Ian

September 29, 2022

But for a few stabs of activity, slept all day. 

A panicky actor wants to axe a song. Actually, he wanted to recite it. I told him to axe it altogether. 

Wandered around Foundry Road. Met a man unloading lumber. We talked a long time in the coming-from-everywhere-at-once sunlight. 

Tyger Tyger gallery, the work so overpriced you think it must be a joke. Nice lady opening the gallery said she just built herself a studio in her yard. 

Met MT in the Bruegher’s parking lot. She told me of triumphs in Europe and Kansas City, and the 1000 foot studio the city of Zurich gives her for free. She adds “You weren’t always I great fan of my painting,” as though the tales of eminence were all to make up for that. 

Almost unbelievably annoying rehearsal. 

The stillness of our sky makes me think of the hurricane now blasting Florida to pieces. 

 

September 28, 2022

But for a few stabs of activity, slept all day. 

 

September 27, 2022

Finished a new play, The Photograph, which is hilarious, as I don’t know what to do with the last three dozen plays. Plowing through more Italian at AS rehearsal. 

Pick-up

 

September 26, 2022

Storm came from the north last night like a dark fist. The lights went out. The attic is very, very dark. 

Interesting day. Call from Charlie, my absentee neighbor, reminding me that Ingle’s has bought up the surrounding properties and, allegedly, intends to build a multi-level, multi-use building on the site of Grace Plaza. Will this make me an island in a sea of asphalt? Will I be eminent-domain-ed out of existence? I could be dead before this moves forward; it could move forward tomorrow. 

I foresaw that this borrowing of my little blue Ford truck would be the end of our life together, and I was right. L had it for 12 days, returned it with the driver’s side rear-view mirror gone and a serious oil leak. L said the oil leak was of long standing, but there are no stains on my driveway, and never, in twelve years, had I added oil. I bought my friend on September 1, 2010.  Here is how I recorded it: I got myself a birthday present. While I was having my inspection done at Jim Barkley Toyota, I eyed a cobalt blue Ford Ranger pick-up on the lot. It stayed in mind. This morning I gathered myself and went down and bought it. I suppose this is my mid-life crisis vehicle, and if so I am lucky, for among mid-life crisis purchases it is both small and useful. I feel very sad. Eras open and close, and you hope you have some control over the timing and circumstance, but you never do. 

 

September 25, 2022

Back to the theater last night, the room half empty on the show’s last night. The play was skillfully wrought, dedicated, honest, exactly as interesting as the Hallmark Channel TV program that its audience will watch next time instead of dragging itself to the theater. How to make the point to playwrights that honesty, unalloyed with other virtues, isn’t enough? That if, after years of workshopping and revision you finally capture that precious moment from your past, you have probably not created something anyone will really want to see. Your friends and family will sit there clapping wildly at the wrong places, and the cover of the play will never be opened again. Getting it right isn’t even the beginning. There must be discovery by the playwright or all will be inert. I used to tell my students that if you wrote the play/poem/story you meant to write, you have failed. I met the flashing-eyed, voluptuous playwright, and was grateful she didn’t ask anything substantive. “What’s wrong with my play?” Nothing. Nothing at all. Just that if this is the first play an individual has seen, he will never return to the theater again. 

I was reading over FR, chastizing myself that it isn’t better, and it goes on in two weeks. In my mind it’s flawed and pretentious. Amid the company it keeps, it’s a masterpiece. Somewhere in there is comfort.

Downtown

 

September 24, 2022

Planted white iris. 

