.
So I Googled her name. The first two “hits” on Google were, of course, younger, newer Sara Vogans on Facebook. But the third one read: “Sara Vogan, 43, Dies – Novelist and Teacher – Obituary – NyTimes.com”
The dateline on the story was 1991, ten years after In Shelley’s Leg was published. She “was found dead, at her home in San Francisco. There were no immediate survivors.” Cause of death had not been released pending coroner’s toxicology report.
* * * *
Sleepless night. Awake at 3 am, orbiting the lower rooms in my stocking feet, not orbiting near the scotch bottle, which never has been much of a temptation anyway, and doesn’t allay sleeplessness, I bring up on my computer the 24-hr webcam in NYC at 43rd and Broadway. I love this thing, this NYC webcam, and visit it often, mostly at ungodly hours. Watching New Yorkers, in pewter streetlamp glow, wallking past the USA Today dispenser box (some striding, some ambling: it’s six am there).
Ding: in my email stack is another MyLife Search Alert arrives: “I’m looking for Louis Jones,” reads the subject line.
One keeps getting these things, tho’ one belongs to no social networking site. The person searching for Louis Jones, intended to tantalize me, is described in the email as a “28-yr-old female” in “Flushing, Minnesota.”* * * *
June, 2010.
For Barbara at her age now, just to get up out of a chair and cross a room is an adventure requiring courage and strategy and resolve, as well as a clear prevision of wreck. I compare her tribulations – pains, embarrassments and inconveniences, and the prospect of good-old death always ahead – with ten-year-old Dashiell’s tribulations (we tend to forget the miseries and anguishes of children, for whom the prospect of life looms ahead; which, too, is a room to be crossed at peril). And I’m frankly not entirely sure which form of tribulations I’d pick for myself, if I had a choice.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.* * * *
July 18, 2010. Up in Squaw Valley.
Poets are in the valley. Hunter and Zoey, as poetry elves, must wake at 7:15 to pick up drafts for Xeroxing. It’s fine to see them, way before their usual rising time, a pair of 19-yr-olds sleepily trudging with coffee-cups to the car.
I’ve ordered two cords of firewood (at inflated mountaintop prices; but they’re full, unstinted cords), which yesterday were dumped off the bed of a truck. In the afternoon Tad and Andrew and I set up the usual bucket-brigade-style system of transporting it all, by tosses, to the shelter of the deck to be stacked. If you’re the man on the catching end, you have to look lively or you’ll get a log in the belly, or in the back. After an hour of repetitious work, conversation takes on a different pace and protocol. Longer uninterrupted speeches. Longer intervening silences.* * * *
7-23-2010.
The usual annual party tonight for eighty visiting poetry devotees. Right now it’s two o’clock on a hot afternoon (I am in the cold shade of the basement), and party preparations are stopped till five, by Sands’s decree. In the high Sierra, one may lay out outdoor place settings only partway. During the afternoon, wax candles will slump, and stemmed glasses might possibly set tableclothes on fire by focusing sunlight, burning holes. I saw it happen once. A smoldering at my elbow.* * * *
6:30 AM, working in the basement of Barbara’s house in Squaw Valley, I can hear Tad’s voice droning overhead in Barbara’s bedroom. It sounds almost as if he’s reading aloud to her, at this hour of the morning.
Later I see Tad on the road and ask him what was happening. He says his mother had had a sleepless night – (her daughters are all out on highways driving to far places; she is alone at home with Tad) – and she asked him to come and tell her a story. So Tad pulled up a chair by her bed and launched into an hour-long redaction of the Wyatt Earp gang’s story, with Doc Holliday, the Clanton gang, the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral – and Wyatt Earp’s “incredibly dysfunctional family, the Earps” – and Wyatt Earp’s subsequent career in Hollywood, where he became so wealthy he bought the whole town.* * * *
August 7, 2010.
Today’s the day. The 150 writers are due to arrive for the annual week of ambition, tuition, disappointment, romance, festivity. It’s dawn here in Calif. but planes will already be in the air, and cars on the roads, aiming here.
Woke up with the vibrant sensation of time’s sand-grains dwelling in my bones. How much of bullshit, I wonder, is in my feeling that everybody is already a “saint or at least mystic,” though unbeknownst. – [The Mormons do that thing of theirs: they make you be a “saint” right away, right when you join up, no kidding around.] [Like it comes with your certificate and your secret decoder ring and your T-shirt: You’re a saint, and there’s no pretending otherwise; so get started.]
