July 7, 2012

Bird-song-y first of morning. Kevin the frog has note yet joined the chorus. There usually needs to be a little more light for him.  Ben the giant tree man and his less giant helper hauled the broken limb and the debris away. The magnolia was not broken at all. She was bent over completely onto the ground under the weight of her neighbor, but was supple enough that with a little help is erect and hopeful again today. Replanted the royal fern whose planter was smashed away around it. A few days will tell what was killed and what merely bunged up a little. Yesterday’s brief, sweet rain helped.  My attitude toward the back yard is changed though, like one who has gone through an earthquake. I’m watchful walking under the sweetgum. I listen for the neighbors’ great oak, overarching both my vehicles, to come crashing to the pavement. Ben and I have selected the trees which go next. Caroline is ecstatic, for they are yellow pines which border her parking area, and she claims they rained down ruin on her cars. Nobody speaks up. This could have been done years ago.

All this has made me tired and dispirited. The garden was meant to be a refuge. One doesn’t expect to be attacked by it.

Off to Denver tomorrow. Am not looking forward; dreading, in fact, but this is usual with me.  Eighty five things must be done before we leave.

Kevin gives voice. It’s time to start the day.

July 5, 2012

Late on Independence Day afternoon about 1/4 of the sweetgum eased down onto the ground, with loud crack, but no other warning, in dead calm weather, without a cause. Maybe a fat bird landed in exactly the wrong place. The limb and all its branches were green. Sweetgums are a queer tree anyway. I fear the whole thing must go now, for all its branches are on one side, and I imagine a heavy rain or an ice storm pulling it right out of the ground onto DJ’s roof. It took out my little magnolia, and roses, and time will tell what else, though, of course, I should be noting all it missed, notably my house, which anyone looking as it fell would have thought would be a goner.

Got my chainsaw out of mothballs, oiled it up, and went to town on the downed tree. I would have got it cleaned up, too, except one big limb had too much pressure on it, and vised the saw in the cut so I couldn’t get it out. There is a sculpture in my back yard of a chainsaw balanced perfectly in a fallen tree. Called enormous Ben, the tree guy, who said he would clean it up tonight, but did not. Evening and drizzle begin to fall, so this drama is carried into a further day. I like chainsawing, as it turns out.

Cataclysmically tired– maybe the heat, maybe the chainsawing and log lugging. Painted a little, and well, and gossiped with Jolene and Madison. Madison and I decided it’s a bad idea to belong to any local arts organization that is run by a woman. That measure of, or that kind of, power turns the local girls into conspiracy-sniffing, micro-managing martinets.

July 4, 2012

Two planets low in the east at dawn, far north of where the moon rose, one atop the other, though a little askew. One must be Venus and the other Jupiter, but I’m not sure of that. They are more golden than I am used to those planets’ being. They shine in lonely majesty, while all the rest of the sky–except where the moon sinks in the west– is deep blue marble.

Call from KNB, in the midst of which I realized I had missed, again, my reunion at Hiram. But this was the 40th, a big one, probably the last that will mean anything. I did know about it and might have gone. A certain coldness– I can’t explain it. For most of my life my experience there meant the most to me of any segment of my life, and I spent time and thought trying to get back. But now. . . there is some grudge in my heart, and I don’t know what it is. It’s not the place it was, of course, hostile now to the sort of free intellectual inquiry that once reigned, more a business than a school. I did offer–even beg–to come back when a position was open, but the said they couldn’t afford me, which may or may not have been the truth. But I think it’s something more metaphysical. Maybe Adam, passing along the bitter road and realizing suddenly where he was, wouldn’t have turned aside for a glimpse at former Eden. The pain would have been too great.

Kevin the frog hymns the two vast hanging lights above his pond.

It being Independence Day, I am going to think of America all day long.

Most of my recent 4ths have been spent out of the country, where they celebrate it as much as we do. Fireworks in Sligo. Huge parties in Galway. Sweet picnics at Lucy Cavendish under the perfect trees.

July 3, 2012

Baked yesterday with a sort of idiot mania. Did make a fairly successful crust at last. But the rest– it was like a race, where speed counted but not so much pleasure in the process.

