Oct. 2009.
Brett and Barbara in SFO for the week.
Dash and I here live as bachelors and struggle along just fine. Came home today from school pickup, w/backpack, w/bags of groceries. The usual. The cat was on the table eating remains of eggs, the cold front was arriving from the south, the wheelchair had rolled down the meadow slope to get stuck in the blackberry brambles, the groceries stayed standing in bags all over the kitchen floor, un-put-away, to be dodged around, because the present urgency was to get a fire built in the mud room stove, to warm the place up for the boy to tackle his backlog of homework and clarinet practice.
Tearing apart old paper shopping bags for tinder, I discovered two documents in the bottom of one bag, about to go in the crackling stove:
“WITNESSETH:” was the banner on the top paragraph; and the next paragraph began “Section One: Definitions” – (of “owner,” of “copyright,” etc).
Complete with notary-public stamps, they were the release-of-rights agreement for a Kansas City production of Tad’s play. Could these be the only copies? About to be fed to the stove fire? Poor Tad, now in New York, with us as the only executors of, for example, this last play he wrote before the accident.
* * * *
This summer in Squaw, many visits from a particular bear. He got into the house a couple of times and needed to be chased away with shouts and missiles. Somewhat smaller than a SmartCar, cuddly-looking, with fur so deep you could plunge your hands in up to the wrist – he was a fellow it would be wonderful to sleep with, if not for the obvious drawbacks. We chased him out of the house but all summer he was insistent: he would leave, only to come back on some other night. The general theory grew that he must be getting old and unable to fend for himself, increasingly dependent on humans for what he could cadge. He had no shyness about coming into the house with people present or no. (Dana and Sands sitting around. Cosmo-drinks in stemmed glasses. Bill Frissell on the stereo. Enter bear.) On these occasions he was always easy to scare away, shambling down the hill. When I followed and threw stones to make him feel unwelcome, he might pick up the pace and hustle a little, checking back over his shoulder. Then a few days later, forgetting his lesson, he would show up again. Sands left a chocolate bar out in a bedroom, which must have smelled good, because it invited another trespass. Sometimes when chased away, he wouldn’t leave altogether but would hide under the deck whimpering, sulkily, or would climb a nearby pine tree (those lipstick-sized claws digging into pine bark supporting all that weight). For the duration of the summer he became almost, dangerously, pet-like. At least in his own mind. At this point I think Fish and Game has shot him.
* * * *
Today:
On Main Street in Grass Valley I pass by a pile of rubble, including thousands of ancient bricks, scarred and scorched and pink, from some old knocked-down chimney.
I want some of those bricks, to pave walkways around here. They have a tenderness when they're a century old. So I go investigating. Hop the fence.
The defunct used-car lot, on which the pile of rubble stands, has a sign reading: “Madonna Motors IS open for business. Ask at our office across the street.”
I cross the street. It's an empty storefront, an old steel desk on a showroom floor. A sign taped to that window reads: “For inquiries about Madonna Motors, ask for Bob in the Kwickie Print Shop next door.”
Next door, the Kwickie Print shop is turning into a coffee-shop-cum-thrift-store. Nobody there has heard of a “Bob.”
My interest in a pile of rubble is thwarted.
Such is the economy.
Back at home, the mailbox contains a letter from our paperboy informing us that the San Francisco Chronicle will no longer be delivering on this route. (The old Chron itself has been growing skinnier by the week, w/dwindling advertisement and readership.) He's sorry. There just aren't enough customers out this far to warrant a whole route. He's going to have to revise his career plans himself, the note ends.
Inside, I get the Mexican crema started in the kitchen and lift the laptop lid and open my email: the column is headed by junkmail-spam announcements from facebook.com, linkedin.com, classmates.com, “LOUIS, SOMEONE IS THINKING OF YOU.” “LOUIS, YOU'RE TURNING HEADS!”
* * * *
[with "Huck Finn" exception, as noted:]
To enlarge on earlier reckless remarks, that Samuel Clemens is a children's-writer because he had no sense of real “evil,” (*) just cartoons of it to flatter our own sensation of moral ennoblement:
Turn to Henry James. He “got” evil. It’s quite scary. Real evil, moving in the world. Evil moving in people’s drawing rooms, and people’s marriages. Not “Nazis” or “Serial Killers” or “KuKlux Klansmen,” or any other such inventions we can pretend are not ourselves. James displays evil to make your blood run cold. [How a father, a widely admired great man, can systematically destroy his own daughter over the years with his kingly sarcasm (“Washington Square”). Or Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond manipulating a young woman (“Portrait”).] No writer describes evil as knowingly as James. Must have been a cold-blooded man. Or a broken-hearted man.
