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Louis B. Jones

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Louis B. Jones

December 31, 2008 by Louis B. Jones

skyDreary winter days.

To lighten up Brett:

Go into her office in the cottage where she’s always slaving over her laptop,

and say: “Come on, let’s go monkey with the chickens.”

* * * *

In the week of Superbowl and State-of-the-Union Address, I am in the shed today, sorting seeds.

In corn, “Platinum” hybrid.

“Cheddar” cauliflower.

Early Girl tomatoes.

Varmints invariably get the asparagus. Never any luck with asparagus.

* * * *

Junk in the woods:

– five old steel washing-machine tubs (Ginny and George had saved them frugally, one day to be planters)

– four steel 55-gal drums, generally rust-free

– bales of fencing

– bucket-like thing that must have come from a very small bulldozer

– sunken canvas tarp, cadaverous-looking, down where the vinca grows [Ginny used to believe, where the vinca grows, there had once been a foundation

– rusty conduit from hydraulic-mining days

– neolithic stone mortars embedded in earth, fashioned by Maidu for pounding acorns into mash  (at least ten of these)

– two huge cylindrical iron tanks, immovable

* * * *

Cold Christmas of 2008. News is of Israelis bombing Palestinians, and of economic depression worldwide. Deep snow here in the mountains. At the ATM machine of Wells Fargo, while I stood waiting for it to grind and clank and deliver my money, I watched an ant (one of the small, coppery-black Argentine variety) come out of the “INSERT YOUR CARD” slot and immediately reenter the bank by the “Take Your Statement” slot.

* * * *
Late fall: The field mouse and the bulldozer: Barbara’s cottage will require its own septic tank, and there’s been a bulldozer/backhoe in the meadow this week, excavating for a new leach field. For some reason, the machine that was rented is as big as a Tyrannosaurus rex, looming up higher than the garage. Yesterday morning with dew still on the grass, the operator got the diesel engine running and began ranging all around and, first of all, plucked out of its foundations Dashiell’s old iron swingset, because it was in the way – and then suddenly I became aware that he’d leapt off his high throne, climbing down out of the cab, saying Poor little guy! and he was creeping up on the foundation of Barbara’s new cottage, with handkerchief out. He’d scared a field mouse. In his handkerchief he brought it over to show me the frightened refugee, its whole body as small as a strawberry, elegant grey fur, eyes like beads of caviar, little pink hands trembling. He took it over and set it down in the tall grass far from the job site, and scaled his machine again.

* * * * * * * *

Expensive Arborist comes to call: that peartree is doomed. The oaks are fine – this is just a particularly big year for the little green caterpillar, and those two-hundred-foot trees are in the prime of their lives. No sign of leaf curl on the young peach. Have not sprayed this year.

* * * * * * * * * *

Pacific weather system keeps rain heavy. National Public Radio from the valley is slashed by static. Strange satisfactions of this pleasant so-called Recession. Idly Google-Earthing places I used to live, and even “street-viewing” them. They haven’t changed. Someone else is there now, and it’s fine for them to have it. Tonight in the kitchen, suddenly the compost bucket looked a lot like the soup stock pot, the one on the left, the other on the right. (One on the stove, one on the sink drainboard.) The difference between the Saved and the Condemned is a personal judgment call. And one realizes this is not “hitting bottom,” rather it’s an inspired old innovation. Surely for thousands of years, grandmothers have had the same reflection.

* * * * * * * *

Used heavy-gauge “gopher wire” mesh to create a long enclosure to lower over the rows of broccoli. Weighted it down with several huge, heavy truck-tire chains. Still the rabbit can get to it, and nibble the plants to the ground. It’s very uneconomical, this war I’m waging. I think I’ll never recover the broccoli of yesteryear, the cauliflower of our first seasons here.

* * * *

Thinking about that baffling custom “the Eucharist,” the weekly eating of a god’s “flesh.” It’s interesting because it’s a barbaric enormity. But yet a true worshipper wouldn’t have it otherwise. A thoughtful worshipper will, no doubt, want authenticity, and not empty ritual, and will occasionally send his thoughts in the direction of seeking bedrock meanings. One can see how a Muslim or Jew, say, will think X-ianity must be baloney, because if you actually believed that could be “God” lying on the silver platter, you definitely wouldn’t do that to it. (Be honest, an imam might say, What do you think or pretend you believe?)

It’s an audacious, terrifically naughty thing to do, to eat God. The subconscious mind experiences “pretend” actions as “real.” In the depth of his consciousness, the eater on his knees is actually, literally, annihilating the Creator. The only deep-psychology explanation I can see, for such a Eucharist, is that it involves a generalized vengeance toward God. One can only think it must involve a legalistic redressal of balance in the moral universe, a redressal that was initiated within a religious tradition (Judaism) that had already licensed a lively back-and-forth conversation between man and “Creator.” So X-ianity is a prank, an insubordination. The mean-spirited Tyrant must be brought to justice. He Himself is “redeemed” in the process. Weekly god-eating is the beleaguered Regular Joe’s justice, proposed originally by the Victim himself, as a way of rescinding the rule of “sin” that was inflicted “originally” upon created beings.

(These miseries – samsara – are the medium of consciousness.)

