Diaries

[october 24]* * * *

December 31, 2012

Home again.

Squinting. At this lattitude sunshine is low in the windshield and sour.

Split wood in the afternoon.

(these English-speaking lattitudes, these heavily forested, rich-soiled lattitudes)

Helped H. with grad-school applications.

Read.

Collected thoughts on Clark’s paintings for his book intro.

Tonight is the last night of 2012!  It will be clear, starry, frosty.

Jupiter is still — still! — hanging out competing with Aldebaran.

(Supermarket chicken thighs.  Leftover squash.)

The wonderful thing about the occasional popular “End-of-the-World” frights (this year’s was predicted by the Mayan calendar for Dec. 21^st; the first popular scare in my own generation involved the passage of “Kohoutek’s Comet”) is that they might force even the most numb, presuming fellow to get a little bit of a metaphysical shiver.

 

* * * *

 

Mexico, Popotla coast, around Xmas.

The boom of Pacific waves all night.

The only two books I brought on this trip are about modern philosophy of time.  Our experience of time doesn’t represent its reality, according to the general opinion.  Parmenides is making a comeback: many physicists think there’s no such thing as change or motion; only human experiences of it.  Even Zeno’s arrow is still here: it turns out to be still frozen like a snapshot, midflight, back in the 6^th Century.  Hasn’t been moved forward by Leibniz-Newton calculus).

So, in Mexico my usual insomnia is, during certain dips, floated on dread.  Never had such a feeling before.  These are all imponderables they’re taking up.  For such thinking, there will never be empirical help; all these wishful philosophers in the end reach no conclusions.  It does nobody any good to write or read about these things: that’s how I feel these nights.  Let there be an end of curiosity and science, sometimes.

 

* * * *

 

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Foothills’ coldest morning so far.  Frosty death is on everything outside.  Dash is awake before dawn, downstairs finishing algebra homework, math book open, knees tucked, converting fractions to decimals by lamplight, a tender prayer-like activity.

 

* * * *

 

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Three days till Mexico now.

We’re supposed to meet Hunter in the San Diego airport.

Packing, Brett thinks of everything.

Sunny and cold in Indian Flat.

Will go by bicycle – (inshallah!) to public library.

The manuscript of The Assistant is in great confusion, as I’m tearing it down.  Getting closer-in on characters; the wanton vulgar pleasures of caricature are no longer allowed.  (But how all our understanding of human nature is “caricature.”)

Half this sunny afternoon, I’m indoors lying in bed sending out emails in batches: season’s-greetings recordings of “chestnuts” tune.

 

* * * *

 

Sunday, Dec. 16

The old book lying out in the rain this month:

Helene Hanff’s “84, Charing Cross Road,” its cover flipped permanently open.  Its front endpaper bears a dedication from my mother, in ballpoint pen:

To Brett –

Whose appreciation of

books is always a pleasure to me.

With Best Love –

Mary Lou

This in her Palmer-Method handwriting.  Nowadays if she writes at all, from her wheelchair, her handwriting would be illegible and dribbly.  Beneath this is a Post-It note, with the same handrwiting:

Thanks so much, Brett,

for the wedding pictures.

ML

 

* * * *

 

Dash is working on a long essay assignment for school: to describe in specific detail a future vision of our society, fifty years on.  (Dash’s version, and all his friends’ versions, are 100% dystopian except for a few cool gizmos.)

So I guess that’s how it’ll be.  Because, as children dream, so arises the future.  Dystopian-plus-gizmos seems like what we’ve got now; and we’re pretty happy with it.

 

* * * *

 

December 15, 2012

Saturday.  Quiet little rain coming in.  Worked only till 10:30.

Cavendish is staying in the corner room again.  Bacon and scrambled eggs for all.  Dash has been prescribed eyeglasses, and he’s excited about the style possibilities, tho’ he doesn’t strictly need them.

Afternoon in the soft rain cleaning up the several felled cedars.

Chain-sawing in the rain: not as miserable an activity as it looks. It’s fine, when there’s only a drizzle.  It’s even pleasant, muffled.  The first snowflakes of the year started falling.  Cold front arrives palpably, suddenly.  Got the whole job done (ropes gathered up, slash dragged out to road for chipping, chainsaw coughed empty of fumes and laid up, gas and oil-can stowed, canvas gloves in the filing-cabinet drawer in garage) before the rain picked up pace.

Sands is back in town.  Lamb stew.

 

* * * *

 

December 10, 2012

Monday.  Up at three.  Jacket copy off to Counterpoint at last.

Cold, clear.  Outside in the dark, I’m blinded by a wall of a pale computer-screen, ghostly before my retina.

On the meadow, the LED lantern stands, shedding light on turf.

Jupiter looks big and fat going down behind the pines.  Lots of shooting stars.

 

* * * *

 

Then the afternoon grew summery.  Barbara (in the sun, in a wicker chair in the meadow) studied the newspaper.  I started taking down one of the three cedars.  Started with the biggest.

Miscalculation: I didn’t want to fell it downhill into the immediate embrace of the forest, but uphill into the open north.  On north side of the trunk, made 45-degree directional-cuts.

Maybe the cut was too deep: almost halfway thru the trunk.  Because when I made the felling cut on the opposite side, the tree sagged to south (alternative diagnosis: the whole cedar, which had looked perfectly straight, was actually bias-weighted to the south).  So the mouth of my cut closed and bit down hard on the chainsaw bar, and I had tons of timber standing on the bar clamping it tight.

I walked away fast, leaving the clamped chainsaw sticking out of the wound.

Called Brett for help (and all-important witness).  Threw ropes into the upper branches, all the while dodging through danger-zones (a tree held vertical by a hinge of wood, hinge as thin as kindling) – and all the while, the little white dog needed to be poked back out of the way, over and over again, for his safety.  Success.  Pulled it down to meadow floor.  And by the end of the day I had it limbed and bucked in rounds.

Barbara has “book club” tonight, with Cavendish.  Who brings smoked salmon.

 

* * * *

 

December 8, 2012

Baited new rodent traps in studio.

Replenished all firewood and kindling in mud room.

Raked off west meadow, under pines by the road.

All day, on and off: orbiting the computer to take stabs at some language for the jacket copy.

Hunter in Massachusetts is applying to graduate schools.

Chainsaw lacks proper oil for oil-gas fuel mixture.  Trip to store.  Then I have no bar-and-chain lubricant.  So I resort to crossing the road and finding some in Billy’s fantastical workshop, where he has a big gallon jug.

Mushroom identification (Yuba Watershed Institute) in the Stone House in town.  Dash comes along.

 

* * * *

 

December 7, 2012

At the café, Brett and Barbara and I catch the Luke-Maggie show, first set.  Corner table by window.  Frost on windows.  Barbara grows garrulous and fond, on red wine.  Passing around set-designer’s fresh-purchased 1844 German mandolin like an infant.  Warmth and light.  Genevieve’s crepes.  Coq au vin.  Probably tipped too generously.

Four-thirty AM.  Money worries.  Car worries.  Outside on the frost-sparkling meadow, I can’t make sense of the stars’ display, they’re all visible but they’re all shaken up, no Orion, no Polaris, no Pleiades, nor planets, nor Taurus, just one northerly group that might be a wrongly bent Big Dipper, in the wrong location.  Nothing is identifiable.

 

* * * *

 

December 7, 2012

Cavendish asks if he can move into playroom, for a brief time.  Then doesn’t show up.  At four am, his bed is turned down, the lamp on, the space-heater humming.

 

* * * *

 

December 7, 2012

Apple tree by the garden plot – once a three-trunk fixture – is now down to one trunk, and that last one is losing bark at the base. I think this is fire blight.

The sound of chainsaws and heavy earth-moving equipment from the south in Ericson Lumber’s old property, only a mile distant.

 

* * * *

 

 

December 3, 2012

Brett goes to Squaw for the day, to take care of the last fine niceties I couldn’t possibly.

Here, I fuss over The Assistant.  “The Assistant’s” narrative conceit – of constantly reminding the reader of the Biblical stencil that is held against the modern characters’ every move – risks causing a headachey astigmatism in most readers.  It flouts a rudimentary rule of storytelling, as taught in workshops and MFA programs, and as fomented in popular literature: Keep the Reader in the Fictive Trance.  Never remind the reader that this is artifice.

But I’m not sure the fictive trance ever did – or ever does – enthrall me.  Whenever I read, I’m always reading past the scrim, through the scrim, searching out the figure of the idea behind, and the author’s worldview.  I think I’m not alone, I think everybody does this.  I think everybody is searching out Jane Austen’s worldview; Richard Ford’s worldview; even “Raymond Chandler’s” worldvview.

Books should bring us something we can use, not take us out of reality but put us into reality.  Readers who want escape will find it in genre literature, or better yet, watching television.  Television does much better what “pleasure reading” tries to do, and nowadays, media are so easily available on various devices, people needn’t resort to the comparatively clunky old mechanism of the grammatical sentence.  The grammatical sentence, in risking the exposure of criticizable, logical assertions about the world, accomplishes a very different kind of miracle – and it’s not for everybody, as most people really would rather be at the circus – the grammatical sentence is not exactly “entertainment” – it’s not even, quite, naturally built to be “popular,” as a narrative medium.  The grammatical sentence is going to tend to close in upon on a corralled, smaller readership, who could be called an elite.  Great literature is “boring,” compared to the miracles wrought by television and Hollywood.  And most people think that the sensation known popularly as “boredom” is an Undesirable.

 

* * * *

 

December 2, 2012

Storm over.  Sunday.

Happy with “Assistant” chapter.

Typical loss of ten minutes, on a Sunday: getting distracted googling “Screaming Lord Sutch” and probing deep into the history of a brief, profound mistake in pop music.

Proofing Squaw-brochure documents for Brett.

More news from Hunter, who is delighted with his test scores and applying to schools in fuller confidence.

Barbara is in the cottage filling out a “Depression Questionnaire,” rating assertions from 1 thru 4 for validity: for instance:

• “I’ve been feeling down in the dumps.”
• “The future sometimes seems hopeless.”

I’m satisfied with new “Chestnuts” mix.

Sermon in church is insipid.

Off to the movies!  With Barbara and Dashiell.  Bio-pic of Abraham Lincoln is disappointing – but as good as it might ever be, considering the Industry.  Bravely written.  More exciting to watch is Barbara’s comprehension of the entire plot, keeping the characters distinct, getting teary at the right moments, laughing at the right moments.

 

 

* * * *

 

December 2, 2012

Daybreak, distractions of storm, violent from six-thirty to seven-thirty AM.  Can’t work.  Tall pines bend low, and even the low clumps of lavender by the garage are squashed and whipped.  It’s painful to watch the pair of huge far-off oaks grope through this.  NOAA radar loop displays unprecedented red wrinkles traveling over us.  As light comes up, the roof-gables in wind shed slashing mists, like what you see ripping off airplane wings through the porthole in flight.

 

 

* * * *

 

November 30, 2012

Churning storm, all this weekend.  The sense of living in (however grand your house may be) a hut.

Picking old ham off the bone, sock-footed in kitchen.

NOAA: In Blue Canyon watershed of Amer. River, 14 inches of rain in a sixteen-hour period.

This bashed-up, stringless guitar I’ve been entrusted with, by Oswaldo, turns out to be a ’55 Martin double-00, precisely the same year and model as Willie Nelson’s (even more bashed-up) guitar.  But the unpaved roads in this weather will be too bad, out into the woods where the luthier’s (Luke’s) magical workshop is.

 

* * * *

(Still, there’s the school pick-up, as those roads are paved.)

 

* * * *

November 29, 2012

Funny exchange by email:

R: agrees to come to Squaw next summer.  By email he says yes if airfare is paid, but he won’t want to stick around as he doesn’t like California.  He’s a Yankee now. Hates mountains, too.

Me: Fine, excellent, however, in defense of Calif: you may be thinking of Southern Calif.  In Northern Calif, migrants brought in some Yankee or Puritan baggage, you’ll recognize it, work-ethic, brave-clean-reverent, etc.

R: in response: “Thanks but I’m pretty comfortable with my loathing for California.”

 

 

* * * *

“theology”–  Interesting breakdown in reasoning:

In good conscience, and using our shared language according to its rules, one is really constrained to confess aloud, “I don’t believe in God.”  Saints and mystics will readily say the same, plus wink indicating it’s complicated.  The sentence itself, semantically, is a terrible candied-hash: “I” and “believe in” and “God.”  But, an illogical truth: something else describable as “divine love” – (the something extra, the something unasked-for) – does evince empirical evidence, because that mythological concept “love” furnishes a reason or warrant or motive for the existence of anything.  In this thinking, the cart comes (somewhat necessarily) before the horse: Love is a merely emotional scent lingering from the long-ago Big Bang event, but it’s more cogent to reason than the putative event itself.

(Unwitnessed and occult as that Big Bang event will always be.)

Before the Big Bang (i.e., “prior to” that event in a chronological sense and, also, in a logical-argumentation sense), possibility does not yet exist.  That is, there was once a “time” in the pure void when there was no such thing as possibility.  The possibility of possibility, then, was the first thing.  It was the primordial fiat-lux ingredient.  That is, in the primordial nothingness “before” there could be any such thing as possibility, the possibility of possibility had to be decreed.

(Definitely not the best verb, there, at the end: “decree.”)

And note the passive voice.  …It had to be instituted? …It had to be inaugurated?  What active verb can describe this ex nihilo, unthought-of debut?  With necessary agnosticism, they all seem to default to passive voice, implying an actor or agency.  Merely to find a vague intransitive verb and paste it over that debut – like “appeared” or “arose” (verbs that presume an action without a cause) – seems a cop-out if one really does hope to inquire sincerely into origins with genuine surmises.

So in this trend of theistic thinking, a kind of emotion or an anthropomorphic “motive” called love, is treated here as a legitimate element of objective surmise.  So it is: If we were using the old language of mythology, this primordial moment of cosmic fogging-up (the Big Bang) would be an artifact of God’s beneficent love. (the galaxies)

Such an entity as this generalized “love” – an original will to posit rather than to negate, a will for “position” rather than “negation” – would be a very strange thing to be living in the midst of, if it’s real.  One can’t even understand what it consists of, all around us.  And certainly such a Universal Love must be “mysterious” in its workings (that’s the usual euphemism), since misery and pain and samsara are often – or invariably! – the brunt of it.

Overcast day.  Medium-sized work morning. Afternoon to be spent with odds and ends, writing recommendations, putting back fallen-down bookshelf in Dash’s room, reapplying duct tape on shower door, mixing slide guitar track, reading Richard’s novel.  For the Toyota, four new Sumitomo “all-weather” tires.

In the fruit bowl, for weeks there has been a business-return envelope with a brochure: “No Medical Exam Required: Term Life Insurance,” with a note from Brett on its margin in Sharpie pen: “Louis – I think we should do!”  The Sharpie pen has also circled our age-bracket on the chart: twenty thousand dollars would be the pay-off if either of us dies within twenty years.  This wager costs $40/month.  (I see the premiums climb fast as the age-brackets rise.)

 

* * * *

 

Sentimental notion:

I think about scientific “knowledge” and it sometimes seems to me that there is no such thing as knowledge at all!  (defining knowledge, according to convention, as a correspondence between worldly state-of-affairs and mental model of that state-of-affairs.)

There’s no “knowledge,” no, there’s only love.

There IS such a thing as predictive capacity, enabling practical thinking, but as for that “mental model” thing, no, not so sure.

Knowledge – (for instance, our ideal Platonic diagrammatic conception of, say, green chlorophyll in a leaf’s fabric, or the oval path a planet travels, or the three subatomic slippery pips that make up a hadron) – all this knowledge keeps breaking up into a mist as further advances are made.  The action of so-called “gravity” as it sucks Newton’s apple down to the English pasture, the quark dissolving into superstrings in Calabi-Yau spaces – “knowledge” keeps evaporating before our gaze – (or, that is, the scientist’s gaze) – but the force, the force in our gaze is love.  One can only love“chlorophyll.”  One can only love “gravity.”

(The newest thing pre-Big-Bang is “the quantum vacuum field.”  Picture that. Might as well be ether.  Phlogiston.  Tiny elves.)

