March 15, 2008

Daylight Savings gives me more of the dark of the morning, which is my favorite time to write.

Thursday was my father’s 89th birthday, when he was greeted with the news that record-breaking snows in Ohio brought down the Chinese elm–planted within a year of our moving there, shading my window all through my adolescence–which missed the house but took out power lines and plunged the house into dark and cold. Linda heard this from the realtor, who is master of things now. Dad thought he escaped all that, and maybe he should have, except it is he who has to start the insurance wheels turning. What a frustrating time it is for him at the end of things. Maybe his life was too quiet and this is the balancing of it; maybe it is just unfair.

Yesterday afternoon spent filming a couple of scenes in a movie I never learned the name of. I played a bible salesman. The director was a kid named Gaylin, and Thomas B was the vector who got me involved in the project. Those things always take more time than you think they will, and other plans were wrecked, but it was itself enjoyable. I continue to be amazed at how much these kids know about the mechanics of filmmaking, and how little about scriptwriting, wherefore their projects are almost always impeccably filmed failures. I never did read more than my scenes, so this one might be an exception–excepting, of course, the lameness of those scenes just mentioned.

A few nights ago I was exhausted and discouraged, and started browsing–as I suppose everyone does these days–through the offerings on the Internet. I found myself summoning up and listening to the calls of exotic birds: nightingales and kookaburras and lyre birds. I felt sudden peace enter my chest as if it were the shaft of a blessed spear. I was calm and, if not quite happy, serene in moments. Keats hovered in the room, a bird himself.

Dr. Phil Zaleski writes from Smith College that I am to be included in Houghton-Mifflin’s anthology "Best American Spiritual Writing."

Dusty lavender in the east, striped with peacock.

Conversation with my student David Verga. What full lives some people seem to have, rich with gifts and rich with promise. He is one of the most gifted and most promising young men I have ever known, and matches that with a calmness about his future than can bring but bounty. He is remarkably free from doctrine, and thus can learn from the winds themselves. On top of that, what an amazing turf of dark brown hair, with almost a life of its own. I sometimes ask people to call me so we can talk some more. Sometimes I mean it, mostly I don’t. I meant it with him. Conversation with Tom B’s friend Greg in the Glass House. It would be hard to find two intellects more unlike than ours. He is practically all precept and I am practically all practice. We attended the same lecture, and he was entranced because it was exploratory and rhetorically dazzling, while I was infuriated because it was wrong.

Took account of busywork yesterday, noting that there were ELEVEN little morning chores I had to do before leaving for school, and FIVE appointments for this and that during the day, one of which was lost because the others went too long, none of which was served rightly. How do we so dissipate ourselves? I know I’m worse than some others, saying "yes" to things before I give them thought, but others are worse still. Most of the university administrators appear to have lives made up of nothing but appointments, so that they forget they had other lives, and that their decisions have consequences.

Now the color on DJ’s door seems more an absinthe green. It hums and buzzes. It makes it look like he’s living inside an M&M