* * * *

Six o’clock in the afternoon. The last week of September, in the great year of 2008. Glass of wine with Barbara, in the meadow on wooden chairs after the carpenters’ quitting time. How long will she live in the little cottage we’re building for her? I look up and see a sight I realize I’ve always loved: there’s an hour of evening when the topmost heights of the tallest pine trees are still in direct bright sun against sharp blue sky. It may be twilight and cold down here on the lawn – down here, a chill is coming over us – but up in the high branches it’s still midday, it’s still full summer.

* * * *

When I was young, spiders were ugly. The older I get, the more I can see it’s a privilege to be in the room with one.  (Compared to, say, being in the room with a duchess.  Or a pop star.)

* * * *

My happiness is on these five acres. When I’m out at some desirable diversion, I count the minutes till I can get back.

* * * *

If we count up the “blessings” accorded us in our span of life – (wildflowers, the sight of stars, art and music of course, sex and all the seven harmless “capital” sins, children, food, various colors such as leaf-green and sky-blue, the sensation of cold, the sensation of comfort, the fascinating rumor of history and indeed the physical sensation of time moving in our bones, all of mathematics, music, sun on my shoulder, etc., blah blah blah, all these you might call, if not blessings, at least great good luck) – but the supreme blessing among them is surely our “self,” our tenure of a “self,” something of a “point of view” we can take, something separate from the vast pre-existent ‘Other’! To own a “self” (as it were in fee simple) is to have control of a small sovereignty which is a bite out of the Eternal Other, an incursion into the Eternal Other. In the economic metaphor that rules nature, a self collects the quantity “time” in a somehow separate fund. A fund parallel to eternity’s larger account.

I’ll say it again in a different way. We seem to discern this thing the “Other” (i.e., the rest of the universe). It definitely seems to be larger than ourselves, and it seems to have existed before us and will, apparently, exist after us. Within it we have a temporary freehold. We own this “self” only for a brief duration (as measured by the quantities it construes as “time”). The radical thing about this self is that it seems to contain – or at least behold – the infinite Other. This self sees the stars, as well as, moreover, the black spaces between the stars.

(The institution of a self seems to borrow not only from the time dimension but the space dimension too. The body’s “personal space” – that is, the space inside my skin, including my heart and lungs and liver – seems for a lifespan an inalienable possession. A piece of three-dimensional territory.)

I’ve used the word “blessing.” Of course supernatural or divine agencies aren’t necessarily involved in our gaining a self. One is always aware that this “self” is a construction of nerve impulses that evolved in my species for species-preservation, particularly for the sustenance of society, “society” being another evolutionary innovation, a survival strategy, which will help the species propagate and compete. The word “blessings” implies supernatural agencies. I might have called them simply a list of “good things,” to placate those who are more comforable in announcing skepticism. It is reassuring to go back to the scientific fact that all phenomena (the “self” as much as “the stars”) arise naturally from Nature, via evolution.

* * * *

However, some see nature itself as supernatural. (That must be an ecstatic frame of mind!)

This is then THE fundamental false dichotomy to be deconstructed: the apparent “self/Other” opposition.

* * * *

How a Real Carpenter Moves Around a Job Site. The widow Barbara’s cottage is being built at the edge of our meadow, as August turns to September. Billy, Bruce, and Mike are (respectively) the master and journeyman and apprentice who arrive each morning, in pick-up trucks, with also a dog named Jed. They’re our heroes. Each day after they’ve got in their pickup trucks and gone, we filter out onto the job site to see what miracles they’ve wrought in a day. In the day it’s 90 degrees on that rink of plywood with no shade.

A professional on a building site doesn’t move with impatience, as I myself would (trying for “efficiency”). A professional has a slow, considerative way of traveling on the open floor, among the standing 2×4 studs, as if moving in a dream, moving through future-time. It’s not just caution alone. It’s a trance. It is future-time, there. In fact I’m sure at night carpenters do dream of the job: they inhabit it so completely during the day — all day, each day, nine hundred square feet of plywood platform within a little framework of standing golden 2x4s. Just as I, myself, crawl into intractable little cramped spaces of my novel, while I lie in bed, I’m sure they know those four rooms as well as I know my characters-and-plot, and at night they’re back again on that plywood floor, crouching to drill into a stud for a plumbing vent, wrestling the Saws-All as it sabres a window-opening in CDX, cheating the tub into place inside its cage of 2x4s. All day in the sun, in an eternal noon, tall and slow in their brimmed hats, leather belts swagging the heavy burden of hammers and pouches, when they move through the future they treat it tenderly and dreamily.

* * * *

May 3. Bok choy has failed decisively. Not one sprout appeared. Have hoed up that row and will attach it to adjacent corn plot. Corn, now, corn is exciting. Not like bok choy. Every kernel germinates, and fast, so in a matter of days I see the entire complement of thirty-six miniscule pale phalluses, not a single dud. Corn is an experiment this year, but it already looks like it will be a success. I’m planting so many because — as I understand — you need a lot of them to get cross-germination, and they must be planted in three or four rows to take advantage of the wind.

* * * *
Outside urban economy, how much painting there is to do. Scraper, bucket, brush. Country-music on the radio. Here with wooden buildings, the old-fashioned media prevail, window-glazing with putty, not Hardi-Plank siding or vinyl-covered windows. Wood is, by comparison, such soft stuff. It’s something’s flesh. By the time you’re done painting it all, it’s time to start again. To maintain it requires, of one man, a lot of painting.