 

 

* * * *

 

 

November 28, 2012

A foot of rain is predicted for the coming week in foothills.  On radar a long fetch in remote South Pacific, purple plume onscreen, stabbing straight at the notch that is the Bay Area, basically a long heavy-laden freight train.  Laid away all hoses, hauling on shoulder, raked the lane under cherries and campfire area under oaks, brought in chairs, Adirondack and wicker, collected all six timers, laid down corrugated-metal sheets behind chicken coop as winds are coming, then wimped out and didn’t climb cottage roof to fix Barbara’s gutter, went inside instead, and put a slide-guitar track (probably a keeper) on “Chestnuts” tune.  Soup of roasted beets and celery root, chopped dill weed, orange-peel shaved.

Then, this morning, no precipitation yet, but unearthly dawn light, bruised.  I go out to work in this violet.  Brett says it’s beautiful like a volcano is erupting somewhere.

 

* * * *

In the kitchen this morning I’m trying to issue a few very sharp warnings about our money situation, extravagant expenditures on brush-clearing, work I might have done myself.  Which Brett committed to without consulting me.  I’m telling her in the kitchen, we’ve got this unaffordable Rosarito trip coming up, Xmas, and Hunter is going to need six thousand dollars more, for final-semester tuition, which we do not have, and it’s unwise and wrong to borrow it from her mother.  Which we won’t do.  And I tell her we have to start thinking like Republicans (“You can’t spend more than you take in”) and it’s probably time I go actively trolling for editing work.  And she says, “What I think is you should go looking for is voice-over work, really. In tv or movies.”

 

 

* * * *

 

Thanksgiving.  Squaw Valley.  Long table, including all.  Those not here: lying intubated in Truckee hospital, on chemo in Berkeley, they who every other year brought the first crab of the season.  An entire generation is telling themselves that the great good times are over for them and young millionaires are building their mansions all around this hovel.

Candlelight on mashed potatoes, candlelight on the turkey’s high shellack, candlelight on creamed pearl onions.  Pandora Internet Radio is taken over by succeeding factions – first the Qawwali station, then the Joni Mitchell station, then the alternative-folk-rock station – finally it settles in on the Jaques Brel station, at very low volume.

The blue-and-white Star of David motif:

Clumping his walker ahead of him, John arrives wrapped in an Israeli flag, during this week when Palestine is again under intense Israeli bombardment: It’s draped over him as a shawl; then presently it’s sashed and knotted around his middle like a cummerbund, and he wears it through the whole evening.  He and I are the last two conversationalists, still at the far end of the table, pouring ourselves too much red wine, long after all others have gone away to convalesce on remote couches or to play a board game.

* * * *

 

Squaw Valley.  Arrive two days before Thanksgiving.  The weather is grim on the hilltop, 90-mph gusts, sustained winds of 50mph.  The whole A-frame house keeps booming.  Furnace isn’t working.  From the fireplace, puffs of smoke will be coughed into the room, if I don’t keep the hearth crowned with a tall blaze.

Then in the morning, it’s Brett’s birthday, and it’s calm.  And Dash, with friend Adam, makes eggs-and-bacon breakfast.  Brett crosses the room with arms outstretched telling the supine dog, “Oh, Toby.  Is bacon-smell making you wistful?  Don’t worry, bacon-smell makes everybody wistful.”  The dog did look depressed.

She’s exactly right. Bacon, what is it — it’s the smell of pure delicious envy.

ancestral campfire smell: Other people’s wealth, burning animal fat.

(Like wealth, too, the aroma of it is better than the possession or consumption of it.)

 

* * * *

 

 

November 19, 2012, Sacramento

Our social-media-sodden society, inarticulate and lacking the language of criticism.  At this point we’re all pretty much sunk in the general shallows, uncritically.

At a rock-club concert last night (“Pierce the Veil” and “Sleeping with Sirens”), while the beloved headliners were onstage performing, it was largely iPhones watching the show.  The audience was a field of glowing screens, lifted high, all screens needing constant tickling and stroking and painting runes on the glass rectangle, texting, sending.  Throughout the 45-minute set, an average of about 25% of the room were sending the experience elsewhere.

 

* * * *

 

November 18, 2012

To Irvine, to speak at memorial service: missed the harvest party on this account.

Then home again.  The lonely short lurching bus-trip to the airport lot “Economy Long-Term.”  Finding the pickup.  It starts.  Then back on I-80 on a sunny afternoon, toward the mountains , where black clouds inwardly flash.  “UNSETTLED WEATHER AHEAD – CARRY CHAINS”

 

* * * *

 

The Satori=Samsara equation – (all the validity of an “analytic a priori” sentence) – is inconsequential.  Living in SF alone this week, November, how cold it is in the shadows, north sides of buildings.  And how warm and summery and sandy is the sunshine not far off, across the street, down the block where it hits the city’s mixed tints of NeccoWafer.  Not going out, staying in, finding cans of soup at the back of the cupboard, to be consumed before their expiration date arrives.

* * * *

 

San Francisco night.  Sitting on the roof again.  Across the dark water I recognize my youth in the lights of the Marin hills.  How the hills at night look like heaped sparky coal-ashes dimming, glimmers dimming toward the top, but banked richly and sparkling at the foot.  I’ve been in every one of those dens, every last one.  All my cupidity is still over there.

Typical bachelor dissolution these days when I live alone in SF.  Hypocrisy: At night I abstain from going out for a big sybaritic San Francisco meal, rather I tell myself I’ll stay in and eat dried fish and cheese, and read, with my back to the window.  What in fact results is that I’m feasting – oily smoked salmon, corrupt cheese, deep red wine – while I read of the privations of saints.

(If I ever fret that I’m at risk of any “mystic” pretensions – the uselessness, the preciousness, everything but the dhoti – I take refuge in a word-substitution: not “mysticism” but “immediacy.”   The word immediacy sums up whatever experience, just fine.  I.e., “not mediated.”)

 

* * * *

 

November 9: San Francisco:

The cognizability of the universe.

I am a life form evolved under the warmth of a typical ordinary star.  I can “understand” the concept of a star because I live very near a star, and even sense it on my skin, whenever I don’t happen to be looking at it.  In other words, it isn’t totally a surprise that the Universe is cognizable: my sense of “what a star is” began much earlier in evolution, when the bend of a fern’s stem was governed by phototropism, in other words when I was a fern. Or when I was a basking iguana.  Or when a one-celled paramecium would migrate out of the cold shadow.

The fern, in bending, felt that light.  That fern had a kind of knowledge, practical knowledge, and it was knowledge of lightfall’s “teleological” presence. Yes, teleology.

In the same way, my experience with, say, baseballs and basketballs makes me intimate with planets and their inertial paths, with quarks and their bounciness.  My understanding of “What Gravity Essentially Consists In” is equal to that rooted fern’s.  So it is also, my voicebox’s vocal cavity with its cello resonance gives me the sympathy/empathy to get the idea of a star’s “light.”  That is, to have an intuitive sense of the math involved with a vibrant spectrum.  Because that math is singing in my vocal cords.

Here I sit.  On San Francisco hilltop.  The information from the star (Sirius out there above Berkeley) reaches me at lightspeed from the recent past.  Sirius is 8ly away, so I’m seeing events that are happening eight years “ago.”  The rather older, more out-of-date news of Creation (“Shazamm. Fiat Lux. Bang.”) flickers in my eyes after a 14B-yr delay.  Similarly, the glimmer from the lighthouse on Alcatraz is delayed information, if slightly.  The gleam on my wineglass is delayed information, if infinitesimally.

Of all this info, I construct a world* according to Platonic principles, captive as I am, among webs of lightrays bringing me “history.”

* ( i.e., I construct an interpretive experience for myself)

 

* * * *

 

November 8, 2012

Lamb stew: mostly dried figs and lemon slices (including rinds).  Cinnamon, cayenne, ginger.  Mint from meadow got chopped up and flavored the yogurt.

Change of weather this morning.

 

* * * *

 

November 6, 2012

Darkness falls early w/Standard Time.

Today was Voting Day.  Dashiell’s first presidental election.

Storm system coming in.

As of this afternoon, the entire big oak (felled last year by PG&E) has been split stovewood-length and stacked and tarped.

The storm windows went up today, on upper floor.  Gutters cleaned.

My ballot is cast, candles are lit, and outside, the national election is piling up in drifts around the doors.

 

* * * *

 

The region of the universe visible to us – all the way out to its edge at the 14B light-year point – developed its characteristic pattern of (evenly distributed) galaxies when the Big Bang was ten-to-the-minus-36 seconds old.  At that time, this visible region was the size of a bacterium.  Space then, expanding faster than lightspeed, froze in this pattern we see.  The “Hubble sphere” (regions of space exceeding lighspeed) tore local patches away from mutual communication.

The pattern we see today on the microwave background is a photograph – a micro-photograph! – of the universe at its birth 14B years ago when it was bacterium-sized.  It’s a photograph of quantum fluctuations, captured and blown up huge.  Our universe’s quantum fluctiations.  Our peculiar unique random fingerprint.

* * * *

 

 

November 4, 2012

Drain and cover both evaporative coolers.

Repair linoleum (with a “Henry’s” adhesive product).

Split half the oak that Hunter last Sept brought up and dumped off the tailgate.

The Barred Plymouth Rock hen, victim of bobcat.  Now she’s just a pile of pretty feathers on the meadow, lying before the (fittingly) Gate to Nowhere.

Brett goes alone to Marin, for the board meeting.

 

 

* * * *

 

November 1, 2012

Stoplight, Dorsey Drive and West Main Street, coming out of the little hospital district.

Most times I’m stopped here, I think of the morning Dash was born.  At hospital frontdoor, we’d been delivered by nurses to the curb outside under the porte cochere. And with infant car-seat we drove off.  This stoplight was the first pause, the four of us together.  We’d arrived at the hospital as three, now there were four of us in the car, one in back beside his brother.  I took the turn when the light changed, and we headed that direction.  Toward home.

Today it was just me in the car, twelve years later, with two bags of frozen microwave burritos beside me, with Wells Fargo ATM receipts, and from Staples Office Supply ten vinyl three-ring binders for Squaw, for Brett, plus ten legal pads – from B&C Hardware a roll of tarpaper, roll of composition roofing, tube of linoleum glue – and the light changed and I turned up that same direction.

 

* * * *

 

Halloween night.

Dash didn’t want to “Be Anything” for the occasion of trick-or-treating.  But Brett had the idea of buying a housepainter’s disposable white paper cover-alls, splashing it with black paint, and folding it over vertically, to print blots in symmetry.  He would be a Rorschach blot for Halloween.

Dash resisted.  He would rather be nothing.  Or would rather be mistaken for a Justin Bieber impersonator.  Which was what he did last year.

In the end, a good sport, he gave in.  (His mother had bought the paper coveralls and gotten out the bucket of paint and everything.)  His friends wear no costumes.  Nobody does.  I picture him right now, on a streetcorner in town in the Hallowe’en gloaming, telling his inquisitive friends, “I’m a Rorschach blot.”

You’re a what?

“I’m a Rorschach blot.”  Despondently.  “My mom made me do it.”

What’s a Rorschach blot?

 

* * * *

 

 

October 29, 2012

Big hurricane is approaching New York.  Here in Calif, in the middle of the night I’m watching webcams: Times Square has a camera, and midtown Fifth Ave has one.  The viewpoints webcams provide are a pigeon’s, on his ledge seeing all, knowing all, not moving.  All is quiet, only taxis in the streets, cruising, no fares.  It’s three-in-the-morning there.  On broad sidewalk, New York’s unsleeping ones – man here, man over there – nearly crossing paths, not greeting each other, at three AM with some cause for being out, some responsibility or ambition or compulsion.

Stoplight sheen on pavement, even tho it’s still dry there: red or green.

By watching streaming webcam, one learns nothing about the coming storm.  But the steady New York sound is great, the sleep-sound of NYC at three am, the turbine, idling rather high, as usual.

* * * *

October 24, 2012

Snowfall at elev 6200: 18-24 inches.  Over the summit it will be three feet.

Brett plans a trip to Truckee, with Laura, to ask for money from a foundation.

She’ll spend the night at the  Squaw house cleanimg up old files.

Here: microphones and mixer in the spare bedroom again, dobros fanned out on bed, crick-in-the-neck, headphones.

 

* * * *

Driving out Rough-and-Ready Highway.  Three in the afternoon.  Rain.

The low-rent trailer park.  The scrubby acres where a Walmart was forbidden.  The old lumber mill road.  The abandoned storefront.  (Looks like it was once a beloved dispensary of popsicles, suntan lotion, white bread).  On the radio is great old English pop music, all from the “British Invasion” decade, Cliff Richard forever asking a girl does she wanna dance, hold his hand, under the moonlight, he’ll be her man.  The Tremeloes’ sexual metaphor so amazingly explicit, C’mon baby, twist and shout.

Nicely preserved old turquoise Ford pickup, parked at roadside.  The fancy new kind of mailboxes, all in a row.  Plastic sheeting covers a shed roof, held down with C-clamps.  Down at the bottom of the the long incline, there will be the stop sign – at the three-way corner with the huge live-oak tree.

You would be just as dissatisfied-and-worried, in general, if you did get the drippy transmission-fluidleak fixed.

You’d be just as dissatisfied-and-worried if you were back in the “Big-Book-Contract” zone.

You’d be just as dissatisfied-and-worried if you found the time to rehearse a band and play in bars.

And just as dissatisfied-and-worried, too, if you were an impoverished amputee on sidewalk.

You are going to be be just as dissatisfied-and-worried when you’re on the beach in Mexico next month on the coarse grey sand.

You’re going to be just as dissatisfied-and-worried in five minutes when you get to the feed store in Rough-and-Ready.

Cliff Richards wasn’t John Lennon, but he might as well have been.  Poor dead Cliff, he’ll never get that girl to hold his hand, he’s the lover on Keats’s urn, he’s forever frozen in a couplet, reaching out.  Lennon, too, will always be imagining there’s no countries.  That “old turquoise pickup” isn’t “Cliff Richards,” either.  They are different entities.  The one is a car, the other was a human.  But that pickup truck is at least as good at being a fine old pickup truck as Cliff Richards was at being Cliff Richards.  The big live-oak at the stop sign might be a lot better at being itself than I am.  (At being myself, that is.)  I might just as felicitously have been that live-oak instead of myself, if we’re both considered with regard to long-term result and utility.  (I’d have been good for the forest., shedding leaves, enriching soil.)  I happen to be, instead, this person who drives an old leaky German car, in the United States – where the stop signs say “STOP” – instead of living in Germany where that same sign would say “HALT,” or France, where that sign would say “ARRET,” all of which would mean the same thing to me.  And all would signify the same thing to the live-oak that stands at its side.  That live-oak cares not whether it’s a French tree or an American.  I myself might as well have been “a Frenchman,” speaking “French,” driving my own transmission-fluid-leaky Citroen, married to some other woman, probably also a French-speaker: I would be just as dissatisfied-and-worried even if I were all that.

Dissatisfaction-and-worry: that seems to be the essence and meaning and raison d’etre of these situations.  The rest is incidental/accidental.  The rest is mere wood, or metal or flesh, mere treebark, paint, proteins, lipids.  Dissatisfaction-and-worry are a man’s true metier.

In fact, each thing is each other thing!  I see this now, as I drive this highway.  In a network of interdependence, the old Ford pickup depends on the existence of “Cliff Richards,” dead and obscure English pop singer, ever winning nearer that girl.  The big old live-oak needs me to drive past it.  The lumber-mill road – existing just as it did in 1889 – suffers me to go by and observe it, in my own ghostly reverie, 2012, rainy afternoon, October.  Among all these phenomena there are only accidental differences – between the live-oak and Cliff Richards, between the live-oak and the old turquiose pickup truck.  Or between me and the sad, low-life trailer park.  That collection of sunken mobile homes, which I call low-life and sad, exists only in my observation of it.  Anyway I passed it a mile back, I see it no more.  According to Time’s chronology and space’s geometry “I” will arrive at the feed store in five minutes, there to present “myself” in all my impatience: I’m the one who still wants to hold the girl’s hand, the one who imagines there’s no countries, the one who lifts his branches out, and plunges his roots fathoms-deep in the soil, providing shade and shelter for centuries, in all seasons, snow and rain and summer sun, always in the same spot, loving that spot.

