Thursday, October 17, 2024

 

October 16, 2024

Sudden sharp cold. As I brushed my teeth, I saw a doe and her young one cross the street on the other side of the creek.

Went to downtown Alpharetta to a cafĂ© with airplane decor, where they didn’t produce my coffee until I’d asked three times. The second time I was scolded for being impatient. “We’re working on it. We haven’t forgotten you.”I inquired what there was to it beyond pouring coffee into a cup, and got a supercilious look. There are reasons for not letting women run businesses. Strolled past a barber shop, stopped to get my wild mane cut. I don’t have to LOOK like a refugee, Found a seat in the library among the early voters. Wrote a poem and looked at a glossy movie book. Tried to go to the bathroom, but there was a huge black man soliciting sex. Wandered about in the cold bright light. Sat watching the astro-turf where kids play. A big boy and two little boys–brothers, I think– played a kind of football which was mostly an excuse for an extended brawl. I admired the big boy, his engagement with his brothers, his kindness, the attention he was paying them that they will never forget. From their voices when they shouted at each other I think they’re British.

Spectrum email declares that my Internet is restored. Why is my doubt instant and inerradicable?

Home either tomorrow or Friday, depending on the motion of the spirit. If I get back too soon, if I get back with everything still unresolved, it will be too exhausting. L & J are off to Ohio, so my departure time doesn’t have to be specific. Had a productive time downtown today, and know how I can have a productive time in days to come, so the urgency is off just as the possibility arises. 


Aquarium

 

October 15, 2024

I’ve switched typing surfaces, which makes things marginally better.

The house in Dahlonega appears to be a done deal.

On D’s advice I motored yesterday to the Chattahoochie River National Recreational Area on Jones Bridge. Walked in wood that are mostly yellow poplar, therefore lofty and airy. Discovered the windleaf. The river itself looked normal (though I never laid eyes on it before, so there’s no opportunity for comparison), but the trail bridges cross feeder creeks, and mud on the vegetation there indicates a flood stage as much as twelve feet above their current levels. Almost every walker but me had at least one dog.

Mornings are hard, longing for home, anxious to find a way to do my work. But, I search the Internet for something to do, do it, and by evening TV and family cocktail time, the circumstantial contact feels comfortable and sustainable. Then it begins again the next day. L & J have certainly gone out of their way to accommodate me. 

Fascinating email from Spectrum announcing that my payment is due. Haven’t had Internet service since September 27, and they’re closed as clams about what, if any, progress is being made in restoration. Companies make people hate them more by hiding behind a baffle of blind email addresses and unnavigable phone trees.

Downtown to the Georgia Aquarium. Stopped on the street by attractive kids trying to run a charity scam. I almost fell for it. All the denizens of the aquarium had Halloween decorations in or on their tanks. Skeletons lay on the bottom of the shark tank as if they had been stripped clean by the predators above. A male beluga was erect and trying to interest a female in afternoon delight. She declined. The sea dragons had bats on strings hanging from their tank.


 

October 14, 2024

Birthday celebration for M, organized with my sister’s apparently effortless aplomb and enthusiasm. With two infants in the room, discussion turned inevitably to baby things, which was informative but in which I could not participate the least bit. Everyone was tired and giddy with baby-attending. Everyone was fascinated by the babies’ doing nothing at all but allowing themselves to be served. This is their lives for a while, as mine is watching it unfold.

During the night my laptop was blasted by something, and in the morning I had to recover Word Perfect and e-mail and Google Chrome and Facebook, and wait for everything to upload and unfold two hundred miles from the book in which I note my passwords. I was not calm. I was not patient. I pictured a situation in which I was even more isolated and impotent than I was before. It did turn out well, but it is not yet time to feel more grateful for that than infuriated by the supplemental tribulation.

Domicile temporarily to myself while everyone checks out the vacation house the family is buying in Dahlonega. I think they’re meeting the inspector. The boys’ lives speed ahead. They each have two houses and a piece of land at a time when, I think, I was still in grad school.


 

October 13, 2024

In the dim of my little basement retreat in Atlanta. Shuttling between sites is possible but wearing thin, until I compare it with the lot of those who have nowhere to go at all. Alpharetta hosted a street festival last night, which we attended. Lots of music, convivial and diverting. Listening to WCLV, streaming from my ancient haunts. Baroque Bieber going Gl-o-r-ia over the airwaves.

I wonder if my discomfort here is mainly having nowhere to balance the keyboard as I type. The room is cold. Can mendicants mention that the room is cold?

Monteverdi “Magnificat.”


