January 29, 2021

Renaissance Viols. Bright, cold, a little too cold for me to take advantage of the brightness, Did buy mealworms for the bluebirds.  Did put The Storm You Must Endure together.

Zoom meeting last night with AGMC. We sat staring at one another because none of us had anything in particular to say. I could have said, “I just finished a book about musicians–ya’ll should be interested in that-- shaped in less than a month, and I had a book of poetry accepted, and am working on the 6th novel I’ve hammered into being during the Pandemic, and I’ve resurrected my oldest hobby of all, hiking in the woods. . . “ but none of that, except maybe the hiking, would go over. Silence, perhaps “that’s nice.” We can hear about triumphs or failures in the kitchen, and illnesses, but talk of art stops the conversation. Maybe I travel–have pretty much always traveled– with the wrong crowd. Graduate school shines golden in my mind because you could actually talk about such things. I remember at B’s birthday how I never mentioned The Falls of the Wyona, because, though it was what happened in my life, though it was the only thing anyone outside that little clutch on the lakeshore would have heard of, it would seem alien among the illnesses and cute tricks of grandchildren and the effort to avoid mention of those things that would set one or another of us off. Now that I think of it, I was never able even as a child to talk about the things that really interested me. Secretive little bastard, but I sensed that was preferable to being an outcast. This has bothered me less than I would have expected, reading it about someone else, written in a book. 

 

January 28, 2021

Terrible, bitter, windy weather mellowing into afternoon brightness, though the wind is still strong.

Renewed by the success of ODN, I set about gathering all the poems which are any good and which have not been collected into a collection. I have filled a volume and I am not yet out of the D’s. 

Bluebirds thronging my trees. If I could figure out what they’re eating, I’d plant more of it.

 

January 27, 2021

Some fussing with poems, then an early trip to the Beaver Lake reserve. The champion of the day was the pied billed grebe. 

Alex came to talk about his senior project, The world, even the university, trundles on.

I was too casual about The Ones with Difficult Names. There is information there I was desperate to get out. Reading through, correcting, I am too happy to admit it to this watchful world. 

Difficult Names

 

January 26, 2021

Started before light a revision/proofreading of Difficult Names, didn’t finish, as the task was turning out to be bigger than anticipated. Yesterday I was congratulating myself on how wonderful the poems were; today I’m wondering why the press accepted them, they’re so faulty and flawed. Plus, I have a hard time reading Times New Roman.

Stepped away from the computer and drove to the Hard Times trail head. It had rained all night, and it was difficult to see for light glancing off standing water everywhere in the forest.  Low places exploded–quite suddenly–with the chorus of amorous frogs. The first time I heard it I couldn’t identify it– a machine? Some huge animal I didn’t know rooting through the undergrowth?  Of all sounds the best. The hooded mergansers were joined on the lake by three big Canadas. Saw a black vulture, a kingfisher (I might say THE kingfisher), cardinals, chickadees, and a huge fish near the dam. I took it for a trout. Walked new paths away from the lake. One– Pine Ridge, Pine something– was exquisitely abandoned. I rejoiced in my aloneness on a wooded ridge overlooking the creek. Humans–especially the females–are incredibly loud. I don’t know why they come to the forest to chatter to each other, when that can be done to everyone’s better content elsewhere. 

Two very cute sanitation workers brought my bear-proof trash can. It has a bear on the lid, I guess to drive the point home.

Had a hard time giving myself the day off. 

 

January 25, 2021

Busy with entering contests and the like, I glanced back at my mailbox and saw a letter from Kelsay Press (American Fork, Utah) accepting The Ones with Difficult Names. I sent them the book on January 16th. If you hit, you hit fast. I am very happy about this. The poems seemed solid, even wonderful, to me, but somehow the book kept getting passed by. Great joy. I will wait the hours until noon before a start drinking celebration. 

Vestry

 

January 24, 202

Bright winter day. Purple crocus blooms in the yard. I always miss the first day of the crocus. Maybe they bloom at night to keep the operations secret. 

