April 29, 2020

As I write, stupendous evening rain. I think of the new seeds under their thin layer of soil, and I rejoice.

Young rabbits play in the garden under the bamboo.

A magazine remind me that Princess Ann and I are exact contemporaries.

The first UNCA covid 19 patient has been identified, an employee.

I fear at the end of this all I won’t be able to pull back from doing only what I want to do and having all the time I want to do it.

April 28, 2020

Finally heard about my Charlottesville flight, which was to have been on March 18. The person who needs to be scolded is never the one on the line. Student whose paper was due yesterday cries out this morning “What should I do?” The specific answer is, “Give this up and be a mother, which you’re probably good at..” You can’t say that. Our Dunning-Kruger administration does, among other things, make it an offense to speak truth to our students about where their virtues lie. We are failing them in every conceivable way. I feel like a rat leaving a sinking ship.

April 27, 2020

Catastrophic day. Partial mitigation of the catastrophe was watching a pair of thrushes glean my garden. Wrestled with the wild honeysuckle, making some progress. Excruciating pain in my hand because of twisting the spade some weird way. I bellowed “Stop it!” and it stopped. Not enough to turn the day around.

April 26, 2020

Good writing in the morning. Good gardening in the afternoon, opening a bed and putting in sunflowers. Dug out 39 bamboo shoots. I dug about that many out two days ago. The bamboo is relentless and means to take over the world. Poked my eye with a bamboo twig, and it stings even now. Thought going hither and thither like brown birds in the wind. I have never been my best friend’s best friend. I have never been my lover’s lover. Will I be able to die and leave this world, or will I ghost around the edges of it, able neither to enter nor to depart?

April 25, 2020

Last night was the first I felt sad and lonely for reasons consciously related to the quarantine.

Dream that in a deep pool in the forest I found a small, magical fish. The fish was shaped like a pyramid. We communed magically (none of the magic things the fish told me made it out of the dream, of course), and then I left. I woke from a dream within a dream and the fish was telepathically asking me to save it from this old Japanese guy who had captured it. The Japanese guy had destroyed the pool, but I took the fish away and ran to a lake that was nearby, freed the fish. In the last scene, the Japanese guy was kicking around at the edge of the lake, naming the attorneys who were going to help him sue me.

Discovered that the idea to celebrate my retirement came from A, who suggested it to my chair. The department probably were going to leave it unmarked on their own. Wish I hadn’t learned this. But, oh well.

Thought at intervals of my cousin Eileen. She came into the world with nearly everything against her. Yes, I was mean to her for no reason. Who would have though it would take fifty years to worry about this?

Moving forward on Sam-Sam.

April 24, 2020

Dream: I’m living in a commune with sketchy people. Drugs and alcohol abound. Somehow I acquire a son named Jesse. Jesse is about eight inches tall, but otherwise a perfectly formed little boy. The task then becomes protecting Jesse from the others, while not letting it look like I’m doing so, because they are dangerous and apparent caution would turn them against us. At one point one of the communards (Stephanie, actually) gives me a drug to calm me down. It fries my brain. I am incapable of functioning, and the drug knocks my eyes awry, so I can barely see past the bridge of my nose. I think I see Jesse climbing a huge ladder. I’m calling frantically to him. The dream ends before I know if he comes back.

About school: Won’t miss the stupid questions– for, contrary to the adage, there are stupid questions.

April 23, 2020

Woke from a long dream, one which renewed even after being interrupted by a trip to the bathroom. I had an eye injury, and was taken (by Pamela Myers, who knows why?) to a doctor in a gigantic mall– which has appeared as a locus of chaos in dreams before. I was surrounded by a clutch of retainers who had helped in the process of getting me to the doctor, somehow. When my eye was declared healed they all stood and looked at me. I said, “You expect a tip?” They all did. I took money from my wallet, and they all grabbed at it until nothing was left. Then they disappeared. “OK,” I thought, “find an ATM.” When I got to one, I saw that my credit card had fallen apart, and though I tried to jam it in the slot, it didn’t work. Pamela, who was meant to be my ride home, had disappeared, so I roamed the mall, unable to find a way out, unable to find anyone who would help me. I inquired at all the restaurants and little kiosks in the hall. One person pointed out that Pamela– who was meant to take me home–had been sitting at a restaurant with a friend watching the whole drama, chuckling at my consternation. I was confronting her as the dream ended.