Hiawatha

 

October 11, 2024

Retrieved a CD player (acquired but never used) from the riverfront office, discovering that I do have a broadcast radio and, Internet or no, can have the sound of a human voice in my house. Listened to the Sixteen performing the Eton Songbook by dim light, writing, reading Traherne and The Song of Hiawatha, an evening of almost perfect bliss amid the ruins.

Read Lao Tzu at the car dealership and Traherne at my desk at night. What a collision is there, one renouncing with a wry smile, the other gathering in with both arms, wanting life to be richer and richer, battening on the bounty of the soul. I am in Traherne’s camp, of course, though the old mendicant clears the air. 

Added a single figure to Forest Edge and made it my favorite painting. 

Rose early and gardened. Needed a jacket, and then I didn’t. Planted and mulched daffodils, iris, autumn crocus, those onion-like flowers that I don’t remember the name of and can’t look up because there is no Internet. Allium. 

I am happy at my house.

I am miserable away from it.

These truths should be part of the equation, but clearly they are not. 


 October 10, 2024

Cold morning. Turned my furnace on. As there was no explosion, I assume it’s independent of the water system.

Errands. Got a prescription filled. The pharmacy guy says they have Internet in Black Mountain and were promised water this afternoon. Made an appointment for routine car service, that I missed twice during the hurricane. 

Drove to the Mill at Riverside. My space smells like an outhouse, but is secure and untouched. High Five, miraculously, stands, though scoured empty by the flood. All the lawn furniture is gone. Smashed sheds. The far side of the river white with what seems to be an infinity of pcp pipes. Workers and owners out on the pavement trying to hose off (with what water?), dry, and clean furniture and equipment. Grace Plaza becomes a staging area for water distribution and the parking of utility trucks. Streets still hazardous with splintered lumber. Linda sent lily and elephant ear bulbs home with me. I got those planted, along with two roses that came from Heirloom and a row of orange iris by the street. All live plants are planted; the bulbs can bide their time a little. Interesting process of getting clean, or cleanish, after a bout of gardening. Fifty thousand years of being mostly dirty becomes quite understandable.

Routine maintenance at Anderson Toyota. Took up time, anyway. Gorgeous autumn day, the trees etched with blue shadow on the nearby mountain. 

Poking through old journals reveals that I began painting in November 1991.


History

 

October 9, 2024

Thinking of the man in the High carrying his baby (less than 12 months, I’d think) from work to work in the Modern Art room, explaining and exclaiming. Like Wordsworth, I imagine that some dim recollection of that moment will color, however unconsciously, the child’s life.

Back in Asheville, suppressing rage that the Internet is not restored. A bear defeated the bear-proof lid (or else I left it unsnapped), overturned the garbage bin and took the food, by that time quite elderly. Hope it didn’t make him sick. It was all the contents of my fridge, and therefore a windfall. 

Good news is that T cleaned up my yard and made it look civil again. It was a task that I wasn’t sure I could address. 

Because of the Cone of Silence over Asheville, I don’t know what havoc Milton is loosing upon Florida.

Unable to master my car’s various display mechanisms, I listened to news the whole way, concluding that Conservatism in 2024 is solely focused upon preventing others from achieving the lifestyle and privileges you yourself have attained or aspire to. It emphasizes difference, mocks compassion, adores dogma, has no particular interest in the truth. All Conservative spokesmen (those interviewed by the media, anyway) consciously and knowingly proceed from a dishonest premise.

My three turkeys paid a visit. I think they’re all girls, for none is aggressive or showy. 

Looked up the hurricanes of 2004, the likes of which I imagined I’d never see again. This is what I wrote on September 8, 2004:

Our little hill was so undisturbed, and I didn’t turn on the radio today, so that I didn’t know Biltmore and the River District, Black Mountain and Swanannoa are under water. South and East Asheville are blacked out, and half the city is without water. I finally went to look when I received an e-mail from a patron who was coming to my studio tomorrow afternoon, which said, “Let’s reschedule when things get back to normal.” I snapped on the car radio and heard people howling that someone had given the order to open the floodgates at the Bee Tree Reservoir at exactly the wrong moment, which meant a flood of water came down the Swanannoa just as the rivers and creeks were carrying their full load of hurricane runoff. I drove in a panic toward my studio, but found that the river road was blocked and flooded. I circled around through the city and came down Chicken Hill, and saw the flood plain of the French Broad not only under water, but under flowing water. For ten years the River District has been trying to pull itself up out of the grubby warehouses and dim garages and become the area’s arts showplace. Now it is under water. Who knows what’s gone and what remains. The New Blue Studios are under water half way to the roof. The Warehouse Studios first floor must be at least twenty inches under. Railside Studios stood in the middle of a lake, but I parked and waded through, and the upper room of my studio is high and dry, though the lower room is gone and a thick stack of paintings I had on the floor are lost.  I didn’t care as much as I thought I would when I was driving and hadn’t seen the awful majesty of it all, People were lining the Craven Street Bridge to watch the great brown fury of the French Broad, bearing whole trees and the walls of buildings. The most distressing part was the heavy stench of fuel oil, the red pools of it lying on the eddies, from where tanks had been overturned and storage facilities flooded. The smell is unbearable. I hope nobody lights a match. Tonight’s forecast calls for rain, and Hurricane Ivan is coming.

