June 27, 2014

Slept late, pale, pale light in the east. Maud had to knock over the wastecan to wake me up.

Dropped by school to gossip a little with Dawn. I wish I hadn’t, for there is dissension and . . . well, strangeness that I was just as happy not knowing about.  Frank hinted at this and I waved it off, as I always do, as baseless nattering. Almost every departmental or institutional scandal (that I wasn’t the direct cause of, and sometimes even then) I initially publically poo-poohed as delusion. I simply do not pick up on these things fast.

Wednesday was so horrible that on Thursday I tried an experiment: I willed myself not to think of anything beyond the moment, where the next pleasure was coming from, what I should drink, what cool spot I should sit in to drink it, should go to the studio and paint (yes), should I do a little shopping (yes.). Get sweaty at the Y. Chat with the guy in the studio downstairs. Pull a few weeds. Water the garden. Take my time doing it. Watch a little TV.  Do not let any ambition or regret cross the mind. It worked. All the advice of all the gurus in the world should have assured me it would work, and they are right. In those hours of unaccustomed peace I realized, as I have at times before, that I have wandered from the Eden that the Lord set me in when I was born. I am a natural mystical, and the joy of dwelling in that radiant, guarded world sustained me through childhood and youth and would have sustained me forever if I hadn’t turned my heart to the world of men. The Expulsion from the Garden is re-enacted on my own little stage. Nothing but Desire keeps me from reentering the garden (I was there yesterday), and it is, almost hilariously, desire for the things which I know make men miserable: work, love, some sense of effort come to something, some sense of one’s own presence in the eyes of others. I lived part of my life with those things meaning nothing to me at all: maybe I could again. Is that wisdom or surrender? Today is another good candidate for a Day in the Garden.