September 18, 2011

New poems in Slant and Comstock Review. Pile of magazines with my work in them, which I have not catalogued, don’t care to catalogue. It didn’t used to be this way.

Planted blue hyacinths.

Looked at 21 acres out toward Barnardsville. Liked the previous owner’s gardens. Like the baby goats on the farm across the road.

Despairing of time. Everyone wants a piece of it and each request, taken in isolation, is acceptable. It is the mass which is annihilating.

Handel’s deeply strange Aci, Galatea e Polifemo on the CD player.

Backyard pink with turtlehead, cyclamen, rose of Sharon which I got tired of cutting back.

Later life is a sequence of learning things which would have been useful to your early life, had you but know them then. I was listening on the radio to an interview with a man who had written a book on the development of a child’s brain. He outlined the times at which certain kinds of learning are optimal, and while he spoke I gained one more clue as to why I am the way am. When I was a baby and a toddler, my mother was sick and I seldom saw her. My father attended upon her, and I seldom saw him. I am simplifying considerably, but basically telling it as it was. In addition, whenever you’d dip down into our life at home, or my sister’s, you’d find a remarkable lack of stimulation. No books, no pictures, no music, no conversation, a few flowers in the garden. Because of sickness and my father’s inclinations, you wouldn’t find much society either. There were the rooms we lived in and the natural world outside, and if I were to have company, I needed to create it myself from the most meager materials. Any offhand comment from a friend, any hint for something overheard on the radio, a random sentence in a book I would turn into a realm. I remember when my parents took it into their heads that I should learn to play an instrument. It never occurred to them that I had never seen a flute or a violin played, and my failure to learn them certainly had something to do with complete ignorance of what they were supposed to do. When DS stayed with us for a while, he observed that he had never gotten better grades, because there was nothing else to do in our house but study. In any case, when my brain was hungriest, there was nothing to feed it. So it went into itself. My colossal, pervading, untempered imaginative life is the result of having to have a life of some kind, and that being the only one available. In most ways it was a good thing. Because I would have died of boredom had I not found ways to fill the hours, I am almost never bored. My hunger for knowledge and beauty endures longer than the average of my race, as does my openness to new experience. I will never fill the void left by the lack of experience in my childhood, try as I may. On the other hand, I am myself like those twins who form a private language, having no one else to talk to. Even when they learn the common tongue, the deepest and first things must remain unexpressed. I simply have not lived in the same world as everybody else. Eloquence and adaptability disguised this fact from others, but not from me. I have been a spy in the world of men. I have enriched myself–and possibly them–but there is no home, no sure place to store the riches in. I am exactly as un-entailed as I was the day I was born. Maybe my imagination was not so powerful after all, as none of the destinations I imagined for myself ever became manifest.

Chris’ room is full of admonitions to better writing taped to the wall, the tables strewn with books to make him a better man and therefore a better writer. He has one laptop, but changes his position behind it after surfing the internet, so that writing remains sacred.

SART, without comment, pays me half the fee they advertized for Vance. Am I meant to be content with that? Am I meant to wait for the rest? Was I supposed to say, “Oh, no, it’s not necessary to pay me for my labor, as you do everybody else”? Can’t even find the lines I’m evidently meant to read between. Bailiwick never paid me for Anna Livia, and I hated them too much to ask. When I was in Cambridge, some magazine in Arizona said I’d won their fiction prize, which involved $1000. Haven’t heard from them since. The road neither ends nor bends.