This is what I wrote on September 18:

The sky is green-gray, a high wind moaning in the tips of the trees, a day and more now after the slamming through of Ivan. I have all the lights on, and the CD playing Rococo opera, tapping away at my computer, just to revel in having power again. We got fringes of hurricanes in Ohio once in a while–Donna, I remember–but they were just a line of especially vivid thunderstorms. DJ and I watched Ivan on the Weather Channel Wednesday night as it poised to strike Mobile. I kept saying “it’s not coming here.” Thursday afternoon I went down to church and helped lift everything off the floor to the third or fourth shelf, in case high water came. I told everyone it was a false alarm, but I kept lifting, because I wasn’t sure. My nature is such that I have refused to cry wolf from time to time even when the wolf was at the door. Thursday night, Ivan came indeed. The lights went off at about 10:30. What followed seemed to be an eternity of dark and noise, though of course it couldn’t have been any longer than the hours on the clock. It was impossible sleep; I was up most of the night. When walking circles in my own floor grew old, I put on my yellow slicker and went out into the storm itself. The trees were swaying like grass. The mountains were great dark harps, roaring. My colossal sweet gum seemed rocked by a series of explosions. Green flashes were sometimes lightning, sometimes exploding transformers, plunging some new part of the city into deeper darkness. What surprised me was that the hurricane was warm, like a flying bath. I liked that part. Waves of wind-driven rain swept like surf across the parking lots. A pine split and sailed into the street, all but grazing the tips of my toes. I stood and watched it, wondering, until the second when the question was answered, “is that thing going to take me out?” Tremendous, roaring majesty, an exultant god whirling in the middle of the air. I stood in the middle of the Wachovia parking lot, the waves of watery wind coursing around me, the hemlocks bending almost to the ground, and I felt solid; I felt like the earth itself, immovable, maybe, in an unfathomable sort of way, merry, with the great wind roaring around as though we were complimentary powers come to visit each other at the edge of the world. It was stupendous. One doesn’t get to use that word very often, “stupendous.” 

I startled Zack when he came out with a flashlight to inspect his porch, and I called his name out of the whirlwind. The air is filled with the incense of shattered pines. Carolyn’s basketball hoop had been uprooted and launched through a back window of my Explorer. But, in truth, what surprised me was that the damage wasn’t worse. Wind like that, rain like that, should have obliterated the world. The epic quest for a cup of coffee at last achieved– downtown had power--I drove to the studio. The river had risen, but not so far as before. The river district had electricity, so I stopped, picked up my brushes, and painted. DJ bought a battery powered radio, and we learned that two lanes of Interstate 40 had fallen into the Pigeon River gorge, that tornadoes and mudslides had wiped out an as-yet-unknown number in Macon County. Flooding closed all highways east and west, though we could probably have fled north if we’d needed to. The street-level businesses in Biltmore and the riverside studios which had just been crawling out of the debris of Frances were hit again. Ryan e-mailed me about a group of students holed up in a house behind Charlotte Street, and a flying oak had crushed all their cars but his. I had been thanking my luck, though luck, as usual, was not doled out equally. As DJ and I were pulling out to go to rehearsal for the bishop’s installation–which even natural disaster is, apparently, powerless to stop–the lights in our houses came back on.

 Found this prayer I wrote for the reconstruction of All Souls:

With Solomon the founder of the temple, with Peter the founder of temples now and yet to come, we acknowledge that all that is built without the Spirit is built for a season or a time, but all that is built with the Spirit is build for the ages. We ask the Spirit which God sends to inhabit the true labors of the human heart to come to us, to abide in our labors, to inspire our bounty to right use, to perfect our skill and our determination, so that in our building all may be as the Spirit wills. May the lines be plumb, the foundations firm, the door open to all who would enter. May we who have received the legacy of the past deliver the gift whole to those who come after. May those who come after remember us as men and women who received the Spirit, who acted by its voice, and raised our roof into the stars.

Paid a $114 water bill. $5 dollars of that was water actually used, The rest was exactly the infrastructure that failed this week, 

Painting to Obrecht masses on the CD. Serenity that would be prized if the goal were serenity.