Hurricane

 

October 29, 2020

Flood this morning, though the afternoon is hot and dazzling. Deep water under the railroad bridge in the River District, almost didn’t get through. The barriers came up almost behind me. The Swannanoa was level with the road in most places, over it in others. Swannanoa River Road was blocked, and I had to flee uphill into Kenilworth. Drove to the Crafts Center on the parkway, but the Parkway too was closed, so I hiked in the rain and the half rain and then in the clear air. Fields of amaranth beside the pavement. In my garden a single nasturtium fights into the final light. Marked the day because it was the first time I met (and exceeded) my step count since Folley Beach, and the first time I did so without cheating.

 

October 28, 2020

Hurricane Zeta pouring itself against the roof. 

The All Saints Evensong will be beautiful, I think, and I’m glad to be singing again. I don’t think my voice got rusty, though someone else would be a better judge of that. It sounds OK to me in that unwonted emptiness.  Jonathan caught me on the church lawn and poured out the news of his wife’s advanced and apparently hopeless cancer. What on earth does one say? I hope some service was done by merely listening. One prays, but then asks what is the nature of intercessory prayer. Does God not now she has cancer? Has God not already taken thought for it? One does what one can, hoping good intentions make stupid gestures look less stupid. Wandered about in Biltmore Village, hoping to raise my footstep count. Looked through the window’s of John’s stores in commemoration. 

John

 

October 27, 2020

John Cram is dead. I wonder who else remembers when he and I were the Asheville Power Couple? Few people I have known directly have done so much good. I should have been more observant about our friendship. I should. . . I should. . . . 

Long, successful session by the river in Woodfin, writing, strolling, writing again. Maybe the riverside will be my office as long as the weather allows. 

Ste’s book arrives, huge rambling, often incomprehensible, but a gift of the new age, which allows you to make a book whenever you want to, and not wait for curation by minds that may not understand.

Looked up iron deficiency, and while I don’t have all the symptoms, I have several: exhaustion, the inability to take a really nourishing breath, dry skin. I’d even suspect my craving for radishes is related to the warning about “strange cravings.” I do not have constant headaches or anxiety. This is scarcely news. . . why do I not commit to an increased and constant regime of iron pills? Because it makes my stool weird. My pre-New Year’s resolution is to get past that. 

The final, final proof of OBN is in email. I fear to look.

Monteverdi on CD. Opera at its peak the very first moment of its life.  

 

October 26, 2020

Sick to throwing up last night. . . I think it was the half a hot sausage sub that I gobbled down in front of the TV. Smooth and restful sleep afterward. Dreamed that I had become Neptune’s assistant. The name referred more to the planet than to the sea. When Neptune needed me, he send a summons and I’d take off in a space ship and rendezvous with him on the planet. The planet and the dream–and Neptune himself- were all white and blue and silver, very beautiful. Neptune’s wife was his adversary, and I took an apartment neat her palace (on earth) to watch her movements and report to Neptune anything untoward. 

Made a breakthrough with The Garden of the Bears.

 

October 25, 2020

Went downtown to stroll and rack up steps on my little counter. Haunted the Blue Spiral, figuring no one there would know I was there the night it opened. Had great red wine again at the little wine bar attached to the gallery. Everyone striding down the sidewalks wore a mask. The girl at the wine bar recognized me, mask and all, and quoted back to me what I had said about the valpolicella weeks ago. Listened to a conversation outside the AC Hotel between a young couple, deciding whether they were going to try to move to Asheville or not. I tried to send “No” telepathically through the air. 

 

October 24, 2020

I keep thinking a certain day will be my last day in the garden, but maybe it will be this one. Planted the last shipment of peonies. Dug out rascal stands of bamboo and put Shasta daisy in the wounds thus opened up. Went briefly to the river, where I watched my beautiful duck dabble and nibble. Finished the “intermediate proof” for OBN.

Flashed on an image of myself walking the Hard Times trail a few days back. If this planet has a recollection of me, it’s probably that– a child walking in a great wilderness, under the rising moon, or perhaps a vault of trees, alone, maybe singing, stopping every few strides to listen-- fully, in those moments, happy. 