* * * *

October 22, 2012

Before bed last night I lowered the window sashes: first time since May.

This morning before dawn, a heavy mist had started turning to aerosol rain.  Then as dawn comes, a hard rain is steady, loud, banging on the tin roof of my studio.

Ten o’clock, the warm still air begins to break up and gusty winds kick up ahead of the cold front.

By noon the rain has become stingier.  Cold air is locking down hard.  A surf sound is coming from the heights of hilltops.

Barbara snoozes through all this.

Brett, all morning now, is out on the town in her smart, black, small car with the roof-mounted comtainer, the car my heart leaps whenever I see.

* * * *

October 18, 2012

Squaw Valley alone.  Eggs and tortillas and coffee.  Aspens in mid-October light: in the canyon, individuals flare up, papery yellow.

The deep creek is dry, just boulders, boulders, boulders, some stained basins.

Closing up house for winter.  Days are warm and bright.  First big snow will be Monday, maybe twelve inches’ accumulation above 5500 ft.  A little caulk on the south wall would have been nice.

* * * *

October 13, 2012, San Francisco

Happy collaboration for SF party.  Lisa will be in town (has a teaching job at St. Mary’s) so will be here for “LaitCrawl” spectacle.  The bevy of pretty girls as party helpers, Laura, Eva, Isabella, Ola.  Cases of wine and smoked fish up the lane.

* * * *

When it comes to early-morning springing awake alone, sometimes one is awakened by love, sometimes by ambition. Both are excellent, but luckier by far to be wakened by love.

* * * *

A writer or any content provider will sooner or later take note of the popular preference for Burger King over Chez Panisse, cliches over actual poetry, Mozart over Bach, television over Henry James, etc.

The problem is: people don’t like to feel “lost.”  They’re not used to “The Ambies” (ambivalence and ambiguity).  That is, they want “valance,” pure and simple, never ambi-valence.  For them, the virtue of Mozart’s symmetrical doily is that it never does anything unexpected.  (If they pay attention at all!)  (Which they don’t.  Because that’s who Mozart’s audience is: the inattentive.  Similarly, that’s who romances’ and mysteries’ and westerns’and chick lit’s audience is: the worried and the inattentive and the weary needing respite).

People want the feeling of  already having been on this journey before.

They complain, when reading better literature, “Who’s the good person?  Who’s the bad person?  I’m confused.  I just want to know the good person will win.”

Content providers have to come to terms with this.

I’ve spent some time with such intellects – which is everybody, not excluding me – people I’m fond of too, and I do sympathize with them.  They really don’t want to feel lost and bewildered.  You can’t blame them.

* * * *

October 8, 2012

Orion’s three-star belt points straight at Aldebaran in Taurus and then beyond, to the Pleiades’ convivial blur.  4:30 am.  Bare feet on the driveway.  Coffee.

* * * *

October 7, 2012

Sunday night.  Tomorrow is Monday.  Dash has no homework due.

How glad I am for familiarity, custom, routine,  convention – for the shared institutional idea that there are “Sundays” and then “Mondays,” and hours of the day, along with activities befitting those hours, all cobwebs in the eye, all coccoons.

Something I said in print last month (about a book by an academic) worries me:

That distinction Nagel seems to make so easily—between the “conscious” organism and the “merely behaviorally complex” organism—has been on my mind for days; it’s fascinating; I have to confess I can’t quite iron it neatly flat.

“Conscious”?  As opposed to “merely behaviorally complex”?

Is the songbird on the mulberry branch conscious of what he’s doing?

Or is he just an animatronics bird?

My discomfort consists in the doubt whether I, myself, have a conscious mind at all, or merely a set of “complex behaviors” as I grope from a Monday to a Tuesday, thence to a Wednesday and onward, putting one foot before the other.  (while inwardly my language-generating machine burbles) (putting one word after another)

My opening feeling is that the “mind” isn’t an ontological reality and I might be all animatronics. (Think of it: If mind were an ontological reality, that would budge it nearer the category of deity!).  But rather that the mind is a conventional rainbow, a standing hologram, which we all agree to refer to (as if it existed).  The “mind” eidolon was first sketched, quite usefully, by the process of evolution, then recruited by the larger organism society-and-language.  (Society and language are evolution’s grandest organism.  Evolution’s supercharged reprise).

The volitional-“mind” eidolon called Self (the little vertical column of the letter “I”) serves as a placeholder in my language-stream, keeping it grammatical, i.e., logical.  So I’m a pronoun.  I’m the first-person singular.  I stand as a subject for a number of verbs.

Secondly, the “mind” eidolon was set up, too, as a political entity which, like a “corporation,” is ordained as an agent of social responsiblity.  To participate in the biological “organism” that is my species.

According to this view, plainly, there would be no such thing as the little inner homunculus at the control panel, who watches the world through the twin observation portholes.  Consciousness is a congregant phenomenon.

John Searle’s “Chinese-room” picture of consciousness:

Suppose a man operates a computer that can translate sentences perfectly from Chinese to English and back, so perfectly that its communications are indistinguishable from a human’s.  (The Turing test.)  This man sits in a room and receives notes through a slot, which he translates, and which he then feeds back out, perfectly translated.  His answers to questions are impeccably clear and correct.  Does that man, or that machine, “understand” the communications?

No, says Searle.  Says Searle, what’s lacking in that room is intentionality.  And intentionality is the distinguishing attribute of “mind.”

So “intentionality” is the thing I would need to disestablish – or somehow undermine as “mythological” – if I wish to stick to my spacy Zen point-of-view, above.  I would have to hold that the green finch on the mulberry branch above the meadow gate is singing his song in the morning just as a fountain-burble, not with any particular thought of the listening female.  And that Tolstoy stays at his workbench NOT in order to write a specific novel, with specific results in the world, but out of an inner metabolic strain.

* * * *

Simone Weil, on the period she spent doing factory work:

“Slowly and with suffering, I have reconquered through slavery my feeling of the dignity of being human, a feeling that this time did not reside in anything external, and was always accompanied by the consciousness that I had no right to anything.”

* * * *

October 3, 2012

This morning, a new local bobcat.  Very big.

Last few I saw were terrier-sized.  This one is large, the height of a black lab, and weighty, musclebound, a wrestler, big gluteus maximus, and mounded shoulders.

Seen close-up: the kittenish, wicked mascara, ear tufts, leopard markings, sausage tail.

He lets himself be chased off, but he’s in no hurry.  He’s not frightened by me.

Rather, he walks away when I catch him at the hens’ enclosure, then trots when I chase, sulking, pissed-off.

He knew he could have taken me down.  But as two members of the animal kingdom, we share a political agreement, which is basically economic, having to do with energy conservation: prudent wisdom decrees a real fight isn’t worth the energy expenditure, risk of injury, not for either of us, so this is only a dominance-display I win.

* * * *

September 30, 2012

Lucy visits.

Celtic fair.

Page-proofs of Innocence arrive.

* * * *

Simone Weil:

“Time” is a reflection of eternity.  [merely a poetic image]

It’s also a substitute for eternity.  [more of a metaphysical assertion, and inscrutable]

“The first and greatest renunciation is the renunciation of Time.”

She says:

“The past and the future: man’s only wealth.”

(It’s why past and future are the first thing to be renounced.)

* * * *

How I’m less interested these days in good writing.  Preferring bumpy graceless peculiar writing.

The prosperity of literary-formulaic novels, which we promulgate at Squaw, and which succeed so dependably.

I don’t want to endorse crabbed writing.  Just necessary writing.

* * * *

September 25, 2012

Culmination:

1. A) The old philosophy called “solipsism” will always have an interesting stubbornness: “I” am the only source of the universe, epistemologically.
2. B) On the other hand (and to the contrary), “I” don’t exist, but am only a grammatical placeholder and social-role eidolon.

So put the two hands together: Both positions are true.

* * * *

September 24, 2012

Microwave background:

We are “present at the creation” because we’re observing it in present time.

* * * *

September 24, 2012

“The Assistant” has gone to New York.  Thank God for agent Joy.  Lost causes.  Patience and forgiveness.

And “All Things” is once again finished, sitting on my desk.

It’s a Monday morning and I have no interest in writing, nor interest in anything at all.  The well is dry.

On the kitchen doorstep, a lidded glass jug of “sun tea” has been steeping for about three weeks, paper tags of teabags hanging over its rim.

Unsplit oak heaped behind cottage.

* * * *

September 17, 2012

Final version of The Assistant gets its final primping before debut on a few editors’ desks.

* * * *

September 16, 2012

Hotter again.  Sunday.

Sawed up the fallen apple tree.

Planned to split rounds of oak from forest, but discovered an axe wouldn’t split them.  I would need to get out the wedges and sledge hammer.  Went inside and plugged in unaccustomed electric guitar, improvised w/ recordings of Norah J and Mavis S and Frisell, all Sunday afternoon.

Chili for dinner, burned by over-simmering, on high, while I played guitar.

But could be saved.  Homegrown peppers.

* * * *

September 14, 2012

Two-mile run today, first time in weeks.  Also hiked up to the weir, cleared screen.

* * * *

September 14, 2012

In her cottage, Barbara in dressing-gown these afternoons reads the San Francisco Chronicle, and in warm late-summer everybody leaves her front door open all day.  Now chicken droppings have been appearing on the cottage threshold, but moreover within the threshold on the slate tiles.  Today I warned her while she perused the paper that she should be vigilant and drive out trespassing chickens.  She wishes she didn’t have to.  “But when they go pecking in the carpet pattern looking for their little bugs, they’re so endearing.”

* * * *

September 13, 2012

Overly warm September days go on.  This is the week when the water pressure first drops in irrigation.

Apples by the enclosed garden are done.  Apples by the east forest will come in now.

Excepting book-related trips to Berkeley (Counterpoint and Michael), I’m working every morning on All Things.

Brett spends two days in Squaw helping Kait clean out her parents’ basement, both wearing paper sanitation masks to avert exotic diseases transmitted in old mouse feces.

Here tonight, the three of us (Dash and Barbara and I) watch a history documentary about the Medicis, while eating my very successful fish chowder.  (Whiting, salt-pork cracklings, heavy cream.)

* * * *

One wishes Truth and Beauty made a difference.  They don’t.  That’s a secular faith.

(But then nothing makes a difference.)

* * * *

(which is really too bad, as Tr. and B. are the only tool)

September 9, 2012

Genesis: That the first shofar blast was a semiotic artifact!  A “word” in empty space.

(“Thou Whose almighty Word / Chaos and Darkness heard.”

Remarkable poetic image.  Chaotic darkness with capacity to “listen.”)

The whole picture is teleological thinking.  It has teleological thinking’s necessary cart-before-the-horse aspect.

But it’s a metaphor and the general literacy has sunk to where the picture seems only superstitious and idolatrous: old fellow bellowing into the dark.  Nobody gets a metaphor anymore.

* * * *

Cucumbers from seeds have done very well.

“Straight Eight”  and “lemon” varieties.

(September 8)

But the “Straight Eights” tend to be bitter.  The Lemons never.

(Brett: “If you Google it, there are 763,000 results for the question “Why are my cucumbers bitter”)

* * * *

September 8, 2012

The bear has systematically, in a single night, cleanly plucked every plum on the two small trees by the east woods.  The afternoon before, the two trees were hung all over with plums.  He obviously reared up on his hind legs and ate them where he stood, pits and all, so somewhere in the woods tomorrow will stand tiny cairns in the pathway.  I’d been watching those plums ripen, the mist on their purple skins, planning to freeze them for sauces, for all winter.

* * * *

September 3, 2012

I realize lately (age fifty-eight) that I – (my whole generation) – was born and educated under the influence of a certain dreary commonplace: that since human consciousness is such a minuscule part of a large, cold, dead universe, we’re plainly insignificant and ought not to exaggerate our importance in the scheme of things.  That seemed, to some, the lesson in astronomical discoveries.  And so we bravely defied the Middle Ages’ gowned, candle-lit philosophers.  Mid-20th Century writers and intellectuals and professors got a kick out of the emotion, the little drama, of mankind’s forlornness, the bracing, slap-in-the-face reprimand, the “get-real” rebuke.

It took 14 billion years for the observable universe to get this big, starting as a well-packed pinpoint.  A universe needs plenty of time to cook up life’s basic elements – the larger atoms, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, oxygen.  It needed the first 10-to-12 of those 14 billion years, brewing atoms in stellar cores.  Conscious, evolving life isn’t going to pop up just everywhere.  Its sufficient conditions are rare.  It’s unlikely, according to astronomers, that there’s any other conscious life than us in this localMilky Way galaxy; and while in infinite space-time the likelihood of consciousness increases, we’ll be separated from it by the barrier of lightspeed divorce, unable ever to be even aware of each other, as all time-space continues exploding at Hubble speed.  Our visible universe is destined to be an ever sparser, colder, queter place.  If, in all this cold shrapnel flying outward, we are the only “witness” that is “aware of” the great resonant emptinesses and glimmerings, then our importance is not only large, it’s curiously fundamental.  The whole situation isn’t discouraging or dispiriting but rather nicely alarming.  And chastening.  For example, what if we have a future?

A few practical outcomes to plan for.  To avoid our own extinction.  To keep our home planet in good order and not befoul it or render it unliveable. To colonize space if we must but only wisely and lightly.  All the more, to colonize it with “mind” via radiotelescope and optical telescope and probe and surmise.  To practice a little pacifism at home and preserve other species from extinction (thus, applying Kant’s catagorical imperative, entitling ourselves to a right/expectation of our own survival; Kant’s categorical imperative being a funny “ethical” idea we conscious beings seem to have introduced to the Universe; or else dicovered to be implicit as we grew up in its midst).

Et cetera.  If we are the only lumps of matter that have, somehow weirdly, hoicked up to the level of “knowing about” everything, then there’s something rather infinitelyimportant going on, with us.  Our awareness of Pluto somehow redeems Pluto.  We might be the only ones who know about reasons and answers, and the only ones formulating the empty rectangle “God,” in aetiological necessity.  We might be the only form metaphysics takes.  We might be the only metaphysics.

* * * *

August 31, 2012

Cooler evenings.  Cavendish takes Hunter out to “Antony and Cleopatra,” because as one of the rude mechanicals, he gets plenty of comp tickets.  Brett has drinks with girlfriends.  It’s Barbara and me alone here.  Watching a Ken Burns history on television.  Canned soup heated-up, in a bowl on the knee.

* * * *

August 31, 2012

Still thinking about Thomas Nagel’s great book.

An atheist and rationalist, of course, refuses to suddenly start taking up fuzzy thinking late in life.

Yet he has sensed something compelling in Kant’s sentiment: “Two things never cease to amaze me: the stars above, and the moral law in my soul.”

Nagel doesn’t quote that, but that’s basically the burden of his book.

So Nagel’s idea of “teleology” is supposed to fill the explanatory role of a “God” without any resort to the supernatural.  I think Nagel and his school would like to think of this “Teleology God” as a kind of algorithm.  “Algorithm” would be a word and concept they might like.  And might accept from me, if I could offer it for their use.  They’d say it’s an algorithm that was inherent in matter from the start, which naturally issues in biological evolution and consciousness and moral law.  (Not sure substituting a different word ever helps.  Sometimes it does.)

Whether you use the old expression “God” (say, trimmed of story-book embelllishments, for the sophisticated, Tillich-fashion) or this rationalist word “teleology,” you’re still talking about the same entity.

there was a plan.  The plan was immanent.

This algorithm teleology, seed of all Creation, seems to have the attributes assigned to the mythological god.  Even (if you think about it) that most story-book trait “beneficence.”

* * * *

August 28, 2012

Meeting in Berkeley with the Counterpoint gang – editor and publicist and marketing director.  Cobb salad on Fourth Street.

