June 8, 2008
Crushing heat (again) and it’s only 9 AM. I think I’ve lost the window of opportunity when another bike ride was feasible.
Darren had a party last night, a very loud and prolonged one, probably for the opening of Antony and Cleopatra at Montford. I’m several doors away and pretty tolerant of such things, so I wonder if he got complaints from his nearer and tenderer neighbors. Cars were parked crooked all over the streets, including in front of my house, edging so far into the right-of-way I wonder why it wasn’t wiped out by traffic. Lying in bed listening to the din I was thinking complicated thoughts. I liked the sound. I had to push away the tatters of conventional response, which suggested I should have been indignant. I wasn’t invited, but would probably have been welcomed had I appeared. Did I want to appear? I actually wanted to be there and at a distance, listening, at the same time, and the strange liquidity of perception on a summer night almost allowed that. Individual voices were sometimes very clear over the din. I listened to tell who they were, but all voices shouting sound pretty much the same. Half in my dreams, I thought it sounded like an invading army, but a happy one, one to which you wouldn’t mind conceding the victory. Broken bottles glittered in the street when I walked to Mountain Java, the orange party lights looking peaked in the dawn. I wonder if before I die I’ll abandon myself so much at a party that I’ll have to sleep on the couch, or flopped on a bed with a brace or two of others in the same state? Time passes, and now such an outcome looks unlikely. . . . alas. . . .
Jinx was incredibly cute and giggly at the studio today, almost another, and lighter, person. Then I saw the beautiful girl he was with, and that explained it. She took almost her own age off his.
Encountered a colleague at the Fresh Market. His huge-eyed daughter Eva (about 4?) looked me up and down and said, "Where’s your mother?"
"Uhm. . . she’s in heaven."
"Why is she in heaven?
"She died. "
"How did she get died?"
"Well, she got sick, and–"
"You have COCA COLA!"
I finally realized where she was going. If my mother were here to watch over me, I wouldn’t be buying the nasty junk that was in my shopping cart.
A director in Atlanta requests a copy of Bathory after reading it in and preserving his notes from 1988. Have I really being laboring at this that long?
Scarlet lilies blooming in the back yard, in the afternoon shade or at evening so intensely red they look lit they’re artificially lit.
Tom Thompson sends a list of 31 classmates who are deceased, as part of the preparations for this summer’s reunion. I have a clear image in my head of thirty of them. Almost all I "knew" in some capacity deeper than being able to identify them across a room. Three were, at one time, relatively intimate friends. Three I had a crush on. A surprising seven of them were from a group one would at one time have called "hoods," and have assumed that early, perhaps violent, death would be but expected. Two of these were in the "crush" classification as well. With one, Cathy Casey-Billings, I feel a bond that is not only lingering, but mystical. We were separate from our classmates from kindergarten on up, and made a classification of our own, though neither of us talked much about it then. Or ever, but once, when she came to buy a book from me, and she was very ill, though she could not bring herself to say it.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
June 7, 2008
Connie Bostic’s show at the Flood is well-painted and nobly imagined, though it shares with all topical art the peril of looming obsolescence. It is possible that the plight of black people fighting the aftermath of the hurricane in New Orleans will always "read," but it is possible also that it is a little too specific. Some of the images--without an immediate social context understood, at the moment, by all observers-- can look almost comical. Fat ladies pushing swollen suitcases through deep water could be "avarice" as well as "refugee" minus the moment’s common understanding. But in its moment, an important exhibition. Connie is one of those painters who refuses too great a technical refinement, lest it detract from a message which has nothing to do with refinement or belle artes. She paints subjects and not painting, which endears her to me.
Connie Bostic’s show at the Flood is well-painted and nobly imagined, though it shares with all topical art the peril of looming obsolescence. It is possible that the plight of black people fighting the aftermath of the hurricane in New Orleans will always "read," but it is possible also that it is a little too specific. Some of the images--without an immediate social context understood, at the moment, by all observers-- can look almost comical. Fat ladies pushing swollen suitcases through deep water could be "avarice" as well as "refugee" minus the moment’s common understanding. But in its moment, an important exhibition. Connie is one of those painters who refuses too great a technical refinement, lest it detract from a message which has nothing to do with refinement or belle artes. She paints subjects and not painting, which endears her to me.