Bard and Bull

 

October 23, 2020

Morning spent on a mountainside in Crusoe. Candice had everything planned elegantly, a plan thrown off by my arriving, as I always do, early. She made me mint tea. She and Ken live off Sharp Mountain Road, in a place which any taste would consider paradise. They have two red dogs who romp inexhaustibly. The larger of the two is a love machine, who crowds up against you until you hold him, and he lingers in your embrace with a blissful look on his face. You don’t get that from cats. They live on the banks of the Pigeon River, whose stones we crossed to get to the mountainside where she wanted to film, because of the morning light. Adam appeared and helped direct me through it. This is only the second time in my career when I’ve done much on camera, and the first seems (blessedly) to have disappeared. I did the “This battle fares like to the morning’s war” soliloquy from Henry VI . It made me wish I were doing it on stage night after night, for a little of the bliss came back of being able to realize repeatedly the same words, and get something new and different and deeper out of them each time. This happens mostly with Shakespeare. . . and with me. (Grin). I was nervous about it, but I ended up enjoying myself. They assured me my stage experience was not causing me to overact for the camera, but I wasn’t sure. Will decide when the time comes whether to watch the broadcast of “In Our Solitude.” When we began to sing, five bulls walked up from the forest. Formidable as they appeared, they turned out to be much like the dogs, curious and friendly, though weighing half a ton and with horn untrimmed. Beautiful animals, immense deep, sad eyes.  

Leaf Fall

 

October 22, 2020

First experience of singing through a mask. Less remarkable than one would have thought.

Wrote some by the river– a lot, now that I think of it– then drove to the Parkway and walked high up on the Hard Times trail. On such a fine day I knew I would not be alone, and I wasn’t. It was dog day, dogs walking or jogging with their masters, and one observed personalities among them as varied and often more evident than their masters’–those that trotted obediently, even fearfully by their masters’s side, those who  had to be restrained (who wanted them to be?) from pulling away and investigating the new person, those allowed to trot on over and allow themselves to be petted. One especially elegant white dog with blue eyes padded over, sniffed, allowed her fur to be ruffled, then went on. When she and her mistress returned the other way, the dog nodded, as if to say, “It was nice to meet you, but let’s not make a big thing out of it.” Watched an iridescent blue beetle make his way among the fallen leaves. In times of silence, there was no silence, but a perpetual whisper, like to rain, but rather the falling of a million leaves against a million leaves.

 

October 21, 2020

Walked along the river memorizing my piece from Henry VI. Like Romeo & Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream, the language is languishing, silken, exquisite, sometimes sharp and wounding as finding a dagger in your lover’s pocket. I stood by a wetlands pond and a little black duck came up out of the water and looked at me. I apologized for not bringing bread, but she didn’t look like she was begging. She looked at me and I at her, each wondering, I suppose, what it would be like. 

Kyle wants the men to do “Salvation is Created” for All Souls. First time I will have entered the church since February. Found places on line where you can sing along to the scores of Renaissance pieces. I’ve still got it, at least the lower register.

2020! Closed my studio and stopped painting (maybe). Went to Ireland as it was closing down. Retired. Retired with a  bitter taste in my mouth, which nobody wants to hear about. Sat behind castle walls because of Covid19. Did almost nothing of what I did before, but was tolerably (if not perfectly) happy. Realized I was born to be retired, the hours like red fruits hanging from a tree in a perfumed orchard. Grateful for my companion Maud, who is the one other visible soul in this house. 

Persimmon

 

October 20, 2020

Plucked a persimmon from my tree. Astringent almost past bearing, but the taste under the astringency sweet and melon-y. If there’s another, I’ll wait till after the first hard frost, as the old ones say one ought. Lonesome for my bears.

 

October 19, 2020

Unquiet night. Reminded of the choice I make between taking iron for my anemia and suffering the intestinal disruption caused by taking the iron. 

I have a good feeling about The One with the Beautiful Necklaces, that it may be the one to catch on and turn attention toward me. I want to say, “even though it is not characteristic of me at all,” but how do I know? Maybe it is exactly characteristic of me, and everyone will know it before I. 

Student coming at noon to sit at the picnic table and discuss Stoppard. 

Yesterday another big gardening day, finishing everything that I had planned before the snow flies, though other projects formed in my head as I worked. 

Finalist for the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction from the U of Missouri, Kansas City. 