Two days of adventure. Journeyed downtown last night into the thick of Ashevilliana, roving beer floats blocking the streets, throngs, drunks, buskers, street people, drummers in the park surrounded by tourists and dancing children. I looked for a place to park-- a search which was, of course, futile-- so I resorted to the garage on Biltmore, where I did an amazing thing. The sign said “Flat Rate $20,” so when I drove in I saw the apparatus where I thought you put your credit card to pay the $20. Slid my card in, nothing happened, so I jammed it harder, to make contact. Turns out it was the apparatus you press to get your parking ticket out, and I’d jammed it up trying to force a credit card in. Spent the next few minutes trying to dig my card out, a line of cars forming down Biltmore, wondering what the hold-up was. By some miracle I actually got it out and went on my way, and the cars behind continued their interrupted procession. A very Senior thing to do. Crossed town. Early, of course, I watched the drummers at the drum circle and had a cocktail at Jack of the Wood. I’d gone to see JC’s SoR at the Bebe. The Bebe is terrible, but it can’t be helped. John is a flawless performer, and the material was solid, engaging, impassioned, enthralling, the performance (a one-man show) totally without a glitch. The tiny black-box half empty in the midst of a teeming metropolis reminded me of all the best nights of theater I’ve had in Dublin, London, wherever, when some miraculous thing unfolded before me somehow hidden from the scrutiny of the many. Of course, a performer doesn’t want to be hidden from the scrutiny of the many, but for the onlooker it may be a secret and selfish delight. 

This AM it was Pride. AVLGMC sang–well, it was reported– and I wandered about in a daze of exhaustion which cleared enough for me to realize what I was doing most of the time. Had the worst lamb gyro in the history of the world. Staggered home and slept, rose, and now prepare to return to the theater. Each activity requires recovery time. 

 

September 23, 2022

Early yet, the sun slanted. Cold last night. I wish I had shut more windows. Dread of rehearsal last night. I was ill and short of breath, but when I got there I had fun, and the various minor pains went away. Let that be a lesson to me. Will be the only bass at Pride (eight baritones, for instance), which means I will scream myself hoarse. I live in a world where there seems to be little use for Pride, though I do understand that ten miles beyond city limits it’s still the 50's. 

Reading. I do not understand why people thought Lowell was a major poet, or even a good one. Because he was a beautiful youth? Because he suffered? Because he knew the right people? Article in The New Yorker about Elizabeth Hardwick, concerning whom I feel the same bemusement. Some people are foreordained for a measure of notoriety, a condition not affected by actual achievement. She was part of the generation that made students think that good writing is the inevitable outcome of hard work (it isn’t) which was necessary to establish Creative Writing as a paid academic discipline. I thank them for that, as it made my life easier. She was one of those whose eminence was based on eminence, so far as I can see. Maybe just the elevation of the name “Elizabeth Hardwick,” which must perforce belong to an eminent person. Had I taught in a graduate university, my influence might have been different and greater, but also my teaching style might have been altered in ways I wouldn’t necessarily find pleasing. I was seldom challenged by my students, so my growth had to come from inside. That, in the end, was well. Did I challenge them? Is there any way of knowing? Even while it strove to be a real university, UNCA’s emphasis was on the encouragement of local kids to be the best they could be, with little thought to whether that was “good enough” in the great world. I agreed with that, and still do. I was a teacher more than a critic. I was an encourager, one who found something to praise in each work and hoped that lack of praise elsewhere would get the point across. I think that was my nature, and would have remained unchanged wherever I was. My approach to academic classes would have been different had my students been better prepared, but surely I gained something from starting at the beginning each time. The bitterness at the end of my career probably colors all remembrance. I was probably a greater success than I think I was, or, if a failure, one with less influence than might be feared.

Had I been a handsome young Brahmin named Geronimo Millstein, I’d be living in a New York penthouse now, with NYRB articles being written about me. 

Daylilies

 September 22, 2022

Sept in a cocoon of inflammation last night, enfolded by pain. I knew all I had to do was get up and take a pill to alleviate it, but I lingered a long time before I did. There was some odd comfort in the pain. 

Squalls of cold rain backed by sharp wind, though the first half of the day was summer, and in that late warmth I got daylily and iris into the ground, cleared out space for the next batch before my strength gave way. Rounding the side of the house I came upon the same big, dark hawk that had called in the branches before. He was on the ground, and I think he’d caught something, possibly a snake. Too big and dark and shambling to be Sweetboi– I think he’s a this year’s red-tail finding safety in my garden. After the planting I sat downcast on a chair on the front porch, thinking such thoughts as one has, and I heard the gentlest rustling. I looked up, and the hen turkey stood three feet away, staring at me. She’s not used to the big ape being so still. She hopped back onto the ground and led her five big chicks on a foraging journey through the garden. I followed them around back to watch them nibble through the great pavilions of sunflower and goldenrod. How many devastations and disappointments is a sight like that intended to make up for? Some, truly: probably not as many as God thinks. 