The hopelessness of “marketing” my kind of writing.  The most ingenious wildest marketing pranksters couldni’t make this book float – nor me as a commodity or “narrative” – my soul and body have been formed around a dedication to ordinariness, I’m so anti-sizzle, even my writing itself will take any risk of an “enormity” only when necessary – whereas plenty of writers go promiscuously in search of enormity.  In this way I think of my books as in the Sink-like-a-Stone category.  An allergy to publicity, a queasiness about bedazzling, are ticklish debilities in a business where attention-getting can seem like the whole point.  I still love everything about publishing – the time at my own workbench where nameless things get named, the jacket-design fun, the collegiality of people who love books, the general conversation – everything except the final result, failure.  And was glad to get out of town, in the end.  My parked pick-up truck is an eyesore on Fourth Street, piled high-as-a-hayrick with branches and slash from my Russian Hill tree, lashed down under the macrame of old climber’s ropes with pruning hooks and chainsaw.  Parked here where Ladies Lunch.  I got all the way up I-80 without a trooper’s stopping me for a badly tied load.  Of course, how can I regret my unmarketable personal banality if I’m making a programme out of banality, in these daily notes here publicizing my banality (and immortalizing it, somewhere out in Internet) banality as a programme of ethics and aesthetics, and in fact would rather be cleaning the garage, or helping with algebra on a hard chair after dinner, than anything else.

* * * *

August 27, 2012

In San Francisco for three days.

I stay in.  I eat in.  The glittering city at night below the windows is losing its wanton attractiveness.  I’d rather be working on Innocence copy-editing in the mornings, during the day cutting out the big exotic tree that’s begun blocking the view, at night reading Hunter’s essays for grad-school admission.  I never leave the place.  I even brought my own victuals from home.  (Excepting two purple Montepulcianos at Mario’s, upon first arriving and finding a parking place.)

Brought chainsaw.  Fuel mixture in a Mason jar.  But when I got here to these exalted precincts, I realized the sound of a chain saw on Russian Hill would cause consternation.  Chainsaw will never get used.  My two good pruning saws are almost as fast as a chainsaw, though.

* * * *

August 25, 2012

Gerry and Leah visit.

Cooler summer days are here.

Not much of a workday.

Bantam hen vanishes, victim of predator.

* * * *

August 24, 2012

A good day.

Woke at three.  Spent the morning working, cutting out an entire Boaz-Hokhma conversation.

Went back to bed and slept till ten.

Read galleys of “Innocence” from Counterpoint, finding a few typos and glitches and being satisfied with the whole thing, and proud of it.

Moved cut oak with Hunter, using tractor-wagon.  I’ll soon have firewood to last all winter.

Cut up last yeat’s long cedar branches, stowed under holly bush.

(Cavendish, who showed up this morning covered in sheetrock-dust asking if he could nap all day in the playroom, sleeps through the roar of my chainsaw right outside his bedside window.)

Read more of “Innocence” galleys.

Excellent chicken Marsala.

* * * *

August 23, 2012

Back home from Squaw, in Nevada City.

Will gut chapter of “All Things.”

Will handle a few home tasks.

Then Berkeley visit, to try to get Innocence treated with a little care.

Then home for good.  To enter into “All Things” with meditative force, the old Ferocity-and-Precision trance, the festina lente trance.

Keep Dash on schoolwork.

And in autumn, when the bright hot days are gone, I’ll spend afternoons painting the west face of the main house.

* * * *

August 21, 2012

In Squaw.  Not working.  Rather staying busy with repairs.

Sleepless nights.  I think of my real work, the novel now looking for friends in New York, and I rationally picture slow-motion train wreck, wilful misunderstanding, the whole boredom-indifference carwash.  So much of what’s out there in the book market is charming as well as attention-getting; and my own work avoids those pitfalls.

In the night, the only kind of contemplation that puts me in a state of tranquillity (finally falling asleep near dawn) is thinking of the jobs I have here: how to lash a ladder to the exterior wall of the Annex, digging a flat footing for it in the steep slope of scree, so I can apply a coat of oilstain without falling.

Because I’m totally inexperienced in all such arts, my maintenance work has some of the derring-do of writing, and creativity.  But its problems all have solutions.  It’s like solitaire, but solitaire where I can cheat.  Once I have a plan, I enjoy contemplating it, lying in bed: roping the extension ladder to the house in a way that will keep it from sliding.

* * * *

August 20, 2012

For Squaw:

– Sliding cupboard above Annex fridge.

– Loose deck boards, both houses.

– Railing, upper house wedding-deck.

Thatch of pine needles, roof of upper house.

– Oil/stain Annex exterior E and W walls.

– Cut little cedars and junipers on slope.

– Close down swamp cooler, Annex.

– Replace faucet, Annex.

– Roof-patching, Annex.

Cut back aspens, upper house.

– Dupe keys.

– Living room light globes.

– Timer on water.

– Cut cable?

– Outdoor heater to dump?

– Frame Annex basement windows.

– Remove east pine sapling.

– Caulk satellite-dish bolt-holes.

– Leak in Annex basement.

– Leave sign for landscapers.

Check chimney.

* * * *

August 19, 2012

Tall sweaty boots in the oven-heat of afternoon, as anti-snakebite measure.  Carried chainsaw down to the ravine on south tip of woods where PG&E felled a great oak last winter on their powerline easement.  Sawed it up in rounds, stovewood-length, which I’ll get Hunter to load on the wagon and bring up for splitting.  He’s here for a week, making multiple graduate-school applications, running three miles a day, taking lots of showers, mens sana in corpore sano.

* * * *

August 17, 2012

Working on “All Things” again.  Spent the day condensing and quickening exposition.

God’s-Eye point of view this afternoon.  Lopped the head off an ailing and doomed Rhode Island Red, then went back inside the chickens’ enclosure, where all the rest, the lucky, the blessed, the elect, crowded around in their usual pushiness, Hey there, Mister Good-News, Got any handfuls of granola for me?  Got a treat for me?

* * * *

August 16, 2012

A hen is down with Marek’s Disease and must be killed, but with people coming and going – Sands and Diane Fetterly to lunch with Barbara, Dashiell’s friends after school capering in the woods, Zoey and Hunter to arrive tonight and stay all weekend – the party atmosphere won’t let up, and there’s no right time to for the job.  (Me stalking away from the picnic parasols, in my tall rubber boots.  Where’s dad going?)

The small plywood-topped table under the oaks, with a tin can screwed down, and a nail driven in as a sort of pommel.  Axe leaning beside it, yellow Fiberglass haft.  And bucket proclaiming the commercial logo of a detergent.  All the while far from the party, paralyzed, she sits in the dust looking panicky, one wing absently oaring and oaring.

* * * *

August 15, 2012

Ten-thirty AM.

First day of school for Dash. So we’re a kind of “empty nest”!

Peace.

Hot morning.  Tho’it stands in oak shade, my trailer has all doors and windows open, and roof-vent open.

No breeze.  In the dead stillness of the forest, I can hear a mile away, where a carpenter is (it sounds like) roofing some new structure.  The distinct knock (three times, then a couple more times) of an ordinary good hammer tapping the butt end of a 2”x6”.  (Or maybe it’s a 2”x10”, or 2”x12” – sounds like a rafter and would be doug fir.)  He’s gently cheating it into place with these knocks, and it’s interesting: from this distance, I can know the board as if it were a musical instrument.  Like telling an oboe’s reed from a clarinet’s, or a bassoon’s.  A carpenter’s intelligent tap, coming through a mile of thick forest, is a sound as fat as a marimba clank, in the ear of the organism as logically triumphant as a ripe apple on a twig, on this kind planet, the easy triumph of sweet reason, fruit of evolution.  (From this distance, I could even guess, by the resonance, the lengthwise dimension of the board, maybe 8 to 12 feet, that’s how it rings.)

(shows how much we know.  How tied-in we are, without thinking.)

* * * *

August 14, 2012

Sent finished ms of “The Assistant” to New York, now to wait for loving responses and offers of money.

Wildfires in Plumas and Colusa Counties are spreading their smoke this way, and the air this morning was ginger-ale.  Hundred-degree heat.  Chickens all day stood panting in the shade.

After dinner I go alone to town, to see Jesse Harris with one percussionist, and Jesca Hoop with full band and back-up singers, in cool, brick-walled basement on Main Street.  Solitary glass of Zinfandel in old hotel bar, second-story verandah, smell of a dry-rot small-town damp, hot August night.

* * * *

August 8, 2012

Home from rafting in the upper American River.  Days of sun on fast water.  Dashiell’s bravery, in the front position of the raft with standing-waves pouring over him, still paddling and laughing.  Sparkling days.

Sleepless misery in the tent all night at the river bank: dehydration-plus-wine, plus despair of all my projects.

Back on the farm it’s very quiet.  Far from the rapids.  August evening.  Meadows need cutting.  Stemmed glass on the garage workbench, uncooked hamburgers on a plate before the talking clock-radio.  Dash is doing cartwheels on the slope.

On the garage radio, the voice of my friend the poet!  He has been asked by NPR to say something about August – something lyrical – and one of his observations is that “We realize what’s really important: We’re still alive!”

Well, yes.  But who is this one, whom we exult in thinking is still “alive”?

* * * *

July 22, 2012

Fourth afternoon cutting weeds on the steep rocky slope below the Annex.  (Wildfire abatement).  Sharp smells of bleeding stems, wheatgrass, sage, wormwood artemisia, coffee bush, creosote.

Exhaustion and sweat-slick.  Lemonade quart bottle.  Lying on the carpet indoors staring at the ceiling.

Far down in the scree, I turned up a strip of chrome from the old fridge, an ornament of ice-maker or vegetable-crisper drawer.  Years ago I threw that fridge over the deck railing and watched it roll down the mountain.

* * * *

July 21, 2012

Woke up at three am, went down to workbench and added a welter of astonishingly good writing to the novel.  Napped then till noon.  Wakened, then went back down and took it all out.

Tap-tap the delete key.

* * * *

June 26, 2012

Joy says she loves “The Assistant” and will try to sell it, but has asked for a number of very smart changes.  (Conversation via cell phone, while I sit on a boulder behind the 7-Eleven.)

* * * *

Dinner with the poets.

Sharon Olds: “Just getting things accurate overcomes the fear of writing.”  I guess she’s referring to Rapture of the Workbench.

Meanwhile the ski-corp kitchen supervisor Jess, with her clipboard, is moving along the buffet checking each chafing dish: green salad, corn salsa, churros, grilled chicken, black beans, rice, flan with mango, tomato salsa, grated cheese, making pencil checks one-by-one on her clipboard legal pad.

* * * *

June 25, 2012

Coming up on foot from the valley floor, on the old Carville property below the Annex I see jays orbiting and screaming around a moving subject.  It’s exactly how they treat a bear as it shambles cross-country, the birds obeying an interspecies social agreement to raise the alarm when a predator passes.  (The way a pair of little birds will harry a passing hawk, moving him on past their glade.)

Then ahead, an impressive coyote lifts its head – big grey leonine ruff of fur – and vanishes like smoke.

I notice that when we homo sapiens walk up the canyons, nobody sends up the interspecies alarm.  The implication is, we must be benign.  It’s not that we’re harmless, we can do plenty more harm than a coyote, but it’s evidence we might be a little nearer the angels (in the ecological-evolutionary evaluation).

* * * *

June 24, 2012

Cold stormy weather in the mountains.  Powerful winds.  Poets are in the valley.  Tomorrow I drive all the way to San Francisco for Kathi Goldmark’s memorial.

Several mountain-chickadee chicks have hatched in a nest, which is inside the wall of our bedroom.  This exterior wall is at the head of our bed.  During the daylight hours, about once every fifteen minutes they make their cheeping pleading sound together.  Then at night go silent till first light.

* * * *

June 21, 2012

Windy days.  Building a lattice fence, to make a courtyard at Brett’s mobile office.

No-Answer from my agent.

Gone back to cutting at “All Things.”

Sleepless nights.

We have a new bear in the vicinity – a little juvenile from the pawprints.  We had discouraged all bears with the new electric-wire system, but Sands left a cooler full of blueberries, apricots, etc., out on the driveway overnight.  The little one, from the evidence on the ground, feasted messily, then was interrupted and ran into the ravine affrighted, without finishing.

* * * *

June 16, 2012

Cliimb with Dash and his two friends Jackson and Romain, up to Water Ouzel Falls.

With only forty percent of normal snowpack, the creekwater in mid-June is only slightly lower than usual but there’s a big algae bloom below the 7000-ft. elevation.  Emerald fur waving on the rocks.  Which must result from a slight rise in average water temperature.

The three boys discover the granite tub behind the second big waterfall and, howling from cold, frolic in there with water thundering down on their heads.  I, keeping my boots on and my socks pulled up, stand on the bank telling them to be careful.

* * * *

July 17:

Word comes that Galway in Vermont is losing his recall.  He often can’t summon the right nouns.

Maybe for an old poet such incompetence isn’t such a felt heartbreak.  Maybe an old poet has always sensed himself to be swimming in those waters, inarticulacy, all his life, the unexpressible, maybe he’s used to it.  Galway always did have a tentative walk-softly manner, as if he were used to it.

Anyway he buckles down and works with the usual acumen on S. Olds’s new poem when she visits, adjusting her line breaks.

But he won’t be coming out to Squaw any more.  Brett still keeps the plywood square (actually chipboard), painted in Sharpie pen “Home Base,” which was stored for the softball games by the lake.  Now it will enter an archive where it can’t be thrown out.  It’ll still, always, say “home base” here.

* * * *

June 15:

A “theism” that had been, by reason, so clarified and rinsed and lustrated and refined, any atheist, too, would find it inevitable, or simply inconsequential, and have to assent.  Or just admit it’s not incoherent.

In the end the theism-atheism equation is a bit of an anticlimax, for sheer obviousness, a bit of a shrug.

(Atheist and theist, as self-descriptions, are not assertions about a verifiable state-of-affairs in the world, they are audible announcements about the speaker.  Both of those words ought to be rendered in quotes always, held up in those tongs.)

* * * *

June 14, 2012

Squaw.

Chipmunk in the Annex, stunned and disoriented, in the jaws of Thing One.  Released: it recuperates on a terrycloth washcloth in the shade of a creosote bush.

Sands and Maggie perform on the party deck.  “Joy Divine of Friends.”

Cavendish presents “To a Mousie.”  (Silly thing brings tears to eyes!)

Afternoons dressing up Brett’s portable office (plastic box on wheels) to make it look like a habitation.

* * * *

SORGE:

Existence was a choice (in historical cosmic time)  (the “theistic” premise)

Outside time, here-and-now in consciousness, existence IS eternally a choice.

And because in both cases it is a choice in favor of existence rather than non-existence, it is a positive choice.

* * * *

[As for the “Problem of Evil” as a refutation of beneficence, it confuses the putative “total goodness” of all creation with the putative “total goodness” of local, anecdotal areas of it.  Local evils may remain “mysterious,” in their causes efficient and teleological.  Meanwhile all creation can be agreed-upon as a basic good.]

* * * * * *

With America in a century of Roman Empire-style corruption (salaried soldiers now in Africa and Asia and anywhere else we want the natural resources; domestic population filling with “rabble” [and cold hearts in all the best neighborhoods]; popular entertainments that are immoral and cruel), I find I really am leading the Virgilian life of “rustic” escapee.  Will start keeping bees.

* * * *

June 8, 2012

Many years ago, a plywood disk with an eight-foot diameter (painted to represent a cathedral’s stained-glass rose window) came to live behind the potting shed.  It was a theatrical prop, left over from “The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” which at our house was going to serve horizontally as an occasional banquet table.  Now, thanks to Cavendish, it’s going to have a second life, as The Wheel of the Thirty-Six Basic Plot Types* – to be spun game-show-style at the Community of Writers.  Cavendish (generously jumping at the chance, chronically under-employed, Yale-dropout engineering type in our Local Post-Petroleum Economy) has hauled it away to mount it on some kind of axle.  With I suppose thirty-six pegs around the rim.  Some kind of clapper, to act as a dragging kind of escapement.  And thirty-six PLOT rubrics in calligraphy — “Supplication” — “Deliverance” — “Daring Enterprise” — “Madness,” etc.

