September 28, 2020

Got up determined to put some steps on my step-counter, though my phone’s goal of 8500 + a day has been fulfill able only thrice. Walked the bird-watching path at Beaver Lake, seeing few birds (and, despite the crowded parking lot, few people) but taking repose from the faintly glowing gold of the autumn bog. Watched terrapins at ease in the gray water. Went from there to the Greenway, beginning where it begins under the railroad bridge and walking a piece. Evidence of desperate human existence under the bridge. More jimson than I’d ever seen in my life, interwound with Byzantine purple morning glories. 

E is for Effort

 

September 27, 2020

Freakish effort on manuscripts, getting ready for publication and sending out more, perhaps, than on any other day of my life. I maintain that my work is better than the rest, and so should not be rejected. Nevertheless, I find something to correct and improve every time I go back in. 

Trump’s tax returns reveal whatever every sensible person already knew: that he is a cheat and a disastrously bad businessman, whose only real motivation is finding a way to work every situation, every opportunity to his own benefit– and he’s not even very good at that.

Bear

 

September 26, 2020

The dogwood berry banquet continues. Bubba bear paid a visit. I ran out onto the porch to take a video. I startled him, and he ran toward the street just as a car rounded the curve. He winced and backed like a frightened child, and the car stopped just in time. I never expected–or wanted–to be a danger to a bear.

Good writing, sometimes quite old projects brought back into the light and completed. Not, however, making my step count. Woke oddly ill, which has diminished through the day. Noted that I had no recollection of what happened after our ZOOM meeting last night, and wondered if I’d drunk enough for alcohol poisoning. I looked in the fridge and saw that I had eaten the leftover vegetables, and had no recollection whatever of doing so.  Pull back from that. Water at my elbow. 

Hawk

 

September 25, 2020

Red-shouldered hawk in ruddy, banded glory at my pond. The berries of the dogwoods must have hit perfection today, for the trees bristled with every kind of bird gobbling them up, including the biggest crows I have ever seen. 

Lamentations

 

September 24, 2020

Trump refuses to commit to a peaceful transition of power, declaring (already) that the only legitimate outcome is a victory for him. So far as I know, this is unique in American history. It becomes clearer now why he’s anxious to pack the Bench with his choices, assuming that a contested result would go to the Supreme Court. As a naive boy I would have assumed even the suggestion of such a thing was an admission of treasonous intent. Some evil magic surrounds this president. He has survived 10,000 blunders each of would have sunk anyone else who ever held that office. A simple explanation is the determined collusion of the Republican Party, but that is another mystery. In the past, there have been at least a few persons of conscience even among the unconscionable. Does Trump hold a lien on all their houses? Does he have incriminating videos? Is the desire to hold onto power so great that a part would gladly destroy a nation in order to do so?

Facebook overruns with ways in which Trump could steal or invalidate the election. Nothing these days is inconceivable, as such things once were. 

Breonna Taylor’s murder goes unjustified because no one has the courage to challenge the sovereign right of the cops to take life with impunity. Incalculable thousands believe that a cop should have the right to shoot you dead if you do not obey his orders, however corrupt or illegal they are. Incalculable thousands have never experienced the event they insist on having opinions about. 

Sent a query to a long-time publisher of gay material, who said he’s getting out of the business, but gave me a list of 4 or 5 other places to try. Every one of them is out of business or not accepting manuscripts until such-and-such a time. 

It is the worst of times but not, for anybody I know, the best of times. Maybe I’ll sink back into Middlemarch.

Napped. Woke with the first movement of Brahms’ 4th on the radio. One ray of light.

 

September 23, 2020

My furnace has been on for two nights and already my voice is ruined. Causality is, at least, established.

Tiny feet on the roof above me. Tiny cat feet on the stairs.

 September 22, 2020

Autumn. I know its beauty, but, still, alas. 

The police called about the stolen checks. The cop sounded young and sweet. Told him the story and said he needn’t fill out a report, only be aware that such things were happening. He said, “We used to patrol that area a lot, but now we dn’t feel wanted anymore.” 

Took a walk along the Greenway in the River Arts, surprised at its being so extensive and so fully connected. You’re inconvenienced by the construction, but it doesn’t occur to you that the construction leads to anything.  Perfect bright autumn weather. I sat on a bench and contemplated the tangle of herbage, jimson and Jerusalem artichoke and convolvulus. 