AVLGMC rehearsal tonight. I truly doubt I have the stamina to make it through all that. 

 

September 21, 2022

Woke in the night to a high tingling in the air, like tiny glass chimes. I thought they might be the wind chimes, but they were too high and far too fast. Maybe autumn welcoming itself into my garden.

Pulled some demon out of my dreams and only now, mid-afternoon, do I fight may way out of the murk. Got my flu shot and finished off the shingles series. Gardened until it was too hot, then sat in the garden and strove with God. Does His secrecy need to be so great? We would fight him less if we understood him more? If he didn’t feel like communicating, he shouldn’t have created us longing for communication.  I feel like a man who labored to draw harvest from his own fields, and then is driven away that others might profit from his achievement. In the dead of night he sneaks back to see if there is any remnant to glean, furtive, lest even that be snatched away. If God has excuses for his cruelty, he does not do well to conceal them. I sat in the garden and emptied my heart, then waited for a reply. A dark hawk cried from the maple branch.

Glorious first of autumn unfolds despite this. We die of grief in fields of gold. Me, I am never happy to see summer go.

Evening: shoulder throbs from the shots, as the ladt at the pharmacy said it would. Last time with Z. Neither of us could think of what to say. I found distant comfort realizing going without his ministrations would save me $3000 a year. Sorry to have thought of that.

 

September 20, 2022

One of the great days. I rose and sent off manuscripts, then gardened, and the gardening was easily in the 65th percentile of all gardening. The west side of the porch is utterly transformed. Pulled out a giant hibiscus tuber for Russell. The last day of summer was supremely beautiful. SC rehearsal in the evening, and I made it through without an energy crash.

Persimmons

 September 19, 2022

The perfection of yesterday was such that I determined to do some gardening, and at that was moderately successful. Got ½ a plot dug for $200 worth of new daylilies. Continued the long war against the grapevines and honeysuckle, which had colonized the tops of my hollies without my noticing. Discovered a bumper crop of persimmons. Ate one warmed by the sun, and it was indescribably delicious, the best of all fruits, even with the astringent wave that comes after the last taste. 

Z is giving up his practice, at least temporarily. I’ve been with him, what? Twelve years? Fifteen years? It’s like getting fired. 

SN sends me delphinium seeds. 

Watched bits of the Queen’s funeral. The uninterrupted yakkety-yak of the news commentators was at odds with the dignity of the proceedings. 

I’m told to leave the persimmons be until they fall to the ground. 

 

September 16, 2022

The loss-of-taste part of Covid kicks in. Tried to eat a tomato sandwich, and all I got was cold and doughy. Stomach muscles sore with coughing. 

COVID

 

September 15, 2022

Feel great this AM, but pretty sure that I had Covid, and had it longer than I was aware. Did I have it at the beach? Did that explain the listlessness? Understanding now that the weird cough and the (even for me) inexplicable exhaustion were symptoms, I certainly had it Tuesday night at Symphony Chorus, which meant that I, in my ignorance, was blowing Covid in everybody’s face. Because the weather was perfect, I forced myself to do some garden work, and was down in the lower thicket pulling vines. When I finished, the prospect of climbing that little hill back to the house was daunting. I thought I would never make it back to the house. Once I did, I had to sit on the stoop a while to recover before I went in. Maud was right to require me only to cuddle with her the rest of the afternoon. 

Morning was energetic, but now, late afternoon, fever and exhaustion re-assert themselves. This disease will take some learning. Meeting with S, in which strategies for Stewardship were discussed. I was working too hard. She told me explicitly to pause while she catches up. 