 

October 18, 2020

Excellent gardening day yesterday, in the crisp cool sun. Got most of what remains done, and the path open for the rest, which will but labor and repetition. Mental exhaustion–maybe from the sprint toward the end for OBN– seems to be eroding today, and maybe there will be some writing. 

Strange dream. I moved into a large apartment complex, the kind with pools and towel service and elevators and lots of young professional tenants, and a giant busy lobby. This is a recurrence of this dream, which I first had long ago, when it had something to do with TD. He had wanted me to move there with him, I think. Anyway, nothing in the apartment worked, everything was exactly the way I wouldn’t want it, and the manager went on vacation even as I finally found out where his office was. I’d left my car somewhere, and took a bus to go find it, and discovered that the bus was going the wrong way. The apartment was near Hiram, and I watched the skyline of Charlotte lift into sight. I ran through my head if I had enough money for a taxi home. The dream continued through at least one trip to the bathroom, and even after I woke up it ran in my mind as thoughts rather than purely a dream. Makes you question what a dream is.  I need no warning against doing something like that; I have not come close in the past to doing anything like that. My theory has always been that various intelligences mutually inhabit one, and the one that rules dreams is not necessarily connected–in any way that makes sense–to the one that lights daily life. 

 

October 16, 2020

Rain. Went to Staples and picked up my new computer, the old one having died rather catastrophically– after, I will admit, allowing me to back up irreplaceable documents. Even the technicians had to call India (or whatever it is they do) to make it engage one last time. $$$$. This week has been a strain, some of it connected to the mechanics of using a computer (heard myself screaming at the top of my lungs twice JUST LET ME DO IT!), some of it connected to the haste and magnitude of finishing off the proofs for OBN . I was not entirely satisfied with what I read as I proofed that last time, but the problems were stylistic, evolutionary (which is to say, that’s just how I was writing then) and would have taken a complete re-write to resolve. Went to bed last night literally sick from exhaustion and frustration. Better in the morning. Couldn’t have been worse. Of course I was sure it was Covid, but it was just Too Much. Took 5 spent computers or parts of same to recycling.

Walked in Bent Creek yesterday. Too tired to get much put of it, except they’re planting lights for a grand Christmas display.

 

October 14, 2020

Monteverdi on CD.

The bulb in the elephant lamp that lights my writing desk was out this morning, after having burned day and night without ceasing since the day I moved in. 

Long walks beside the river, to take in the autumn loveliness, but also to keep the step counter happy. The swirls and upwellings of just the French Broad are so various and  unaccountable I wonder if anyone could form an image of the whole and actual surface of the Earth. How to measure the surface of an eddy? The river has been near flood stage most of these weeks, the sad artificial wetlands brimming and alive with mallards. 

Gene at Moonshine Cove was serious about bringing out The One with the Beautiful Necklaces on November 7. Chose cover art done by my old studio mate Elizabeth. Would have done it myself, but–. They sent me their corrected version, complaining that my quotation marks had been backwards and that my speech attributions were overdone. They claimed to have made changes, but I didn’t notice them, so they must be well. Corrected it again myself through a long Saturday, finding mistakes which had eluded us, and noticing cruelly my habitually elliptical sentence structure. My guess is that I rewrote 1000 helping verbs and variations on “be”: Why my impulse is to write “She was going” rather than “She went” I don’t know, except that I wish to indicate a process begun in the past and ongoing, an indication which is almost never necessary. I saved that corrected manuscript weirdly somehow, and they couldn’t read it and I couldn’t retrieve it, so on Monday afternoon I took a deep breath and began again. I’m keeping to myself the truth that I was delighted–at least relieved– to have another crack at it. The second revision was far better and more thorough than the first. Delivered it all Tuesday afternoon and they said it was well. We’ll see. 

 

October 10, 2020

UNCA closes because of a credible email threat, demanding that our Black Lives Matter mural be painted over. The long shadow of Trump allows these night creatures to creep out of their holes. 

Spent the day correcting proofs of The One with the Beautiful Necklaces. The book is better than I remember it. The press’ edits were so organic that I didn’t even notice them. 

Rain all day. Began transcribing my play about Artemisia Gentilleschi from my notebook. 

 

October 9, 2020

A moved into my office today. There’s plenty of room to share. This is one of those occasions when you feel the Lord weaving unsuspected threads together, not for your sake, but for the sake of someone else, and it is well. But, it saves me money, and who knows how it will turn out? Maybe it is for me after all. The Great Tapestry. 