 

September 21, 2020

Disturbed by a sound in the night until I realized it was the furnace turning itself on after a sweet summer. Love the sound, hate the prospect of the coming cold.

Odd financial disharmony to the events of the day: the lady at the river office said they had not received my rent check from me for September. I wrote it and mailed it, but something happened in between. So, I drove to the complex, wrote a new check, sat by the river a while watching the water flow and talking to two people from Louisville– both of whom, so they said, had survived Covid. Was able to steer them to all the landmarks they wanted to see, most of which were off the River Road within a couple of miles. Got home from that adventure, checked the mailbox, and the mail I had left there this morning (all bills being paid) had not been collected. Instead, each envelope was cut open and the checks removed. Total: somewhat over $3000. Frantic calls to two banks. Unless the thieves were very fast, I think I’m OK. But they do have my account numbers. I thought it odd that they should leave the envelopes, which would alert me immediately to what had been done. Maybe it wasn’t simple theft.

Got my flu shot.

Agreed to meet Denny and Kit in Ohio on October 26.

Autumn

 

September 20, 2020

The sky is the most stainless, serene azure from horizon to horizon. The air is on that line between cool and a little too warm, cool in the shade, too warm if you’re exerting in the sun. The upsides of the leaves flash with white fire. Two remarkable days in a row. I’ve stopped listening for the sea and worrying about waking the others in the house. Two days of effort in the garden, the most this year by far, and the thing to say about that is that I have done so without being out of breath and being no more tired than a man of threescore and ten ought to be. Yesterday when I began my labors, I felt a tightening where I presume my diaphragm to be. I had been stretching, so thought maybe it was just soreness, but it disappeared, and its disappearance was like a tight band being loosed of a sudden from my chest. I have no more explanation to give than that, but must report faithfully that I have worked the last two days as I could before the weakness and poverty of breath came upon me, before the anemia and whatever else has been ailing me. Stopped when I finished, and not when I could stand no more. Yesterday I cleaned out the west garden, behind the dogwoods, and began a new shade garden. Went to Reems Creek for hydrangea and camellia and turtlehead and anemone and other shade-lovers. Came back also with joe-pye and spice bush that love the sun, but there was room elsewhere for them. Today I tackled the honeysuckle tangle that the northwest corner had become, ripping out vines to a pile the size of a haystack, freeing plants I had forgotten were there. When I was tired of that, I went back and finished off, for the moment, the shade garden, watering, planting spring bulbs, mulching, ripping out the tangle of vines that shielded against the house. Something in the weather or the soil has made extreme weeding conducive, the stubborn vines pulling out to the last micron of their roots.  

Meanwhile, in the hours of dark indoors, I wrote well and productively.

I’d been thinking of returning to painting, wanting to, literally dreaming of it, but realizing that if I wanted to return to oils, I’d have to have a dedicated space, as it’s too messy and too fumey for either home or the river office. When I rose this morning, I found my colored pencils and gave myself a tutorial, discovering what they could do, how they could shade and bend and produce other effects of painting. The experiment was exhilarating. Maybe that too shall return to me.

Went to clean out the almost-spent zinnias, but a cloud of goldfinches was still harvesting their seeds, so I let be. Sat so still on the porch that a thrush drank from the urn five feet away. 

 

September 18, 2020

All people of good will register shock and sorrow at the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, not only for who she was in her own right and for what she did, but furthermore for what her life prevented our demented president from doing. The sky is so dark you wouldn’t think another, darker cloud would be discernible, but there it is. 

Hurricane Sally

 

September 17, 2020

Vivaldi on the CD.

Deep rain from the disintegrating hurricane. 

After the customary maximum of three hours necessary to clean my house, I come home to find the cleaning girl still here. “Oh, I got here late,” she says, an excuse which might have carried more weight had she not been talking on the phone when I arrived. Lateness enrages me, especially on occasions–like cleaning Thursday–when I plan my day around those interrupted hours of the morning. More–or shifted because someone “got here late”-- hurls me into despair. On the other hand, she is 18, maybe had been at some mission of mercy that made her tardy, and I do realize that my on-time fetish is not fully humane. Still. . .  Despair. . . I made her my mail-in ballot witness. Voting by mail, not that I fear not being able to get to the polls, but because distance voting seems to irritate the President, a constant goal.   