 

September 14, 2022

The furnace company sent their man to inspect my furnace. It was fine, as it ought to be, having been installed in March. D is a giant and bashed his head on my lintels more than once, when in fact a small tragedy of my house is that it was built for people bigger than I, and I can’t reach many of the top shelves. He plans to get out of the furnace business and get into “digital marketing,” but admitted he needed to do so in a particular way, as his impatience with authority could sabotage him if he goes the regular route. 

Coffee with K at Summit, wherein we discussed art & theater & the personalities therein related. I will be speaking at a showing of Frankenstein at a local arts cinema, which was a hundred yards from where we sat without my knowing it. I am wondrous ignorant of most of what goes on in my own town. 

Boring Symphony Chorus rehearsal. I must have thought it was better than spending Tuesday nights in front of the TV, and I still do. 

Major weeding and vine-pulling, after which I was pathologically exhausted. I wasn’t sure I could make it up the little hill from the pond. Maud came in where I lay on my bed and hollered at me until I went to our place on the sofa and cuddled her as we do when watching TV. It’s the most amazing thing. She has a yell for an empty bowl and a yell for “come cuddle NOW” and another for just– I don’t know– making sure I remember her. We lay there for a couple of hours while I felt exhausted, coughing this odd and unlike-me kind of cough. Rose to bow out of choir rehearsal to discover that rehearsal had been cancelled because five choristers have tested positive for Covid. I’m wondering if I would be the 6th, if I were to go to get tested. It wold explain the exhaustion and the cough. 

 

September 12, 2022

Getting control of my food intake after the yearly beach-binge has improved my sleep, increased my energy. Up today before the sun. Revisions and submissions. Well done.

 

September 11, 2022

A bitter anniversary. 

The new Dean’s first day, and the imps of perversity seemed arrayed against her: technical problems, sections of the rubric apparently under-rehearsed, wrong hymn played at the wrong time. No matter. Striking out first time at bat is nothing so long as the game is won. 

“Bethany’s Boyfriend” accepted by Dillydoun Review in Texas.

 

September 10, 2022

Home from the sea: a long, rainy trip, with me being no use to DJ because I couldn’t keep awake. I hadn’t related to the actual water in a long time, and I’m back in love. Will miss that, but dealing now with almost unspeakable exhaustion. Maud hollered at me when I walked through the door, but a snuggle and a nap with her on my belly smoothed things out. R fixed the closet door. DJ's van annihilated the cosmos on the way out of the drive. All is as I left it. Stupid comments on Face Book about the death of the Queen. Why do people mock those whose lives have been incalculably more useful than their own? 

 

September 9, 2022

Rain began in the darkness and continued all night, as it does now, wind from a direction that allows me to type on the balcony with the full roar and gray fury of the sea before me. One surfer enters my field of vision, his red shirt the only note not in the pearls and grays. The sea is not much rougher than before, but the inclemencies above it make it seem more threatening. 

Saw dolphins at the edge of the pier.

Began feeding gulls and grackles from the balcony. I’m sure that’s a transgression. 

Amy gave me The Buried Giant by Ishiguro to read. I’m pretty sure I’ll never finish it. The man has a Nobel Prize and the one virtue I can find in this book is a remarkable fidelity to an atmosphere of decrepitude and Medieval squalor. 

Queen Elizabeth

 

September 8, 2022

Repeated the best of yesterday: played in the Atlantic, then eased into the condo pool, inhabited this time by children, whose parents told them to be respectful and not to splash me. Two kids about 11 years old were flirting furiously with each other, without, perhaps, knowing what they were doing. They were witty, and able to land some pretty sharp barbs into one another. The girl’s name was Emma. 

In the afternoon we learned that Queen Elizabeth had died. Many retrospectives on TV which I, at least, watched. She reigned on the far side of the water all my conscious life. A world never again as it was.