*As devised by Georges Polti, 1929

* * * *

June 5, 2012

Depart for Squaw.  Lock the trailer, cut the meadows, pack the kitchen shelves into cardboard banker-boxes.

Brett has preceded me up there, to make sure the portable office is set down where she wants it.

* * * *

May 28, 2012

1) Zoey arrives today from Portland (Hunter to fetch at airport)

2) Sands departs with Maggie for folksinging trip

3) Nagel review today is, with a click, SENT (“fwissshhh”) to Threepenny for consideration

4) Brett will have finished reading “Assistant,” so I’ll get back to that

5) I’ve finished the few Caridwen patches to “All Things.”

So I kind of have an empty desk.  Today must be one of the season’s equinox points: everything turns toward the climb to Squaw, the set-up there, the carpentry and housekeeping, the lattes for the whole office, the gin-and-tonic after tennis, life slowing to the pace of miniature golf at the King’s Beach Mini-Golf.

* * * *

May 28, 2012

Funny how death of Kathi Goldmark continues to make me miserable.  She’s irreplaceable.  I always flatter myself that I keep death always before me, but the real thing is always going go be not-so-edifying.

* * * *

May 19, 2012

Hunter is home from college, sleeping in. Weather continues fine.  The Nagel review fares well.  “All Things” is next on my docket.

Last night, Sands and I took Barbara out to the café where Maggie and Luke do their weekly gig.  Pulled up at the curb.  I scouted inside for available tables, then came back to hoist Barbara out of passenger seat and get her up on the curbstone and into the café.

But all four musicians – Maggie’s accordian, Randy’s clarinet, Luke’s (bigmouth Djangoid) guitar, Murray’s violin – had stood up behind me and, while playing, swirled out onto the sidewalk, a wink must have passed, and they surrounded Barbara on the sidewalk and floated her into the place, up an aisle to a table, all the while swooning back and forth in their mazurka or whatever, making Barbara beam, as she shuffled along.  Such things will always – and always did – happen to Barbara Edinger Hall of the Rosebud Rancho in the Sacramento Valley.

* * * *

May 15, 2012

“Consciousness” is an essentially gregarious phenomenon.  Consciousness isn’t an individual, sovereign, autonomous suzerain (as it usually feels).  It begins to shine only by being kindled in congregance with a vast – verily ecologically complex – network. Especially language, language’s built-in logic

* * * *

May 10, 2012

Tomato starts are in the ground.

* * * *

May 6, 2012

Reading Nagel, on the mind-body problem, has me thinking about “consciousness,” and I actually wonder seriously whether anybody IS “conscious” in the commonly understood sense that they have rational, objective, autonomous thoughts about the world.  That’s the cultural myth we use to represent experience.  Rather, this habit we like to call consciousness feels good  because – (that is, it just feels good, to wake up in the morning and recover it) – it feels good because “consciousness,” this tingle, is a familiar, habituated form of social and ecological harmony, arriving mostly from outside ourselves (in the politique, and in the rigor of grammatical language) and within ourselves (in our cells and our endocrinological juices, and instincs and muscular habits).  That’s what “consciousness” is.  It’s not the inward homunculus, not the tiny junior deity inside, not the tiny, sharp-eyed, sharp-witted witness and adjudicator and active force, seated at the brain’s control panel exercising “logic.”

To give very specific examples, nobody really, e.g., “Believes in hands-off government,” say.

Or “Decides to marry.”

Or “Believes in god.”

Or “Is a pacifist.”

All those things are just announcements, not evaluations of reality; they’ve announcements debuting in a social theatre, and they also feel good inwardly to announce.

Suppose we define “rational consciousness” as the ability to make decisions and have fresh thoughts, all based on accurate observation of the world.  Well, I think the actual, true medium of those operations is (A) language and the evolved human culture, and (B) the ecosystem (the latter including the birds-and-the-bees AND the personal, inward wilds of brain and liver and lungs, endocrine secretions, pancreas and testes and ovaries and bowel).

If I look at the “rational” decisions human beings believe they’ve made, they seem to be mostly culturally and biologically extracted (and, at best, mixed in their consequences).

Decision: To smoke a cigarette; or have a glass of wine

Decision: To marry

Decision: Not to marry

Decision: To look for coffee, upon waking up in the morning

Decision: To brush one’s teeth, upon discovering the usual yucky mossy feeling

Decision: To study poetry in graduate school

Decision: To study accountancy instead.  And skip the poetry

Decision: To kiss somebody and start something

Decision: Not to kiss somebody, and so start nothing

Decision: To get a good job

Some of these decisions are just occasions of luck. (Like something that came to us through a brother-in-law, which we couldn’t have helped).  Some of these decisions, in all their “irrationality,” turn out to be regrettable because they actually contravened our self-interest!  [See Josiah Royce’s language on this?]  It seems to me that all these decisions are prompted by our bodies and our society.  The latter as mediated by the wonderful splendid complex gift of language, greatest heirloom in the biosphere.  It’s not a sovereign “consciousness” that makes these motions: these motions are part of an organic process.  We would never say the apple on the tree has “decided” to form a seed in its heart.

Nagel lives in manhattan, teaches at NYU, and worries about the mind-body problem – how unbelievable it is that a mind could ever be mere neurochemicals; and how impossible that mind should arise, according to evolutionary doctrine, from lifeless elements – but I wish he could spend some time here – just an afternoon – to observe the society of a few hens pecking in the hedgerow, alongside two housecats and a dog, and see the interplay of consciousness taking shape at a much lower place in the evolutionary scale.  The protocols they evolve – the felines’ impulsive urge to hunt and harry, their social obedience to the protective displays of the big Barred Plymouth Rock hen, their affectionate coexistence with the hens, all species basking in the sun together edenically, but keeping an eye on one another.  The hens’ following the cats around, in an instinct to be herded.  And the dog’s supervision of the scene.  His occasional spurt of pursuit.  The hens’ querulous scolding.  The dog’s constabulary interventions, when a cat forgets his manners and starts stalking a hen.  Meanwhile all afternoon, overhead in the tree branches, are species of birds who are less domesticated, less socialized according to homo sapiens’ semiotic and cultural standards.  The young males, at this spring time, are singing a lot, for all kinds of practical reasons; and each is developing his own repertoire of calls and songs, while at the same time learning to reproduce, roughly, a few of the songs of his neighboring birds.  This according to animal ethologists.  At the borders of their territories, males share songs.  Ornithologists suppose it’s a form of sociability.  (With sociability’s atraction/repulsion, ambivalence/ambiguity.)  Sociability’s mixed message of threat and appeal.  The upshot is, those males who acquire more of their neighbors’ songs live longer and have more offspring.

One wonders, are we supposed to ask whether the young males are “conscious” of this acquisition and application?  We only suppose consciousness to be a miraculously unlikely artifact in evolution when we forget that such acquisitions “feel good.”

As for the individual human, I think when “rational consciousness” dawns in a human infant, it happens over the years while it’s learning to listen and speak and walk and focus.  It’s coming through language and habituation.  Thus, “consciousness” is a collective radiance that arises in congregation.

* * * *

In other news:

Alone by myself here all day.  Loud guitar, and any other bachelor’s vices I devise.  Defrosted the old deep-freeze in the pantry.  Repaired the broken spoke on the huge canvas umbrella.  It’s not a perfect-looking repair, but it will last another few years, and it’s one more thing that won’t hit the world’s landfills, there to attempt to “biodegrade” for a few centuries, to be replaced here in the meadow by a newer and chintzier item from China.  The clumsy, ill-equipped half-hour I spent patching it up feels like the noblest thing I’ve done lately.

Brett has gone, with Barbara in passenger seat, all the way to Tiburon for the board meeting.  I have an exemption.  The only drawback that I don’t get to see and greet that handful of great people.

* * * *

April 29, 2012

Treated unpainted out-buildings with Thompson’s water seal, crappy water-based version of the product, a gallon of which mysteriously got into the paint cabinet.

It cures in late sun, while Dash and I pass a lacrosse ball back and forth.

Tilapia with lime/chile/shallot buter.

The preferred tv entertainment is “American Idol” – Barbara watches confused and disconsolate, the others avid.  I get away to read.

* * * *

April 25, 2012

10:30 AM.  Sad rain spreading over the foothills.

No work today.

“The Assistant” is done.  Will give to Brett for a reading.

Tall meadows.  A cat in the morning aerosol mist torments a mouse.  Sprouts of chard and lettuce stand shining in the raised beds.  On the woodbox roof, an old Barbara Kingsolver paperback lies absorbing the rain, its front cover with chick-lit color scheme curling to a tube.  It’s done with furnishing wry wisdom and consolation.

* * * *

Francis Bacon:

“Inquiry into Final Causes is sterile, and like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing.”  He’s exactly right, but I do go on, but he’s exactly right.

* * * *

April 20, 2012

Storm windows removed from second floor.

Afternoon with pick-axe and shovel, in certain lost clearings in the woods uprooting heavy stands of flowering yellow broom (English: gorse).

The bear had dragged a fifty-pound bag of feed down to the edge of the woods below the meadow, there to tear open its plastic belly and feast.

So now begins a tactical war.  All feed will be withdrawn to the mud room every evening.

* * * *

April 16, 2012

Back home from travels.

Damp and sunny, here, after hard rains (those same torrents that made the drive to the airport such a hectic tunnel, three days ago, four-AM, visibility zero, whidshield-wipers batting at the apocalypse).

But today: Morning sun on oaks.  Abundant yellow daffodils by the chickens.  Tall clouds of cherry blossoms over the moss lane.

Out back, the grass is littered with the projects that Brett and Dash took up during the weekend of my absence: the good bicycle pump is out in the dew, and so is the hack-saw, and a big rectangle of heavy hog-wire, and an ancient bottle of carwash soap from the garage, and a roll of Visqueen.

One result I can see: they’ve rigged up a frost-protection cover for one raised garden bed.  And they purchased a flat of starts from a nursery, of lettuces mostly.  Commercial seeds too, for root vegetables.

* * * *

April 15, 2012

In Los Angeles for a book thing.  Happiness in spending time with Andrew and Lisa and Louis.  Sailing the freeways like there’s no tomorrow.  The news (by phone) from home this morning is that Brett washed the Indian blanket, from my studio, and ran it through the dryer, too.  At the end, when it was taken out and folded, a dead mouse fell out, very old mummy, completely laundered.

* * * *

April 9, 2012

Finished re-installing myself in trailer.  Sprayed foundations of all buildings with diazinon.  Including pumphouse, where I’d disclosed big black carpenter ants hard at work.  (As it’s spring, I’ve seen, too, a few swarms of Argentine ants making their little creeks across paths, aiming for the house.)  Got the mower going and took down the already-deep sections of the meadow.  In the west meadow Brett had raked together lots of dry old stubble, all last week, so the slope was dotted with heaps; I hooked up the little wagon and used old, loud, fragrant fossil-fuel-power to transport the heaps to the bluff over the ravine.

Tonight: Brett is at Maggie McKaig’s birthday party, for women only.  We kids stay here: barbecued pork ribs and a romantic-comedy movie.

* * * *

April 8, 2012

Twenty shiny copies of the paperback “Radiance” arrive from the publisher.

Packaged one book up in an old padded envelope, with postage, to mail to my sleepy mother.

In her wheelchair, on the linoleum in the sun dozing, she can hold it in her lap.

* * * *

Nico and Aleksandra are here for Easter.  Short hike along the Yuba, downstream from the highway-49 crossing, about six miles total.  After dark the big bronze brazier is dragged out, to a spot under the budding mulberry, and a log fire built therein, for siting around and roasting marshmallows.

It’s spring, and it’s been warm, and I spent the afternoon cleaning the trailer in the woods.  I haven’t been working there, nor entered it all winter, and it has been well settled by rodents.  Every drawer, slid-open, discloses a nest packed with leaves, and every cabinet and closet and shelf.  Eventually, the best housekeeping tool was a rake, for clearing the mounds of nesting duff out the door, back into the woods.  Gospel music on the CD player – Soul Stirrers, Blind Boys, Pilgrim Travelers.  This world ain’t my home.  Among the stuff nibbled for nesting material: old Threepenny Reviews under the sink (the issue with the great D. Eisenberg story, a story I used to teach.  It’s a great story.  That issue of the 3PR will one day have been a collectible number.)

Out on the meadow before my trailer in the tall weeds: obsolete cassette tapes, dictionaries, Fowler’s English Usage, the orange Chicago style manual, Bic pen caps and Bic pens, multiple copies of my own old novels, looking nice and freshly cloned, but wicking rodent-pee.  Hundred-year-old hardcover Baedekers to Venice, Paris, Rome.  The Indian blanket. More cassette audio-tapes.  My space heater.  My Explication du Grand Modele Anatomique, Demontable, du Corps de la Femme.  My ergonomic chair.

Rain is coming tomorrow, so I had to finish the whole cleaning job and get it all back inside.

* * * *

April 2, 2012

The Absence of the Author is the central fact of literature.

Writers forget this and seem to want celebrity (this seems to be truer now, in these days of instant electronic renown), in the sense that they want to be everywhere present, the personpresent (or personality present), rather than absent, and with Facebook and Twitter, authors have new ways to flood the known universe with their presence.

The truth is, I seal my own permanent, eternal absence with every sentence I commit to ink on paper (or launch, in pixils, into cyberspace’s open sky).  Death is the condition of a writer’s medium.  Writers ought to know from the get-go, a writer is already absent from a sentence as soon as its final period is punched.  Always rattling around in the mausoleum.

Lately I’ve been declining invitations to show up at literary occasions because I feel it’s unseemly for me to be loitering anywhere around my own writing.  Got a friendly request from an acting troupe that I be present at a dramatic reading of a short story.  This I did go to.  Because my home only a few miles from the performance.  And notified long in advance.  So I hadn’t much excuse.  But I shouldn’t have been there, sitting in a back row, doing my best to register responses.

* * * *

March 27, 2012

“Sense of Wonder” – it’s something children are supposed to have a bigger endowment of.  But no.

The older you get, the more stunning and paralyzing it is, not the “sense of” wonder, but the thing itself, everything is so improbable.

Children, by comparison, are worldly-wise.

* * * *

The Zen master prefers to talk about the soup, or the soap, or the weather, not Zen, and the monk asks why he doesn’t like to talk about Zen, and the master says, “That kind of talk makes me sick.” (tr.: turns my stomach)

* * * *

March 21, 2012

Dash has been out of school for several days now, sick, home.  Liz drives down the hill with her homemade tortilla soup.

Arrives with one special serving, just for him – all the garnishes in an unfolding kit – a clump of cilantro, fresh avocado and separately poached chicken, spiced stock, two tortillas, poblano chiles and anaheim chilies not-yet-diced, all in Tupperware and Saran Wrap to be unpacked like a magic-act on the tabletop.  Which did in fact go a long way way toward curing Dash.

* * * *

March 20, 2012

Watching a TV nature show with Dash last night, I saw the origins of Christianity among the bison herds.  A small herd was being chased by a pack of hungry wolves.  At last, the slowest, weakest one (the doomed one, the nice one) was being isolated, and the wolves were closing in on him.  But then a bigger bison, in escaping, gave the little victim a fatal, crippling shove in passing – as if to nudge him to the wolves! – because in this way he was preserving the herd.  Preserving the society.  A sacrificial victim had been elected, so that all may live.  That must be the social drama that led to the story of the the emaciated man on a cross.  (By way of the tribal Hebrews, their killing-of-firstborn to appease fate.)  Imagine that.  “Substitutionary Atonement” (theological term) originating among the cloven-hoofed ungulates.

* * * *

March 19, 2012

A day of sun, between rainy periods.

Dash is staying home from school today, with fever and aches.

I can hear him and his mother, staying in bed together, reading, playing with two cats under the covers.

* * * *

March 17, 2012

Memorial get-together here for Patricia Gagne.  With a lot of fine people who were her friends and family.

* * * *

March 14, 2012

Finished with “All Things.”  Sent it to Caridwen for a friendly read.

Counterpoint wants a final draft of “Innocence” by the end of May.

