October 31, 2013

Odd dreams last night. New York today, though things have changed enough, suddenly,  that the original purpose of the journey is moot. Reasons to cancel and reasons to go ahead with it are so balanced that I’ll probably just walk forward like a robot through the plan already conceived. No real energy for the journey, no real energy to go to the expense and effort of cancelling, now. The things I would have done instead are largely out of the picture.  Planning ahead has many advantages (and, on balance, the upper hand) but not doing so makes changes of conditions a whole lot less bothersome. Still, onward.

A few stray irises put into the ground yesterday.

No, New York will be good. A last journey before the winter closes in . . . .

October 30, 2013

Savoring a few days at home. Truck gone while the boys dismantle Apothecary and haul it away. Attended the ribbon cutting for the remodeled everything at NC Stage. Looks like real theater, European. Looked for mother’s chair to sit in, but didn’t find it before it began to look peculiar. Drank Riesling at 5 Walnut, ran into Jane and her girlfriend. Jane is ageless and unchanging. Wrote college recommendations for J and D, two of the best students we’ve ever had lighting out on their own at once. I have been laughing out loud. I have reconnected with an old love, my first love, actually, and I laugh all the time. What they say is true: nothing else matters.

October 29, 2013

No sea-sound in my sleep last night. But there were cats.

Left Big Sur at noon, got home at 5 PM the next day, having gone to my long day of class before coming home. Sleeping in the Delta Sky Lounge and sleeping every second of the plane ride from San Francisco helped. The drive from Big Sur to SF was a psycho-drama, out of which I came, at last, on the sunny side. I’ll enlarge if it lasts.

Talking to R in my office, realizing how much I liked him, the simple candor of his expression, how much I like nearly all my students, who are always half-consciously giving little gifts of themselves.

Dream last night that DJ had the opportunity to sing a new found solo cantata by somebody famous, and I was to keep the manuscripts–or something–but they kept getting infested by these horrible green ticks, and I made it all worse because I ignored them until there were millions of them. We had to go to the origin of the ticks, which was a nasty muddy place which, I recognized in the dream, was at the “deep end” of the creek where I used to play as a kid. There were the bones of somebody who had been murdered (and, I suppose, unavenged), breeding evil ticks.

Flying off again Thursday, I can’t feel completely at home. . . .

Esalen 2

October 27, 2013


Night. Twenty minutes before my final session. The first two went well, so the fear of being an abject failure is gone.

Day spent staring. Staring at the orange marigolds with the orange monarchs upon them, as though the butterflies drew their color from the flowers on the fly. Staring, ever and ever at the sea. This landscape with without nostalgia for me. It is pure. I have no memories of it, no sadness, no longing; the reception of it is oddly clean, fully fresh, unmarked. Staring most recently at Venus tremendous over the sea, the horizon still a little blood where the sun sank. When I turned on the lights in my room, I thought how some creature far out at sea could see me, know that I was by the light I shed toward the darkening west. And I no longer could see it.

I am sad about something. Leaving? Seeing L again, as I do every few years, remembering that I love him, seeing his beauty and his virtues undiminished? I am sad about something, and there is nothing to be sad about, only light and waves and the perfect stars. I am alone beside the waves and under the perfect stars. Perhaps it is that.

Mist over the sea, no stars, but the high small moon leaking a kind of radiance into the murky dome. The Pacific to one side grumbling and hissing. It is too early for the land to say anything.

4 AM

Three women at my presentation last night. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have come, either. The discussion was good. What they needed? Who knows? I think of the long hill path, lined with uncertain lights, threading through darkness to the Murphy House.

I can’t account for my feeling of dull, pervasive dread. I feel many things, but usually not that. It’s as if I had a premonition that Esalen were about to be pitched into the sea. Just as I found it. . .  It would figure. It is possible that the dread is not dread, but sadness, and it is over L. I really do forget him between timeswith  the Sun; the remembrance is both bittersweet and gratuitous. It’s like some failed pretender to the throne remembering the time he was almost acknowledged in the streets.

This beautiful, changeable place. Changeable and immovable at the same time. I am like the elves in Tolkien, disquieted by contact with the sea.

Esalen

October 26, 2013

The drive from San Francisco was long, but most of it through the most wonderful scenery I’ve seen that was not in Ireland. At a certain point the extended suburbs transformed into rolling brown hills, the landscape of a cowboy movie, dramatic and, to me, exotic. Then, almost as abruptly, mountain to one side and the sea to the other. The war between ocean and continent left vast and scattered ruins, great cliffs and pinnacles in the midst of the torn sea. I pulled over several times to explore. One time, at Carmel River, there were seals barking far out in the surf. Made an extended stop at Point Lobo, clambering among the stones, taking dramatic shots with my camera, which died in the midst of it. The light was veiled and misty, but brilliant enough to show all things as though minted the moment before. I remembered the joy of the rocky shore, which I have not known for an extended time since I moved from New Hampshire. I stood in the cutting light with the pelicans beating over and the strange flowers of the salt cliffs blooming around. I was exultant. Arrived at Esalen late in the afternoon. Esalen is Rivendell with an ocean. People talk about how magical it is, and that makes one doubtful before one has ever seen, but magical it is. Everything tilts down toward the sea, and the air flutters with monarchs. You think they are falling leaves, but they are living butterflies. I’m already on hugging terms with a lad named Jake, who is from North Carolina. He saw me watching a Stellar’s jay flash his sapphire into the tilted woods, and conversation started from there. They gave me the Cypress Studio, overhung with, yes, cypresses, with the sounding Pacific outside the window. I have to walk through the sensational main garden, all thick vegetables and gold and orange flowers, to get anywhere. It is the best room in the world. The only rivals are the one I had in the B&B that overlooked the Liffey, and the one Nick and I had opening on Dingle Bay. The sea sounds like liquid, and then it sounds like wind, and then it sounds like a kind of music when it withdraws, rattling stone upon stone within itself.