*(because a fiction artist must imagine a world with something “wrong” in it; that's the hardest thing: What's Wrong? -- How the author invents that something will define the moral force-of-gravity on his planet)
* * * *
10-3-2009
Tolstoy’s peculiar character-introduction technique:
The main characters in Anna Karenina each make their debuts twice. Not with a ‘bump,’ but with a ‘bu-bump.’
With Levin and later with Anna, there’s a glimpse first (in some minor character’s POV), then subsequently a regular, full character introduction. This recurs, too, when at last Levin and Anna meet up: in Levin’s POV, there’s first a view of Anna’s portrait in oil, then the entry of the woman herself.
The technique, maybe, gives bulk to major characters: a shadow implying inertial mass.
* * * *
Back in North Beach alone today. Always happy here. WashBag. City Lights Books. Tosca. Park bench in Washington Square, by the pissoir, the bums under the swingset, the old Chinese ladies doing their limp tai chi. The double-capp at Mario’s Cigar Store. It makes me think gratefully of Jack Kerouac and the Beats. None of them was “a good writer,” and in fact, I’d never read them before coming here, yet they are the reason I came to San Francisco. They discovered and advertised an opening here. They were only a rumor to me for years and continue to disappoint me (with some very spiky exceptions!) whenever I look into their pages. The truth is, in the case of someone like Kerouac, to “write” very “well” would have been a betrayal of his whole ethic. He wasn’t about “good writing.” He was such a sweet person, his vulnerability and mysticism shine through every page. In the end, I couldn’t use him, not as a model or teacher, but I guess I could see in him a San Francisco, and he certainly was an open heart. Huge gratitude.
* * * *
Winter nights. In the hour of clarity, 3:30 am, I consider the idea of “objectivity.”
Coffee is brewed, boots laced-up, jacket zipped-up, and the murmur of NPR is shut off, the kitchen lamp doused – so the whole house is dark again, and, flashlight in hand, I cross meadows on a moonless morning, to reach the trailer where I write. I seldom use the flashlight, in fact, as my feet know the way. Even the insulated boots (in treading the blind abyss that is the mossy lane under the cherry trees) thru their soles know the nudge of the one granite rock that protrudes from the soil and in summer is a danger to the mower’s blades.
So, in contemplating the stars (that most objective datum! stars’ positions!), at that hour, one decides that one’s experience of objective reality is mediated by one’s body, this body of mine invisible and afloat in meadows on worn dirt paths in the dark. Something as objective as a nearby visible star’s “location” in the sky – or the “temperature” of this home planet, or the “size” of the Planck quantum – all these observations are mediated by the body’s mysterious retina, the flesh, the habit of having a “hand,” a hand that invents a ruler and puts notch-marks on it – or a “foot” that knows the path – or an “eye” that absorbs certain wavelengths and excludes others, this body that is the natural fruit, like a pear or a blackberry, of these rounded rocks that whirl infinitely in the cold dark.
* * * *
Getting the trailer warmed up takes forever. On my laptop, the nice “touch-to-click” function (and "stroke-to-lift") doesn’t work in the trackpad's ordinarily sensuous little rectangle. Either it’s my finger or it’s the platinum surface: we’re both cold. The spark won’t pass.
* * * *
To live as if already dead:
Overcoming death (one way or another, by hook or by crook) is the raison d’etre of religions and certain philosophies and even medical science at its remotest end-point. We are supposed to believe that nonexistence is a threat.
To this (in fact factitious) fear, the practical answer is: What makes you think the very next instant of “life” is so cozy, or so comprehensible? Is it your habituation to the sensation that this second was preceded by a different second, and will be succeeded by yet another second? What makes you believe “you” are “alive”? Plainly, you’re already at this moment firewalking, an act requiring an ecstacy of belief.
I hear from the X-ian pulpit, and I read in the Dhammapada, that living as if “you” don’t exist is liberation. It’s an attitude that will lead straight to the humility-and-compassion schtick, of course, and its fundamental practicality. But “living as if already dead” is what the happiest and most unpretentious among us already do, naturally, without fuss or self-consciousness. Even without doctrine. It may be what you and I already do. Maybe you’re doing it now!
-----
My Big Epiphany, for this week.
I don’t, anymore, need to practice my fond old superstitious magic.
I have always made a habit of seeking omens and auspices in found pennies (depending on whether face-up or tails-up), the recurrence of the time 11:17 on clockfaces, choosing the right coffeecup to take to work in my studio (the handthrown mud-brown mug), being flown over by a bird (whether of the blue variety or the black variety, or the red-breasted).