June 6, 2008
Crushing heat. I rode my bike in the cool of the morning along Bent Creek, and was happy. I remembered a few things from long ago when I was, for a time, a serious biker, how to turn into a curve, how to handle gravel. The forest was empty and the forest roads heavy with perfume, mostly honeysuckle. White laurel studded the roadside and places higher on the slopes. Biking gives one a subtler sense of topography than walking. I was aware of having to pump the pedals the whole way out, but didn’t realize until the way back that it was because it was a very little bit uphill, which meant the return was a dizzying, breezeful, joyous glide. It is not yet noon and I have had my bike ride and finished a draft of the opera, which suits me just fine. Lets see how it suits FF. I think he’ll hate the title.
Crushing heat. I rode my bike in the cool of the morning along Bent Creek, and was happy. I remembered a few things from long ago when I was, for a time, a serious biker, how to turn into a curve, how to handle gravel. The forest was empty and the forest roads heavy with perfume, mostly honeysuckle. White laurel studded the roadside and places higher on the slopes. Biking gives one a subtler sense of topography than walking. I was aware of having to pump the pedals the whole way out, but didn’t realize until the way back that it was because it was a very little bit uphill, which meant the return was a dizzying, breezeful, joyous glide. It is not yet noon and I have had my bike ride and finished a draft of the opera, which suits me just fine. Lets see how it suits FF. I think he’ll hate the title.
June 5, 2008
Dragged my bike out of the garage and had the guy down at the bike store– the guy with the amazing tan ropes of veins–get it in fighting trim, and I rode it for the first time in–what? A year? Two years? I picked the hottest day of the year, so I about had heatstroke, but it got me back in the saddle. It’s going to take some practice. Even a little hill annihilates me.
Went to the studio and painted. It was good. Afterward, when I parked in back I opened the door, and saw a big tick scuttling across the black pavement. It changed course when it sensed my foot and leg, and changed course again every time I moved, bearing toward the heat or the CO2 or whatever it is ticks target. Sometimes it would tumble over a pile of debris and spend sometime flailing its legs in the air, trying to right itself. I thought what labor. What labor it is for the little creature to negotiate the colossal world and get its little drop of blood. What did it do when I walked away? Did it blame some tick God for the sudden removal of what seemed to be a gigantic sack of dinner?
Dragged my bike out of the garage and had the guy down at the bike store– the guy with the amazing tan ropes of veins–get it in fighting trim, and I rode it for the first time in–what? A year? Two years? I picked the hottest day of the year, so I about had heatstroke, but it got me back in the saddle. It’s going to take some practice. Even a little hill annihilates me.
Went to the studio and painted. It was good. Afterward, when I parked in back I opened the door, and saw a big tick scuttling across the black pavement. It changed course when it sensed my foot and leg, and changed course again every time I moved, bearing toward the heat or the CO2 or whatever it is ticks target. Sometimes it would tumble over a pile of debris and spend sometime flailing its legs in the air, trying to right itself. I thought what labor. What labor it is for the little creature to negotiate the colossal world and get its little drop of blood. What did it do when I walked away? Did it blame some tick God for the sudden removal of what seemed to be a gigantic sack of dinner?
Thursday, June 5, 2008
June 4, 2008
I paid off a BP credit card which I will not use again.
I bought a lawnmower and mowed the lawn, for the first time since I don’t care to remember when. I loved my garden before, but I love it more now that it can be seen behind the wild grass, rather than substantially imagined.
Today, not having bitten my nails in two weeks, I will buy the first nail file I have ever owned in my life. I do not know what has brought on these changes.
My sister reports that dad is eating and drinking and wanted to join his new friends at supper. This is one of those times when it is impossible to know what to hope for, what to pray for.
My sister has her will rewritten, and gives custody of her children to Andy’s St. Louis brothers in the event of her untimely death. I say, "What about me?" She says, "Well, you’re out of the country all the time. " My next line was, "Well, I wouldn’t be if I had something else to do," but it seemed best to cut that exchange short. Here I am, the Covering Cherub, with almost never anything to cover.
Planted lavender verbena. The hollyhocks change from year to year. This time it is almost entirely the black ones. They’re black in the afternoon light, though at dawn, when the light blazes from the east into their cups, they are the richest blood red.
I paid off a BP credit card which I will not use again.
I bought a lawnmower and mowed the lawn, for the first time since I don’t care to remember when. I loved my garden before, but I love it more now that it can be seen behind the wild grass, rather than substantially imagined.