Elected to the All Souls vestry this morning during virtual Annual Meeting. I pray to be a good vestry member, having no idea whether I’ll be or not. The vestry, in public anyway, seems to have a lot more patience with verbiage and excess process than I do. Maud kept loping into the picture doing the Zoom meeting. After a while I just turned my video off. 

 

January 23, 2021

Turning out to be a fine bright day, though when I went out it was snapping cold. Finished DSLLD in the sense that the story is told and I zoomed past the 60,000 word line specified by the contest. I thought I’d be typing till the last minute, but I have a week to revise and polish. The story is important to me. I know that means nothing outside this little electric box. 

 

January 22, 2021

A routine “flushing” turned into the replacement of my hot water heater, which Jamie the Plumber said was fourteen years old, an age which he seemed to think was prodigious. Something broke while he was replacing it, and the basement floor flooded. There’s no drain, but the bare floor is clay, so the water sank slowly away. Direct contact with the earth! I should have been more excited than I was. DSLLD plods forward. I have less than a week.

 

January 21, 2021

Tried to get a vaccine. Buncombe County was out and not making appointments until they get some more. 

Tried again. They gave me a waiting list number and said they phone someday.

Having gone full Einstein hair-wise, on Zach’s recommendation I decided to try the new barber shop in the Walgreen’s parking lot. Got a ginger good old boy named Hunter, whose hair was wilder than mine. Hunter is an ex-cop who got disillusioned with policing and started to cut hair. Everyone in the room, except me and the one female barber, were cops or ex-cops, and all knew each other and each other’s stories. Hunter has two kids and a wife who likes to read but throws the book against the wall if a dog gets killed in it. The little girl is afraid of everything and reads all the signs when they’re hiking, for fear they might be trespassing. I liked Hunter, and got the best haircut I’ve gotten in North Carolina. I’m not sure it looks the best on me, but the process of getting it was pleasurable, relaxed, thorough, almost, one might say, loving. I sensed something fascinating. Coppy-ness was palpable. Cop jokes, cop gossip, cop-speak, but also cop affection. The men liked each other and felt liked in return. There was real community. My instant reflex is to excoriate “coppy-ness” and to hate things like Police Benevolents, but the sweetness of the atmosphere was hard to dismiss. I don’t know that this can change my mind about the evils of the “thin blue line,” but it can allow me to give those operating outside of it a break in my regard. One of the cops (who had been Hunter’s firearms instructor) was talking about some old guy he stopped on the road and his demented ramblings. “What do you expect” He was born in 1950.”

Biden & Harris

 

January 20, 2021

Writing faster on this book than on any other before, finding new material just as the old seems to be coming to an end. Hope I’m not deceiving myself. Preserving and valorizing whole passages of my youth. 

Biden and Harris inaugurated without the threatened violence, so far as the media have revealed. I had been hiking in Bent Creek, and turned the radio on in time to hear most of the ceremony. Moving. I tried to sing along with Garth Brooks, but I was sobbing too hard. I pity those for whom this afternoon is not a bad dream ended, a violence stopped just at the instant of no turning back. For those still gnawing the rinds of malice and delusion, I don’t know what to do.

 

January 18, 2021

Considerable flocks of robins heading north in their ragged clumps under the gray morning sky. Fairly even blanket of snow. I walk out in the morning with my bonics to see who’s abroad: mostly titmice and sparrows, the fluttering robins high up. My catastrophic text slows things down at Sublime Press. I write past 50000 words on DSLLD. The contest I want to enter  on the last day of January, with it specifies 60,000. Realize I dream new plot lines, wake up ready to implement them. 

Hawk

 

January 17, 2021

My red-shouldered hawk hunched in the black walnut beyond the fence this morning, so fluffed up I took him at first for an owl. He sat so he looked north, mostly, seeing what and thinking what I’d like to know. A flock of migrating robins shared his tree for a while. They seemed not to be afraid, except they all perched so to be looking at him.

Wrote hugely on DSLLD. Wrote grad school recommendations. I wonder if they’ll be my last batch. 