Added to my note to my chair this morning: I haven't spent much time considering my own theory of teaching. Now, as I can look back at what it was I actually did, I realize that I had the notion that working to gain the deepest understanding I could of a work would enable me to transmit--through lecture and dialogue-- the deepest understanding a student could use at the moment. It is a bit oracular, but it worked. I present  what I have to say; students inquire and probe so that enlarges into what they need to hear. I have thought that being a true model of the disciplines I presented would go farther than any deliberate statement. I had the duty to know as much as I could possibly know, to  present the widest vista I could possibly present. . I realize how old fashioned this is: the model of the Upanishads, students gathered around the teacher's chair, listening. If I started again I would do the same thing. It was right. 

Contemplating O. He is a godly and devout man. I think I am, but when I meet one who really is, I am abashed. All Souls is lucky to have him for an Interim. I wish he could linger with us.

AGMC tried unsuccessfully to have a ZOOM rehearsal. We joked. We looked old and hairy.

April 22, 2020

Some yard work, trying to hack away the honeysuckle on the outside of the fence.

I  assumed the department was going to let my retirement go without notice. But yesterday I get a note from Lori to summarize my experience here, as part of a public statement about my retirement. Sorry to be so shallow, but I was happy. This is what I wrote:

I came to UNCA in 1983 to head the creative writing program, to which I added as soon as I could non-fiction and playwriting, also founding the student literary magazine, which I quickly passed on to abler hands. I was one of the originators of Arts and Ideas, however much it seems to have crept from its original vision. I loved teaching Humanities, and was maybe as good at it as anyone has ever been. The literature courses that I didn't like were few. I suppose I felt most lyrical and useful with the Metaphysicians and Romantic poets, but I also liked teaching courses I had not taught before, which gave me an opportunity to learn new things. I taught a brand new Arts & Ideas course in my last semester, and American Lit for the first time in my second-to-last. so I was never one for settling into comfortable niches. For a while I was the Shakespeare man. That was a deep mine where one might delve, and I still cherish the sense of discovery that came with every lecture. Creative writing classes depend on their quality on who's in them, but I have vivid memories of hearing student poems and thinking how lucky I was to have the first glimpse at what could, in some cases, only be called inspired. I loved teaching playwriting, and presenting, as happened for many years, to the public  evenings of student plays. Maybe my favorite class was an Oral Interpretation course that got taught only once as a special topic in creative writing.  That was at the apex not only of my energies as a teacher, but of UNCA as a force in the community. I looked for ways to be ecumenical, and for a decade a year did not go by when I did not act in a play put on by Theater UNCA. I sang several semesters with the music department's choral groups. In my last years I was concentrating on my own work, so I tend myself to forget that for a while I was the UNCA professor most evident in the wider community. I performed with every theater group then active, sat on arts committees downtown, sang with commuinity groups, and worked diligently, sometimes dangerously, on issues related to gay rights. The pastor of Trinity Baptist once devoted part of a sermon to me. Who could blame him?  I was then not only an advocate for gay rights (one of the founding members of SALGA, the Southern Appalachian Gay and Lesbian Alliance) but also the faculty advisor for the Wiccans. I was a founding members of the Asheville Gay Men's Chorus, and for two years the poetry slam champion of Asheville. To support new playwriting, I founded Pisgah Players, which became Black Swan Theater, which was active for several years, despite yearly attacks from Theater UNCA. We were the only theater group to perform for the North Carolina Writers' Network.

