April 29, 2020

As I write, stupendous evening rain. I think of the new seeds under their thin layer of soil, and I rejoice.

Young rabbits play in the garden under the bamboo.

A magazine remind me that Princess Ann and I are exact contemporaries.

The first UNCA covid 19 patient has been identified, an employee.

I fear at the end of this all I won’t be able to pull back from doing only what I want to do and having all the time I want to do it.

April 28, 2020

Finally heard about my Charlottesville flight, which was to have been on March 18. The person who needs to be scolded is never the one on the line. Student whose paper was due yesterday cries out this morning “What should I do?” The specific answer is, “Give this up and be a mother, which you’re probably good at..” You can’t say that. Our Dunning-Kruger administration does, among other things, make it an offense to speak truth to our students about where their virtues lie. We are failing them in every conceivable way. I feel like a rat leaving a sinking ship.

April 27, 2020

Catastrophic day. Partial mitigation of the catastrophe was watching a pair of thrushes glean my garden. Wrestled with the wild honeysuckle, making some progress. Excruciating pain in my hand because of twisting the spade some weird way. I bellowed “Stop it!” and it stopped. Not enough to turn the day around.

April 26, 2020

Good writing in the morning. Good gardening in the afternoon, opening a bed and putting in sunflowers. Dug out 39 bamboo shoots. I dug about that many out two days ago. The bamboo is relentless and means to take over the world. Poked my eye with a bamboo twig, and it stings even now. Thought going hither and thither like brown birds in the wind. I have never been my best friend’s best friend. I have never been my lover’s lover. Will I be able to die and leave this world, or will I ghost around the edges of it, able neither to enter nor to depart?

April 25, 2020

Last night was the first I felt sad and lonely for reasons consciously related to the quarantine.

Dream that in a deep pool in the forest I found a small, magical fish. The fish was shaped like a pyramid. We communed magically (none of the magic things the fish told me made it out of the dream, of course), and then I left. I woke from a dream within a dream and the fish was telepathically asking me to save it from this old Japanese guy who had captured it. The Japanese guy had destroyed the pool, but I took the fish away and ran to a lake that was nearby, freed the fish. In the last scene, the Japanese guy was kicking around at the edge of the lake, naming the attorneys who were going to help him sue me.

Discovered that the idea to celebrate my retirement came from A, who suggested it to my chair. The department probably were going to leave it unmarked on their own. Wish I hadn’t learned this. But, oh well.

Thought at intervals of my cousin Eileen. She came into the world with nearly everything against her. Yes, I was mean to her for no reason. Who would have though it would take fifty years to worry about this?

Moving forward on Sam-Sam.

April 24, 2020

Dream: I’m living in a commune with sketchy people. Drugs and alcohol abound. Somehow I acquire a son named Jesse. Jesse is about eight inches tall, but otherwise a perfectly formed little boy. The task then becomes protecting Jesse from the others, while not letting it look like I’m doing so, because they are dangerous and apparent caution would turn them against us. At one point one of the communards (Stephanie, actually) gives me a drug to calm me down. It fries my brain. I am incapable of functioning, and the drug knocks my eyes awry, so I can barely see past the bridge of my nose. I think I see Jesse climbing a huge ladder. I’m calling frantically to him. The dream ends before I know if he comes back.

About school: Won’t miss the stupid questions– for, contrary to the adage, there are stupid questions.

April 23, 2020

Woke from a long dream, one which renewed even after being interrupted by a trip to the bathroom. I had an eye injury, and was taken (by Pamela Myers, who knows why?) to a doctor in a gigantic mall– which has appeared as a locus of chaos in dreams before. I was surrounded by a clutch of retainers who had helped in the process of getting me to the doctor, somehow. When my eye was declared healed they all stood and looked at me. I said, “You expect a tip?” They all did. I took money from my wallet, and they all grabbed at it until nothing was left. Then they disappeared. “OK,” I thought, “find an ATM.” When I got to one, I saw that my credit card had fallen apart, and though I tried to jam it in the slot, it didn’t work. Pamela, who was meant to be my ride home, had disappeared, so I roamed the mall, unable to find a way out, unable to find anyone who would help me. I inquired at all the restaurants and little kiosks in the hall. One person pointed out that Pamela– who was meant to take me home–had been sitting at a restaurant with a friend watching the whole drama, chuckling at my consternation. I was confronting her as the dream ended.

Added to my note to my chair this morning: I haven't spent much time considering my own theory of teaching. Now, as I can look back at what it was I actually did, I realize that I had the notion that working to gain the deepest understanding I could of a work would enable me to transmit--through lecture and dialogue-- the deepest understanding a student could use at the moment. It is a bit oracular, but it worked. I present  what I have to say; students inquire and probe so that enlarges into what they need to hear. I have thought that being a true model of the disciplines I presented would go farther than any deliberate statement. I had the duty to know as much as I could possibly know, to  present the widest vista I could possibly present. . I realize how old fashioned this is: the model of the Upanishads, students gathered around the teacher's chair, listening. If I started again I would do the same thing. It was right. 

Contemplating O. He is a godly and devout man. I think I am, but when I meet one who really is, I am abashed. All Souls is lucky to have him for an Interim. I wish he could linger with us.

AGMC tried unsuccessfully to have a ZOOM rehearsal. We joked. We looked old and hairy.