* * * *

March 14, 2012

County agricultural agent comes out to hang a trap for European Grapevine Moth.  (Orange cardboard prism hangs above the rosemary bed.)

* * * *

March 11, 2012

I’m not sure I know what I’m doing when I have the feeling that I’m “understanding” something.

To “understand” an event (any event, like a sunrise, or a sneeze, or a childbirth) would involve perceiving a connection, of some sort, between the event and its antecedent “causes” – as well as its subsequent “effects.”  During fourscore and some years, I will have awakened on 30 thousand mornings, witnessed a few lunar eclipses and earthquakes, stood on a volcano, written and published novels, been married, played musical instruments, fathered children who will have stayed healthy and gone off and perhaps, themselves, gotten married or been otherwise generative and consequential, etc.  But I’m not sure I have a grasp of the causes of all these deeds, or their consequences.  I’m really just the white flesh inside a living apple.  (Zen saying: “Between basin and basin, I have uttered stuff and nonsense.”)  (I.e., the basin where the newborn is washed, and the basin where the corpse is washed) — (A benign and liberating view, really.)

Science does seem to keep advancing genuine “explanations.”  These explanations (I’m talking about the logos! my favorite thing!) are supposed to award human beings a kind of authority over phenomena and their mechanics.  I look at the young maple and I think “chlorophyll,” “xylem and phloem,” “cellulose,” “C6H12O6.”  But I’m not sure that those words represent understandings so much as they represent simply love.  I love the “wood” I believe the treetrunk is made of.  And I have words for my experiences of it, which words seem themselves an explanation.  Just as I have the word “gravity” and use it loosely without any understanding of it, or the word death, or the name Brett, or the concept of the sky.

Take a fencepost: I think I “understand” that the old fencepost in the forest doesn’t fall down because it stands vertically in the gravitational plane, rather than leaning, and its underground portion is pressed on all sides equally by soil behaving like a liquid.  That picture, or mental sketch, is supposed to substantiate my understanding of that fencepost.

But it depends at every point on concepts I have no clear notion of – “gravity” and “pressure” and Euclidean geometry in “stable, three-dimensional space.”

This isn’t exactly Hume’s skepticism.  (The billiard ball moves after the cue ball moves, engendering the merely conventional myth of a “cause.”)  I believe that there may be “causes” discoverable in the “logos.”  But the fascinating fact is that, in the absence of apodictic certainty, we’re suspended rather comfortably in faith.

* * * *

March 8, 2012

Sunshine.  Purchase of new pruning hook at B&C Hardware, $53

(as now both the old pruning hooks are shot, lying in an inch of water in the pick-up truck bed).

Large old pear tree by the garage requires major amputations.  A three-inch-diameter branch at the top.  Lots of new whips, too.  The southernmost old branch is losing its bark, worrisomely.  (It’s in full blossom already, in this weird spring weather.  I hack and clip, up at that elevation on a ladder, while the honeybees are thundering all around me, ignoring me.)

All other pruning is minor.  Among the other pears and apples, none have extraordinary fresh growth.

As for the perhaps-dead trunk, of the apple’s three trunks (by the garden fence): I’m leaving it for the time being.  See if it revives.

* * * *

March 4, 2012

San Francisco.  A happy errand.  With free time.

Six o’clock, I’m at the window table in Vesuvio’s reading (fat paperback of Penrose’s mathematics; very disorienting), on my second glass of crummy pinot grigio.  In the corner of my eye, I glimpse a disfiguring rash on my wrist – it’s only an illusion, trick of the shadow, it vaporizes when I focus my gaze on it.  But I realize I wasn’t much fazed by the sight of it, as at this point in my life, I’ve been hospitalized enough, and pained enough, and thrust to extremes enough, and I’ve bidden enough people goodbye, and seen enough enormities, that I could pretty much go along with anything in equanimity: not just a sudden rash but a disappearance of a limb, a dislocation in time, instant blindness, the collapse to rubble of “Big Al’s” dance hall across the street, a tsunami rolling up Broadway as if computer-generated by LucasFilm, salt water lapping at the curb before City Lights.  Nothing would alarm me.  Least of all betrayal by my own body.  Because of course that’s one sure thing.  Nightmare betrayal, monstrous betrayal, by one’s own body, freakish betrayal, it’s all coming for sure.  And I’m reminded of something in long-ago Sartre, where he claimed to be so existentially estranged (“alienated” the big word of the time) that it wouldn’t be surprising to him if his tongue in his mouth turned into a centipede or the bit of litter on the boulevard were moving under its own locomotive power.  I see what he means.  Which, at the time, I though was Sartre’s idle jokey bluster.

* * * *

February 28, 2012

Very dim quiet day.  A big snow is promised for tonight and tomorrow.  All day the solar sphere is visible low in the pines.

A few miscellaneous snowflakes fall from a sunny, tumultuous sky.  Upwind smell of horses and horseshit, from down the road, is almost “warmth.”  Or just sentiment.  My sentimentality.

My little job this afternoon: rebuild the hen roost.  On the garage workbench radio, the NPR pledge-break beseeching goes on and on.  After that: Iran is suspected of developing nuclear weapons; a high-school student in Ohio shot all his friends at the lunch table; gay marriage in New Hampshire; a recipe for goat curry; Americans are getting obese; a terrorist’s bomb explodes in a Baghdad marketplace.

Lately I’m  thinking of how “understanding” is a mythological condition, which we wade through confidently.  The “logos” that was launched by the Greeks, though always under improvement, is still a stencil that only roughly lines up with how actuality must be.  Our mysterious presence in the world is much more juicy and biological than apodictic.  Once years ago, in an effort to console a friend (whose husband had committed suicide), I told her, “And don’t try to understand anything.  There is no ‘understanding.’  Never was any such thing.”  For we do all live on a visible surface.  Flows together and seals over the punctures.

Now today, in a much less dire situation than hers – keeping peace among my hens – that agnosticism seems, wherever I look, universally applicable.  The hens eye me with a knowledge all their own.  They shamble out of my way, when I haul in the new roost.  The little white terrier-dog is their true shepherd.  They’ve got an understanding among themselves.

The afternoon closes down, and quickly the cold is a vice around my ears, at only 4:00.  Inside, in the kitchen, charred lamb shanks braise in an entire bottle of red wine.

* * * *

February 24, 2012

Thrush is back.

What CREATURES OF HABIT are “wild” animals.  They’re like morningtime commuters accustomed to the same Danish at the same sleepy subway get-off.  The annual thrush pecks at pretty much the same small swatch of meadow each morning, about ten feet by twelve feet, by the garage.  Arrives there and also departs at about the same times.  The hare who raids my garden in summer (in Calif. the more the gangly Bugs Bunny physique, not the Peter Cottontail endomorph) in wintertime crosses the north meadow around the same time of dusk, on the same diagonal.  As for the foraging old bear with the corkscrewing hind-end hernia-gait, he trudges below the house in Squaw along a habitual route, before dawn.  Now that I myself am keeping still, in one habitat, I see all this.  When I lived with my kind, in cities, I’d thought that the untamed animals of the so-called “wilderness” probably practiced the same anarchic, wide-ranging promiscuity/irresponsibility/anonymity/impulsivity that wealways practiced.  Couldn’t be farther from the truth.  It’s a village out here.  We in San Francisco were the “wild” ones, in our wilderness aliens and brutes.

* * * *

February 20, 2012

This prolonged rainless, warm winter of La Nina conditions.  The pear trees, today, have blossoms bigger than cat’s-eye marbles.  It’s February!  Already the roar of honey bees!  The red-headed finches have arrived and are building their nest in the usual lantern outside the mud room door.  The winter thrush hasn’t been much seen in the meadow, as if maybe he’d moved on earlier than usual.  What happened to him?  Overhead thousands of sandhill cranes are sifting northward, flocks, making wrinkles in the blue sky, and a purring noise knitting everywhere.

* * * *

February 18, 2012

Day closes cold and steely.  Silent.  The woods get deeper.  The junco’s kew-kew-kew defines an abyss.

In the mailbox is a letter from United Airlines marked URGENT: OPEN IMMEDIATELY: my Frequent-Flier Miles’ wealth is about  expire if I don’t use them soon.

* * * *

February 18, 2012

Got back into “All Things” this morning, leaving “The Assistant” aside.

Sunrise.  Saturday.  Cloudy with threat of sprinkles.  Warm morning.

Cleaning up tools and lumberscraps in west meadow.

Trip to Ridge Feed, for the purchase of a batch of month-old pullets: we bring Barbara along, so she can contribute what she remembers of ranching lore from her days by the Sacramento River as a girl.

* * * *

February 16, 2012

A School Day.  Before sunrise, I’m helping Dash with his math.  [The homework is delinquent.  Also, Dash is bewildered.]  I don’t resent the sacrifice of my precious dawn time of work.  Rather, arithmetic turns out to be the right thing for me to be doing.  I could never have predicted, as a child, that when I was at the height of my adult powers – (as probably right now my intellectual stamina is intact, memory banks accessible, the mycorrhizal mat of “wisdom” as widespread as it will ever be) – that in the prime mornings of adult life, arithmetic would be the good thing!  Instead of poesy.  Not Penrose’s abstract shining towers but long-division of decimals; pausing for pencil-sharpening, reversing the pencil in hand for erasures; and on a separate scratch-paper checking the answers by the multiplying of divisor and dividend.

* * * *

Buddhism and Nietzsche:

If “God is Dead” and “the Self is a Fiction,” then the job of the Ubermensch is to live in the present moment fully because that moment returns eternally       = Nibbana

* * * *

February 11, 2012

It’s just Barbara and me for dinner.  Mushroom omelet.  Parsnips.  Watching endless CNN coverage of the death of a young pop star.

* * * *

February 10, 2012

Rain, on and off all day.  Still convalescing, and so moving dreamily, cautiously, tagged by aches and pangs, I work on the poultry enclosure, in the mud digging trenches to sink galvanized fencing 24 inches into the ground.  On the radio, I hear screams and wails: a tiny dapper potentate in a desert is bombing his own people.  When a bomb lands right near them, they shout or whimper “Allahu Akbar!”  (God is great!)  I have to move the radio inside the chicken coop when the rain starts getting heavier.

* * * *

Sands, honoring an old custom, sends her novel manuscript to her mother for a critique.  Unboxed, it slid off the couch cushions in B’s cottage and the pages needed to be restored to order, so at least a day or two went into the repagination project.  Lots of slow mincing back and forth, in nightgown, between table and countertop, bearing a single page here, another single page back over there.  After actual reading of the ms began, further repagination became necessary.  The whole effort kept Barbara busy all week.  Some time later, when asked for her critique of Sand’s story, Barbara confided with a discomfort, “It just seems like the main character is always chopping onions.”

* * * *

February 8, 2012

Soporifics.  This sunny world, by the light of day, is constructed of hurt feelings, grief, envy, desire, remorse, cruelty, ignorance, all apparently necessary, part of the economy, the ecosystem.  Grateful for children.  (Just the abstract, ideal possibility of children, let alone the real thing.)

When the delusions brewed in sunshine are over for the day, and the insomnia begins and I’m lying prone, the best solace comes from (in ascending order):

1) contemplation of my utterly fictional characters

2) head-bump against starry sky, the of course absent “god”

3) contemplation of my next day’s carpentry on the hen house (that’s the best)

Today I roofed it with mesh (against hawks and fence-scaling bobcats).  Needs another reinforcing girder, as some day a wet snow-load will burden the mesh.  For this purpose, the 2×6 girder is already cut.  Tomorrow I will trench for the perimeter foundation where galvanized wire will be buried, to foil digging coyotes.  Light rains are coming in but I’ll work on through them.

* * * *

February 4, 2012

Please Tell Your Nurse About Your Pain Level Today

–

It Helps us Provide for Your Comfort, And Your Recovery!

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10

No Pain         Moderate Pain          Worst Pain

The not-quite-full moon sank all night in the broad open window.

* * * *

January 31, 2012

An occasion for happiness.  I’ve been writing indoors lately as the trailer in the woods is too smelly from animal habitation, and I have set up shop (laptop, coffee cup) in Hunter’s old bedroom.  Here in a drawer, I come across a photocopy of Hunter’s birth certificate!

“May 14, 1991, 18:43 Pacific Daylight Time, County of Marin [we were so affluent then], Male, Single Birth, Hunter Dallas Jones, born alive.”  And there is my signature, as father vouching that the above information is true.  I see that, twenty-one years ago on that day, inside the signature box, I didn’t inflict the usual slash that my name has shrunken into over the years, the up-and-down years of autographing books and signing checks, at cash registers or notaries public or bank-tellers’ windows, with max efficiency ridding myself of my personal OK.  I went slower on that afternoon in May when I was younger.  The pen added a few serrated key-edge bumps to the line, implying separate letters, implying particularity, on that day, at 6:43 pm, when I remember the sun was setting outside the hospital window over Mount Tamalpais.

* * * *

January 28, 2012

Myself the prophet of dinginess.  Enviromentalist imperative.  Dinge will be the new black.  The future, art-designed, would look like the stage-set of the old “Honeymooners” TV show, where parsimony ruled, where Audrey Meadows was never able, quite, to launder the greyness out.

• Use the old grimy computer for one more year, rather than buying new one, and be patient.
• A frayed bathtowel in the linen closet.
• Chipped coffee cups rather than buying new.
• Clotheslines of course, as important as solar panels.
• Saved and reused tinfoil, yes, even that.

In general, putting off all purchases.

Prosperity is the enemy of earth.

* * * *

January 20, 2012

In pajamas writing all morning.  In pajamas with hammer and saw framing the poultry run under the bare cherry trees, cooking in the same pajamas, sleeping in them, in pajamas painting fenceposts with copper napthenate, for days the same pajamas.  This is a pathetic, not enviable, existence, but the distinction isn’t interesting, or occurs to me only when the mail truck passes.

Pajamas and rubber boots, pajamas and parka, and straw hat, etc.

* * * *

January 19, 2012

The rains finally arrive and Cavendish is back, his duffel bag in the playroom, his pickup by the shed, his place at the dinner table, his gallantry towards Barbara in her fragility, the deep-dyed cigarette-butt smell at corridor turnings, his panache, tall nodding plume in the room.  (I think he’s discouraged by the long muddy road home, lit only by his truck headlights, to get to his stranded trailer in the river canyon.)  In a small-town production of “Death of a Salesman,” he is playing the part of Willie Loman’s brother Ben and so is sporting a new haircut, spending a lot of time in town.  In the mud room shower stall he can be heard, with a booming voice rehearsing his lines.

Work on the poultry enclosure goes on, in little west meadow.

Wild sweet pea fronds dead all around, plywood scraps, Skilsaw plugged into the far-away pumphouse for electricity, Makita drill, country music on the radio on a 55-gal drum – hammer and spirit level and pencil – and Cavendish comes down along the lane, with cigarette and aluminum coffee mug.  I point out to him that I’m using his “Mountain Man” method of cutting steel, by magically drawing a wire through it.  I’ll always benefit by his transmission of such lore.

The Mountain Man method of using a cigarete: smoke it down to a very pebble, and then pinch the pebble itself to snuff it, with calloused fingers.

Providential good luck in Cavendish’s arrival: some salvaged 2X4s.

I’ve been sticking to my principles, building the poultry enclosure and predator-secure coop entirely out of salvaged wood and hardware, from around the place, with ALMOST NOT ONE SINGLE trip to the hardware store.  The ethical stance results in an aesthetic consistency, which is harmony, element of beauty.  Then just as I happen to be hitting the bottom of my scrap woodpile (particularly long-enough 2x4s), Cavendish mentions that he has come into a heap of redwood two-by and four-by material, from the barn of his theatrical-prop workshop.  His truck has a lumber rack.  Will bring it over, gratis.  Plenty of it.

* * * *

THEOLOGY:

If any thinking about “god” amounts to thinking about AN ENTITY THAT IS INEFFABLY WITHOUT KNOWABLE QUALITIES, then what do we like to think we’re contemplating? (!)

The Universe once did begin to exist (this according to recent physicists’ thinking).

We infer its cause’s bare “existence” via the following induction: if something begins to exist, there was a “cause.”