Ordered barbecue sauce online, and it arrived smashed to pieces. Hesitated to put it in the trash because a bear may find it and hurt himself on the broken glass. Smiled reviewing all this, me like a papa baby-proofing a hostile environment for my 250 pound baby.  

Last thing before sleep last night I took the Lord to task over Gluck’s Nobel Prize. Not that I think I’d ever come within a million miles of it, but the fact that I wouldn’t needs, between the Power of Night and myself, to be discussed. I am like the man who builds a castle, dark, stately, towering, full of intricate rooms, and reads in the morning paper that the kid who spray painted the lower walls has won a prize. Often–usually– I can say “it is well.” Last night I couldn’t. I turned away from Him in contempt. I hope He felt it.  

Downtown

 

October 8, 2020

Wearing actual tailored men’s pants for the first time, I think, since March 13. They’re pretty loose, too. While most have gained weight during isolation, I have apparently lost it. Doing nothing & eating nothing balanced a little in my favor.

Anxiety about Covid made me cancel plans to go to Ohio. The threat seems to be tightening, though people treat it more and more cavalierly. If all those in the Republican inner circle who have, through their own belligerence and childishness, contracted the disease become at least temporarily incapacitated, we might get through this year with a shred of dignity. 

Went downtown for a haircut. Walked about in the autumn light. Masks were general and ungrudging. I had wine all by myself at a street side café, some tongue-burning Mexican sandwich at the place where the exquisite TABLE used to be. The lady wanted to explain all the exotic dishes to me, but she did so in Spanish, which is why I ended up with the flamethrower sandwich. Almost inexpressibly exhausted 

Louise Gluck receives the Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s not that one didn’t see it coming, but that one lives in hope that, sometimes, the worst thing one imagines does not come to pass. All part of the spiraling disaster that is 2020. Gluck and I have met or read together several times. The first time was at Warren Wilson. She was beautiful and dramatic then, like a witch in a TV romance, and you knew that the manifest badness of her work was going to be set aside because she LOOKED like someone who ought to be a poet. Her destiny set, her actual achievement from that point onward was going to be irrelevant. Her poetry was not merely lacking, but bad to the point of parody—which Tom and I did during the drive home, turning the mundane things visible through the car windows into poetry is fully Gluckian as her own. We were making the point that the work is all tone and no substance, and that even the tone has to be laboriously and externally applied but those who trust the effort is worth it. You say the lines as if they meant something, even though they don’t. We are like people in community theater, standing and hollering for bad performances because we have, somehow, invested in them. Or, from another angle, it’s quite Trumpian: a man who provably failed at everything he tried is still passed on as a paragon of some sort until he sits in the White House. Luckily, Gluck can go very little material damage from the eminence to which she has been sadly and predictably raised. It makes me sad for poetry, though, when bad and good are tossed together in one rancid bin as though there no difference between them. Only people indifferent to poetry could make Louise Gluck a Nobel laureate. 

 

October 7, 2020

Various duties throughout the day. One’s definition of “busy” changes at times like these. Having to be in a certain place at a certain time once during the day is an imposition. Coffee with Alan, who may end up sharing my riverside space.  He had the inside track on gossip of which I knew only the periphery. He hates Miss Jill as much as I do, and with more information to build the hatred upon. Skipped the vice-presidential debate. The fragments I heard of it this morning on the radio make that seem the right choice.

 

October 6, 2020

Before dawn trip for service at the Toyota dealership. I started a play about Artemisia Gentileschi on the covered patio while waiting. That taking 15 minutes, I headed off into the mountains, where I parked at Walnut Cover and entered the forest, moving north. All things being equal, I typically head north. Gold-green, wondrously silent forest. The sun broke again and again out of the cover of fog. Even a slight hill debilitates me, and so I must resolve to walk alone, or walk with someone wondrous patient. Dug and gardened when I came home, finishing off the “baby-blue-eyes,” a million seeds of which I bought without really knowing what they are. 

 

October 5, 2020

Note from the Board of Elections that my ballot was accepted. 

Gene at Moonshine Cove tweaks me to get my publication materials in.  Truth was, I never expected it to happen, and now that it is, I run to catch up. What on earth cover would a book like that have? Helpless now that I don’t have a studio. 

