October 16, 2011

TT sends a link to an article in an Ohio paper about Virginia Goson, my art teacher at Hyre Junior High. The article spotlights a mural she and her students painted in a Kenmore school in 1947. Her students are 77; she doesn’t look much older. I suppose after a certain point additional years have no more damage to do. I recognized her because the article told me who she was, but I did see the woman I knew. Back at Hyre she was dramatic, Cleopatra-like, with raven-black hair and excessive eye make up, and sweeping garments, every inch the Artist. She took an interest in me which I never particularly understood, for it was clear she didn’t think much of me as an artist. She’d corner me in homeroom in 8th grade and ask me questions, one of which was to guess her middle name, which I did in one try after she gave me the initial. The initial was “D” and I said “Dare” in two seconds. Maybe she thought I was some kind of oracle. She was one of the two deliberately discouraging teachers I ever had. She said, giving me a C on a design for a new kind of car, “It’s good you’re in college prep, for you have nothing of the artist in you.” What a victory for her that it still stings after 48 years.

Late in his life my father observed how grateful he was that he had happy memories to think on now that the active part of his life was over. I was jealous of that even as he said it. I don’t want to go so far as to say I have no happy memories, but I might in fact mean that. Whenever I’m thinking undirected thoughts–whenever monkey-mind prevails–my thoughts light on sad, tumultuous things, occasions when I was cruel or gauche or thoughtless, moments when I was excluded, wounded or rejected. Other, neutral moments might have a gleam about them, but they turn eventually toward some darkness, some regret that seems to be attached, in retrospect, to every moment of my life. Even if I tell myself to think of something purely happy, it is difficult to do without my mind’s pointing eventually to the way in which that joy ended in catastrophe or disappointment–or to nothing at all. Some pure moments are available from my experiences in the natural world– moonrise on that road in Clare, the yellowhammer perched for a moment on my boot, the skunk singing to me in the silver woods–but among persons there is always irony, mortification, regret, heartbreak, confusion about the fact that I have never seemed able to rouse very deep emotions–except for anger–in other people. I wonder if my mind lights on sad things as a sort of punishment, though I don’t know for what, and what good is the punishment if there is no understanding of the sin? Maybe no one else can think of a happy moment unalloyed with grief, either, and I simply need to consider it part of the human condition. It is as if I’m fighting a long war, a war as long as my life, and all thoughts, all emotions must be geared to combat until that struggle comes to some sort of end. Repose is nowhere to be found, whether because I cannot or because I must not. I have an excellent memory, one which responds to my needs, and I do not think it is blocking the joy. I think there has been none, no joy that lasted longer than the hour of its birth, or that I didn’t make myself out of pure will. If that is the case, then the war, whatever it is about, is just.

Amazing sky as dawn comes– silver and turquoise and gold all at once.

Realized (during church) that the exception to the lamentation above, those memories which are in fact sweet & without a bitter aftertaste, are the random sexual encounters (I don’t want to use the word “random”– perhaps “unanticipated” would be better) which began in Syracuse and were almost always good, and offered no expectations of quality or endurance to be disappointed by. And, to be fair, there were a considerable number. Not the same as a life, but– almost enough midnight snacks to make up for never having a meal.

Worn out by my own emotions on what may have been the most beautiful day of autumn. An orange monarch settles on a pale lilac aster against a cobalt sky. Only October can get away with that. I worry about my frog, what will become of him in winter. I think, “the blessed spirits who will not look after you will, however, look after him,” and, oddly, the thought is comforting.

My mind has gone twenty times today to the upstairs bar of the Abbey Theater in Dublin. Does somebody there think of me?