Late in the evening took to writing on a couple of plays, one new, one a revision. Will look in a few minutes at the results. The revision was of beautiful lines trapped within a piece which was, all in all, a bad idea.

Our Chief Justice is on Malta. I read all the articles online just for the pictures, to get glimpses of familiar places.

Went to the chiropractor today. Unfortunately, nothing that happened challenged my ingrained prejudice that it’s a fraud: a big sell at the beginning, no effort to address my specific problem, but rather to find the subluxions (or whatever it’s called) everywhere else. The X-rays actually look pretty good. I have wide whatever-you-call-em’s between my vertebrae, which means I’ll probably be dead before the bones start rubbing together. Nevertheless, I signed up for the initial barrage of treatments, on the possibility that it may be wonderful, and because the doctor is cute. I do actually feel energized after the first encounter.

Tremendous golden moon surrounded by a halo of deep red.

July 2, 2012

Sweeping thunderstorms last night, and a sweet light drizzle when I awoke. Won’t have to water today, anyway.

Surprised by how many mistakes I made in our first “off book” rehearsal for Denver.

Kevin the frog croaks and bellows into the moist air.

If their own statements on the Internet are to be believed, everyone who opposes Obama’s health care package is either 1) deeply stupid, or 2) wickedly invested in the predatory aspects of the present health care system, or 3) so hysterically opposed to the President that they would repeal oxygen if they though it did him good. The problem is that Americans are no longer embarrassed by being stupid (perhaps we never were). Making sense, basing arguments on facts, being reasonable are varieties of elitism which the real American eschews.

Determined to conquer pie crust. Some success, in that the crust itself was acceptable, though I don’t know how efficiently to get the crust off the wax paper and into the dish without its sticking or falling apart. More flour, I guess. Baked two zucchini pies in the acceptable crusts. Forgot the milk, but I can’t see that the pies are any worse for it; maybe better, spicier, more body. Took one of them to my secretary.

Agitated, energized today, without specific cause.

July 1, 2012

Took Marco to Brief Encounters at MF last night. He’s good company, in a way unlike most of the rest of my friends, innocent and tough, like a soldier in a movie.  Mesha’s play originated in my class, written to a prompt I invented, which is to say its origins were arbitrary and artificial. Yet it was good-- as far as gravity and radiance are concerned, the best thing in the show. I repeat to my classes, “never fear the arbitrary,” and Mesha’s play could be an exhibit of proof. Some other pieces I have seen are clearly arbitrary also– what if person X were in situation Y– but the difference between Mesha’s work and the others is that she explored, while they controlled the vision to make the first manifestation of it work. Since it had not arisen in the heart, the minor writer allows the artificial inspiration to remain distant from it, an intellectual exercise or an occasion for wit. The major writer finds a way to tie the artificial to the heart, to bring it home. There is always a path between any incident and any human heart; the task is to find it. A sweet and happy evening, ending with champagne and a lopsided moon.

A little gardening today in defiance of the heat. Wild clematis had grown a tangle of tendrils behind a plank of siding-- amazing, and a little sickening, like a cancer or an orgy of pale green squid.

An impression from the Iliad is how devastating those bronze weapons were. Limbs are sheared off, bones penetrated, guts spilled  by the strength of mere human arms. Modern weapons are not more devastating, merely more wholesale. Great King Idomeneus takes out one guy with a spear, face to face; some idiot can take out twenty with artillery, and never lay eyes on them.

Ache in my shoulder became unbearable, so I went to the gym and did a pretty hefty weight set. The ache was then bearable.

Rabbit. Rabbit.

June 30, 2012

Maybe because I napped so much yesterday in the heat, my dreams last night were abundant, lengthy, and what I would call “shallow”– not deep and weird like some, but almost like waking life. Feel I must hose the garden against melting or bursting into flame, Kevin against his boiling in his own pond. At the crack of dawn assembled The Book of the Mystic for some guy in Spain who offers 7000 euros for mystical poetry. I should tell him I have nothing else but.