June 2, 2008

Fought off sleep as I was driving from Virginia Beach this morning, but now I feel enough alertness in my for at least a few lines.

Returned home to a world still haunted by the din of cicadae, that alien sound now even louder than it was before, the great bodies of the insects themselves buzzing through the air and flopping clumsily from branches and bushes in ineffectual escape. Black hollyhocks and dark orange lilies have come into bloom.

I kept a handwritten journal at Virginia Beach, but perhaps I will try to reconstruct it from memory. The Sandbridge area, where Jack and his sister’s beach house is, is a long island or peninsula which manages a measure of wildness even though the upper part is entirely built over. DJ and I saw a deer hoofing through the sand one morning, and Stout the dog barked at a turtle in the yard, and people say they have seen wild horses. The lower end is a wildlife preserve with dramatic dunes and various kinds of pools containing various kinds of wildlife. An indigo racer shared the boardwalk long enough for me to touch him. At the same moment watersnake was swimming toward the largest slider I’ve ever seen, almost the size of a sea turtle, a great dome of light-snuffing black. Ospreys are numerous, and find buoys and pylons on the water to their liking as nest sites. I walked along the beach (always alone; the house wasn’t much for outdoor activities that were not sunbathing) and beachcomber picking were slim, though there were many shattered horseshoe crab shells and the alien-looking skeletons of rays. The beach was awash with mermaids’ purses. I walked to the big pier and talked with a couple of fisherman and rangers, who told me what could be seen if I had arrived at a luckier time. Black dolphins sported in the surf, which was plenty lucky, though a sight, it turned out, not to be repeated. One day we took the ferry across Carratuck Sound. It was a lovely trip, but part of the loveliness depended on one’s ignoring a truly unbelievable mass of floating trash. An osprey chick hawked at us from her perch on an island pylon.

The company was Jack and Leland and DJ and myself, with Leland’s two friends, Tom and Kevin, joining the party last night. Had only one night with them, and I’m sorry, for they seemed lively and imaginative and engaged with the world. The weekend was, actually, rather trying, though no blame is to be laid. For me, relaxation is to do different things than I usually do. For the rest of the group, it is to do nothing at all. Twice I heard "Oh, isn’t it great just to do nothing at all!" and my inner response was not only "no", but "hell no." This is a difference of perspective in which there is no possible harmony.

Did read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Gripping, of course, but also the kind of book which could have been written in a week. That sort of writing is like composing in heroic couplets: once you get the form down, it goes like an avalanche. It’s harder to stop than to go on.

My sister keeps me up to date by cell phone on the latest dad drama. He forgets he has given himself an enema, and goes to bed, and wakes with the room covered in his own feces. She uses his credit card to buy Depends and more sheets, and is almost arrested at Wall Mart because the credit card is clearly not hers. Father is miserable and confused and hedged on all sides, he thinks, by enemies, and has begun to feel the cancer in his throat, and decides he doesn’t want to go on living. He divines that the quickest way is dehydration. Father was always one for surprising you with lightning–and often jaw-droppingly contextless-- decisions, but whatever one thinks of his choices now, he has a legal living will, and it is clear he must have foreseen and provided for this moment. Linda asks if I want to see him "before" and I say, "Not especially." No one but her heard me say that, but still I think I must explain. I’ve said before that I believe we all were a surprise to dad, and not a joyful one. He was happiest and best when he was alone, a wild child looking at the world from the fringes of a fairy kingdom of his own making. I see him in my mind’s eye now, peering from the brush on the banks of the Mongahela, squirrel-eyed and joyful as he would never be again. I think the sovereignty of dying should be yielded to him. I think he would be bewildered, distracted, disappointed to find himself amid a host in the last moments– a host which he would not necessarily identify as "loved ones." I don’t know this for sure. I know that at my death, however much I might want to be surrounded by loved ones, I would be surprised actually to be, and maybe worried that even in those last moments I might not fulfil expectations. Dad is five times more private and more secret than myself. I think I am doing what he wants. I am giving room to a man who never had enough room. I am giving the last illimitable imagining to a man whose imagination was always crashing into what people presented to him as reality. I know he will not be thinking of me in his last moments. I know that none of us will be able to imagine what he will be thinking. I believe it might be, in ways that might even be recognizable to me, beautiful.

Notice that Passport will be part of the Gone In 60 Seconds Festival, to be performed in a few days in Brooklyn.