However, here’s why all such superstitious practices are fallacious: They are premissed on the notion that I have any desires or preferences.
None of us, dear reader, has any desires or preferences, when the chips are down. To speak more theologically, superstitious practices imply that God is comprehensible.
Therein lies the true “theological error” of the good-luck amulet – or the astrological chart, the rabbit’s foot, the horseshoe, the found clover-leaf. The problem with superstitions is not that they are an “idolatry” or a “heterodoxy.” (Such is the childish objection: that one seems to be ‘worshipping another or false god.’ The god of pennies. Or the leprechauns.) Rather the indulgence of any good-luck ritual involves the more basic mistake, that I might want anything at all.
* * * *
Bad year for pears. Excellent year for apples. And Italian plums at woods’ edge were abundant. I got to them in time. With visiting nephew Justin I garnered a bucketful, for freezing, later to appear as sauce for pork roasts.
The only pear tree to come through for us, this barren year, will be the little Asian pear in the shade of the oaks. They’re small but I think will ripen well.
* * * *
Oct 10, 2009, drizzle arrives.
Reluctant to enter into the excavation project to hunt down clog in underground PVC irrigation pipe. It’s just me and my spade out there, and it’s raining. And hernias are a regular aggravation of the family hero, earned in ecstatic afternoons clearing brush, getting out stumps, bringing firewood uphill. I’ve had three surgeries so far, and the stitches never hold. Country doctors can be a bit on the incompetent side, I fear. Standards of goods and services are generally lower out here (something a cosseted urbanite can’t help but notice; and indeed it’s a fitting-and-proper aspect of country life; not getting the perfect latté), and likewise when it comes to medical care, the human livestock must be patient and forbearing. My particular man (athletic small Scot, healthy head of hair like a Ronald-Reagan plasticene mask, with hands that, in a handshake, are tiny and elfin and strong; his huge Harley-Davidson parked outside the office-clinic), on our first surgical outing, was dismissive of the new-fangled mesh implants, indeed contemptuous of all that, trusting his own handiwork in needle-and-thread. Then, a few years later, after his stitchery failed, he had taken a course and learned all about mesh. So the second surgery on that side involved mesh. Now the mesh is failing. Fourth hernia surgery. $2000 a pop, after the big insurance-deductible. I’ve always had a love of hard physical work, sweat, the happiness of exhaustion. Can’t keep from it. It’s therapy and it’s piety. (Maybe it’s Protestant nirvana, work!) But these hernias are a constant check, and I suppose I must learn new techniques of using leverage, carts, inclined planes, all the simple machines, etc., cleverly to evade exertion.
Right now, anyway, it’s raining; there’s no question of going out with a spade this afternoon.
* * * *
Henry James’s style:
He repeats words and phrases, making a constant jingle-jangle in the prose. A little phrase ending one sentence will be tucked somewhere into the beginning of the next sentence. The effect is of chiming: a tiny, tinkling, incessant chiming. He does this constantly. His prose is a blizzard of repeated phrases, making a cloud, or echo chamber.
It has an effect which I hereby designate by the name “sfumato” (after the Renaissance painters’ – esp. DaVinci’s – brush technique of blending borders, with tiny feathering strokes which make the edge of the Virgin’s rosy cheek melt, at its limit, into the grey stones in the distance behind her: a brush technique art historians call sfumato.) (Sfumato means smoked-looking, or misted-over.) James’s prose, from this blurring of edges, this smoked mistiness, gets the same high gloss and classical inevitability as a Florentine masterpiece. The music of the medium itself – words – is the surface one is in contact with, not so much the fleshy characters.
* * * *
One begins to see how, living here without a job but yet constantly busy with the emergencies of parsimony, a country fellow begins to subsist “outside the economy.” It happens just naturally, without any intention to defect or rebel. Years ago, in defense of capitalism, I had an announced contempt of those back-to-the-land types who wanted to make their own granola and split their own stovewood to heat their own greasy hottubs. “There’s a reason for the economy, and for a marketplace of skills and goods,” I would say. “Let them try cobbling their own shoes. Manufacturing their own stereos to play Jimi Hendrix on. Let them see how efficient that is.” Now here I find myself in such a situation.
(My father used to say, “The only lasting thing you learn at school is How To Learn.”)
--
This morning, mowing, I came upon an immense poop on the west meadow, obviously fresh from last night, and obviously composed of local apples. My apples. It lay in my path, so I got off the tractor because I didn’t want to tear into it with all three whirling blades in the mower deck, went for a shovel to move it, carried it to the ravine where the sea of blackberries accepts all.
