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.
The woodwork's redwood grain after sixty-one years has been shrinking. It starts losing its grip on the old hardware. However, during the same sixty years (esp. on the south- and west-facing exterior walls), the beauty of redwood’s grain intensifies, in a red-golden toasty corduroy in the wood, a woodgrain big-as-matchsticks, 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 dark chuckle wherein all mortality and futility are foreseen, “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,” but of course it's 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 something one can wear with a noble bearing.
* * * *
June 21, 2010. Hunter and Nico tear down the old shed on the south side of the upper house. Crappy two-by-two construction of little pre-fab cedar barn, a kit, purchased no doubt from some hardware store’s parking lot: the whole structure goes down in a single morning. 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.” (But the irony there isn’t quite-enough acquainted with futility and mortality. Because he half meant it, and with rue. Insufficiently acquainted with the deep full, liberating ocean of futility and mortality.)
* * * *
On the topic of that embryonic heartbeat (SEE ABOVE, previous entry) which pro-life advocates are sentimental about:
That particular advertised 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.
******************************************************
[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 as alarmed, and as mobilized, as we can see the average German citizen ought to have been, during the days when Jews were being removed to death camps systematically, rationally, hygienically, methodically, discreetly.]
* * * * * * * *
At what point, after conception, does “life” begin?
Suppose you want to say 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?
* * * *
[The most torturous wine headache in history: the $2.50 bottle of “California Cabernet” from Rite-Aid’s shelves, brought by Cavendish.]
* * * *
Who among us is worthy of preservation if it’s true that “un-consciousness is the defining characteristic of sub-humanity?”
I, for example, personally, travel around within 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.”
* * * *
June in Squaw.
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.
So 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 good novelist in my generation – or send a note to her agent, to be forwarded.
So I Googled her. 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.
* * * *
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.
* * * *
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 really 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: “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 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.
* * * *
The veg. garden’s eleaborate 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.
* * * *
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, strategy, resolve, as well as a clear prevision of wreck. I compare her tribulations – pains, embarrassments and inconveniences, and the prospect of 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.
* * * *
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.
Yesterday 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 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 got our pumphouse, still, 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, 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, and they plugged its nozzle into the bottom end of the pipe, 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 ran downhill.
* * * *
June 1st
Gutter repair, replant ruined tomatoes, spray all buildings’ foundations with Diazinon solution, start up irrigation to see what leaks, new tires for Hunter’s car, sort among my kindling-pile and my firewood-pile, like Croesus, restacking it for dryness of summer.
Diazinon has been taken off the market by the EPA, but I’m using up this old brown-glass bottle, inherited from 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.)
* * * *
Where the old Empress Mine road hits Newtown Road -- (the road is called “Newtown” because there was once an ambitious new town there at that crossroads, of which now there’s no evidence, though an area “Newtown” still appears on certain maps, such as the National Weather Service and the USGS maps, while not even an old foundation is visible there anymore) -- a big hand-lettered sign has stood for years, deep in bluebells, lupine, Scotch broom, wild lilac:
For Sale, 32-plus Acres
Three Buildings On Four Separate Parcels
Well and Creek
OLD MAN READY TO DEAL
That crossroads lies on our drive home from Dash’s school, we see it every day, so he’s the newest generation to be amused by it, as it’s been standing for decades now, getting harder to read each year. The old man is likely dead. Or possibly just older.
* * * *
Sands is back from her teaching job, reoccupying her place here, so Cavendish has found a pied a terre in her spare room, among stacks of fileboxes. (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.) Staying someplace in town saves Cavendish the long trip, on dirt roads at night, to his deep forest fastness.
Night before last, Sands called from the hospital to say she couldn’t come to our little party, because Cavendish had showed up at her door, in convulsive pain, after a closing-show cast party. Had to be driven to the emergency room, vomiting, worrying. Sands 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-some years ago and went to Woodstock. Was put to bed among the 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.
* * * *
May 24, 2010. NO PLANTING BEFORE JUNE FIRST, EVER AGAIN. ENTIRE ROWS OF FROST-KILLED TOMATOES ARE DEAD, STANDING, LOOKING LIKE COOKED SPINACH.
* * * *
May 17. Warm breezes in the night. First beams of morning sun arrive from new angles. My brick paving project in almost done, and I will be able to give back the borrowed rubber kneepads. And return to regular mornings of writing. (Getting that pavement laid was something of an emergency). Back in my teardrop-shaped trailer under the oaks. The windows crank open, against the cobwebs. 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, as if it were a snack for myself. 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.
* * * *
May 5, 2010
Winter’s gone. Balmy days. Cavendish has been looking more grizzled, post-winter. Living in his woods will be more comfortable for him now, as the warm days have come, but still, the man must be deep into his sixties. His crash-pad in our northeast spare parlor has been taken over lately, by Nico and Aleksandra the new-arrived Polish couple (one a nephew of Brett’s) who are trying to get a foothold and green-card legitimacy. Cavendish, meanwhile, is back in his blind. But he’s obliged to come out of the woods every day, dressed and groomed, because The Theatre Calls. He is providing his yeoman’s services to an amateur Sondheim production in Grass Valley, on Main Street, just a block down from the heap of used bricks I so envied.