Coffee has already been brewed. In the Annex living room the Executive Directors, Brett and Lisa, are in long white nightgowns in dawn light. The scissoring hum, rising and falling, of the sewing machine on the dining room table. They are up early hemming broad swaths to serve as tablecloths in workshops.* * * *
The book business transmits Gossip with orgasmic immediacy. For some reason I particularly am entrusted with these reports whispered with level Schadenfreude, so I find I’ve become, in my 170-lb frame, a treasury of atrocious information about famous or beloved people. I don’t even tell my wife. All the most appalling news of the celebrities, I’m a graveyard for it. The Talmudic tradition is, Gossip is murder.
* * * *
August 18, 2010.
Back home in Nevada City, end of summer. The air is heavier down here than at the high elevations, more humid, and a cobwebby smell of home permeates the woods. The garden is late: tomatoes all unripe. Another “zilch” year for pears. Rodents have eaten through the line providing electricity to my trailer. (It’s just an orange 100-ft extension cord on the forest floor, originating in the pumphouse, which is the nearest juice.)* * * *
The trailer under the oaks. The windows crank open, against the strands of summer-spiders’ architecture. Those spiders now grown and gone. The heavy-metal space heater still works, making its strange elephant-trumpeting noise in waking up and electrocuting its toaster coils. The usual rodent shit all over the desk and the trailer’s sink and the three-burner stovetop. Each birch-veneered drawer (I slide each open) is filled up with a mouse nest, so it’s like an apartment building. Which I just leave alone. I slide each drawer back in place. The little plastic tray of D-Con bait, heaped levelly with minty-green pellets, is at my elbow, as always. My fingertips are so calloused from handling my ten thousand old bricks, their touch won’t stimulate my laptop’s trackpad, which doesn’t recognize the electrostatic touch of skin.
* * * *
September: Mowing largest meadow, I feel fat raindrops on my forearms, but I keep on mowing. The wind picks up. On hood of tractor, wet freckles evaporate fast.
* * * *
Fall, 2010. Good to be back from Squaw, back in my trench. Hunter will be leaving soon for his sophomore year, and Dash is back in school: fifth grade. I’m in my fifties now.
A month ago in July, Dash and I played miniature golf – at the same old place as ever, along a shabby tourist-strip boulevard by the lake. Most cherished and dorkiest of mini-golf courses, its old green felt shrinking away from the cement channels, its girl dispensing scorecards across her window-sill with open boxes of Baby Ruths and Butterfingers, its course’s plywood obstacles (Indian chiefs, clown-mouths, eightballs) hand-carpentered and hand-painted, varnished, by an old man in the 1950’s, unrenovated over a half-century.
An increasingly interesting reward of having had children: During this our brief hallucinatory witness among clouds of apparent particles endowed with “mass” and “energy,” in the midst of the ongoing, rumored Big Bang, if we have fostered biological children, then we have actually taken a dip into “matter.” We haven’t just groped spectrally through the particle-swarm for a few decades. We seem to have augmented the whole thing by a few pounds. It’s a sort of a great metaphysical event. Apparently, there will be consequences to our (apparent) existence, in the form of the continuity of the mystical thing flesh.
What made me think of this: the scorecard from eighteen holes of mini-golf (actually 36 holes; we went around twice) is still riding in my car’s door-pocket with suntan lotion and candy bar wrappers and replacement bulbs for the dashboard display. The rainy, cold, snowy season will come, and there will be many pick-ups and drop-offs at school, and that paper scorecard will go on riding along indefinitely.
* * * *
September 20, 2010.
At this time of year I can tell fall is coming by a new sound in the trees, which I remember from other winters. It’s a big murmuring ocean overhead, coming from the foothills all around, a gentle profound steady surf. It’s a sound you don’t get in the summertime here. Meteorologically, it’s probably the announcement of “the arctic low” dropping into the Gulf of Alaska.
The paint on the southeast side of the house is peeling. Out back behind my trailer, in the upended pollen-dusted Sony cassette-player, wasps have built their nests, a wealthy papery mound of hexagonal nurseries, in the open jaw of the player deck. The tomatoes this year are ripening too slowly: it’s September and they’re still shiny-green.
Have replaced the old Volvo with a (even older) diesel-engine car, to be converted to biodiesel as non-corn fuel starts coming along: there’s a fellow out on the Ridge who is starting a business distributing vegetable fuel. He plans to offer a $3/gallon contract, to home-deliver fuel in drums, to be mounted on an angle-iron trestle here, so maybe I’ll have my own filling station beside the garage. A diesel vehicle turns out to be a slow tractor-like thing, which will take some getting used to. Different pace of life.* * * *
If you count any event as unfortunate (or unpropitious, or a setback), you’re not “loving the Lord your God.”