Woke in the dark and crept out on my deck overlooking the sea. The little moon rides very high, just before zenith, I think, but is sufficient to light everything one needs to see: the moon side of the cypresses, the rocks, even the contours of individual waves marching in, at what seems to me wondrous slowness. The ravine beside my cabin is a well of moonlight, in which something is screaming a small but piercing scream. I don’t know the fauna here well enough even to give a guess. The stars are a bright myriad, sealed off near the horizon by what I assume is fog. Astronomy was not an option most of the places I have lived. It would be here.  I honored all by masturbating from my deck as close to the sea as I could get. It was– and as time goes by this becomes less and less frequent– a unique experience. I quizzed myself on the color I was seeing over the sea, and though habit suggested blue, I realized it was not blue at all but the apotheosis of black, deeper here and paler there, ending the continuum at the cold white of the moon, which holds to black by being its opposite. Now as I write in the yellow light of my room, the sky seems deep blue indeed, but perhaps that is the sun coming. It seems to take its time in the west, to come late and hurry along, compensation in the middle by wince-inducing brilliance.

At opening session, Angela had everyone–a hundred people or so– read their short bios. It was one of those moments where you think “Oh, God, no,” but it was eventually over and one did get a better sense of one’s colleagues. We presenters read, announcements were made, and everyone filed out into the night. I read “The Friend beside the Pool” to God knows what reception. The fear that no one will show up for one’s sessions. . . .The female propensity to stop and fuss in doorways even if a hundred people are behind them trying to get out never ceases to amaze.  This goes for one-person-at-a-time bridges as well. I wonder what I do that drives everyone mad. If told, I would try to stop. I really would.

Sea at my left ear, the wondrous dark.

On the Shore Path

Walked out long before daybreak and took the sea path toward town. Instantly I was glad, for there are wetlands there, full of teeming and skittering life, which I could hear if not see. I was swollen with the greatness of the sea and the endless sky. I came back and sat in the Marriot lounge (having bought coffee from Starbucks) and wrote a poem on the backs of advertising menus  for their Thanksgiving buffet, Acquired some bagels and went out again when dawn was finally breaking. The light from the east– which seems to be the end of the long Bay– came pinkish and lavender and goldish and silver, and the gulls were flying amidst it. I fed the bagels to the gulls. On shore were scores of birds, plovers and avocets and sandpipers and Canadas and coots, and beneath a wooden bridge, a pair of egrets and a great white heron. It has been a long time since I was so happy. I sometimes mock Wordsworth’s “Nature was to me then all in all,” but it’s a hypocrisy, for I would say the same myself, nor have I, as he did, left that behind. Writing now in my silly room, the tingle of the sea air still on my cheeks.

San Francisco

October 25, 2013

Red neck boy in the security line in front of me at the Asheville airport. He told the security people, “This is my first time,” to buy patience for not knowing what to do.  I spoke to him on the other side. His accent was the thickest drawl I have ever heard outside of a comedy sketch, but rather than being funny it was poignant and lovely, He said he had not only never been on a plane before but had “scarcely ever been out of Candler.” He was going to Denver to work in the coal fields in some capacity. I wanted to protect him in some way, but, like most things, it was out of my hands.

It’s hard trading the Merrion in Dublin for the Hampton Inn in Burlingame, California. If I had known it was going to be the crappiest hotel on the road I would have stopped somewhere else, but it’s only one night, and the room itself is huge and dignified.  I’ll cross to the splendid Marriot for drinks and pretend I’m staying there. A long path goes between the hotels and the Bay, which I found as if summoned. Away to the north gleams San Francisco. Proud blue collar South San Francisco proclaims itself over the airport, and the great planes seem to be landing on the water. Same-color-as-the-rocks plovers array themselves at pretty much equal distances along the rocky shore. I felt we understood one another. Ate at the Elephant Bar. Drank a tall and girly pina colada. The pina colada was because I got notably lost coming from the airport, and was in San Mateo before I turned around and tried again. Long line at the car rental place; planes had been late and customers were stacked up. I struggled not to lose composure, and succeeded.

I stare at the Pacific murmuring to myself, “The Pacific,” so I realize it wholly.

Bought a biography of Bruce Springsteen at the airport, and midair read about his experience at Esalen, which was presented as a sort of seaside paradise. Maybe I’m more excited than I thought I was. In my hotel room in San Francisco, on Rachel Maddow’s show, I was thrust back into Buncombe County, where our surpassingly ignorant Republican Committee Neanderthal Yelton embarrassed us before all the nation. The world is small indeed.

3 AM San Francisco time. The pitiable little coffee maker is bubbling away in the corner, I have little hope for a good outcome there.

When I signed on to my computer, it was still trying to connect with the wireless internet at the Albany airport.