Bears must have terrifically inefficient bowels, or a perpetual diarrhea, as the fruits and berries in their chyme are hardly digested, still as crisp as they might show up in a morning bowl with yogurt, but mounded in the grass in the morning. Often one finds pools of bearshit right beneath the peartree, where he stands up tall to dine. (Once I found a pool of shit with a bright Baby Ruth wrapper embedded intact.)
--
2009. Huge success with pumpkins and acorn squash this year (at least until the drip irrigation failed and the squash got dessicated). And many varieties of tomatoes, beans of the haricot vert type, leeks, onions, squash vines and melon vines swerving all over the enclosed dirt floor. When we planted the fenced-in plot last spring, we crowded in way too much stuff, way too close together, but it’s working out fine. (At the time, we predicted a “demolition derby” in there by harvest-time.) But they haven’t gotten in each other’s way. The Lesson: Squeeze in everything you want. Don’t heed the warnings on the package about spacing.
* * * *
[The Iowa farmer: an instance of the banality of evil.]
Food riots in India. In Mexico, Iowa corn (govt-subsidized) can be bought more cheaply than the corn grown right there on neighbors’ milpa.
The news on the radio is that, if you filled an SUV with one tank of “ethanol,” you’d be burning up an amount of corn that might have kept one human being alive for a year. That’s one tankful. I have actually begun to turn down invitations requiring a drive to SF, partly out of my increasing love of uneventfulness, but also because I’m being transformed into a Jain Buddhist who even wonders whether, say, staging a writers’ conference every year in Squaw can be done in good conscience (as we put hundreds of people on transcontinental planeflights). So little does one wish to disturb the world. So much of the book-business’s “content” is (courtesy Ecclesiastes) “vanity.” “Sense of sin” expands like neutron bomb shock wave.
Banality of evil, “Author” driving to town for gala luncheon.
* * * *
Judging by the pawprints on the full-length mirror, it was apparently a very small (even a baby) bear that got himself stuck in Barbara’s bathroom and, at last in desperation, trashed the wooden door to free himself.
* * * *
Barbara, with her teacup and saucer, revolves in the doorway.
“Where are you going mom?” says Brett.
“I’m going back to my reading.”
“That’s the living room, mom. It’s cold in there. You were reading in the mudroom, remember? We’ve got the stove going in the mudroom, it’s nice and warm.”
Barbara is laden with many heavy old silver chains and amulets and medallions, as, in the barbaric way of women, she remembers every day to bedeck herself with booty. She doesn’t remember anymore the little house in Del Mar or Casa Raab in Mexico, or many of her own photographs, or the many picnics of life, Europe in the sixties, the laughter on the deck, her childhood on a California ranch in the Depression with a horse of her own named Bummer, her benign rulership of many long dinner tables, her recipes. Brett and I remember it all for her and keep telling her. An extremely important station in life. Extremely important. No joke.
* * * *
October 12. The season’s first good California monsoon. Such weather systems are more interesting to watch from these elevations. For the day preceding, canyons fill with an air that is mistier, more isolating. Also, sound doesn’t seem to travel so far. Or else that’s just a moral effect associated with a storm’s gathering eschatological rumblings. Yesterday was a muffled, deaf day of climbing ladders, pulling detritus out of the gutters, putting up storm windows, covering woodpiles with tarps, bringing in tools, making a last harvest of tomatoes, filling the bathtubs with potable water. On the National Weather Service website, we watch the radar animations’ whirling dragons with pleasure.
This morning, the storm is loud on the roof. It’s a roof whose shingles I put on myself, last summer during several days of intense heat, bloody knuckles, fatigued ankles, the camaraderie of Mike and Bruce up there. Which today gives me the more pleasure in hearing rain.
But within the house, everything is uprooted. Dash was sent home from school because he has head lice – or, strictly speaking, one head louse – so he’s moping around here in the dejection of the unclean. He was the first child to be discovered, with his one louse, so he has had the added shame of thinking he was “Patient Zero.” – until it was learned that several of the kids who went on the camping trip to Jughandle State Park were later sent home with lice of their own. Inside our well-roofed house in the rain, the windows are steamed up from laundry. Bedding is stripped and piled in tripping heaps in the mud room. Carpets and pillows have been plastic-bagged and moved to the garage, and the washing machine is running constantly. We own some new bottled poisons, as well as a set of cleverly designed fine combs. Dash has sat on a stool to receive a very close haircut, and now his scalp is covered in olive oil, which must remain for eight hours. His hat, which he will wear all day today in despondency and ignominy, is a plastic produce bag with the upside-down banner “IGA Fresh: Five Servings Daily!”