* * * * *

Oakley, in these last weeks of his life, sat in our wicker chairs with us, and kept mentioning the two immense trees at the far end of the meadow, how well they were leafing out this year. He continues to like gin-and-tonic but without the gin. It’s about all he has. Of course the obvious circumstance is that he will never see another springtime. He keeps reverting to the subject of the pretty leaves. When he was born in 1922, astronomers thought the universe consisted of this little Milky Way galaxy only. Oakley would have been taught in gradeschool (as I was too!) that our universe is an isolated cluster of stars, an island universe surrounded by a black void. And the black void, simply, “goes on forever.” That was roughly the picture my generation got, too.
Now, especially since Hubble, we know that the universe is actually expanding, flying apart ever faster, so we’re losing data and galaxies at the outer edges, but still, we can see four hundred billion (400,000,000,000) galaxies out there. What a universe to have lived in, during the period 1922-2008. And moreover what a place to be departing from, to sit on a meadow in, and admire two big oaks.

* * * *

The garden in March is a ruin, but there are still parsley and onions for Hunter’s omelette Sunday night shared by all.

* * * *

[March 15: The experiment of freezing last summer’s great tomatoes has failed. Brought out two of them from the freezer — they made a billiard-ball clack, knocked-together — but found when they thawed they collapsed into little wrinkly orange bags in a bowlful of their own water.]

* * * *

Back again on this topic of clotheslines and drying laundry in the sun.

I continue to sense myself at the brunt of an American avant garde when I wield wooden clothespins (British usage “clothes-pegs”) in the meadow. I sense myself the cleverest fellow in the world. My dryer is idle. No sound of propane jets. Early this morning I was pinning up laundry again, in a parka, January sun just coming over the tops of the far pines. Economists are coining new words, or reviving old ones, to describe the mix of inflation and recession that is coming over us all as the consequence of our rapacious and stupid relationship with Mother Earth. Oil prices (but also prices of all raw materials including land) are driving up even the cost of broccoli and steak and have brought the Limits of Affluent Growth to our attention. The word “stag-flation” is being brought back from the seventies. Funny word.

A good word for what’s coming is “impoverishment.” In an economist’s sense, that is. Lack of wealth. Scarcity of resources and capital. But it’s not altogether bad news, because another fitting expression would be “simpler living,” wherein lies elegance. Also, the resources we continue to retain are our entrepreneurial and human-capital talents. So wealth is there.

That “putting up laundry” places me in an avant garde must sound pathetic. It’s a grandmotherly expression. And I know well, there are still neighborhoods (for some reason I picture them in Eastern states) where even “recycling” a little glass or aluminum is, still, a humilliation or an effeminacy or contemptible. I’ve been with people like that, and I know they’re not bad people, not at all. I also know that my own sanctimonious holier-than-thou attitude, on these topics, is a privilege of one who can afford the “off-the-grid” life of divorce from the corporate (or, for a word-and-book man, academic) job scene. And one who is happy to live modestly and work at all kinds of different things. My boys Hunter and Dash don’t have all the latest coolest stuff, unfortunately. I know most folks need two huge jobs and total tie-in to all conventional institutions, just to keep up with normal. And I know I’m not keeping up with normal.

But it strikes me as rather a happy prospect that, soon, there will be fewer and fewer people trying to keep up with “normal.” There will be fewer of us looking down upon the economic choices of folks in (terrible expression!) “third-world countries.” Because I announce and declare now from the foothills, like Isaiah in my remote avant garde, we may already be a third-world country. Complete with a third-world country’s classic “dual economy” unsupportive of a middle class.

* * * *

More of Oakley: In the weeks before he died, sitting beside Barbara on the porch in the afternoon drinking tonic-water w/out gin, he told her, “I’ll be waiting for you sweetheart in my little carboard box on the mantlepiece.”

* * * * * * * *

That certain events “grow larger as they shrink into the past.” Found myself using that expression in a letter of condolence to a friend of mine whose close relative had committed suicide. And then last night, I discover myself Googling “GLOCK, 9MM, CHROME” in “Google Images,” because I wanted to get the details of a memory right. Long ago a screenwriter friend of mine displayed for me, from a desk drawer, the chrome-plated Glock nine-millimeter pistol he intended to use on himself one day. His first novel, thirty years earlier, was briefly on the best-seller list, and once he wrote and produced a major motion picture, still rentable in most video stores. His life in a rented apartment in Mill Valley. Upstairs from the coffee shop where he liked to hang out in the afternoons, and “hold court.” The poster on his apartment door of James Joyce (looking dapper and austere and unforgiving, legs crossed in a white linen suit) had been there for twenty-five years. He later used the gun on his own stomach sitting in that same desk chair, where the window beside him had a view of the roof of the former “Varney’s Hardware” just being transformed into a Banana Republic.

* * * *

February 20.

From the point of view of environmental soundness , the citizens in the best position for creativity are the cityfolk, not us country people. The great possibilities for innovation (as well as probity) are in the cities. Out here, the mess is still being created and the old Romanticism still prevails.