I am grateful for the personal growth teaching here allowed me. I came to Asheville as a poet, but was in the fullness of time an essayist, a fiction writer, a playwright, and a painter.  I don't know that this wouldn't have happened otherwise, but I don't know that it would. For a decade I ran Urthona Gallery in various places downtown, and served as art critic for the Citizen Times and columnist for The Laurel of Asheville. I had my hand in most of the theater that went on in the community, and am to this day an associate of Magnetic Theater and a partner in The Sublime Theater. I organized the one and only City Dionysia, which featured all the theater groups at that time in a grand performance cycle at the Diana Wortham.

I have been publishing broadly and consistently--and rather variously-- but the full volumes I have published since coming to UNCA include A Sense of the Morning and Bird Songs of the Mesozoic, collections of nature essays, and A Childhood in the Milky Way, a memoir. In poetry I published The Basswood Tree, Blood Rose, A Dream of Adonis, and Peniel. In the last two years my extended experiments with the novel have begun to pay off. My first novel The Falls of the Wyona won the Quill Prize from Red Hen Press. Local publisher Black Mountain brought out Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers, the story of the birth of the Asheville Arts Scene in the 90's. My 3rd novel, The One with the Beautiful Necklaces, a sort of hillbilly magical realism, is due out in November 2020.. Three completed novels wait in the wings. But the literary form to which I've devoted most energy has been theater. My first play won the North Carolina Playwrights Fund prize, and if I go to my archives to count, I have eleven prizes for playwritng, some of them considerable. I have had six professional productions in New York City, as well as productions in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cincinnati, London, DC, Portland, and on down. I have twice won the North Carolina Playwrights Prize (with a production in Greensboro) and four of my plays have been produced by the Magnetic Theater in Asheville. That needs to be mentioned because none of my colleagues bothered to attend. My trilogy Father Abraham was given a fine reading by the Sublime Theater, and is being considered for production at Ford's Theater in DC.

Let me say that my goals as a teacher and as a writer have-- I understand at this moment-- a certain lucky unity. I have striven most essentially for clarity-- to say as a writer what I mean as clearly as it can be said, to explain as a teacher the inner workings of art as clearly as it can possibly be laid out, to demand of my students clarity in understanding and in expression. I am a believer that both the making and the consumption of art should be an exultation. joyful, redemptive, revealing. When I was at my best, my classrooms were joyful, redemptive, revealing. I am satisfied with that.

April 21,2020

Cautious grocery shopping. Arriving at the ABC too early to restock the liquor cabinet. Realizing that it is possible that I will never stand before a classroom again. In some ways this annihilation is better than the build-up to that ceremonial “last day,” which, being valorized in my imagination, was bound to be disappointing. Thoughts of academia led me to think of my old wonderful professor, Earl Wasserman, at JHU.  His death in my second semester sealed my fate there. Early accounts of his life revealed the most astonishing and thorough-going anti-Semitism. He was rejected for employment because the department already had a Jew. He was recommended for employment even though he was a Jew, because he wasn’t a cartoon Yid. This was after the War. Was it just Baltimore? Was it just JHU?  Hard to imagine this in a time when I was alive. In any case, I realize it is Wasserman and John Shaw after whom I modeled my teaching. I hope that is a scintilla of immortality.

April 20, 2020

Tavener on CD.

Green-gray rain outside, rather beautiful, rather Irish. Except for the sunflowers, whose bed I have not yet dug, all I wanted to get into the ground is in the ground.

Still capable of collapsing into grief over the loss of Circe. Something is unresolved about all that. I see her little ghost here and there, pet it, speak to it, so if she wants to stay a little while longer she will know she is welcome.

April 19, 2020

Faure on You Tube.

Though at waking I thought I was stuck, I spent practically the whole day writing. Now I am stuck again, though a little further along. I’m not sure I have so much as stepped out of the house today. I opened the door, put my shoes on, but it was cold.