So, a Cause’s (colorless, shapeless) “existence” we hold to be an a priori necessity.  Nobody is assigning this cause properties like beardedness or wrath or beneficence.

It is an a priori necessity in much the same way that “2+2=4” and all other mathematical axioms were eternally facts, facts even in the void before the presence of any things that could be enumerated.

Thus, mathematics and the cosmic cause’s bare unqualified existence are treated as necessary, a priori.

Then furthermore, from the causative (a more provocative word would be habilitative) quality of this thing flows the assumption of its puissance.  This is a second quality we attribute to this supposedly unqualifiable and ineffable thing.

The dangerous step:

If you could say that this habilitative entity “acted” (when, in Time, it incited the possiblity-of-possiblity in the original, much more peaceful vastness of dark impossibility and timelessness), then that “action” description implies “choice,” and “will,” and even “beneficence.”  So there you end up with some unwanted anthropomorphic notions.

(Kant: Teleological Proof only another version of the Ontological Proof.  Using existence as a predicate.)

* * * *

The God’s-Existence Proof.

(Silly word, the G-word.  Over the years it has applied to paunchy Olympians, six-armed blue hermaphrodites, etc.  Even more troublesome, it has applied to that authority who justifies our wars and hatreds, the effigy raised aloft over racism and complacency and ignorance and mental laziness.)

(If we were to change convention and always lower-case the G-word – to refer always to “the existence of god,” “the role of god,” “god’s characteristics,” etc., rather than “the existence of God,” “the role of God,” “God’s characteristics” – we might elide the residue of superstitious personal-deity worship.  To call god merely “god” restores the thing, indeed, to a more numinous stature in Creation.)

“God’s existence” is not a scientific observable..  Not observable like the redness of Mars compared to Venus, or measurable gamma emission in radioactive decay, not seen in telescopes and microscopes.*  So, rather than a datum, say god’s existence is an unexaminable foundation, like “gravity” a foundation concept we use without any understanding of it, and even feel in our bones without comprehending it, as we do gravity.

*Except to the most delirious mystic who will see god packed into such views, exactly as observed.

(My mental laziness as well as thine, brother.) (Call it rather mental incompetence.)

* * * *

Here’s the a priori “reasoning,” in favor of God’s existence:

Evidently there is such a thing as “being,” as it’s all around us.  Before the possibility of any being, how does the possibility of possibility originate?  This is strictly a priori.

Furthermore: If the “possibility of possibility” arises ex nihilo (though to phrase the event thus is to make assumptions about chronological time and palpable measurable space that pertain only inside this our humid, foggy little sphere of subjectivity), then another precedent has been invented there, an attribute of this “god” entity which you might call “positive.”  The possiblity-of-possibility takes a “position.”  It “posits.”  This divine fiat takes a position in inaugurating “somethingness” (rather than defaulting to “nothingness,” more naturally).  That seems to be an impulse.  And it would be a positive impulse.

And this knocks on, directly, to the popular and attractive “God is love” equation.

A SUITABLE NAME, TO REFER TO THIS A PRIORI PHENOMENON?

“HABILITATION”?

* * * *

Now Stephen Hawking would point out that I’m using temporal terms: I’m suggesting that this possibility-of-possibility thing must have “preceded” (in chronological time) all other things.  However, it may be rather a logically “prior” assumption, as opposed to chronologically.  Making it contemporaneous and perpetual.

Inside our epistemological bubble, “time” serves as a metaphor for the teleological sequence we think of as “Creation.”  Time is not pertinent outside our subjective experience; but as a metaphorical tool, the idea of a “Before” points outside the epistemological bubble, points toward this “god” premise.  That is, the premise of god as the agent of “the possiblity of possibility” before all things.  (Meaning, logically prior to all things.)

[Interesting logic-vs-temporality conflation in the language here:

Whether “god” is chronologically antecedent or logically antecedent: these are questions that share some semantic characteristics.  God can “precede” the universe IN TIME (in the case that we think we can make reasonable guesses about that singularity the Big Bang) or god can “precede” the universe in terms of LOGICAL NECESSITY.  We call it a priori reasoning – that is, reasoning prior to empirical observation – as if there were a chronological sequence.]

* * * *

January 14, 2012

Dashiell’s Birthday.

For his party, treasure hunts are ruled out.  No pinata.  No games.

Now girls are invited – half the guests are girls! – no Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey, no sack races, the only activity is “hanging out.”  Little boom-box on a milk crate in the meadow.

Campfire, built by dad, who remains invisible.

* * * *

Infinities we are knitted into:

• space goes on outward forever
• space is also inwardly divisible without limit, infinitesimally knitted and knitted and knitted
• time extends forward and backward forever in both directions
• time too, inwardly, is infinitely divisible by interpolation

* * * *

Concert with Sands in Eric Tomb’s book store.  Randy McKean on reeds, me on dobro and electric guitar, Luke and Maggie.

* * * *

In the year 1961, the Swedish Nobel Prize committee considered the following candidates, on the short list for the Lit prize, and rejected them:

Robert Frost

J.R.R. Tolkien

Isak Dinesen

E.M. Forster

Graham Greene

Those were the losers.  The prize that year went to a Yugoslav, Ivo Andric, whom the committee preferred for the “epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies.”  (The novel “The Bridge Over the Drina” seems like it must be a worthy book, but it’s amusing to contemplate the also-rans.)

* * * *

January 5, 2012

The old “Ontological Proof” of God’s existence doesn’t seem to be dead yet.  Stanford website is taking it seriously; premissed as follows: “A proposition that has a POSSIBILITY of being necessary must BE necessary (for instance, “that six is the sum of its divisors 1,2, and 3” can POSSIBLY be a necessary truth; therefore it is!)

So, in the same way, God (whose necessary existence is admitted as a “possibility”) must exist necessarily.

I can’t believe my contemporaries with respectable academic jobs can be such jeering lazy thinkers.  I mostly envy them their great health-insurance packages in institutions where they lie low sending up such gas.

A.J. Ayer said, speaking of all religious propositions, that (according to the old rules of logical positivism): An assertion will be true if either (A) it’s analytic, like a math equation; or (B) it’s supported by evidence from the world.

Religious discussion is meaningless discussion, says Ayer, because it satisfies neither condition A nor condition B.

Well, yes, agreement to that would come from the mystic as well as the theologian as well as the atheist.

This Ontological Proof makes of “God” an analytic proposition: God exists by definition – in the same way that “three” by definition equals “one plus one plus one.”

Well now, God surely does have a lot in common with mathematics,( that shining castle of analytic propositions).  This reprise of the old Ontological Proof makes god an arithmetical statement (God exists, because he is defined as a thing that exists).

Exiles God to the place where A.J. Ayer banished him: undiscussability.

(Ayer, atheistically, made the mistake of adding that, because God is undiscussable, the thing doesn’t exist.)

(“Undiscussability” is the same place Moses put Him after all, on coming down from Sinai)

* * * *

New Years Eve

The rib-bones from Christmas dinner’s roast have come into my possession.  And so, with beef stock, am making French onion soup.  Nico and Aleksandra to arrive tomorrow New Year’s Day.

It’s ten-thirty on this twinkly night, last of 2011, and I go out to the compost heap with a full bucket  of onion skins, to pour them out upon the heap – and have to pee, out in the open meadow, making heaps of steam in the vastness.  Silence of New Year’s Eve in the boondocks.  No fireworks out here.  Quarter moon.  Piercing stars.

* * * *

Patriotic, but still ashamed of my country sometimes.

At our local tennis club, the caretaker kid – a strong healthy young man – uses a loud, gas-driven, wheeled machine to air-blast fallen leaves across the lawn.

And I think of the enormous oil-spill now spreading in Nigeria (though censored by western media) over the fishing grounds of the Ogoni people.

And I think of the news in today’s Times:

“SOUTH AFRICAN FARMERS SEE THREAT FROM FRACKING: A plan to drill for natural gas in the Karoo region of South Africa would use millions of gallons of water in a drought-stricken area.”

The caretaker kid doesn’t even, himself, like the blowing machine, dragging it up and down the slope.  A rake would be so elegant.  And quiet.  And simpatico to his nervous system.

So here go Dash and I, to practice our serves with a basket-cart of tennis balls, while the engine roars in the distance and the lazy getting-overweight teenager drags the machine up and down.

* * * *

Xmas vacation.

Hunter, with friend Adam Haight, both home from college, lie around sloppily in the mud room with stove ablaze, idly Googling misc. oddball videos and music.  They stay up till all hours, heat microwave junk food, talk endlessly in their rumbling voices, on the muddy purple couch, pick up stray guitar and twang it, cook escargots from of a tin can.  Butter and garlic and shallots.

I’m home from rehearsing with Luke and Maggie.

* * * *

http://louisbjones.com/2012/12/31/a-new-leaf-2012-2013/

December 27, 2011

Barbara will have surgery on the thirtieth.  Needs an artery in her neck unblocked of plaque.  She’s not being very brave about it.  We tend to try not to bring it up at all.

* * * *

December 26, 2011

An affluent Christmas.  Like everybody, we’re spending money we don’t have on stylish black boxes with demonic inner embers, with power-cords that will bring more of the audiovisual into our lives, and absorb time, and added expense in maintenance, their phantom-power pilot-lights marring the darkness of the midnight while we sleep, raising the energy bill and the global temperature.  The usual sexy delusions will now be announced by the persuasive BOOM (triumphant boom) of THX Dolby.  It’s all pollution.  We are pollution.  THX Dolby doesn’t make the cliché any more tolerable, it just makes the cliché loud, booming, swirling, bristling, inexorable.

* * * *

The absurdity of thinking about “god” at all.

Any Prime Mover must have been “caused”. . . . . Infinite regress.

(Also, acc. to Kant, the cosmological argument is just another ontological argument but in disguise.)

What we can know is that (a) things exist; and (b) that fact has a “positive” aspect.  [That second assertion is the theological part, and the anthropic part.]

* * * *

December 22, 2011

Hunter is home from college for ten days.  It’s good to hear the deep voice in the house, a pacific voice.  In rooms where I’m not present.  A deep voice.

* * * *

9:30 in the morning.

Brett makes an appearance outside the kitchen door in the cold morning light barefoot, with last night’s tablecloth on her forearm.  She gives it a big shake, the whole banner of it, and goes back inside.

Slam of screen door.

Soon to appear: the finches and sparrows.

* * * *

A Tuesday.  Few days till Christmas.

Spent another entire day not working.  Always a dizzy condition.

In the morning, finished a computer-recording of a version of “Shendandoah” (to be my homemade X-mas present).  Which after three days’ work disappoints me summarily, and I’m going to have to re-do it.

Then cleared the far deep-woods meadow of  Scotch broom, pulling seedlings up by their roots.  (Member of the pea family.  Cousin to the wild sweetpea I love to munch elsewhere here.  In italian “La Ginestra.”  Meaning “the broom.”  Invasive plant here.  The Plantagenets’ family crest bore an image of a sprig of this stuff, because “planta genesta” was its emblematic flower.)

Then the blackberry.  Back-breakingly on knees under the fig trees, dug and extirpated almost all blackberry vines, by their ancient roots – really venerable underground woody wrists, hard fists, witchy long dusty fingers.

Tilapia w/ chile-lime butter.  Asparagus.

Hard freeze expected tonight.  Went out and flushed irrigation to empty it and not freeze pipes.  The firehose explosion of muddy water thundering from the old rusty, seldom-opened hydrant into the ravine.

* * * *

December 11, 2011

Sunday morrning.

Barbara is in the corner of the kitchen, next to the heater, feasting on the entire Sunday paper, not saying much.  All around her, noisily, three 12-yr-old boys frolic and punch and quarrel, post-sleep-over, crowding around the “ipad,” Dash dominant, tapping and stroking the little pane.  Buttermilk pancakes are made, syrup poured, then the boys including all housepets are sent outside. I’m not writing today, I’m responding to interview questions on Internet, then fooling around with home-made music, recording a version of an old public-domain tune.  On Brett’s ipod down in the kitchen, while Barbara reads the paper, the “folk music” stack is playing Tim Buckley, Judy Collins Leo Kottke’s Tacoma album.  Later today, as it’s warm and sunny, Brett will be out with loppers and shears.

2:00 – afternoon – Dash, very grown up with $10 in his pocket and knowledge of a crepe place to spend it at, needs a ride to town, where (with my cell phone in pocket), he is to meet a certain “Ciara.”  I drop him off, but he insists on being let out three blocks too soon.  Then with wings on his fleet he runs at top speed, sweatshirt-hood flying, down Spring Street.  I linger in the intersection to watch him, flying down out of sight.

4:30– Give up my Sunday music-making and set out with two mousetraps (brand name VICTOR, printed on wood in red and blue ink dyes, the flat cedar wafer that is to be the mouse’s last touch of material Earth and spiritual threshing-floor.)

Brett is working on her huge quilt in the cottage.

Barbara with the newspaper by lamplight.  She complains that (according to the newspaper) the director of the San Francisco zoo outfits herself in clothing of wild-animal prints.  This is in poor taste.

Very dim at 4:30 in the woods’ edge, baiting my traps with peanut butter and oatmeal, in the potting shed where there’s a big woodrat nest, and in my trailer in the woods.

* * * *

December 5, 2011

12:16 midday.  The silence of the whole house, midday, weekday.

A creak in the 150-yr-old floorboards.

Brett: “Louis, I’m going for a walk with Toby.”

Me: “Oh.  Okay.”

The floorboard creaks travel away again.

* * * *

December 3, 2011

In the depth of the night, sparkling frost on grass.  How glamorous is death.

Dash is away at a friend’s house for a sleep-over.

Barbara and Brett are in the cottage watching, on television, “Anything With English Accents.”

Happiness of seeing the big Angel book come into perspective.

The merry clothesline all day, scalloped at the top rim, bouncing.  All afternoon, while the denim dried toasty, last night’s ice stayed intact on the shadowed bricks of the patio.

Dinner of polenta and pork loin with sauce of last year’s little plums from the freezer.

(This year, through my own negligent inattention, all the little Italian prune plums were purloined by The Bear before I could get to them.)

(This is a surmise I reach from having observed The Bear’s pie-sized shit in the woods beyond the chestnut trees, wherein are mostly the pits of my plums.)

Sour local wine.

* * * *

December 3, 2011

Up early.  Coffee brewed.  Heat started.  Softly on the radio: NPR’s well-regulated, easy ironies and poignancies (the valve of intervening segue music.)  Saturday morning.

Dash went to a party last night (at a girl’s house!) and was delivered here after my own bedtime, by some mom, or dad.  And this morning I can hear him singing to himself while he lies in bed.  He still has a girlish fluting voice.  And he is exploring this melody only by guesses, before he’s even lifted his head from the pillow.

* * * *

December 2, 2011

“Crazy pretty” —— Today is the kind of sunny, windy day that will, in the sensitive, bring on migraines or epileptic seizures.  The trees churn and shimmer, the grandstands in the Roman coliseum.  This American language: Our weekly cleaning “lady” – (really a girl, not a lady, herself a poet and blogger) – pauses with lunch-spoon halfway to mouth, standing and looking out the small pantry window, out to where the low winter sun makes tinsel of the grass, and she says, “I’n it crazy pretty out?”

* * * *

November 30, 2011

Big winds are predicted for tonight, and we’ve brought in or lashed down everything loose.  Consequence of atmospheric turbulence: I have spotty connection with the internet and can’t bring emails up to see what agreement my agent Joy in New York is reaching with my editor Jack in Berkeley.  I guess that’s exactly fitting, I in turbulence.

* * * *

A great novel I’m finally getting around to: John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.”  It has all the artless ineptitude of a great novel.  A clear surface through which to see deep.

Myself, I don’t do that.  For better or worse, I tend to let it be a hard glittering surface.

* * * *

Insomnia, I love it, I alone shimmering high up, hours of ultra-alertness,

and the inevitable nearness-of-god monkeyshines, always unfailingly interesting.

Thinking of my great good fortune in Brett beside me.

* * * *

 

November 27, 2011

Sales of Radiance are VERY disappointing.  The offers for Innocence will be humbling.