* * * *

Feb 21:
People who will find themselves somewhat plagiarized in my new novel, if they look close:
poet Charles Entrekin;
poet and anthropolgist Gary Snyder;
agriculturalist Wes Jackson;
my old workshop-mate of twenty-five years ago Lynne Schatz.

Let us see if, in the published book, they can detect ideas I took and churned in.

* * * *

The Catholic catechism’s radical mysticism, in chapter on ‘tenth commandment’ to avoid envy: the impoverished are to rejoice because: “To see is to possess.”
Also this, elsewhere: “Modesty protects the mystery of persons and their love.”

http://louisbjones.com/2008/12/31/putting-up-laundry-2008/

Filed Under: Diary

November 7, 2007 by Louis B. Jones

ice_000September project.

Needing a studio to work in, I was planning to choose a spot in the woods to put up a “pole barn” (two-by-fours, 4×8 plywood, a dozen bags of cement mix, rolls of tar paper, a space heater – all available at B&C Lumber). All one needs is a little place far from the hilarity of family life. With a window.

However, Brett ran across a small ad: “Shasta Trailer, 1953, $100.” One hundred dollars is about one tenth of the cost of the lumberyard materials listed above. So the fellow who was selling it, down near Auburn, was happy to haul it here himself (having pumped up the empty tires). Over the years he’d been using it only as a hunting blind, dragging it to places on back roads. Its last DMV registration was “1969,” a year when a great many things went unminded. My writing studio, now, is teardrop-shaped in profile, two-wheeled, turquoise on the bottom half, silvery on the top half, quilted aluminum, with birch-paneled interior and cabinets. It lives now under the drippy oaks off the edge of a somewhat lost meadow on the property. You have to look, if you want to see it. If you look straight at it, it tends to vanish.
John Cavendish, who knows how to do everything, came out of the woods to help me get it up level on cinderblocks. He not only knows how to do everything, he is, also, infinitely generous. Cavendish is another thing that in 1969 went unminded. (He was born here in this Western town, son of a mining engineer, and he had started at Yale. But then went to the Woodstock festival, joined VISTA, etc., never looked back.) Cavendish arrived in the morning overequipped wearing his workgloves, bearing huge rusty iron housejacks, car jacks, a block-and-tackle, his own supply of cinderblocks. He has leveled many a trailer. I’d picked out some sloping ground, and my trailer’s back end might need a small tower of cinderblocks. We backed it down the slope into place using Cavendish’s four-wheel-drive with trailer hitch.

It’s dry inside. I tore out the rickety formica breakfast table (something more like a fold-away ironing board) and installed a solid table at the window, all of old, true two-by boards. Mouse shit. Open cardboard tray of D-Con’s fluorescent pellets in the corner. I remember when I lived in Mill Valley and had received a small “forty pieces of silver” from a movie deal, I built a more opulent little studio, high on a hill, with a view above sequoia treetops, thru leaded-glass windows. Writer “A” visited and noted that other famous writer “B” would be building his studio in Berkeley with a full bath – and that yet another writer friend, “C” in Orange County, has a backyard studio that is soundproofed and feng shui-adjusted, and adobe! “A” suggested “studio envy” would come to plague a circle of writers. If they could see me now! Mine has a license plate. And a license plate frame, too, on the back end, with a witty joke for tailgaters “Stay Clear – My Rear Is Near” announcing itself to anyone or anything in the depths of the forest behind who might think of following too close.

* * * *

Hemp Is Stronger Than Iron.
It was time to cut down a stand of cedars. In so doing, I exposed some forest ground where my son discovered the frayed end of a buried length of rope, sticking up from the earth. (This is near where a barn is rumored to have once stood, as there is a squarish old foundation of stacked granite in those woods.) By pulling the rope’s protruding end, he was able to unzip the soil in a long meandering path, from its burial-horizon about two inches under the modern surface, lifting dirt-clods wherever he went. Sixty feet later, at the ultimate end of the rope, a now-rusty nail (not a square nail; not that old) had been driven through the braids, once long ago, to fasten it against a tree or a post now long-gone. The nail had corroded, it was nothing but a flexible twig of black rust, while the hemp fibers were still strong and hard and resilient. I dried the whole sixty-foot length on the garden-fence for a day or two, and put it away in the garage with other ropes, for future use.

* * * *

February 23.

Last month Dash lost his first tooth and was awarded a silver dollar by the Tooth Fairy. Then, this week, another tooth came loose – (these things are smaller than the kernels at a corncob’s tapering end) – so another coin appeared under his pillow. The two shiny coins have since been prodigally lost, somewhere among hoards of plastic toys. But the two discarded baby-teeth, they have been archived, by my wife, in a Zip-Loc Baggie with a torn-off paper identifying them and dating them. This morning I was reading in bed while Dash (as a seven-year-old will) wandered around the bedroom silently exploring drawers and cabinets and dresser-tops, the mysteries of cufflinks and theatre-ticket stubs, suspenders and big old boots. I was aware of him picking through the drawer of the little writing-desk behind the bedroom door. Then he wandered away, toward other parts, wafting around the room, finally drifting down the corridor. It was about five minutes later that he drifted back to that drawer and said, with hesitation, softly but pointedly, “Dad? Why are my teeth in here?”
During that five minutes, only silence had come from his bedroom. During that five minutes, he in his sovereign loneliness was taking responsibility for the whole mysterious world. On the one hand, he had seen with his own eyes the gift of the Tooth Fairy, solid evidence of what a deserving boy he is and how ample the world is. On the other hand, there were the very teeth. I wasn’t paying attention during that five minutes while he was totally quiet. He bore that weight because it’s something children know they have to do, even in their darkest innocence. I think of it now in regard to my father-in-law’s cheery anecdote — that his cardiologist in a jocular mood told him as he went off toward the oncologist, “Beware of oncologists, Oakley, they just want to make you feel good.”