Folly Beach Continued

 September 7, 2022

J and M and we festive on the balcony until all hours. He kept pouring shots and we kept drinking them. We discussed the relative merits of scholarship and immediate response. Odd to be having that discussion with adults. Went to bed too drunk, slept poorly. Swam in the sea again this morning, and when I was done I soaked in the pool, an experience so relaxing I almost fell asleep in the water. A sandpiper patrols the space before the condo. Sanderlings dash into the wavelets. Both are more substantial birds than I remember them.  Dinner at 101 Pier, and then I broke off from the group and did a minor pub crawl downtown. Returned to Planet Follywood. The copy of Necklaces I left there last year is gone, so maybe it found a home. Drank with the owner, who is also a city councilman, and a guy who is head janitor at a local college and showed me photos of a chunk of clogged pipe.  He began an anecdote of an all-black high school in Charleston, but it never got where it was going. A guy celebrating retirement from the Army bought a round of drinks. Hawk devouring a lizard near the pier. 

Into the Sea

September 6, 2022

Another bright morning. Threats of inclemency have not materialized. Yesterday was gorgeous in that I ran about and saw the town as I would have done in days before this debility hit. I was tired, but never too tired, never out of breath. My first year I couldn’t make it to the pier without major problems. Reminder that for me the joy of traveling is to walk out of the hotel door into the street and just start discovering, meeting, engaging. Usually there are castles and museums, but a little beach town will do too. Was given free tea by Theresa in the Drop Inn. Opened the 101 Bar on the Pier with their first drink. In the afternoon the group went about town– to eat and drink– and again I went at some pace without losing the breath. The tide rises, the tide falls. Happy people on the pier listening to horrible music. Flashlights on the shore at night, I think looking for baby turtles to help them in their destinies. How they survive the crush of human bodies in the day, though, I don’t know. Warning about married life, and how it is well I missed it: every surface covered by some cast-off item, a book, a water bottle, so there must be major excavation even to sit down. 

Arrival of Jay and Martina, who have been fishing for redfish somewhere nearby.

Walked into the sea this morning, the first time I actually swam in the Atlantic since– I don’t recall. Strong and refreshing, but mostly strong, so that at times I scurried back toward shore, unsure that my strength would be enough. You don’t have to enter the sea. You stand and it engulfs you. Where I stood I could see waves that I knew to be far taller than I, until they were broken by the sand. The surfers and I rejoiced in the same waves. 

 

September 5, 2022

Sleep slightly better, but often interrupted. 

Big dinner at Loggerheads last night, good looking beach people in various stages of inebriation. 

Time at the beach is spent watching the others scroll endlessly through their phones. No one is present in the moment for very long. I creep into the cool to write, or nap. 

Folly Beach

September 4, 2022

Folly Beach, SC. Arrival pretty much as it has been for three years, me honoring traditions set long before me. Tried unsuccessfully to fight off sleep in the car. DJ exceptionally voluble. By night on the balcony we watched Antares and Jupiter ride a sky ruled by the half moon. There are two beds in my bedroom. I tried the first, and no sooner had I lain down that visions popped into my head of a derelict pirate ship washed up on shore. I tried to explore, and as I did, ghosts of men who’d died in the brig emerged to tell me their stories. The bed was haunted, so I moved across the room, to one suitably inert. Pulled the Venetian blinds down trying to close them. Stuff pillows in the window so my named self can’t be seen from the back terrace. Sat in the blinding morning light on our balcony and wrote poems. Going to dare myself to at least a poem a day. 

Wandered into the sea amid the late morning holiday crowd. Happy feeling. Saw a small fish, almost transparent, at the edge of the waves. There are waves of the sea perpendicular to those coming onshore, which are warm and cold. Babies held by parents, dangling their feet in the water

 September 2, 2022

All that I wrote yesterday reminds me of Gilgamesh. I wander the streets of Uruk crying “Enkidu!” and the people say “Who?” 

New singers for AVLGMC. Excellent new bass from Orange County.