Jared writes on his Dinesen paper:

Dr. Hopes,

I so appreciated your kind words on my last paper. Encouragement from a literary-minded titan like you is SO much appreciated, you have no idea, seriously, thank you.  Attached is my Dinesen paper which was a blast to write, as it distracted me from the uncertainty of these strange times. She was a brilliant woman. I wish we could discuss these writings in class, but as Jim Morrison would croon, these are "strange days" indeed. I hope you enjoy my paper and are thriving creatively in quarantine. I am applying to grad school asap, and am currently finishing my writing sample. If you would be willing to read over it to make sure it isn't total garbage that would be great haha. If you're too busy I also understand. Thank you for always being an encouraging mentor and constantly reinforcing the importance and perennial beauty in literature.
You are appreciated, and your retirement is deserved, while also being a loss to the students of UNCA.

Thank you for being yourself in a world of drones, much appreciated,

To have been myself in a world of drones is an honor I had not thought of for myself. So much the better.

April 18, 2020

Folies de Espana. I will put the last flowering maples into the ground. The blue of the sky cuts.

April 17, 2020

Contemplating my at-one-time-preferred-vocation as a playwright. Will there be theaters when the plague is ended? Can the habit of going to live theater–never very strong–be revived? Will people want playwrights and new plays, or will they want to see West Side Story again and again? In the face of the variety of suffering inflicted by all this, it is a small matter. But there is time to think about everything.

Planting and gardening in the evening light, hibiscus and flowering maple. Severe and disappointing freeze damage from the last couple of nights.

April 16, 2020

Gesualdo on the CD, which I bought in Tel Aviv.

Upstairs while the cleaning women are downstairs. As they were getting started, I felt an attack of ALMOST irresistible diarrhea. It was an interesting two hours.

Hydrangea arrive in a box. Must be planted.

On toward evening, achy and chilled. I thought the worst, but aspirin and a hot toddy cured me. 

April 15, 2020

Angie Parrotta has died. She was on anybody’s top 10 list of prettiest girls at Ellet. And without the lofty air some of the other pretty girls had. She even once went out with me.

I note that the light bulb in the elephant lamp on my desk has been burning non-stop, twenty four hours a day since I moved in.

Minor gardening day, planting California poppy, morning glory, yellow 4 o’clocks.

Posted this on Facebook: Some reflections on the current administration: at any other time, in any other place the volcano of indecencies now occupying the the White House would not be in the White House, but in prison. He goes on national TV and declares his intention to subvert the Constitution, and yet survives. He commits in one day 5 abominations that would have unseated any other president in American history the first time through. Yet. . . he survives, on TV the next night, in a time of plague, jawing about how wonderful he is, and if something has gone wrong, it is not his fault. And yet he survives. He is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth or believing in the full reality of anyone but himself. . . and yet he survives. The future is going to look at us and see bad judgment worse (because the issue was clearer, the evil rhetoric absolutely unashamed) than that which saw Hitler to power. No one with a brain or a conscience can vote Republican ever after this. The second thing is, I am a playwright, and pride myself on being able to write a play about anything. Nope. Uh uh. Not this. Why? Because you have to make Trump ten times brighter and more human than he really is to have a remotely believable character. The truth of him is too vile and sickening to work in fiction. Nobody would believe it. His affect is comical but his effect is tragic. Flat, two-dimensional, nothing but a pair of fat baby hands reaching out and saying "gimmee gimmee." He would be laughed off any stage. That his stage is not a stage but the world is the most horrifying thing in my lifetime-- and I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc. And I haven't even seen this evening's abominations. . . .

With the dogwoods in full glory, looking out any window is looking through an ivory lattice.