* * * * * * * *

March 3rd.
The oldest peartree on the east side of the house has, or rather did have, three main branches. Last summer, one of the three branches produced no fruit at all, and but little foliage. This winter, all that side’s wood and twigs were clearly dead: the spurs were putting out no incipient buds. So during the February cold-snap, I sawed off that whole branch, at its base, releasing a gallon of muddy rainwater that had been steeping like coffee in its hollow core.

Now April is coming, it’s blossom time, and one of the two remaining branches is behaving just similarly.

* * * *

March 20th.
The neighborhood lion – a solitary female described as long-bodied and not so tall as a deer – has been spotted this spriing on the road, and Hunter (who has loved the pre-dawn hike alone to the highway schoolbus-stop every morning, lighting his way on moonless winter mornings by the glow of his phone, constantly closing it and flipping it back open to keep the screen-light) now tends to stay in bed later, do some extra history reading, and let his mom fire up the minivan and scrape the windshield frost, to drive him out to the road.

* * * *

Cut down hundred-foot cedar with swift fine effective new Husqvarna 350 saw. Saved out two eight-foot lengths of the trunk for splitting into fenceposts. Rolled them up to the meadow and, with two iron wedges, split them lengthwise into posts, 6’x6’x8”. Enlarged the garden enclosure by establishing new posts on the south side, sinking them three feet underground, leaving five feet of vertical cedar standing aboveground, and stapled up ten-gauge wire against the depredations of deer. Hung old gate from new gatepost, using the same old doorhinges. Began tilling the new-enclosed earth and, at this point, Dash appeared. His videotaped cartoon-shows must have ended. He turned on the irrigation-spigot’s rusty gush, to make mud in the new-tilled earth, while I fenced him in. Eventually he was flopping and tumbling in it, sitting in it and squashing it into little castles. By dinnertime he could claim, rightly, that he looked like an orc, and had to be hosed off on the threshold before tiptoeing through the house to the bathtub, and I told him at dinner that today had been a good day because, ninety years from now, when he’s old and grey and nodding by the fire and can’t recall much about his life’s ups and downs – and doesn’t even recognize anyone in the room with him anymore – he might yet remember with crystal clarity, as if it were right before his eyes, the great day when he was seven and played in the mud in the sun.

* * * *

March 21: started tomatoes indoors, Brandywine and cherry. And planted one row of bok choy outdoors as experiment. Lettuce, cabbage, onions, chard will go in tomorrow outdoors. Broccoli and cauliflower still to come. Potatoes and corn when frost is no longer a danger.

* * * *

March 24. Today I parked behind the bookstore/cafe on the main street, to walk around to the front for my double-cappuccino to go. On the parking pavement out back, all three waitress-barista-girls were on their hands and knees — circled in a huddle — all wearing their ripped-denim skirts and other pretty gear, bare-shouldered or silk-shirted. They were following the dopey adventures of a small, dusty, brown thing that tumbled slowly there, a honeybee who had fallen into the cannister of powdered chocolate. The entire wait-staff was outside. Work at the “Wisdom Cafe” had come to a halt while they discussed whether to let him be, or “dump a glass of water on him,” or find a little brush somewhere and poke at him, as meanwhile he blindly revolved.

* * * *

Religions make preposterous claims, but they are oddly practical claims.
Plenty of human institutions – art, for example, or poetry – are impractical-looking. A number of successful, smart people go from cradle to grave without setting foot in a museum to look at a painting. Some care little about “cuisine,” some are not meant for sensuality, or reading a poem. They get along fine.  Same with religion.  Some people just never look up.  And they seem fine.
In the case of a tried-and-true religion, if it’s the real thing and not merely a pretext for racism or sexism or war, its practical result is (let’s face it) to transform you into a saint and mystic. That’s the inevitable point: sainthood and mysticism.
Since, in every full life, it is finally necessary to be a saint-and-mystic – yes, for every one of us; it’s the sieve we’re all inescapably ground through (most of us with the dignity of our privacy) – then a “religious” attitude of some sort becomes an inevitable necessity, whether homemade or off-the-rack.
There is a lot of talk these days – especially post-9-11 – about the obvious deludedness of religion; how ridiculous religion is; as if one day we could all be rational! And overcome it! And everything would make sense! Such writers as Sam Harris and the author of The God Delusion are perhaps – I don’t know – too young, or too wilfully pretending an innocence. They would say they don’t believe a day will come when they’ll have to be saints and mystics. They pretend, publicly, that they have no idea what such a bizarre warning could possibly mean.
Well, the fact is, maybe they will succeed in leading a life entirely on that level. Maybe some people do. Like those who live without art, without reading a book, without sex in some cases, without cuisine, and are perfectly happy and self-sufficient. Maybe they’re übermenschen, those Christopher Hitchens types. Christopher Hitchins is a marvelous rhetorician, always a pleasure to read, and a lively entertainment-personality. But one with an interest in “truth” or “verity,” of some kind, ought not to go to an entertainment personality for it. Mr. Hitchins has some unexamined assumptions, and a useful way of defining God is: “a necessary logical assumption.” “A first logical assumption.” Most theologians would insist on its being an unexaminable assumption indeed.