TP says of OBN: Finished this one yesterday. Really enjoyed the mix of history, mythology, and romance.  One writes in order to start a dialog. In my experience it never works that way. 

Ordination

 

January 16, 2021

Watch Will’s ordination to the Diaconate broadcast from All Souls. Sam sang “Love Bade Me Welcome.” Some agony in hearing ten people sing “St. Patrick’s Breastplate.” Though that verse expresses my faith better than any Credo. I bind unto myself this day the strong name of the Trinity. 

 

January 15, 2021

Opened the day with seven rejection notices in email. 

Discovered that I had written, or mostly written, a verse play based on the same material as The Falls of the Wyona. Fingering through my own files is like exploring the shelves of a library. 

I remember when I got my carrel at Johns Hopkins how smitten I was with the stacks and stacks of books all around. Forty feet of Wordsworth hovered just above my head. 

Purcell

 

January 14, 2021

Purcell on the CD, one of his silliest. Wrote until it was possible to stand the cold, then drove to the HT trailhead, but parked in a new place, tried a couple of new trails, one of them quite beautiful. The beautiful one includes the place where there were baying dogs and firing rifles. Plenty of tracks in the mud, but all other traces of that event are lost. One appreciates the quiet and majesty of the forest, but there is more actual wildlife in my yard than in the thousand acres of woods I must have grazed today. I heard nuthatches and saw a titmouse. There would have been more had I gone to the lake, but when I reached the crossroads, too many people were heading that way. Contemplate the fact that, usually, I see and relate to more people on the trail than I did in my studio, which was open to all and craved visitors. What a strange idea all that was! Last night I was trying to dream the next chapter of my book.

 

January 13, 2021

Mr Lost-the-Popular-Vote twice is now Mr Twice Impeached, a distinction which I hope is never challenged. All arguments in his favor, all arguments that seek to mitigate his culpability are too stupid to be taken seriously– except they are taken seriously, and the spiral of despair goes down and down. The Republican Party has earned oblivion. Will I live long enough actually to see it happen? Exhausting time. I hope everybody has a hobby.

 

January 12, 2021

Some Tuesday mornings I wake just after 3 AM, without cause that I understand. Only Tuesdays, as this morning. Instead of fighting to go back to sleep, I wrote on The Dead Shall Live. Realizing that the plumbing inspector is coming next week instead of today, exhilaration returned me to Lake Powhatan, where I again broke my steps record for 2021. Returned to the lake because I wanted to see if the hooded mergansers were still there. They were, and this time I saw the females. The mergansers were joined by a pair of buffleheads, my first ever sighting of them. They’re smaller than mergansers, and hunt very much closer to each other than the spread-across-the-lake mergansers. Walked around the lake, and saw hermit thrushes in the waterside brush. Flushed a great blue heron from her high perch. She looked scraggly, probably one of this year’s chicks not altogether happy with the cold. In the calm marsh where Bent Creek flows into the lake, mallards floated in unearthly serenity. A kingfisher rocketed out of the deep woods over the lake, and then back into the woods, following the creek. I don’t think he was fishing, but exulting. 

My mortgage company send a letter that my escrow account is deficient by 5 cents, and I can forward that all at once, or spread it out over a year’s payments. 

Kingfisher

 

January 11, 2021

Wrote well in the dark of the morning. Took my binocs to the Beaver Lake Reserve. Plenty of fat wrens kicking through the leaves. A man doing a prolonged session of Yoga on one of the platforms looking over the lake. The best thing was the belted kingfisher on a limb across the lake arm, under the houses. Another one called, but I couldn’t see that one. Walked along the French Broad for a long time, noting that I wasn’t really that cold, though the air was. Signed the new riverfront lease. Found music of unbelievable beauty: Morten Sennah. 

 

January 10, 2021

Entire day chopping away at The Dead Shall Live, the Living Die. I was happy. My sitting parts are exhausted.

For an hour or so my garden was filled with bluebirds.