April 14, 2020

Cool, bright day. The department met on Zoom, and I realized that it will be the last department meeting of my professional life. No mention was made of that. We talked of how to get our bewildered students through this uncertain time. It is a sad, dark time, and not only because of the virus. The institution I served through my adult life slides toward mediocrity–past mediocrity, actually, toward real debility. Without bragging I can say it will never–in the foreseeable future– know a professor like me again. It is Jerusalem without her prophets. E, perhaps, but the situation makes him so miserable I see a potential change of profession for this man who was born to be an academic. Never again–in the foreseeable future–will any decision be made at this institution with truth, academic freedom, educational priorities, social progress, or the welfare of the students foremost in the mix. A university run like a business is no longer a university. Like Trump, it tries to cut as many corners, be as useless and retrograde as it can be without being caught. I cannot see the end of this, nor did I get the sense from the department that they can either. Grab a floating beam and save what you can. I saw the best of times at UNCA. I suppose I’m a sort of irritation because they will not.
I thought of Frost:
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Four cartons of Night, Sleep arrived at my door. There must have been a reason. I’ve forgotten what it was. Ken loved Jason of the Apes. We agree that WR could play the lead role. W, E, K, young faces just beginning– I watched them during the meeting, sad that I didn’t know them better, recognizing that’s it’s possible I will never see them again.

April 13, 2020

Either I slept through it, or we dodged the terrible storms predicted for the South. Everyone else posts about picking up the pieces and assessing the damage. My peonies may have lost a few petals. Made a gin run for Ann, who says she has not left her house since March 14. Read through Jason. It works. It is strong.

April 12, 2020

Easter. Tremendous rain on the gray garden. Listening to Rachmaninoff. Read Herbert’s “Easter,” realizing that in retirement I can have a different relationship with poetry, immediate and personal, not always having find context or significance or strip the layered meanings bare. A return to mystery.

When I first opened the front door this morning, for a brief second I imagined that somebody had left me an Easter basket. Of course not, but my mind’s first impulse was belief.

April 11, 2020

Holy Saturday. Italian Lauda on the CD. Day of pale sapphire perfection. Massive gardening. Hacked out several lines of bamboo. Dug the bed for and lay down eighteen canna bulbs. Transplanted the variegated cannas I planted my first spring here, but which never prospered because they came up in the shade. Watched a thrush glean my front garden. Dug up a snake while planting. Left and dug somewhere else, and when I came back he had slithered away A woman was walking a big pink dog down Lakeshore. A car stopped on the street and the driver shouted “A pink dog!” After a little chatter, the woman said, “That’s what happens with a bored fifteen year old in the house.” The woman confided, “I don’t think she knows she’s pink.” Made a pork roast and put it in the fridge without eating any of it. Heard from Stephen in Dublin. He says he hasn’t seen anyone in days. This would be harder on the young and social. And the Lord sleeps in His tomb. Accidentally, but properly, I have been silent all day.

April 10, 2020

Good Friday. The solemn music of the men at noon at All Souls is in my head. I remembered Golgotha in Jerusalem, the skull and the split rock, and how in that moment we were cleansed and saved forever. Christianity has backtracked from that; I have not. Shake the earth, darken the sky, rend the curtain of the temple. I know what is coming.

The iris put themselves forward, the first being yellow as morning light.

April 9, 2020

Maunday Thursday. Solomon’s seal blooming, and the blue sacred lily.

Ate nothing but salad yesterday. By morning this was revealed to be a mistake.

Gout has joined the party.

April 8, 2020

Vittoria on the CD.

Chills last night. As I lay there shuddering, I thought “this is it,” but it turns out it wasn’t, unless Covid-19 makes very odd and interrupted progress. Perhaps I was simply cold. Went to the grocery store, almost passing out because I couldn’t breathe through the scarf I used as a mask. I was ashamed looking at my meager cart behind the groaning Conestoga wagons pushed by other shoppers.

Our President grows more surreal and monstrous each day, a pathology compounded every time he opens his mouth. If I owned the TV stations, I would not broadcast his dangerously misinformed and humiliatingly self-flattering comments. He is the worst man in American history.