* * * *
Few of my favorite things, Seven in number :
Lust Gluttony Envy Anger Greed Sloth Pride

* * * *

April 12, 2007: Zucchini planted, in pots indoors, to be moved outside on May 1.
This year in the fruit trees I’ll try something new. Traps for coddling moths. Last year their worms came to live in at least half of our apples, so that every bite was an investigative exercise and we couldn’t, without admonitions, give them away to people. These commercial moth traps are designed like cardboard-origami boxes, which you hang from a branch. They announce their brand-name in stylish letters on their side-panels, “Tanglefoot.” Pheromones seduce the moths inside, where, with their libido, they presumably die of impatience, hung up in the perfect breezes of May and June.
Personally, I’ve never minded eating an apple where a worm has lived. It only takes a little paying attention.

Plus, the worm isn’t there anymore. It’s just the tunnel he left behind in escaping. And I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those caterpillars, born innocent inside an apple, is cleaner and more bacteria-free than a human mouth.
The weather this spring was perfect throughout blossom time. Every petal and pistil has stayed intact, during a loud bee time. Already the pears are starting to look abundant. Knobs as big as marbles have appeared overnight, two or three for every foot of branch. I suppose culling will be in order. One particular stupendous old tree seems to produce a full unculled crop of pears as big as softballs. When the August nights come, the sound of branches’ snapping will come over the meadow. A real farmer, I know, would fashion crutches for the branches. It’s wasteful not to. (I’ve also seen slings, of torn bedsheets knotted.)

* * * *

The Power/Love Trade-Off.
In the journey of forking paths (Is not Life a Garden of Forking Paths?), at every fork, Love lies on one side, Power on the other. When you choose the one, you are forsaking the other. Also in choosing the one, you veer permanently farther from the other, as you go along.
(I notice this to be a constant theme in my fiction.)

* * * *

May 17. Hot days are here, and laundry is drying on the line. The rumble of the dryer, its jets of hot propane, will be idle for the summer mostly. Advocacy of clotheslines.  I’d like to supply the kit (twenty wooden pins and a thirty-foot length of twine) in every mailbox, free of charge, to all americans.  Rough-nap stiff bathtowels, folded on linen-shelves, can be the pride of every clever household. Let them be a status symbol. Along with organic gardens, on the lawns of Winnetka, the redwood decks of Sausalito. Let Michelle Obama establish, beside her First organic garden on the White House lawn, the First clothesline, where the First boxer shorts may wave in the breeze.

The sight of laundry on a line today has caught me unawares in a sentimentality. We’re educated to see really magnificent or summary beauty in certain conventional places – the Sistine Chapel, Bach’s B-minor Mass, Proust’s big book, the Grand Canyon, even a close look at a wildflower. I was conventionally educated and I’ve been, of course, made aware of all the usual ways we’re supposed to get access to “the sublime.”

But the sublime can sneak up from unexpected directions, and laundry on a line in the spring wind – the big bedsheets in various colors bellying out – comes at me now. There was a children’s-book we used to read to Hunter, called “All the Secrets of the World,” and it contained, spread out over two pages, a particularly moving illustration of a lawnful of laundry hanging out to dry, as seen through the eyes of a child. In a wind that was palpable from the artist’s pastel-strokes, on a slope of lawn that tilted with a moody passion and a predestined ineluctability, the great flying badges of laundry were framed to represent a scene a child would remember forever, a simple spring day, to one side a granny figure, slouched in her metal garden-chair. Today on the meadow behind our mudroom, filtered through my memory of that artist’s illustration, our laundry stretching from a pear-tree’s branch to the corner of the house above a cord of firewood – more than taking another crack at Proust, more than a day at the Louvre – exactly captures the thing I might come back for, if there were such a thing as “reincarnation.” I would leave the Louvre, for this: I would walk right out of the rooms of Dutch masters and down the staircase, and get on a plane straight back here on this meadow. The pure and austere “sublime,” according to my conventional education, is contaminated by such corny ingredients as a particular sentimentality, and in this case, the taint of nostalgia, too. But an education isn’t always-and-unfailingly a useful preparation for life. The whole organism is constituted for the perception of the elusive “truth-and-beauty” revelation.

********

I’m Elmer Fudd now. I’m Mr. MacGregor. A rabbit is my nemesis. He has dined systematically on my rows of broccoli, eschewing the lettuce and onions and the new asparagus-mist above the ground and Swiss chard. (The Swiss chard is, instead, food for green finches, and is a total loss.) So today I fortified the enclosure with finer-mesh wire, and I put a second latch on the garden gate at ankle-height, because a greedy rabbit can flow through the gap there. Will I soon be waiting at a rabbit-hole with a big mallet up-raised?