 

September 1, 2022

Happy Birthday to me. The day given by the gods is brilliant, but I’ve found ways to darken thought. The central theme of five decades of my life is work as hard at writing as can possibly done, improve, probe deeper into the mysteries, so far as it is given me to probe, perfect and refine until achievement and abilities find the same resting place. This I have done. I stand before whatever power there is and say “This I have done.” But alongside that came the supposition that a certain amount of visible success-renown, perhaps recognition, eventual ease of publication-- would attend upon those efforts. This did not happen, and my response was to redouble effort, as an athlete does, to break through, to surge ahead finally by the power of determination. The difference between an athlete’s efforts and mine is that in a race who has crossed the line first cannot be mistaken, or, if it can, both are counted winners. I read or watch onstage the productions of my contemporaries and there are few cases in which mine is not better, but having crossed that line furlongs ahead seems to make no difference. It is somehow not preferred. The moment has been invisible, everyone turned away looking at something else. I am the best poet in America, and ten people know my name. Beating against that wall has been futile so long my thoughts turned another way, a way they do not go naturally. What if I am simply “meant” to be the one who never gets the life he believes he has earned? What if my own efforts are completely irrelevant in this regard? A foreordination, this, that, and then no more? Otherwise is not going to happen, as tulips will not bloom from the chestnut tree. You were meant to have these things, and you have them; these things were not meant for you, and you will never have them. Longing beyond your destiny is not the fault of the gods. It should be a kind of relief if it had nothing to do with me. It is not, though, for it requires a change of world view into something dim and rigid. My conception of God was one who changed with you, who saw what you had earned and rendered the prize, who saw what you needed and stood at the door with it in his hand, who moved the goal when you exceeded it, who lured you on from the front, fleet, inspired, dynamic. My experience of him at all times has been the one who says “no” regardless of the rightness of “yes,” who lets you get to the corners of the box but does not allow you out however you gnaw and protest. Even I went to the end to let the raccoon family out of my attic. In a way, I am to blame. I did not register what stood before my perceptions. I operated on faith. I turned my eyes the other way to spare him. I have not spoken the truth, because it lessened him into One not fit for the songs of praise. So, I asked myself, what do I do about it? If the whole perception is right, thinking you can do something about it is the root of sorrow. What if I refuse to accept it? My recent perceptions about physical pain– crying out that you can’t stand it does not mean you will not have to stand it– enlightens me here. A little mouse voice says from the corner, “What else would you have been doing? Imagine futile striving to be the gift of God, for had you not been striving, your life would have been empty indeed.” I cannot declare this to be untrue. Poetry filled my life, and while I was creating it I was always happy. So if I look back and resent a long, long deception, it’s difficult to know what to do other than resent, go dull to it, move on. It is a kind of relief, as the angels of entropy surely intend it to be. 

This goes some way to explaining my career as a painter, too. I wasn’t bad. So much that is idiosyncratic is prized that I thought my idiosyncracies might find a champion. But the word was, “No, that’s not for you.” Was I happy painting? Yes I was. Should that have been enough? It wasn’t. I paid the consequence. I cannot say these perceptions fill me with sadness. They don’t. On a day when I had more fight in me, perhaps they would. May that day never again come. 

 

August 30, 2022

Maud vomited and I didn’t see it, so I slipped and careered into the guest bedroom closet and onto the floor. The doors of the closet are bashed off their runners. It was the sort of fall that defines old age, but when I managed to get up I realized nothing was broken, nothing even hurt that much, except the closet. I’m a good faller, typically landing completely flat. Off to a gathering in honor of my birthday at Rye Knot. One must plan events carefully to avoid the expanding clutch of rehearsals. Good time, maybe the best of those kinds of times. Late in the evening something screamed in the back garden. Either it was the most irate raccoon that ever was in the world, or some night bird I couldn’t identify. Turning on the lights showed me night and vacancy, so a mystery remains. Someone sent me gorgeous green coasters. With whom was I discussing coasters? 

Revision notes: the elimination of my apparently relentless helping verbs, changing “was going” to “went”; “began seeing” to “saw.” Finding alternatives to “was” and “were”: “He was afraid that” to “he feared.” 

Session of vine-pulling to get the clematis, however lovely, off the trees.

The Nurseryman's Wedding

 

August 29, 2022

Before noon I finished the huge revision of The Nurseryman’s Wedding. Four pages shorter than the last version, though, I think, hugely changed.