I may be spoiled for the rest of my life, getting accustomed at this leisurely pace, having all but no responsibilities, needing to meet no objectives but those I set for myself. Interested also in the ways public life might change. If you order alcohol online, you had to be there to sign for it when it comes. Not any more. Someone is going to realize if it doesn’t NEED to happen always, then it doesn’t ever NEED to happen. Reminds me of all the airline regulations which were hysterically enforced one day and forgotten the next.

Linda sends me pictures of frog eggs in her pond. I am consumed with envy. I think the pump makes my water move too fast, or maybe the presence of fish discourages egg-laying. I fill a steel tub with water and set it by the pond, and experiment to see who colonizes it and how soon.

Cecily gives FW a good review on Facebook.

April 7, 2020

Went downtown to pick up the paperwork for my shocking taxes. I did sell off my positions in time to avoid the crash, but had severely underestimated the size of the capital gains taxes thus accrued: a blow that cannot be complained about in these catastrophic times. Planted a crabapple in the front yard. The delivery man and I looked at each other as though we were one another’s greatest peril, which I suppose was true. Working steadily on Sam-sam.

April 6, 2020

Carol gives me the news that I will owe $50,000 in capital gains taxes. I take the news with a shrug. Some Great Thing pulls ahead with such speed even $50,000 is little matter. 

Cut an idiotic face mask from an old T-shirt.

April 5, 2020

Palm Sunday. Watching Palm Sunday service at All Souls on the Internet. Bare and sad. Jeff and Allyson gallantly make up the choir, the four of us doing the Gospel with as much drama as we dare. The lilacs, white and lavender, bloom, the red buds a haze of purple smoke. Drinking syrupy gin from the freezer.

April 4, 2020

Ordinary day in isolation, growing to a great wrath in the evening. I feel–as I have ever felt– that I am stopped at the edge of what I want and who I am, and he who stops me is the one who should lift me up and forward, according to his promise. Prepared to dance fury in the garden at the rising of the evening star. But when I went out, it was so beautiful, the feathers of the pines against the pastel sky, the calling of so many birds in their last music before night. The skies were clear of vapor trails and the noise of travel. Ishtar sparkled like a diamond over my old house. Lights began to burn in the neighbors’ windows. There was too much peace for me to launch the assault I had intended. Praise, grudging at the edges, but thanks and praise. Beautiful garden, beautiful night oncoming. I decided to dwell, for the moment, on nothing but that.

April 3, 2020

Big gardening day: filled the second raised bed, planted cosmos, black and white hollyhocks, pink snapdragons. Also worked out a little with the weights that have been sitting idle in the living room since I moved here. As I gardened, a narrative glitch in Sam-Sam worked out in my head. Another was of saying that is that inspiration came to me through the verdant earth. Merritt stopped in his fire engine red truck, and we chatted about dying embers and the fall of sparrows.

April 2, 2020

Hesitant to let the cleaning lady in, but the chance of infection seemed remote (she said 2 weeks ago “I have my hands in chemicals all day”) and we must allow independent workers to make as much money as they can in these catastrophic times. Planted the case of daylilies. Shouted to the neighbor across the street. He and his son were digging worms.

April 1, 2020

Open email to find a note from GB. Immediately recollect his enormous endowment. Happy memories. Apparently I used to write lots of letters to people, in which I enclosed poems. I hardly remember that at all.

Another cold and rainy day, though my spirit is higher than it was yesterday, full again of plans and determinations. I see for myself real difficult in getting back to schedules and deadlines after this. Having nothing in particular to do an infinite time to do it is seductive. Found myself resenting the recording of the Saint Matthew Passion yesterday, as it interfered with my doing nothing at all.

Wake as usual, but lie in bed indulging fantasies until the light breaks.

From a student on Facebook: David Hopes, your teaching had a lifelong impact on me. Thank you. Wish I remembered her.