********

Interesting. Fencing wire at Ridge Feed and Supply is gauged according to the size of the varmint it forfends: “gopher-wire,” “rabbit-wire,” “hogwire,” etc.

********

June 10, 2007.
Broccoli has been mostly lost to the rabbit: two whole rows were nibbled down to nothing, in as many weeks. Now I’ve put finer-mesh wire all around, and all raids of the rabbit have come to an end.
Then this week, a quick hail storm put bulletholes in all the broad, soft leaves – pumpkin, zucchini, pepper, tomato. We were inside drinking with Oakley and Barbara. Had to run out in the dark, to (inspiration of the moment) pull molded-plastic chairs off their stacks and set them over the sprouts. The survivors are the corn, the onions, the cabbage, some of the lettuce that hasn’t bolted, and about half the tomatoes.

* * * *

Good Meadow Party this year. Three fiddle players, with all the courtesy of the eminent, were here among the usual mix of dobros and guitars at the campfire. Also a great mandolin player.

* * * *v

June 12, 2007. I’ve been making a practice, for some years now, of sitting in the rear pews Sunday mornings at a very traditional Episcopalian church. It’s fascinating, it’s informative, it makes me think, and when I can manage it, it’s an hour in the week well spent. Now I’m asked whether I “believe” in “all that.”

It’s an ineffectively framed question – the usual purely semantic trap – because “belief” is a word nobody has a handle on. The truth is, people don’t know what they “believe.” Rather, refer not to “beliefs” but refer to “things we say.”
Of the “things we say,” a few might be “beliefs” but the rest are just “announcements.” And they’re announcements for our own hearing, our own ears, our own enchantment. Especially when we talk of higher things – guardian angels, quarks – our one most-enchanted listener is ourselves.
An example of something we seem to believe, freely, is that this table here is solid and will go on supporting an elbow. Or, we believe that the light pouring into our eyes begins somewhere, and represents an object. Or, we believe that, at the lapse of one moment, another moment will rush in, consecutively, to sustain the “flow” of “time.” Those are things we believe. Call that theology.

* * * *

Flannery O’Connor, when asked whether she “believed in all that,” said something like, Well, if it were all just a lot of symbolism, then the hell with it.

* * * *

The logic of Western religion: If you paint a slash of lamb’s-blood on your doorpost, the bully will pass by your house. The message is: “Pass me over. This house has been ruined. The one thing most precious here has already been slaughtered. Pass on by.” Then X-ianity came along and did accomplish the slaughter of the son, quite publicly. [So purportedly “the game is up.”]

* * * *

I was in L.A. on Saturday at ten o’clock in the morning giving a commencement speech to graduating students who had won awards for Creative Writing (I spent much of the time warning them basically not to be writers if they can possibly help it). Meanwhile Brett and Hunter were home on the meadow, in canvas chairs, watching baby birds learn to fly. According to Brett, they would zip out from the appletree about fifteen feet, do a U-turn, and zip back into the tree.

* * * *

Other evidence of the season. Hunter on June 22 will get on a plane for New Hampshire. It’s something I find myself boasting about. On the strength of a couple of string quartets, he has been accepted at a summer composers’ school and been given a scholarship, so for six weeks he’ll be gone from home, for the first extended time. At the airport, he will enter that telescoping tube connecting airport to plane. He’s sixteen. His parents will be shrinking at one end behind him waving ‘bye, and he’ll go through the plane hatch alone, carrying his ticket in hand, and start looking for his seat alone. What a great pleasure that moment is, for him.
* * *

June 5th.

Don Knotts.  He was “Barney Fife” in the television show about the sleepy small-town sheriff. The protrusion of adams-apple and eyeballs, the barfy mouth. He has been on my mind lately. When I was young, Don Knotts was, to me, an instance of pitiable show-biz mistakenness. He was a man who had built a life upon his own ridiculousness, his scrawniness and foolishness, all to make people laugh. Compare him with Mick Jagger, who was incarnated in the exact same physical form as Don Knotts (fact: they were twins separated at birth) but Mick Jagger parlayed it into a form of power and glamor. When I was young Mick Jaggers’s seemed a life much better spent.

* * * * * * * *

It’s been a big year for wildlife. Big animal populations. As in no other summer, squirrels keep invading the Annex, taking bites from the apples in the fruitbowl. Neat black defecation-pellets by the phone and message machine. So we set a Have-A-Heart trap and release them by the Truckee River. Then as more squirrels appear, to be trapped and released, we begin to suspect that, Heffalump-like, it’s the same squirrel over and over again, and not a multitude. It’s suggested that, for identification purposes, we should spray-paint this squirrel before releasing him again, and see if he turns up again (as there happens to be a Krylon spray-can of “Champagne Gold” in the basement); but this idea is discarded because the other squirrels around the Truckee River might “gang up on” a new squirrel who showed up with too dangerous a fashion sense, wearing Champagne Gold.
And the bears. At lower elevations, this year, they’re raiding my pear and apple trees. They leave huge piles of wet shit directly under the trees where they stand while sweeping lower branches of all their fruit.
At higher elevations in Squaw, they provide an instance of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Here is that chain-of-events: For years the local bears learned to dine on people’s garbage. Then, in order not to train up “Bad Bears,” the new local law was that all garbage must be housed in bear-proof steel containers. Everybody invested in those, including poured-concrete footings. The result is that now bears, disappointed with garbage-forage, are entering houses and browsing around, hankering, gross, mystical. They need to be chased out by a featherless biped waving his arms and hooting.