Today, not having bitten my nails in two weeks, I will buy the first nail file I have ever owned in my life. I do not know what has brought on these changes.
My sister reports that dad is eating and drinking and wanted to join his new friends at supper. This is one of those times when it is impossible to know what to hope for, what to pray for.
My sister has her will rewritten, and gives custody of her children to Andy’s St. Louis brothers in the event of her untimely death. I say, "What about me?" She says, "Well, you’re out of the country all the time. " My next line was, "Well, I wouldn’t be if I had something else to do," but it seemed best to cut that exchange short. Here I am, the Covering Cherub, with almost never anything to cover.
Planted lavender verbena. The hollyhocks change from year to year. This time it is almost entirely the black ones. They’re black in the afternoon light, though at dawn, when the light blazes from the east into their cups, they are the richest blood red.
June 3, 2008
My father’s determination to die (or to have his own way in something, one might say) progressed so that my sister called Hospice to facilitate it. Now, Hospice is more amply funded by the government, and father will be spending a lot less, and yet he still refused everything the hospice people offered, assuming there were out to get his money. They are getting what they want nevertheless, for father gave my sister the power to make decisions for him, and she is. The hospice lady–who must have seen a great deal in her time–left her interview with dad saying, "that is one mean son-of-a-bitch." She also assumes he cannot die until he gets over his meanness, in which case we have a long wait.
All his present bitterness and misery arise from the issue of money. Throughout my life I assumed he was money-loving, and I assumed that to be sinful, but he, after a while, HAD money, and so prudence rather than miserliness was at least a possible interpretation. There’s nothing prudent in his present actions. He accuses us of stealing from him. He has been shown the money from the sale of the house in his account, but he still assumes that is a mirage and that the realtor has it. He accuses those who seek to make him more comfortable of merely wanting to sell him something. He claims to be afraid mainly of pain, and yet he will not visit the doctor to get the pain medicine because he feels the doctor is "only out to get my money." He doesn’t have that much that everybody’s eye should be on it. I do not think he is suffering dementia. I hope he is, but I think not. I think this is the dramatic–almost Ovidean– final transformation of a soul who always wanted money more than anything or anyone, and who assumed he himself had worth only insofar as he had it. It is pitiable state, but it is also, in the end, fully voluntary. Love or comfort is rejects because he fears it might cost him something. He is a figure out of a morality play. He is Avarice. I did not expect this. I did not expect it to be so horrible. I had a scenario in mind where a kindly old man would fade away in the presence of his grandsons. I did not imagine a serpent coiled around its cold treasure, hissing and spitting until the last moment.
If I had fears that I would end up like my father, they are gone.
My father’s determination to die (or to have his own way in something, one might say) progressed so that my sister called Hospice to facilitate it. Now, Hospice is more amply funded by the government, and father will be spending a lot less, and yet he still refused everything the hospice people offered, assuming there were out to get his money. They are getting what they want nevertheless, for father gave my sister the power to make decisions for him, and she is. The hospice lady–who must have seen a great deal in her time–left her interview with dad saying, "that is one mean son-of-a-bitch." She also assumes he cannot die until he gets over his meanness, in which case we have a long wait.
All his present bitterness and misery arise from the issue of money. Throughout my life I assumed he was money-loving, and I assumed that to be sinful, but he, after a while, HAD money, and so prudence rather than miserliness was at least a possible interpretation. There’s nothing prudent in his present actions. He accuses us of stealing from him. He has been shown the money from the sale of the house in his account, but he still assumes that is a mirage and that the realtor has it. He accuses those who seek to make him more comfortable of merely wanting to sell him something. He claims to be afraid mainly of pain, and yet he will not visit the doctor to get the pain medicine because he feels the doctor is "only out to get my money." He doesn’t have that much that everybody’s eye should be on it. I do not think he is suffering dementia. I hope he is, but I think not. I think this is the dramatic–almost Ovidean– final transformation of a soul who always wanted money more than anything or anyone, and who assumed he himself had worth only insofar as he had it. It is pitiable state, but it is also, in the end, fully voluntary. Love or comfort is rejects because he fears it might cost him something. He is a figure out of a morality play. He is Avarice. I did not expect this. I did not expect it to be so horrible. I had a scenario in mind where a kindly old man would fade away in the presence of his grandsons. I did not imagine a serpent coiled around its cold treasure, hissing and spitting until the last moment.