 

October 4, 2020

Amazingly vivid erotic dream. I moved to Warsaw to complete some project, and that man in the next apartment was a boxer. We’d say hi at first, and then have a beer together in the evening. He explained in broken English (better than my dream Polish) that his trainer was anxious for him to stay home at night during training, and not put himself in danger at the bars, so would I be willing to have sex with him? I said yes (he was blond, compact, very muscular, beautiful in a way I somehow attach to Eastern Europeans). This worked out well for both of us, and soon his trainer came to thank me for keeping his boy off the street. We all got along, so it became a three-way. The trainer looked a little like a vampire, but that was OK.  Even in the dream I wondered if I were dreaming or writing a short story.

Finishing off a patch of garden, I looked down, and the ground heaved as if some big animal were under it, pushing out, changing its mind, subsiding. Decided not to probe.

Sleepy Gap and Elsewhere

 

October 3, 2020

Hard to justify having no time to record a journal when there should be nothing but time. Moving forward steadily, but not speedily, on two manuscripts, as unrelated as it is possible to imagine. Applying myself nobly to gardening, digging new beds, yanking old ones out of their armories of weed. Bought most of the dirt I’ll need till spring. Yesterday I planted iris and crocus and spring beauty and blue anemone. 

Trying to live up to the expectations of my step-counter. Half the recommended number– about 4400 steps– is pretty much what comes naturally in a fairly active day, though I have taken to strolling the greenways by the river to raise the number a little. This is excellent, considering the extreme physical inertia of the first part of my quarantine. Today I drove to Sleepy Gap to hike on one of my most familiar trails. It being a sunny Saturday of almost unbelievable sweetness and clemency, even the Parkway had traffic jams. Ran into people and their dogs at the opening of the trail, but deeper in came the solitude and almost disturbing silence of the mountain. The paucity of wildlife often disturbs me there, until I consider that on the trail one is nearly at the top of rugged mountains, and all the sensible creatures will be far below, at the deep woods and the creeks. Even after all that I’m only at 58%–5009 steps. Big handsome man ran past me in both directions, going and returning. Admired that he had enough wind to speak to me. Wind is exactly my issue. Wind has always been my issue. From the first time I remember exertion at all–running as a kid– I knew that my lungs shut down long before anyone else’s. Age has not improved that. I do find that there is a plateau, and if I can make it for a certain period of time, gardening or walking–it gets no worse, and even settles back and becomes a little easier. Such it was at the beginning, and evidently will be at the end. I have made a career out of not mentioning this. 

AW interviews me for the GLBTQ archives. I was deep into it at one time, one of the foundations for a while. I wonder who else remember that? 

I do not watch the presidential debates. I understand that neither old man covered himself in glory. The hell-hound’s covering himself again and again in blood and shit seems to make no difference to his ignorant base.

 The hell-hound has contracted Covid, and with him a host of White House personnel and Republican senators–including our own Tom Tillis. So large a slice of karma–all of them virus-deniers and ostentatiously mask-less at rallies– would be implausible in fiction. Everyone is careful to keep the schadenfreude in check, though some of us are surely asking ourselves the question, WHOSE DEATH WOULD MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE? 

Hiking was replaced by painting at one point in my life. One has just so much leisure time, and must choose where to spend it. Painting is gone now, at least for the moment, so maybe the wildwood comes back. I remember noting in those long ago years that I would go into the woods and immediately submerge into a revery of fury, recrimination, debate with God. Sometimes I saw nothing. Today I noted that I was happy, the whole way. No ancient arguments. No blasts against present resentments. The hymn “Immortal, Invisible” played in my ears for a while, I think in response to the rhythm my feet were keeping on the trail. All in all retirement–if that is what is to be thanked–has been congenial to me.  I have wasted hours of it, but not days. 

 

September 29, 2020

Pounding of rain on the roof. 

Bought a pumpkin from Grace Church. Played with a puppy.

Listening to the President trying to lie his way out of his lies. Hope I live long enough to see how the future will regard all this mess. Aaron Burr, Benedict Arnold, Roger Taney, Warren Harding fade to insignificance as examples of bad behavior. They were at least somewhat specific in their malfeasance.  One can scarcely name an activity or office not soiled by the present horror.

I should report the adventures I invent for my characters as true events of my own life. Would make me sound a lot more interesting.