(You could never have explained to Nietzsche that his amor fati was the same flavor as Judeo-Xianity or Buddhism’s Third Noble Truth.)Success in butternut squash this year, in a new-cultivated patch by Barbara’s cottage. Tough-stemmed vines roam the edges of the pavement and get a grip on Barbara’s walker in the sun.
* * * *
The first harbinger: They adopt the British spelling “Neighbourhood” for their mall.
Second harbinger: At the valley entrance, the Olympic eternal-torch shrine from 1960 (sooty flame flapping in the night a dirty-gold flicker beneath the old iron five-rings Olympic device) is now outshone by a towering fluorescent-luminous rectangle, big enough to advertise a Wal-Mart, proclaiming “Celebrating Our Olympic Heritage!”
* * * *
November 3, 2010. In Squaw by myself, putting the cabin away for the winter. All alone here with the romance of the big fireplace, I miss my family’s alarms and melodrama and wit. An old paperback of The Sickness Unto Death has been dislodged from a bookshelf, and I’m gladdened, to greet again that miserable old Dane.
So I’ve thought of rereading it tonight, with the “highly intellectual” project of, maybe, discovering likenesses between Buddhist dukkha doctrine and the Dane’s painstaking analysis of despair (which I recall to be as detailed as the dharma).
Stop with the red wine at eight. But then I discover that, because tonight I’m granting myself the rare medicine of a Unisom gel-tab, as I settle down with my book before the fire, I’m really looking forward most to the sleeping pill. Like I’m dropping acid: a sleeping pill is the big event of the evening. Not the whitewater rapids of Kierkegaard. Not at all.
* * * *
(November. Dumped-on by snow, at 6000-foot elevation.)
Dash will be 10 yrs old soon, and today he went out alone carrying a few paper dollars he’d earned, to walk all the way, by himself, to the store to buy a toy with his own money. After two days of snow, the sky dawned clear and a summery sun has melted all the snow on the roads, which are now shining-wet in the warm air. He has been given his mother’s cell phone, lodged deep in his jeans pocket, and been instructed to call home when he arrives at the store. He has been warned to stay far to the side of the road “if a car comes,” and he’s dressed warmly. All around him, as he walks alone by himself, the world will be shining as it only does in mornings of fast snowmelt and blue sky. Pine boughs will be dropping their ladlefuls of white.* * * *
Clear sky all night. Stars are pebbles at the floor of the stream. Before sunrise, on the high old-snow places (Squaw Peak, Granite Chief, KT-22) snowcaps come up as violet first. Then peach.
* * * *
November 17, 2010
Tracy arrives with elk in her luggage, frozen hunk.
(epicurious.com counsels disguising it with sauces; fatiguing it by many hours in slow-cooker.)
The misery of the hunter. Tracy says the guy who shot it – then, miles from his truck, knelt before the carcass with his knife for the winter afternoon’s work – got himself a hernia in the long process of dressing it.* * * *
[I’m getting the sense there’s a white-trash aristocracy: ALL of my male friends up here have had at least one hernia operation.]
* * * *
Fantasy: The entire American population adds woolly socks and dumpy sweatshirts to their bedtime costume. The immediate result: 11,000 hectares of rainforest per year are saved.
* * * *
…For the high and the next way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet.
--The Cloud of Unknowing, 14th C.
* * * *
Far out Newtown Road, there’s always been a big hand-lettered sign:
For Sale, 32-plus Acres
Three Buildings On Four Separate Parcels
Well and Creek
OLD MAN READY TO DEALIt stands illegibly deep in bluebells, lupine, Scotch broom, wild lilac.
* * * *
Winter nights.
Don’t enjoy movies just now. Can’t sit through them. My boys over the years got accustomed to being disappointed with their dad, in this way. A longed-for movie is rented, the mud room stove is stoked up, maybe even popcorn is popped – all settle in – and soon (this usually happens right about the first plot point, where what’s-at-stake is being declared) – soon Dad is climbing out of his prized comfy chair. Slipping away. To go read a book. (I could sit through an entire movie if I were to drink red wine steadily the whole time and kill off a whole half-bottle.)
I take it as a general principle that, as an organism, I’m like an apple on a tree, fulfilling my appleness in good order without my own having to fret about it too much. So when I find I’m too impatient even to sit through a movie, and take no interest in any of the inside-industry or outside-industry products – or even pictures my own friends have somehow gotten made, even artistic small pictures – I assume that it’s in my nature at present. I’m seeing everything as beside-the-point. So who knows. Maybe it is.