Reports of a bear euthanized because people had been feeding it to lure it close for the sake of photography. I haven’t seen Buddy in so long I fear it’s him.

On her last birthday I gave my mother a bible, an odd thing, but one which seemed meaningful at the time. I remember the event, but I didn’t know I possess that bible until recently. The date in the cover is July 25, 1973. She died the following March. The inscription, “to mother from David,” and the date, is in her hand. I must have neglected to write anything in.

This is the first time I’ve written in the river office. It seems conducive enough. Didn’t anticipate how things are hampered without Internet. Apparently the thing can’t even save to itself without being connected to the outside world. Trust and be patient. I’m surrounded by the ruins of my studio and my school office, but all that reads cheerier than one expected.

Another slim volume of terrible poetry arrived today. Opened it, called it “terrible” after the first few pages, then wondered what I meant by that. The poems are not inept by any means, allusive and skillful and intelligent, aware of their surroundings, truthful, insofar as one is able to judge that. But at the same time, tiny Saharas of self-involved bitterness, self-congratulation, hauteur. The poems intend to slap the reader into submission. The timid attempts I’ve made to express these reservations in the past—beginning forty years ago-- met with furious contradiction, so I write my thank-you note and put the book onto the shelf.  

We no longer expect poetry to be good. Its least important role, self-expression, has become all-in-all. That it is good, if it is good, can be repellent to some, because “better” or “good” implies inequality. We’ve totally lost the concept of the subordination of one thought to another. Students arrive trebly assured from all sides that their perceptions are perfect and the attempt to change them is – what? Patriarchal? Bullying? Thus no education actually gets done. The idea of coming with an empty bowl in an anathema; therefore, no one is fed, no one eats but of the crust they brought along with them. Poetry should lead out, not in. Or, lead in in order to lead out. The student must stand empty, the mind without fence or baffle or wall. The poet must stand silent, waiting to hear the truth before he opens his lips. The entire enterprise as it stands now is contrary to itself.

 

September 16, 2020

Gigantic demonstrations against the wearing of masks, videoed and stringently reported. Part of me assumes it’s a prank, a jeux d’esprit whereby the same people who are amused by Trump’s antics find it amusing to irritate liberal snowflakes on this issue as well. I do understand that. But, if sincere, how unaccountable. First, how is this worse than wearing seatbelts or buying car insurance, hitherto forced on us by the Deep State? Second, how is it that we recognize rights so acutely but have no notion of obligations? We have the right to carry guns, but the obligation to keep kindergarteners from bring murdered is “politicizing” or tyranny. We want our faces as we want them though dozens may die because of it. Even those who believe the virus is real don’t see how it is up to them to deter it. What if we faced food rations or blackouts? It is a generation of tantruming brats. 

Turned on the TV just in time to see Luke Combs–acquaintance, All Souls choir alumnus-- win album of the year and male entertainer of the year at the Country Music Awards. The Bryant’s, his teachers at A.C. Reynolds, must be beside themselves

 September 15, 2020

DJ warned us that he felt feverish. I myself have had digestive issues since the beach, and so venticelli become the a great wind breathing the word Covid. DJ thought not, and I think not (for one thing, I’m better today), but one’s thoughts go back to times when some maskless person came too close, or that time when hunger and weariness led us to eat inside the bar rather than waiting for an outside table. Cancelled my appointment with Zach, imagining bringing the virus to his wife and children and clients without knowing. 

Excellent issue of Vanity Fair, in which the events of Black Lives Matter are told like a folk chronicle, almost. It looked different to black people than it did to us. For us it was “Omigod, there really IS a problem.” For them it was “Still? This must be the end, no matter what.”

Dim, threatening day outside. We’re told it’s not the latest hurricane, but it looks like it.

 

September 14, 2020

Muscle spasm (rare nowadays) woke me last night, and in a moment of confusion I thought I was at the beach. I went the wrong way looking for the kitchen, and tiptoed for fear or waking the others.

Another productive day of ripping up vines. Maybe next year the garden will be exactly the way I want it.