* * * *
Weird inspiration. A defunct old trailer worked fine for a studio. Couldn’t another – (even more dilapidated! to be had for free!) – serve as a chicken coop, secure against coyotes?
* * * *
Wednesday, Oct. 2009. Tonight’s foil bag of Just-Add-Water, Just-Add-Ground-Beef chili will be sweetened with the four small peppers, last shrub standing in the garden.
* * * *
The minister of the Nevada City white-clapboard Episcopal church (a cosmopolitan man, whom I sometimes have lunch with) is I hope not offended when he sees me on Sundays slipping out the door, halfway through the service. It’s been happening almost every Sunday when I’m able to attend at all. From the rear pew, I’m able to exit behind the backs of all the parishioners, unoffending, unseen. (Except by him of course. He “sees all” – like God enthroned back-to-the-wall.)
The readings, the smart sermon, some hymns. But after that point, when it comes to the recitation of the creed and the Eucharistic ceremony, I have to sneak out to the sunny sidewalks, the fallen leaves of the maples, the languid pace of Sabbath automobile traffic, my own loneliness in apostasy.
I am able to identify the cause of my truancy. Elements of X-ianity are idolatrous, of course. Idolatry seems to have set in early, in the first century, that time of Jesus-sightings like Elvis-sightings. I’m hardly an exacting theologian, and sometimes I do stick around for the ingestion of blood and flesh, and the declarations of my own sanctity, tho’ sanctity fit me baggily.
The alienating thing about “idolatry,” in principle, is that it puts an image – a statue – between man and the divine. And all the while, I know I belong out on the sunny sidewalks where my car is parked with its wheels curbed on the hill in case the brake should fail, and errands lie ahead of me, to the hardware store for a bottle of septic-tank treatment and to the grocery store for some kind of dinner meat.
--
[That particular Episcopal church does seem to have theologians in its pews, and captious ones. There’s one fellow who can be heard inserting loudly, “…and the son,” at a certain point during each general mumbling of the Nicene Creed, because he never got over the filioque controversy of the Ninth Century.]
* * * *
Typical Cavendish: kicked out by the last woman, he’s living this winter out in his trailer in the deep canyon, where he has no heat or plumbing but he does have high-speed internet. Watches “Law and Order” episodes and Ken Burns documentaries. Reads New Yorkers.
* * * *
Inguinal hernia gets worse by the month, what with bear repairs, Annex maintenance in Squaw, hauling guitar amp or wine crate, hoisting sleeping kids, uprooting old Scotch broom, chopping firewood, shoveling snow.
But really, honestly, would I rather be, say, riding up the Champs Elysee in a red sportscar? (I’d only be looking for the first parking place.)
* * * *
The “sweet-pea”-vs-“vetch” controversy of 2009.
The tender herb vying for sunlight at the margins everywhere has a sky-blue, miniature-orchidaceous bloom that lasts thru much of the early summer and keeps reappearing till fall, larger than the usual wildflower blossom. Brett would like it all to be mowed down. According to her, it outcompetes and smothers the nicer groundcovers. She also says it’s a fire hazard in the fall, when it dries out. She prefers to call it “vetch,” a monosyllable that sounds like regurgitation. I prefer to call it “wild sweetpea,” as it was called by old George and Ginny when they passed this place on to us. Also, I like it. I like to see it standing.
I seem to have won a victory, in this eco-aesthetic quarrel, because now our friend Henrik Bull brings us news that it’s edible. You can pull the top fronds off and stand there gobbling them, like a deer or a horse. It actually is sweet. You could make a salad. Henrik and his wife discovered this because, where they live in Berkeley, they observed immigrant Vietnamese women harvesting these greens from the median strips of boulevards.
* * * *
Nov. 3, 2009. An unseasonably warm day. Replacing rotten clapboard on the north side, I pull out boards and they’re all held in with square nails. The whole central house is built with square nails.
I’ve saved them, in a heavy pocketful all day. They’ve ended up in the Mason jar in the pine breakfront. But what to do with them? They’re not significantly rusty. Doesn’t feel right throwing them out, nor leaving them idle as quaint antiques in a jar, because some fellow made them, one-by-one with hammer and tongs on an anvil while they glowed red, then dropped each in the cold water bucket to sizzle and temper. These few are some of the elect.
* * * *
November: Pockets of parka sticky inside from tomatoes that popped in there when I harvested handfuls in the dark, needing them for a soup a month ago.
* * * *
Troublesome bear population at higher elevations. Had to run up to Squaw Valley. The upper cabin had been colonized by bears, who gained entrance simply by clawing through the exterior wood siding. Strong, shy creatures: when they want to look in the fridge, they tear the door off its hinges, but yet they can be chased out by a human shouting insults.