If I had fears that I would end up like my father, they are gone.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
June 2, 2008
Fought off sleep as I was driving from Virginia Beach this morning, but now I feel enough alertness in my for at least a few lines.
Returned home to a world still haunted by the din of cicadae, that alien sound now even louder than it was before, the great bodies of the insects themselves buzzing through the air and flopping clumsily from branches and bushes in ineffectual escape. Black hollyhocks and dark orange lilies have come into bloom.
I kept a handwritten journal at Virginia Beach, but perhaps I will try to reconstruct it from memory. The Sandbridge area, where Jack and his sister’s beach house is, is a long island or peninsula which manages a measure of wildness even though the upper part is entirely built over. DJ and I saw a deer hoofing through the sand one morning, and Stout the dog barked at a turtle in the yard, and people say they have seen wild horses. The lower end is a wildlife preserve with dramatic dunes and various kinds of pools containing various kinds of wildlife. An indigo racer shared the boardwalk long enough for me to touch him. At the same moment watersnake was swimming toward the largest slider I’ve ever seen, almost the size of a sea turtle, a great dome of light-snuffing black. Ospreys are numerous, and find buoys and pylons on the water to their liking as nest sites. I walked along the beach (always alone; the house wasn’t much for outdoor activities that were not sunbathing) and beachcomber picking were slim, though there were many shattered horseshoe crab shells and the alien-looking skeletons of rays. The beach was awash with mermaids’ purses. I walked to the big pier and talked with a couple of fisherman and rangers, who told me what could be seen if I had arrived at a luckier time. Black dolphins sported in the surf, which was plenty lucky, though a sight, it turned out, not to be repeated. One day we took the ferry across Carratuck Sound. It was a lovely trip, but part of the loveliness depended on one’s ignoring a truly unbelievable mass of floating trash. An osprey chick hawked at us from her perch on an island pylon.
The company was Jack and Leland and DJ and myself, with Leland’s two friends, Tom and Kevin, joining the party last night. Had only one night with them, and I’m sorry, for they seemed lively and imaginative and engaged with the world. The weekend was, actually, rather trying, though no blame is to be laid. For me, relaxation is to do different things than I usually do. For the rest of the group, it is to do nothing at all. Twice I heard "Oh, isn’t it great just to do nothing at all!" and my inner response was not only "no", but "hell no." This is a difference of perspective in which there is no possible harmony.
Did read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Gripping, of course, but also the kind of book which could have been written in a week. That sort of writing is like composing in heroic couplets: once you get the form down, it goes like an avalanche. It’s harder to stop than to go on.
My sister keeps me up to date by cell phone on the latest dad drama. He forgets he has given himself an enema, and goes to bed, and wakes with the room covered in his own feces. She uses his credit card to buy Depends and more sheets, and is almost arrested at Wall Mart because the credit card is clearly not hers. Father is miserable and confused and hedged on all sides, he thinks, by enemies, and has begun to feel the cancer in his throat, and decides he doesn’t want to go on living. He divines that the quickest way is dehydration. Father was always one for surprising you with lightning–and often jaw-droppingly contextless-- decisions, but whatever one thinks of his choices now, he has a legal living will, and it is clear he must have foreseen and provided for this moment. Linda asks if I want to see him "before" and I say, "Not especially." No one but her heard me say that, but still I think I must explain. I’ve said before that I believe we all were a surprise to dad, and not a joyful one. He was happiest and best when he was alone, a wild child looking at the world from the fringes of a fairy kingdom of his own making. I see him in my mind’s eye now, peering from the brush on the banks of the Mongahela, squirrel-eyed and joyful as he would never be again. I think the sovereignty of dying should be yielded to him. I think he would be bewildered, distracted, disappointed to find himself amid a host in the last moments– a host which he would not necessarily identify as "loved ones." I don’t know this for sure. I know that at my death, however much I might want to be surrounded by loved ones, I would be surprised actually to be, and maybe worried that even in those last moments I might not fulfil expectations. Dad is five times more private and more secret than myself. I think I am doing what he wants. I am giving room to a man who never had enough room. I am giving the last illimitable imagining to a man whose imagination was always crashing into what people presented to him as reality. I know he will not be thinking of me in his last moments. I know that none of us will be able to imagine what he will be thinking. I believe it might be, in ways that might even be recognizable to me, beautiful.
Notice that Passport will be part of the Gone In 60 Seconds Festival, to be performed in a few days in Brooklyn.
