October 22, 2013

Found myself in seven conversations between the departmental office and my office. It was good, but bewildering. Some chatting energy is abroad in the world.  I have very little chat in me, and always feel that I have left people unfulfilled.

Beautiful clear days followed by a beautiful changeful moon.

Planted the last peony.

October 21, 2013

Man in front of the Candle Station (so-called when I dwelt there) wanted to give me the pitbull puppy that came scampering out to greet me, all legs and eyes and instant affection. Wanted her, but it was impossible.

Church and Cantaria. A morning almost lost to memory because it was four hours of readying and sending manuscripts. Two weeks of bother begin today.

Dream that I was desperate to get to my grandmother’s house on Lowhill Road in Brownsville, PA. Everything would be all right if I could get there. Took a bus in a biggish town, telling the driver that I would keep looking through the windows; I’d know It when I saw it.  The bus was huge, and on it there were many encounters, most of them with some edge of danger averted.  Must have been a rough bus. Never got there.

October 20, 2013

Tested the furnace, and it works. The comforting banging and hissing.  The simple joys.

Glorious morning at the studio. I was finished before anyone else came, almost. I kept thinking of the people I wanted to give the paintings to as gifts, knowing I won’t because what if they hate them? It’s a burden to give somebody something they hate. Somehow the question, “What if they love them?” never quite balances the equation.

Rather savage dreams. I was being forced to leave my house (not this house) by my neighbor, Zach, who apparently owned everything. I spent my energy damaging and sabotaging things. I wept when I punctured a hole in the garden hose, because I remembered all the flowers I had watered with it. The house had amazing deep foundations, that went down into an underground pool.

Day of writing, before and after the painting. Have worn my Irish Rugby shirt five days now, have no desire to take it off.

I can say to no one, “My life remains entirely unfulfilled,” because when viewed form the outside it doesn’t look that way at all. Oddly, that is an immense comfort. Do we really wish others to see us as we see ourselves? I don’t, except when the issue is good intentions.

October 19, 2013

Apothecary is officially dead. They boys can get on with their interrupted lives. Not all battles are over, though: Metabolism magazine (which should know better) is carrying an anonymous opinion piece convicting us of gentrification. I haven’t seen it, but one of our number, who does design work for the magazine, has. Our being vanished will steal some of its weak thunder, so in that at least the timing is well. The most questionable academic disciplines (by this I mean, this time, the pseudo-science sociology) are the most eager to put the world in little boxes, especially if those boxes have some kind of temporary social glamour. They are as eager to deliver dogma as any snake handling preacher. There is no such thing as gentrification. There is only change.

Book club discussion of Wiley’s book in the afternoon, then off to see a poet in the evening at All Souls. The poet was good looking and gentle. Gentleness was his only poetic attribute, that I could hear, beside an impressive tolerance for the sound of his own voice.  Holly teaches his books in class, and two men behind me were discussing how he was their favorite poet. It was neither the time nor the place to ask “Why? What am I missing?” People like things they don’t have to think about. I keep forgetting this recurring truth.

Praying that my great angel’s trumpets bloom before the frost.

October 18, 2013

Overslept wondrously, but feel great, so I must have needed it. Late dreams all had to do with painting. Possibly this is because there was a meeting of Eagle Street Playwrights at the house last night, and towering Daniel presented me with a painting he had done of the death mask of Keats. He has been painting for eight days, he and his friend Tad aver, and there is much in the work that is quite sophisticated. It is astonishing to receive a gift. A less welcome gift from loud Jack was the rumor (probably, now that I consider it, the truth) that the Apothecary has been rented out from under us. The boys insisted on a month-to-month lease for our benefit, but we see how those thing can turn. It is a pleasure to watch Tad and Daniel together, their sympathy, their interdependence, their telepathy, the almost comic mismatch of their persons. I found myself loving them. Formerly drunken Daniel has tetotalled for months now, and looks great, even though every time I forget and stupidly offer him a drink. He took grape juice.

October 17, 2013

Two sessions at the studio yesterday, one in the morning when I worked, one in the afternoon when, it turned out, I regarded my work, even as God did. I was happy.
 
Neighbors inquire after my studio, it being of a good size and the open studios in the buildings round about having become shops, where you are required to keep regular hours, as though you were a shopkeeper. Russell describes his despair over teaching over drinks at Avenue M last night. He loves teaching, but the burden of inanities passed down from on high prevent anything that could be considered good teaching. I observe, rather loudly, after the second drink, that the problem today is that everything is supervised by people who do not understand the thing they’re supervising: schools are overshadowed by people who are not teachers and who do not understand either teaching or learning; the college is bullied by legislators who have no expertise in anything at all, least of all higher education; studios are bought by retailers; film studios are run by petroleum companies, publishing houses by banks; the most ignorant are given their say and the wisdom of the long-practicing and long-observing is dismissed as ivory tower or self-service. I tell people I could put this right if I were made pharaoh for seven years.

I do realize that people will say that it is this way because the people who don’t know anything about what they’re doing do know something about making money, and making money is the supreme end. I say their financial expertise is not commonly that at all, but salesmanship, in the sense of public relations, or a kind of glamour like a magic act where what is really happening is concealed, and some schlep who was merely lucky, or got out of the way before the collapse, gets the credit. Besides, what does it matter how cheaply a thing is made if it’s a bad job? You can get students through school the way the State wants them, but they come out ignorant, thoughtless, and unprepared, so what was the point? My argument is that making the most money is NOT making the most money, but rather exaggerating the crests and troughs between unreasonable expectation and calamitous consequence.

Surely the last few years will make us trust our legislators and overlords all the more. . . .

October 16, 2013

Woke expecting to see a solution to the government shut-down streamed across the Internet. My grasp of history is not complete enough to find another time like this, when so much and so many were held at ransom by so few, and the issue so perverse. That it is a desperate attempt for the privilege to sustain their privilege, for the rich to stay rich, for the righteous agenda of a man “not one of us” to be defeated cannot be disputed even for a second, and probably wouldn’t be even by the perpetrators. That the world be set into a tailspin that I might have my way might have some justification if I’m freeing slaves or ending global warming, but in this case it is to subvert the law of the land, to defeat an election, to have your way even when the voters have rejected you, and it is treason and sedition. How anyone ever again with a brain or a conscience can vote for a Republican I will not understand. Wish I had not thought of this first thing in the morning. It’s not that I disagree, but that I sense there is no actual position to disagree with, that it is an amorphous cloud of opposition spreading itself over any sun that might break through. It is a fight to the death over no principle at all. I am Blake’s ox to wrath mov’d.