The letter about my emeritus status arrived, appreciative, familial, a little laurel wreath set upon the end of those days. It mentions “the esteem of your colleagues.” I do note all this because I left there with such resentment in my heart. A variety of scenarios present themselves. The likeliest is that the whole harassment scandal was never anything to them, just a path they had to go down once a certain gate was opened. Perhaps an apology. Perhaps thanks that I did not go down the route of a lawsuit, which if nothing else would have made certain liars public rather than covert and protected. In any case, I will do my best to insure that is the end of it, that someday I stop arguing with people who are not there to argue back, about issues maybe nobody but I will ever recall.

Return

 

September 13, 2020

Familiar crow sounds and street sounds. Began the day with some pretty strenuous gardening, which included the uprooting of innumerable vines and the planting of the purple crepe myrtle I bought while at the beach, which was delivered with lightning speed. Did not water, yet, because all day has impended rain.

Arrived from the beach just as Tony was doing the lawn. At that second, to me, that seemed tragically bad timing. Sometime during the week a bear upended the trash. There must have been slim pickings, and it would never happen if I hadn’t missed a collection day. I felt betrayed, as though a trusted friend had waited until I was out of town to behave badly. Something has felt “wrong” since my return. Something is missing. Something unexpected impends. Maud hollered at me for a solid hour, then cried out in the night until I got up and rubbed her head. That I understand. Fear of abandonment is real. Doesn’t seem that I’ve been anywhere, though of course I have, and re-acquaintance with the sea may be a milestone in my coming life. Maybe life there was too much like life here for it to seem a break. Folly Beach is a lovely destination, though, the rickety town more interesting than the beach hotels. I did get a chance to wander a little, and the farther I wandered the more it was like another world, with strange flowers in the sandy gardens. Began to read the novel Folly Beach, and so far, except for details about the bottle tree, am not much interested. Amy reads one giant supermarket book after another (she claims to have read my books, but has nothing to say about them), and I picked a few up to discover what the attraction is. I would say it is ease. The books offer no resistance, and not THAT much or a reward (or no reward that one hasn’t had before from a dozen more of its kind), though enough for an hour under an umbrella on a sunny beach. They’re not ineptly written, but you can see each author’s little array of machinery working from paragraph to paragraph. On the other hand, when a “literary” author’s machinery shows, the noise is louder and the effect more irritating. If someone asked me for a recommendation for a “good read,” I would suggest Amy’s beach novels before the books I was sent this summer by my publishers. I have to analyze my reasons before I give them. Perhaps the fault of the literary works is that they are “about” something other than telling the story. In each case, now that I think of it, the “story” was negligible or absurd. 

Scalp, nose, cheekbones sunburned. 

Took an evening to adjust to the lack of air-conditioning.

Was addressed in a letter from the Chancellor as one of the “New Faculty Emeriti,” so I guess that snuck through.

Learned that my phone will keep track of my steps, and so it becomes an implement of physical fitness. I typed in my vitals and it prescribed 8430 steps in a day. On three days (out of five) I have met that goal, though there was a beach to walk upon. 

 

September 12, 2020

Was bad company for DJ as he drove home and I struggled, unsuccessfully, to stay awake. Was ready at 7 for an exit which eventually happened at around 9:30. People having coffee and reading novels before packing on leaving day is so foreign to me that I could but look on. Everything, nevertheless. happened in due time. Brief, torrential every mile or so along the road.  Charleston lovely and remote from the highway, her steeples spindly and delicate.

Folly Beach 5

 

 

September 11, 2020

Read “Lycidas” out of my little Palgrave and for the first time understood it, for the first time comprehended its widely acknowledged greatness. All will come now that the pressure of professorship is passed.

I had not expected Middlemarch to be funny.

Felt close to Ann Dunn all week, perhaps because she so loves the shore.

Played in the surf a long time, on both sides of the pier. I was thinking strange thoughts. I don’t often swim in the sea, so perhaps it’s natural that my thoughts should be strange. Didn’t wear my glasses, so everything was blurry and brilliant and impressionistic. Children are best at knowing what to do with the rolling incessant waves. It was long, wet, lukewarm contemplation.