Fought off sleep as I was driving from Virginia Beach this morning, but now I feel enough alertness in my for at least a few lines.
Returned home to a world still haunted by the din of cicadae, that alien sound now even louder than it was before, the great bodies of the insects themselves buzzing through the air and flopping clumsily from branches and bushes in ineffectual escape. Black hollyhocks and dark orange lilies have come into bloom.
I kept a handwritten journal at Virginia Beach, but perhaps I will try to reconstruct it from memory. The Sandbridge area, where Jack and his sister’s beach house is, is a long island or peninsula which manages a measure of wildness even though the upper part is entirely built over. DJ and I saw a deer hoofing through the sand one morning, and Stout the dog barked at a turtle in the yard, and people say they have seen wild horses. The lower end is a wildlife preserve with dramatic dunes and various kinds of pools containing various kinds of wildlife. An indigo racer shared the boardwalk long enough for me to touch him. At the same moment watersnake was swimming toward the largest slider I’ve ever seen, almost the size of a sea turtle, a great dome of light-snuffing black. Ospreys are numerous, and find buoys and pylons on the water to their liking as nest sites. I walked along the beach (always alone; the house wasn’t much for outdoor activities that were not sunbathing) and beachcomber picking were slim, though there were many shattered horseshoe crab shells and the alien-looking skeletons of rays. The beach was awash with mermaids’ purses. I walked to the big pier and talked with a couple of fisherman and rangers, who told me what could be seen if I had arrived at a luckier time. Black dolphins sported in the surf, which was plenty lucky, though a sight, it turned out, not to be repeated. One day we took the ferry across Carratuck Sound. It was a lovely trip, but part of the loveliness depended on one’s ignoring a truly unbelievable mass of floating trash. An osprey chick hawked at us from her perch on an island pylon.
The company was Jack and Leland and DJ and myself, with Leland’s two friends, Tom and Kevin, joining the party last night. Had only one night with them, and I’m sorry, for they seemed lively and imaginative and engaged with the world. The weekend was, actually, rather trying, though no blame is to be laid. For me, relaxation is to do different things than I usually do. For the rest of the group, it is to do nothing at all. Twice I heard "Oh, isn’t it great just to do nothing at all!" and my inner response was not only "no", but "hell no." This is a difference of perspective in which there is no possible harmony.
Did read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Gripping, of course, but also the kind of book which could have been written in a week. That sort of writing is like composing in heroic couplets: once you get the form down, it goes like an avalanche. It’s harder to stop than to go on.
My sister keeps me up to date by cell phone on the latest dad drama. He forgets he has given himself an enema, and goes to bed, and wakes with the room covered in his own feces. She uses his credit card to buy Depends and more sheets, and is almost arrested at Wall Mart because the credit card is clearly not hers. Father is miserable and confused and hedged on all sides, he thinks, by enemies, and has begun to feel the cancer in his throat, and decides he doesn’t want to go on living. He divines that the quickest way is dehydration. Father was always one for surprising you with lightning–and often jaw-droppingly contextless-- decisions, but whatever one thinks of his choices now, he has a legal living will, and it is clear he must have foreseen and provided for this moment. Linda asks if I want to see him "before" and I say, "Not especially." No one but her heard me say that, but still I think I must explain. I’ve said before that I believe we all were a surprise to dad, and not a joyful one. He was happiest and best when he was alone, a wild child looking at the world from the fringes of a fairy kingdom of his own making. I see him in my mind’s eye now, peering from the brush on the banks of the Mongahela, squirrel-eyed and joyful as he would never be again. I think the sovereignty of dying should be yielded to him. I think he would be bewildered, distracted, disappointed to find himself amid a host in the last moments– a host which he would not necessarily identify as "loved ones." I don’t know this for sure. I know that at my death, however much I might want to be surrounded by loved ones, I would be surprised actually to be, and maybe worried that even in those last moments I might not fulfil expectations. Dad is five times more private and more secret than myself. I think I am doing what he wants. I am giving room to a man who never had enough room. I am giving the last illimitable imagining to a man whose imagination was always crashing into what people presented to him as reality. I know he will not be thinking of me in his last moments. I know that none of us will be able to imagine what he will be thinking. I believe it might be, in ways that might even be recognizable to me, beautiful.
Notice that Passport will be part of the Gone In 60 Seconds Festival, to be performed in a few days in Brooklyn.
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