They had obviously been living there for a period of some days. All was squashed out on the carpets and licked up: lemonade frozen-concentrate, large Stouffer’s lasagna, bag of IKEA Swedish meatballs, steel cans of tomatoes torn open by tooth and claw.
Stayed up there for a week doing clean-up and repairs. Lacking a laptop or radio reception, I worked in the silence of swelling and subsiding canyon winds.
(Tribute to William Gaines. Lacking a proper T-square up there, while doing the rude carpenty I used an old MAD Magazine to mark two-by material for ninety-degree cuts, and it works very well.)
* * * *
November 6, 2009. Drizzle all day. The old wooden bench swing, suspended from the Atlas cedar’s lowest branch, has at last rotted to the point that its back is sagging off, like a fishjaw hanging open, decayed. At this point Hunter is a freshman at school back east, and Dash is nine.
* * * *
Cavendish this fall has started living in the woods in the river canyon, ten miles out, in a trailer with no running water and no heat. He’s been showering here at our place, whenever he’s got a date in town or something, and it’s always a pleasure to see him, his inborn elegance, his scrappy, tall Toyota pick-up. The crunch of gravel under tires outside, arriving just at the moment we’ve already lit dinner candles (add a can of diced tomatoes to the sauce), then the way he customarily sits inside the cab organizing things, flipping through things, before getting out. Cavendish’s problem is, women keep kicking him out. Latest was Marian, star of the Sam Sheperd “Fool for Love” in the Grass Valley black-box theatre. Before that it was Sands (Cordelia in “Lear,” one of the sisters in “Lughnasa,” Gertrude in “Hamlet”).
Having showered, he departs in fine dress (he seems to shop at the best haberdasheries in SFO). He has been very gallant about taking Barbara out to dinner, her squire, at Citronee or New Moon, ordering the good wine. He’s probably going to have to sell another piece of property to support this improvident lifestyle, if indeed he’s got any left.
He’s been taking UPS and FedEx deliveries here at our address, of equipment for his theatrical productions. “Follow spots,” “gels,” “floods,” all this stuff arrives here under our porch roof.
Came by tonight, to take Barbara to a closing night of a musical comedy at the Miner’s Foundry. Both dressed “to the nines.” Paused for a bowl of chili before leaving. He says there are still coffee-can lights he put up in 1975, hanging now in the scaffolding of the Miner’s Foundry theatre (his own spray-painted-black “MJB” cans) from “MacBeth” of thirty years ago.
Sands worries about him, as now winter is coming and his trailer in the woods has no heat or water. She’s Back East at a teaching job and can only worry from a distance, remonstrate with him by email.
* * * *
November 11, 2009 –
Twilight. A big mother bear and two good-sized adolescent cubs spent some time lolling around at the edge of the meadow. I ought to have thrown stones and berated them but, loving them too much, I just stayed still. I summoned Brett and Barbara from the blue light of their Masterpiece Theatre murder-mystery, to come to the window to see them. Barbara has reached an age of feeling imperiled much of the time and no longer delights to see such wildlife so near.
(It occurs to me, only now, that Dash and his little friend had gone out with trowels and had been excavating rusty old ranch implements from that antique barn foundation. He’d come inside just fifteen minutes before the bears’ appearance.)
The ursine family becomes aware they’re being watched and shambles away into the woods, the steep rocky ravine to the east, their home, headed downhill. Then, a half-hour later, in the twilight of ten-minutes-to-five, I’m back at my desk and hear a rifle-shot from my neighbor’s dim property.
It seems to me a single rifle-shot means that the man missed. And that they ran away. I haven’t really made the acquaintance of this neighbor (an odd but fitting circumstance, in these country distances. I know only that he owns a lot of heavy equipment because the beep-beep-beep of a tractor’s reverse-gear warning is audible at all hours, coming throught the woods). I reach the surmise that a single shot was just intended to scare the bears away. Not to hurt anybody. It sounded like a small-caliber shell, a .22, which would only wound a bear. You’d need several .22 shots to bring one down.
Five minutes later. Another single shot.
* * * *
Nov. 12, 2009
Brett went out to the cottage tonight to find Barbara standing in her bedroom with the door closed, looking embarrassed, the dog standing beside her. “Toby and I are hiding,” she said. (Toby is the dog.) “There are all those people out there, all those Afghans. I just don’t know how to help them.”
She’d been watching one of her regular favorite shows, the Jim Lehrer News Hour, and must have dozed. When she woke she believed her cottage rooms were thronged with refugees of the Afghan war, who were looking for work in this country. She said they all had wonderful skills and professions back home in Kandahar and Kabul, they were doctors and plumbers and teachers, but now in this country the government wasn’t allowing them to take jobs. A particular dignified man she’d spoken with – (they got acquainted while they both were waiting in line for the bathroom, she said) – had been a diplomat, and owned a little villa-like place in Kandahar.