A turkey vulture flew over even as the bonics were in my hand. Gorgeous close like that, almost artificial. 

 

January 9, 2021

Purcell on CD. Wet piercing cold. Began the day with a temper tantrum, trying to simmer down and get some work done. Achieved that, actually, wrenching the music novel onto its true path. No day is happier than that in which the writing flows.

I hate being cold. 

Random thoughts enter, pass through the head. Some cause me to consider if I have not been a more difficult human being than I’ve admitted in the past. Times when I thought I was merely fighting to stay alive, or win a postponed victory, or get some of my own back, or meekly retaliate, may have seemed to others like deeds of wrath and cruelty. All I can say is, I didn’t mean it that way. Maybe I was put on this track by considering the insurrectionists, how one must at some point believe they sincerely imagined themselves doing right. Or did they? Maybe shrillness and hatefulness is the sign that one knows one is doing wrong. I have never been shrill, but looking back, I cannot deny being, from time to remote time, hateful. Because I hated. 

 

January 8, 2021

The most agitated of times stumbles on. Five years ago many of us recognized Trump and Trumpism were inhumane and anti-American; those who portray themselves as discovering it now want praise, or at least forgiveness. Do we grant that forgiveness? What is the proper balance between justice and reconciliation? America erred mightily on the side of reconciliation after the Civil War– Confederate flags were borne proudly through the sacked Capitol two days ago. So, we have to fight and defeat the Confederacy and the Reich again and again. When do we forbear? When do we strike the killing blow? Personally I’m exhausted treating with reason those who glory in being unreasonable. To arrest, try, and imprison those who committed insurrection and treason does not seem extreme when merely written. Do we have the courage to do it? The sweep would include Congressmen, Senators, Presidents, TV savants. What is “free speech”– however idiotic–and what is subversion? We are almost certain to make the wrong choices for the right reasons. 

Lake Powhatan

 

January 7, 2021

Bach viols in the purple air. I wrote yesterday before hearing the news that Proud Boys et al had strolled–armed to the teeth–past DC police and into the Capitol Building, looting, occupying offices, driving members of Congress and Senators through underground corridors to safety. Photos of yahoos and cowboy fascists cavorting in the rotunda and in the office of the Speaker are almost impossible to credit. The worst 3 or 4 hours in American history since Antietam. Many note that the police stood and watched the rioters walk by, when, had they been BLM demonstrators, there would have been immediate gunfire. All the worst that we are condensed into a few twilight hours along the troubled Potomac. Trump all but commanded his rabble to do just what they did. Trump, Hawley, Cruse and others are so clearly guilty of treason that each hour without their arrest is a frustration and an outrage. . . but, my guess is, Trump will be allowed to sneak away after January 20 without official rebuke. I too do not know where to draw the line between justice and reconciliation, but I would try harder than DC officialdom seems to be doing. I recall the Civil War and Reconstruction. That was the wrong choice. It left the serpent alive to strike out of the shadows again.  How many times do we have to defeat the Confederacy and the Reich before we allow ourselves the killing blow? I should look back in these pages to see how many times I have written, “this is the worst day in American public life in my lifetime.” The bar continues to be lifted. 

So, perhaps in response to this, I rose in the still-dark and drove to the Hard Times trailhead. Hiked hither and thither, but something drew me to one path rather than the others, and that led to Lake Powhatan. I’ve been to the lake, but I didn’t remember exactly that route. The water was slightly agitated by wind, dark green, cold even to the eyes. Far out in the middle I saw two hooded mergansers diving and arising. They were spirits in the middle of a world of things. I watched them a long time, finding them inexpressibly beautiful, their movement on the water a kind of blessing, a kind of calm. They were both males. If there were females about I didn’t see them. I watched through my binoculars until my fingers went numb. Walking back I heard prolonged, hysterical barking. I figured a dog had a bear treed, and I wanted to see, maybe shoo the dog so the bear could escape, so I walked toward the tumult. I got so I could almost see what was going on, when I saw an orange shape and jumped at a sudden series of gunshots. The dog was evidently attached to a hunter. Still didn’t resolve to turn around until I realized my dead-leaf tan coat, my brown shirt and gray pants would not distinguish me very much either from the brush or from a wild animal, so I turned and made for the car. The gun was still firing, the dog still barking. When I got home, phoebes were feeding from the red berries on the vine I keep forgetting the name of. 