* * * *

An unusually cold December. The compost heap outside in the mornings (last night’s asparagas stem, banana peel, coffee grounds) is frozen sparkling. But still a little bit of summer hangs around: beside the kitchen sink every time I lift the lid on the sloppy compost bucket, one little fruitfly appears.

(It isn’t the same fruitfly of course, it’s a descendent and heir of the fruitfly I saw the day before. September’s fruitfly seems to have reached a reproduction rate of exactly “replacement level” in there, months after his tribe’s proper season.)

* * * *

The form “Total Environmental Collapse” will take: It won’t be a dramatic crisis; simply an economic pinch will educate us. The price of an apple. The necessity to learn a new trade. An Ohio U-Haul on I-80, driven by a hopeful fellow with his family. (Or of course perhaps a disappointed fellow). That’s the “recession” for you. That’s ecology.

And the art of making things last; which provides a pleasurable kind of creativity and a constant education. All I learned in grad-school is irrelevant. Our streets and roads could one day look like Havana’s, with old cars nicely maintained.
My ergonomic “BalanceBall” chair (a pilates ball on a pedestal with no backrest) has a puncture in the inflated sphere, so now it’s patched with a bike inner-tube patch. Years ago I’d have ordered a new ball and spent forty dollars. This is how Total Environmental Collapse will look.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Cynic” in literature: one who sustains a display of eternal innocent wonderment at the portion of “evil” in the world which he is so uninquely sharp-eyed and high-principled as to discern. It’s a manner of evading looking within oneself to discover one’s own portion. So, as literature, it’s not really, anymore, for grown-ups. Good for kids. Samuel Clemens (twain) would be an American instance. It’s why so many of Twain’s books are, in the end, tiresome (*), his always holding his own “Having-Never-Grown-Up” before himself as a lamp to light the world. The world doesn’t measure up, for him.
Sorry, but Mr. Vonnegut is probably an example too. Very Twain-like. When I was young, his books got me interested in the moral power of fiction. A fond goodbye to Mr. Vonnegut. In heaven now with Barney Fife.
[* exception: “Huck” – who does contain and embody racism]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Jan. 4. Hurricane-force winds are coming to the foothills. The National Weather Service radar shows a fantastic low-pressure zone offshore swirling, wandering our way. Have garaged both cars, set stones around the skirts of all my woodpile tarps, roped the loose-swinging gate, latched the screen doors by hook-and-eye from within, filled the bathtub with cold water (as the tub is our only cistern when the power goes out and the pump doesn’t work).

* * * * * * * *

Winter: chainsaw won’t start and needs servicing; the lettuce has stopped growing and its leaves are hard and bitter; the woodpile is shrinking faster than I’d planned; Hunter is doing home-schooling this year and drinks coffee continually; all of us in pajamas at noon; no word from my agent.

* * * * * * * *

Poor old San Francisco. Now, there, one feels as if trapped inside a J. Peterman catalogue. (“Here’s a devastating trench coat, as laconic as Bogie in Casablanca, as wounded as James Dean in Rebel. Oh and here’s a little café straight out of the Summer of Love. And in this little coffee shop for an afternoon, you can go back and be a beatnik again. Here’s Buddhism, complete with black cloth shoes, here’s Suffering Art, here’s epicureanism, here’s alienated mutilated subculture.”) It’s inevitable in pop culture, that the soul be trivialized, but SF used to be a small town and a provincial place, more isolated from the Great Marketplace of the Self. (Its reputation notwithstanding!) Indeed wasn’t every place, once, more provincial?

(Kierkegaard, yes: The only real religion is solitude. [Implying that, where “any two are gathered in my name,” it’s already poppycock.])
Even much of the literature of our time has turned to a form of paraphrase and sly quotedness, J. Peterman-catalogue-style, where, under the guise of post-modernism, it succeeds as a series of clipped-together cliché attitudes. The Reign of Irony. Sometimes I think the appeal of irony, for the practitioner, is that it can sustain the feeling that he’s immortal and never grows old, and stays beautiful, by never committing to any sincerity. Sincerity is death. When my son’s pop music employs a “banjo” sound, it’s only the idea of “a banjo,” it’s merely a quoted banjo, an ironic banjo, not the actual thing. An actual banjo, that would be a horror.
All I can suggest, at least for an artist, is, in the end, you have to love something.

* * * * * * * *
[Possibly even a sampled banjo.] [A banjo all made of diode oscillations.]

* * * * * * *

June. The mower’s “blade deck” whacked against a fencepost and is off-kilter. And all the belts need replacing. Fixing it is beyond my powers. I’ve been lying under it in the grass all morning. “Pearson Small Engine,” in Grass Valley, asks a fifty-dollar pick-up and drop-off fee, to send out a trailer for it.

* * * * * * *

May 1 — Have delayed all plantings, especially of corn, in order to make fruit last longer into the fall. At this point, in the small garden patch, all I’ve done is turn over the soil.

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