May 11, 2012

Hauled two truckloads of stuff out for the Cantaria yard sale. The garage is usable again, navigable. Nothing is a greater burden that what you once desired.

After the long, good day, I sat on the back terrace reading Wiley’s book. To this day I can’t think of reading as “doing something.” It feels like a leisure activity, something to be sandwiched in between tasks. It’s a strange attitude for an academic, but it comes from a childhood spent reading, hoarding moments in which to do it, secret and ecstatic, all the while fending off criticism that it wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing, that it really wasn’t doing anything at all. It was selfish. I was a kind of escape. It took me out of the group. It was lazy. It kept me from being “all boy.” So I read, my mind flying hither and thither like the feelers of an insect, wondering if I were letting something “real” go undone. It was a guilty pleasure.

As I read I absorbed the environment round about: the wall of white anemone roughened by the eruption of copper and emerald ferns, the subtle flutter of the million leaves, the birds calling and, as my stillness continued, becoming more and more intimate above and around me with their swift little lives, the expiring iris and peony, the sounds of cooking from DJ’s kitchen, the waves of perfume coming from somewhere– peony? Iris? Wild rose? It was ravishing. I have made for myself a kind of paradise, in a green evening in a green summer in the middle of all time. I have expressed my heart in landscape even as I have in poems, and it is beautiful to me. But as I took in this wedge of Eden, I realized something else at the same instant I realized its beauty. It is not for me. It awaits someone else. You have made us, and we are grateful, but we are not for you. The beflowered evening awaits another, and only then will it open fully, knowing to whom it belongs. Though I am sometimes the one who does, I am not the one it is done for. Never was. I think I wanted this, prayed for it back before I knew what all the implications were. It seemed angelic to create and move on and let another dwell in the creation, to be like a wild god indifferent to the outcome of one's labors. And if one is, in fact, an angelic being, it may work fine. I have never fully belonged even in worlds I created myself.  Even they await the approaching beloved, who is not me This is the central fact of my existence. So the wall of white anemones reminded me. So the evening twitter of the birds proclaimed. I close the book thinking this is not the revelation I expected to come out of an evening in the garden.

Two things fall like bolts of fire from heaven: enlightenment and comfort. In my life it has always been enlightenment. This is good, of course, but I would like to try the other next time around.

Joey McGillivray facebooks from Cambridge that he won’t be at the County Arms when I return this summer. Sweet gesture! I don’t mention that I’m not returning, though in my thoughts right now that corner of the world as clear as if I were standing there.

Discover HULU to give me memories back: the old Robin Hood with Richard Greene, Adam-12. Chloris Leachman way before her fame. Who knows what else before the night is gone? Un-looked-for advances in technology have served to preserve and return what I thought was lost. Listen to old songs on the computer, asking myself, "why was it, now, that you loved this?"