At last not knowing how to help all the imaginary refugees, she’d closed herself up in the bedroom, and just left them out there to talk among themselves and, no doubt, help themselves to her cupboards, she said, because they certainly must be hungry.
* * * *
Poor Dash, the point where he stopped seeming so brave, in the project of scaring bears out of the Squaw house, was not when I told him to stay back in the cab of the truck (I had the headlights shining on the front door), but rather when I turned around and came back to the truck, telling him, “Here, you’d better keep the cell phone with you, too.”
I should have put it a different way, because obviously that was when he started to think this wasn’t such a fun adventure anymore. He said, “Dad?” to detain me, standing at the open truck-door, but then couldn’t think of anything further to say, as a reason for keeping me.
* * * *
Nov. 17, 2009
The twenty-four solar panels on my garage roof have always been terrifically inefficient users of solar radiation. They lie there waiting for photons to come down and knock electrons into motion. Very few photons get lucky. My clothesline, by contrast, uses those photons with maximum 100% efficiency, and with the lowest-tech implements: string and clothespins.
[I continue to indulge these clothesline remarks because the clothesline is such an emblem, for me, of everything we’re in for.]
* * * *
November 19, 2009
End of day. Out on our road, as I drove by in dusk, two vultures were courteously taking turns pecking in the now-famous carcass at the roadside. Early dark of November. 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 leaves have fallen from trees in the woods – and, I suppose, 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.
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 sagging and disorientation. However, she smiles symmetrically. Lifts her two arms symmetrically. Knows who the President is. She’s fine.
As I came up the driveway, Cavendish’s truck stood parked in the grass. (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. (In fact it’s an exact likeness.) At dinner he is quite boastful on the topic of how plenteous are his polyps, 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 beside him in candlelight, digging her way through her polenta, chuckles quietly to herself and remarks, “Hm. We should’ve thought of that.”
* * * *
Dec. 16, 2009. The Eyebrow:
At last I got unstuck with my L.A. 1946 novel. Featureless characters, who had stood back and refused to speak, finally showed themselves. The arbitrariness of the process: All I needed to do was be brave and sketch on an eyebrow, and the one little creature started talking like mad and provoking the others
* * * *
Iron clouds all afternoon. Cold comes steadily from the woods to the south. I pruned ornamental trees, mulberry and dogwood, with some severity. All the fruit trees will be pruned on another, sunnier day.
* * * *
Dec. 6-7. 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 San Juan 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. He boasted tonight by candlelight, taking refuge here tonight from his unheated, snowbound trailer in the canyon, 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.
* * * *
In the event of power outage, we will be bringing buckets of muddy water into the bathroom to make the toilet flush. Nobody’s been to Trader Joe’s lately, so if we’re stranded we’ll be getting into the better-than-usual wine. Silently the flakes, big-as-moths, seek earth and stay. Elsewhere, the Dow and the Nasdaq will take care of themselves. Also the Nikkei and the DAX and the FTSE and the Hang Seng.
* * * *
The town’s movie theatre is called The Magic. ( If you want to see a big-budget Industry movie, you can go down to the Interstate, to the –plexes.) To see a new small or foreign movie, you have to, first, mark your calendar for the one or possibly two nights it will be screened at the Magic.
It’s a storefront. Armchairs. Flat, non-sloping floor. Charlie has only one projector, so the reel-change requires a long intermission including reel-rewind. Charlie preheats an oven and bakes brownies. We can all smell Charlie’s brownies baking during Reel One. Intermission, we all stand around out front and eat warm brownies while he rewinds the first reel and threads the leader of Reel Two into the sprockets.
Charlie’s big interest is in short subjects; he is a connoisseur and archivist of cartoons, public-service spots, vintage newsreels. So his audience must be patient with his opening lecture about the provenance and significance of the Loony Tune were about to see. He stands before the screen as he lectures, in his twilight, wringing his hands with ardor.
* * * *
Dec, 2009. 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 about as detailed as Theravada). 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, it’s the big event of the evening. Not the whitewater rapids of Kierkegaard. Not at all.
* * * *
(December. 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 has cleared 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 arrrives 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, 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.
* * * *
Alone at 6000 ft. Clear sky all night. Stars are pebbles at the floor of a stream. Before sunrise, the higher old snow (Squaw Peak, Granite Chief, KT-22) comes up as first violet, then peach.