Twelfth Night

 January 6, 2021

Epiphany. I began keep this journal on this day in 1969. Patience and endurance seem to have paid their wages, as the runoff election in Georgia has flipped the Senate, so that reptile McConnell can no longer destroy and obstruct. Two great victories, and America walks on her path again. 

SS guides Washington Place toward publication.

 

January 5, 2021

Down came the Christmas trees and decorations. Near the end I sat down and thought of my mother, and the magical day when, all at once, she made the house ready for Christmas, glittering, magical, almost unrecognizable as the house we lived in day to day.. How I miss her! How I miss her Christmases! A seventy year old man sitting on his sofa, crying for his mother, dead these 47 years.

 

January 4, 2021

Clear cold blue day. I missed most of the day conquering an onslaught of phlebitis, but conquer it I did, and continue with what had been planned. This time the tell was exhaustion almost instantaneous and almost total. I realize in time the cause of illness to which there is no cause. 

Amy brought celery soup. 

Random thoughts arrow through the brain. Harvard Place in Syracuse. I think of the kid who picked me up in Fifield’s Grocery, who collected pre-Columbian art, and how we fucked under a stone statue of some god fucking. He was my first Hispanic. Maybe that’s why I remember him. Or the stone god. 

Anne and her two kids, Hailey and Chris, with whom we lived on Harvard Place. 

The scissors man. The peddler with the donkey cart. So long ago

Sniveling PR, who crept around the house, hugging the walls  like a frightened rat. He wanted me to think it was a response to my aggressive nature. It was a response to his own evil which only he, at that time, knew about. Is he the person I have hated longest? So long ago. When I think of the people upon whom my hatred has settled, I realize that not one of these hatreds was spontaneous; all came after I learned that they hated me first. By that admission most designs and subterfuges stand revealed.  

Smell on my fingers of roasted duck, which I have been tearing apart and eating bit by bit. 

Vision

 

January 3, 2021

Last night an important, visionary night for me, a breaking free from bounds, some of them old as my life. Retirement is working for me. 

Duck

 

January 2, 2021

Finally baked the duck, in a sherry/orange sauce. It turned out excellent. I ignored everything Martha Stewart said.

Finished the revision of An Age of Silver. I have never thought before that a manuscript of mine was well-nigh perfect. I suppose that means it will never get published. 

 

January 1, 2021

Same Bach plays on the CD that has played for a week, I unable to get enough of it. Maud curls under the desk, beating my leg with her contented tail. Zoom meetings last night with AGMC and the Usual, the second sustained into the New Year, when we all saluted on another and tottered off to bed. The most remarkable volume of rain continues to pour down upon the roof. Every crevasse on earth should be filled by now.

I have outgrown the minute parsing of the deeds of the past and hopes for the future, but I will say that 2020, catastrophic as it was on the world stage, was for me the longest sustained period without despair since the 70's. Also, in terms of writing, the most productive. In the white heat of play writing I may actually have done more, but there was never much prospect of getting that to the public. Beautiful Necklaces seems to have hit a public nerve– whether a big one or a little one remains to be seen. 

Full steam ahead revising Silver, possibly finishing tonight. In terms of muscularity of prose, it’s the best I’ve done. 

 

December 31, 2020

Revisions continue. Hike with binoculars along the French Broad. Sparse population, red shouldered hawk and bluebirds. Came home to find bluebirds fluttering in my berry vines. Overcast and wintery day. I am not in a very nostalgic or contemplative mood, so perhaps I’ll leave the year-end musings for tomorrow. Two Zoom meetings tonight, and I will be royally drunk by the time they are over. What goes goes on its own, and I am well.