Folly Beach 4

 

 

September 9,2020

Rain through most of the night, misting sweet rain on the sand now. The virtual book festival went well last night, I think.  The observation I most want to make is that my book, or at least my reading, was best by levels of magnitude. Whether this is actually true or something I need to hear myself say is something for others to decide. Last year’s winner, my successor, is thin and full of complaint—like the author, I know now. This year’s, read in a thick Spanish accent trying to imitate a Southern drawl, was unintelligible. I’ll have to read it on the page, though I probably never will.  They sent a fourth book which wasn’t discussed, essentially a manual on body hair fetishism. I think the authors’ discussions they always have are probably pointless, though having said that, I realize I was inspired by it, and full of vigor for writing this rainy morning at the beach.

Long walk to begin the day. Sat under the pier and wrote. Met the pier caretaker and two people hunting sharks’ teeth in the surf. I tried not to think “you’re standing too close.” Saw my first boogieboard, and the use of such. Walked too much, came back after lunch at Rita’s over-tired and on the verge of sickness. It’s a new world for me physically, or there’s something I overlook.

 

Folly Beach 3

 

September 8, 2020

Cocktails last night at Loggerheads, which I liked. Sloppy sweet Southern ambiance, overcooked scallops, a good hillbilly singer.

Folly Beach 2

 

September 7, 2020

 

Labor Day. Toured the town on foot yesterday, discovering the twenty places you could buy T-shirts and the 0 places you could buy talcum powder, or a book. Lovely people in the stores, faces all masked by the plague.  Walked to the long pier, then went down to the sea to return by way of the breaking waves. Exhaustion, of course, but not so bad as I might have anticipated.

Vacation this time is to spend time planning gigantic meals, procuring the means of those meals, spending hours preparing and eating, lounging around after, mixing drinks until dark. I can see how this is restful and correct, especially in a place like the beach, contrasting though it does with my process of running from site to site grabbing a coffee as I go. There are no “sites” here but the sea. In olden days I could walk out to the marshes, but if I did I wouldn’t get back. Amy and I, on a trip to Walmart to buy food, saw spoonbills feeding in the marsh.

Zoom meeting about my play At Distance with Sips and Scripts last night was triumphant. They seemed to like the little plays in every possible way. One said she wished they had been written by a woman so she could include them in a women’s play fest she was organizing. It is the sort of group who would delight in finding faults if there were any, so, hurrah me.

Evening. Walked to and down the long pier, where people fish without apparent success, and grackles forage for the remnants of the fishermen’s sandwiches. Again to the pier with the group for cocktails. The cocktail lounge in open air apparently closes tonight, so those who love it blessed the timing. Much walking, followed by gigantic, irresistible naps.  I’m evidently intolerant of ambient sound—that is to say, of people playing recorded music all the time. I probably live a weirdly silent life measured by that of other people. I'd rather listen to the sea, while I have it. An adjustment to community living. Everyone is more watchful over the welfare of others than I. Everyone says “Are you all right? Do you need something?” ten times for every time I do. Again, probably testimony of my solitary life. 

 

September 8, 2020

Folly Beach

 

September 6, 2020

                The ride to Folly Beach was hedged about with traditions of people who’ve come before, where to stock up on liquor, where to have late lunch, all that. We passed by Charleston, which I longed for. I arrived in a bad mood, having convinced myself that the WiFi wouldn’t work or some unlikely thing, and made for the beach as soon as we settled in.  The beach was lovely with revelers, and far more integrated, black and white, than I remember any public beach being. I waded into the tepid Atlantic, and in one second felt anxiety draining from me into the bronze-colored waters. Lovely altogether! I was the only one to go to beach. Returned, sat on the dark balcony with the group talking about what we talk about. Slept like a child, woke to dreams in which I was berating my former colleagues for teaching badly.

 September 2, 2020

Idyllic birthday party in the garden last evening. Leland brought tiki torches.  We sat and talked until Venus, and then the first stars, came out. I wore black, and in the Facebook photographs look very small and distant. I was glad that it happened. I thought of b\Byron meeting Lord Cambridge on the road in Italy, and reaching out, invisibly, with such tender and hopeless longing. 

Between midnight and morning. . . .

 Lord, I have done ten thousand things that I might please you in one of them.