* * * *
Dec. 14, 2009. Brett has been knitting a stocking-cap for Tad, for Xmas. He’s living in Albany under the care of his new woman, no doubt chain-smoking, talking brilliantly in loops, at leisure all day every day. (Tho’ his 30-yr-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, through an error in the first row. You only discober it’s a Möbius strip only after you’ve made many circling rows.) So she’s going to pull out all her stitches. But I wish she’d send it to him as it is. Tad would get the joke, and love 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.”
* * * *
Xmas. Tracy arrives with elk in her luggage, frozen hunk.
(epicurious.com seems to counsel 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 – got himself a hernia in the long process of dressing it.
* * * *
Fantasy: The entire American population adds woolly socks and dumpy sweatshirts to their bedtime costume. The result: 11,000 hectares of rainforest per year are preserved.
* * * *
…For the high and the next way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet.
– The Cloud of Unknowing, 14th C.
* * * *
January 1, 2010 (SAN FRANCISCO) –
Driving the pick-up 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, all under a lashed-down remnant of carpet, moldy and disintegrating. It’s been two years since his death; and Brett and I spent this New Year’s week working, clearing out his old office in Macondray Lane. Today that little room has two fresh coats of (as it’s called) eggshell paint, and a thick new rug from Pier One, and 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 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, New Years Day traffic is fast and orderly, and my heavy-laden pickup truck fits all right 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.”
* * * *
January 2010. Garlic and onions are the only things in the garden, but they thrive.
* * * *
Hunter to airport, back to school: – 2am, almost no traffic between here and Sacramento. (1-3-2010)
* * * *
(2-1-10)
Call it “Hashem,” call it “Allah.” Like a Zen roshi just shrug around at it, or like most people, skate glassy-eyed through it. Whatever it 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. Sorting the armload of mail. Much of it for Barbara’s demographic, these subscriptions arriving gratis and unsolicited.
LifeExtension Magazine
Is Your CoQ10 Obsolete?
Increase Mitochondrial Support with a Newly Formulated CoQ10
Now with Shilajit!
and
LONGEVITY
Gene Linked to Biological Aging in Humans
Mediterranean Diet May Help Avert Damage of Silent Strokes
At the top of the telephone pole down the road, an unusual woodpecker taps, with a rapid rhythm, accelerating the decomposition of that particular telephone pole.
****
January 22, 2010
With bad weather now upon us, Cavendish seems to be taking up permanent residence, on the first floor in the northeast spare room. (This was probably inevitable.) His scarred muddy laptop and boxed “household gods” – books and magazines, vegetable oil, potato chips, whole-wheat Fig Newtons, duffelbag – all are stacked up in the cold room that used to be Dashiell’s playroom. The big plaid couch there is all right for him.
His large, long shoes by the kitchen door, with their associated puddle. His different (better!) brand of coffee beans. His question Where does this go? His dependable yeomanly contributions of cottage cheese, wine. Trips out for potable water in this power-outage emergency.
I ran into him in town tonight in town. Before the little David Lindley concert I’d stopped to pay a courtesy-visit at a café on Broad Street where a few friends of mine have a regular dinner-music gig – and there was Cavendish at the counter, wearing heavily swagged scarf and tam-o-shanter beret. He took the stage over, 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, those 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. Applause throughout the room. 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 concert and Cavendish is still up. He says he’s had a transcendent evening. Around the corner from the café later, they’d all gone Friar Tucks, he and the musicians. There, he was again prevailed upon to recite, 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 of ‘em.)
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.
* * * *
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, love as a universal Prime Mover, sure, I’ll go along with that. That’s my religion. God is love.”
Anybody is willing to say it. 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!). Really. What would you do if you really thought love was the point of everything? Imagine a life like that! A planet like that!
(Happy thought. Maybe that’s exactly what you’re already doing.)
* * * *
February 2010
Found my bricks, to pave the footpath. Deep in the San Juan Ridge. The gold-mining enterprises of the 1860’s left behind a mansion in the woods there, which today stands in ruin, roofless, vigorous old cedars thrust thru the foundation, tall chimneys and walls, like bombed cathedral in Coventry. The bricks can be dug out of the forest soil – beautiful things, handmade and fired there on-site 150 years ago, pink and scorched and red and brown, loaves in their antiquity muffin-textured.
One does have the sense of living in rubble, here in the forgetful West. In our mud room, great old four-by-eight timbers from my friend’s falling-down barn have gone into bookshelves. 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 – including seed-saving advice, and classes taught by a surviving Maidu Indian in native techniques of cooking and preserving indigenous foodstuffs – so that when the peak-oil apocalypse arrives, we in the mountains will still eat.