So. Displaced from his bedroom here, what does Cavendish do for his dinners? Safeway has a “Deli Café” which offers (among the buffalo wings and macaroni salad) two soups du jour, plus chili, in chromy lidded stainless-steel dispensaries. Safeway 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 there this week, at one of those Fiberglas-resin picnic benches working at his filthy old Apple Powerbook in the twilight, beside an untouched paper bowl of chili – but dozing over his laptop – his forehead near coming to rest at last in the keyboard. At this point Cavendish is approaching seventy, though wiry and tireless and noble of bearing, and is becoming famous in town.
Then, yesterday we were having a party here, and he showed up. (We’ll get him back again, I can tell, when Nico and Aleksandra find jobs and move on.) He showed up with a Safeway bouquet (awarded to Brett as hostess), and a potted Safeway 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 well-focused way, condemning as inferior 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. Sausage and 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 containing a dozen dollops of black soil, with sprouts expected, destined to be cucumbers, expected in turn to become pickles.
* * * *
A few little teleological observations (occasioned by the wedding, here, 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.
In fact, the cause-effect net is much finer-woven than we may ever discern: But I mean this in a radical sense: moment-to-moment, our “sovereign” consciousness is in fact a chip tossing in choppy currents of deep oceans; or, better, our consciousness is just a sequin of reflected light on the surface. Our so-called “reasons” swell and press from outside ourselves. Likewise, the “intended” consequences of our actions are flooded and swamped by creative accident. (Also, some of these “ad”-ventitious “ac”-cidents we blame our deeds on actually were born inside ourselves, and grew slowly inside ourselves, rather than blind-siding us from the outside world.) 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.
* * * *
April 28, 2010
Hard rain all day. Nursing a sore throat. Stayed inside. Fed on the bean soup I made from Easter’s old ham bone.
* * * *
Suddenly I’m in the white water with this book. The scene matters.
* * * *
At present the New York book business looks like the Dunkirk-beach evacuation, but in a Trump lobby.
(But maybe it always does. Maybe it’s always the ideal atmosphere to be working in.)
* * * *
March 31, 2010
I’ve lived on this place long enough now to have seen the sunken granite boulder as it emerges rising millimeter-by-millimeter, year-by-year. It’s beside the young peach. Its stone tip first appeared after I’d moved my trailer from the spot. It used to never bother the mower’s blades. A few years ago I had to start mowing around it – now it’s way taller than an anthill – and the rains keep washing it clean, igneous, salt-and-pepper rock from the deep Sierra, buoyed up in the soil.
This month the usual finches have come back to build nests in the same old places under the eaves again, and there are certain new arrivals this year: a boisterous group of about thirty cedar waxwings. Their crests, their very discreet yellow tailfeather stripes like chevrons of rank, their cleopatrine eye-mascara, their general grayness. On this cloudy cold March morning, they’re all perched in the mulberry’s bare branches, all 30 of them, all facing the same direction, east.
* * * *
$95 + $95 + $75 = $265
Total cost of passport renewal for two adults and one child. But realistically, will we ever use them? I’m a husband of the gloomy pennypinching sort.
(Or, the secret truth is, I’d rather be on my knees in the sun, among old bricks building out my spreading floor between mud room and cottage, than standing in Athens seeing the actual “Parthenon.” Odd sentiment for an old Classics major.)
* * * *
It’s late. I’m upstairs in the east bedroom with dobro. Enter Cavendish, living here still, convivial, winebottle in hand, fresh from adventures in town. He soon has me getting down the Les Paul, I’m such a sucker for any musical enthusiasms, then Brett calls from below, “Hey! Hey! Your chicken pot pie is on fire.” Cavendish had set the the microwave oven on sixty minutes – rather than six – and the smell of the disk’s vulcanization permeates the house. Exactly a rubber smell. Put the lightweight smoking puck out on my sandpile in the driveway to cool.
* * * *
My 150-yr-old bricks (for paving Barbara’s footpath) were hand-formed and kiln-fired here in North San Juan. They have to be dug from the forest floor in the woods, across the Yuba River, up on the San Juan Ridge. They come from a spot near a tumble-down mansion (just off the place where the mansion’s veranda would have stood). Now vigorous old cedars stand inside the walls. Oyster shells abound, in a midden, left by the inhabitants of 1860 who tossed them there over the railing. ( Of course, in 1860, new-minted millionaire gentlemen, who were high-hatting it at their country house, dined on champagne and oysters, brought up from San Francisco on ice in horse-carts.)
* * * *
“Crunch of Gravel”
The pleasure of Oakley’s company. He and I used to keep a running catalogue of the instances in literature of the cliché “crunch of gravel.” Those words can be found in every writer’s work somewhere, all up and down the class scale. Proust or Louis L’Amour, William James or Ian Fleming or James Joyce, they’ve all used the expression “crunch of gravel,” me included. No escaping it. Oakley, of course (as a writer of Westerns), was guilty on several counts. (In his case, many hooves would have “crunched” gravel – rather than, say, limousine tires or Capezio soles or carriage wheels.)