But a letter from New York is in the mail pile.  Sharon Olds is so crazy about Radiance she wrote a three-page, handwritten fan letter.  If one or two fond close readers are out there in the gloaming, that is reward enough.

Home now, for one full day, Sunday.  The weather tender and warm.

A soup of chestnuts from under the tree at the edge of the woods, plus Thanksgiving’s old roasted root vegetables.

* * * *

[It’s later that same night.  I’m making beef stock.  Brett, in putting Dashiell to bed, has fallen asleep, and all lites are low, and I’ve got our local small-town radio station on.  The Sunday-Nite literary show is broadcasting a “staged reading” of a conversation from the last (the posthumous! the thousand-page!) David Foster Wallace novel.  Three actor-voices bicker about consumerism, existentialism, American political parties, Romanticism, communism, post-modernism, late-stage capitalism.  These three voices braid so rapidly from –ism to –ism, the spine of the conversation is lost.  It’s a kalaedoscope of Wallace’s opinions and knowledge.  (Onion, bay leaf, bones of rib roast, some semi-slimy parsley, old shriveled carrots.)

Then, because I need a sprig of fresh thyme I have to desert the lucha libre of Mr. Wallace’s philosophical characters – (and right at the existentialism part!) – to go outside by the back mudroom door, and in starlight find the thyme.  It’s cold outside.  On my knees on the bricks: spongy moss presses dew into the denim.  Totally silent.  Neither the smell of my soup-pot nor the rattle of the radio is out here.

* * * *

Thanksgiving in Squaw Valley.  No snow.  Warm sun on decks.

On “Black Friday” I climb alone above all the waterfalls in canyon, where nothing moves, no animals, no sounds.  Cold air sinking along creek bed.

* * * *

Consequence of scientists’ new Multiverse* Theory:

(*that there isn’t just a single universe; that ours is one of a billion trillion possible universes that have existed, from a billion trillion Big Bangs foaming up through eternity, all generated randomly.)

Scientists suggest that the “miraculous” existence of our unique, improbable universe is explained by trial-and error in the Lawrence-Welk-bubble-machine Profusion of “Big Bangs” in eternity: an inexhastible variety of universes is always spewing forth into time-space; so eventually one of these random-trial universes would have contained, accidentally, a lucky bit of carbon and a few other ingredients (the right kind of gravity, the right proton mass, etc.) to come up with a livable planet, in what we feel to be a logical, geometric space, a stable space.  This idea is supposed to rule out the supernatural agency of a designing “god.”

The further, interesting possibility is of a RADICAL anthropic theory: that I alone, personally, am the existential focus, among billions of dismissed universes and merely heuristic universes.  I’m in the only possible universe: the one containing ME.  Call this “Anthropic Solipsism”:

It’s natural and inevitable that I should exist, because this is the universe “I”happen to exist in, and be conscious of.  All those billions of “possible” universes, no matter how outlandish, were also “INEVITABLE” universes.  (It’s an axiom of multiverse thinking that anything possible is inevitable, in the logarithm of infinite trial-and-error.)  In this particular universe, “I’ myself am, like God, the sine qua non.

Such an Anthropic Solipsism is a cousin to the “atman” of Hindu thinking, the Self who is the entire Web of Indra stretched glittering through eternity.  Also it’s cousin to Niezsche’s “Eternal Return.”  (Nietzsche: he was ahead of all this.)

Two difficulties of this Anthropic Solipsism are (1) the autonomy and the consequentiality of the sensed world, and (2) the stubborn, and fascinating, problem of the existence of others.  Are those pedestrians on Columbus Avenue just spear-cariiers in my own personal opera?  Figments of my imagination?  No, they evidently have autonomy.  And consequentiality.  In the summary above, the pronoun you, gentle reader, could be substituted for every I.

(This is assuming I have a reader out there, in the Internet’s cold starry spaces.  A you who is more than “me.”)  (I have a faith that there’s “Something Besides Myself,” which is the faith that leads to all others.)

* * * *

Nov. 20. McEvoy Ranch harvest party.  The day is blustery and cold in North Marin, and the long table is merry.  That every instant of life is woven of “Dissatisfaction” is the Buddhist principle of Dukkha.  It’s even here at the banquet table.

The Aryans who invented the word Dukkha were a nomadic people, arriving in history on ox-drawn carts, and their word -kha was the name for the axle-hole in their cart.  A good  (su-) axle-hole gave you a smooth ride; a badly shaped (du-) axle-hole gave you a bumpy ride.

[so: sukkha is contentment and a comfy ride, dukkha its opposite]

A “kha” was just an empty space, or socket or hole.  [The crucial thing, if you’re inventing a wheel.]  Later in Sanskrit, “kha” meant not just hole but the entire “sky,” “space,” “heavens,” this vast socket we’re vouchsafed.

All of life is “dukkha” because it’s a bumpy ride.  We don’t fit smoothly into this space.

* * * *

Driving home from the harvest party.

On Highway 49 is a sign of the season: the “DRIVE-THRU NATIVITY” placard (with arrow) at the roadside.

* * * *

Wed, November 16, 2011

11:07 AM – I’m working and Brett calls, “Louis?  It’s a gorgeous beautiful day out there.  And they’re predicting snow is coming, and I wonder if we shouldn’t spend a couple of hours in the garden, getting everything ready for winter.”

So it does turn out, and so the entire afternoon goes, with Barbara set up in the sun in a canvas chair outside our deer-fencing, the pick-up truck parked beside us with its dashboard radio keeping us informed of the Dow and the Nasdaq and the Middle East, I wearing the same thermal underwear I slept in last night, the cats capering, the shadows growing long over the meadow, both of us slipping and sliding on the slick of fallen tomatoes and rotten pumpkin guts in the mud, hacking at vines and stalks and dragging them to the compost heap, or to the edge of the woods if they’re weedy.  Tonight, now, the candles are blown out; all are in bed; I made calamari with capers and lemon for dinner, and the recycling is out on the road, and the animals are all in.

* * * *

November 15, 2011

Cavendish leaves a return message on phone machine, regarding Thanksgiving invitation:  Yes, he does have other invitations for that day, but he would gladly prefer ours, and to spend the day with us, because we are his “home team.”

* * * *

Dash and Mortality:

Dash in the past year has seen his dog die in an accident and be gently laid down on the grass outside the backdoor; his cat Scout vanish as coyote-snack; his other cat JuiceBag disappear as either coyote- or bobcat-snack; his Uncle Tad vanish while in the far-away state of New York, swept away by this thing called Heart Attack; his grandfather Oakley die in a long hushed process of degeneration offstage.

At the dinner table tonight, an anecdote from 1975 was being told, involving the death of a seven-year-old boy.  I was watching Dashiell’s eyes shine in the candlelight as he listened.

The speaker remembered the news of the death arriving, how she was playing with her friends in the alley when she heard the news, “But I was young and I didn’t know what death is.”

The only question Dash asked was, “How old were you then?”

Oh, eleven or something.

Kids of course encounter death right away, first thing, in their earliest stories and rhymes most colorfully. Anyway I wanted to interrupt, at the I-didn’t-know-what-death-is, to tell him, “Dash, everybody knows what death is, no matter how young they are.  But also, nobody knows what it is, no matter how old they are.”

* * * *

Death has been so much my study; so much my special friend; so much my specialty, my schtick, my medicine, my bailiwick, my sweaty pillow, my rehearsal.  It’s interesting that “the actual thing” can’t be anticipated, even by somebody who thinks he’s the most diligent philosopher.  It’s an absolute incalculable.

* * * *

November 11, 2011

Dash, class clown.

His new thing is to go around the playground “asking for sugar.”  He comes up to people with open arms, and pleads, “Gimmeh some sugah, Pawmpkin,” in a moaning whimper.

Some do give him a hug.  Most, he complains, squeal, “Ick. Get away from me.”

* * * *

November 6, 2011

The economy:

Cinder-block hut behind the Chevron station, the spot where the old video-rental place failed, a new “Oriental Health Massage” has opened and turned on its little magenta-neon OPEN sign.

In a town where Caucasian college-grad masseuses want eighty or ninety dollars for a massage, this place is offering – for $19.99 – an hour full-body massage with foot-soak and shiatsu “reflexology.”

This is not the naughty kind.  It’s legit.  They’ll drive out-of-business the locals. Redecoration of the video store has been minimal.  They’ve put in a black carpet and painted the room black, but it’s just an old video store, with perforated acoustic-tile ceiling.  Paper screens are the only partitions separating customers.  For atmosphere (since it is always necessary, constantly, to play Pachelbel’s Canon in G, as performed on a Mellotron synthesizer) they’ve set up a boombox on a black vinyl barstool.  I, as is routine, fell in love with the devoted masseuse.  No English is spoken.  Absolutely none.  You can tip enormously, you can bow in a slight reference to the “Namaste” of Asian custom, but nothing suffices to express gratitude.

* * * *

November 4, 2011

Bright sunshine after a rainy night.

The annual ring of chantarelles encircles the birch tree, and will take all week to expand in a ripple over the meadow.

The maple tree by the pump house is on fire.

Brett and I are to meet with a notary public in town this afternoon, where we will sign our “Last Will and Testament,” and our “Living Will and Living Trust,” with Cavendish and Liz as witnesses.

The house is overrun by 11-yr-old boys today.  They’ve been eating pizza, all four of them in the mud room; then they adjourned to Dash’s computer to Google things; now are back in the mudroom doing exercises.  The YouTube page up on Dash’s computer is:

“GET SIX-PACK ABS IN SIX MINUTES WHILE SITTING ON YOUR COUCH.  THIS WORKS.”

* * * *

October 31, 2011

Back in Nevada City.

Cold night.

Today, a county-dump trip:

Put up upstairs storm windows, light pilot in living-room stove, cover swamp-cooler with canvas, caulk leaks in tin porch-roof.

* * * *

October 30, 2011

In Squaw:

1 – Frame for second-bedroom bed;

2 – Floor-cleats to hold washing-machine in place, keep it from creeping in spin cycle;

3 – Bedstead for rock-room bed;

4 – Get clear caulk;

Push old mattress off the deck and watch it (all in slo-mo!) miraculously leap and leap downhill, on its corners, all the way to the lower road, like a gymnast’s handsprings and round-offs.

Visit Alpine, to consider it as site for writers conference.

* * * *

October 25, 2011

Sharp frost.  Taking screens out of upstairs windows, lowering sashes that have been up all summer.

In the garden, an abundance of tomatoes.

All four big golden pumpkins have had voles delving in them.  Total loss.

Eggplants, peppers, cucumbers are still producing.

And late handfuls of yellow summer-squash, small as ping-pong balls, which might be tender, or sweet (or both — or neither).

(Running a kitchen out of a garden turns out to ask a lot of flexibility and resourcefulness, in the plan of cooking.)

The Ag-Industrial complex — whose triumph my mother’s generation is guilty of acceding to, grateful for TV dinners and Tang — really did change our souls.  Today many lack the heritage to make a real meal. (As I do.  I’ll be cutting open those mystery squash while the oil is already sizzling in the pan, prepared for the possibility of disappointing my family once again.)

* * * *

October 25, 201I

Working indoors today.  Laptop on a desk, upstairs in the vacant east bedroom.

–Intensifying the little “oedipal” section in “Assistant,” perhaps overly.

–email from my agent: Farrar Strauss has passed on “Innocence” and I’m relieved, oddly

— flurry of emails regarding posthumous celebrity of Don Carpenter (Don would spit at it)

— Brett has been on a long, long phone conversation downstairs.

— She comes up, still talking on phone, and puts an envelope beside me, an automobile-insurance-bill envelope, with the following written vertically in ballpoint pen (and giving me a look, she leaves the room):

Eric

Is

Dead

(found by the

Truckee River)

in her beautiful handwriting. The message lies there beside my laptop.  How I cherish handwriting.  What do we have left, of each other – what do we leave behind on earth – besides our handwriting.  Yes, there’s the “content” of our messages, which perhaps might seem less perishable.  Content does seem to matter.  But there’s the lasting beauty of the medium itself, inscription.  The quick, informal, ballpoint pear-shapes and cherry-shapes, the efficient little stems and pistils and thorns, as a schoolgirl was trained in the California public school system in the late sixties.

* * * *

October 23, 2011

Four-thirty AM, in my trailer under the trees.  Moonless night.  The mountains all around are amazingly still suddenly.  They’ve always been, without my noticing.

No wind.  Laptop screen goes dim from inactivity, my hands floating in ready-to-seize poise, above plastic keyboard.  I sitting up straight on my squishy rubber beachball spine-saving seat.

Sometimes in my head the hectic roar of work ceases.  I’m at peace.  Moreover, it was always peace.  I realize that everything – including myself, and even including all the violence – is exactly where it ought to be, doing exactly what it should, from the Microwave Background on in.

(There are times when I’m in the very Cloud of Unknowing, but also, sometimes it’s just tinnitus.)

(It’s always just tinnitus.)

* * * *

San Francisco, October 20, 2011

$40/night.  North Beach Hotel, bathroom-down-the-hall, on Stockton above a massage parlor and a Mailboxes Etc.

Elaborate bedbug prophylaxis isn’t possible.  And I’m not going to try helpfully mentioning the water problem at the front desk, because it’s not the kind of place where you offer constructive criticism.  Those people at the front desk, they surely know all about it anyway.

They gave me a backside room, so it’s quiet.  By lamplight I’m in bed (there’s no other fixture besides a bed in the room) reading Malamud’s “The Assistant,” propped up against my pancake-stingy pillow.  This particular paperback edition is fifty years old (SIGNET Books, 50¢, “. . . Good Reading for the Millions!”), and its binding liberates each page I turn.  The binding-glue, fragile as the golden lacquer holding dead insects together, releases each page as I turn it.  So Malamud’s story of Jews and the old racism of old New York seems an experience I can only have once, and never go back and repeat.  Little harvest of loose pages on the bedside table.

* * * *

San Francisco

Another morning at Macondray Lane, hauling out very old construction debris, extracted from the eternally shady slot between the two buildings.  This rottenness smells great, smells like ancient SFO.

Packing the bed of Tad’s truck, building a tall rick of rotten wood, lashing it down when the pile is complete.  Lashing it fast for the gales of Interstate-80.

Soon, my salade a truite fumé for lunch at the corner patisserie, big double-capp for the road.

(Tour guide leads a gaggle of auslanders along Macondray Lane, dispensing literary misinformation.  “So this is the actual house.  Can’t you just imagine Miss Madrigal living here?”  I hold my tongue, haul my loads of garbage, say Excuse me as I pass.)

* * * *

The Round Table lunch.  What had once been a pageant at Trader Vic’s (in the opulent secret back room, a-glitter like a museum with trophies and weaponry and shrunken heads, with an actual “round table”) has now shrunk to a side table at Capp’s Corner.  The camaraderie of people who never did get into it for the glory.

* * * *

October 17, 2011

Kitchen.  Nevada City.

In late October there comes an afternoon when the cricket starts singing at midday, in the glade, because he has discovered a twilight and coolness.

But it’s still summer here on the knoll, only 50 yards away.

Screen door.

Brett. With laptop at the kitchen table.

I have shown up to help her write an email persuading the Squaw ski-corp people that (like those in Aspen, Sun Valley, Park City) our little art gang ought to be viewed as a cultural asset.  Like a precious mineral deposit there for exploitation.  Like natural-gas deposits they could frack.  Or like the wildflowers, a tourist attraction.

Phone rings.  It’s Kait Klaussen!  Brett gets out of her bad-posture writing slouch.  With phone on shoulder, pours herself some white wine, drops in an ice cube, and, with phone, goes to the living room.

The little white dog, who had been sleeping at her feet under the kitchen table, reckons up the change of afternoon venue, and he bestirs himself to follow her into the living room.  Drops down at her feet.

* * * *

Uganda now, too:

President Obama today [10-17-11] orders 100 special-ops troops into Uganda, to help quench the “Lord’s Resistance Army.”

(Who, until now, really cared about the outrages of the “Lord’s Resistance Army”?)

Well, you drivers of automobiles, think about this:

Geologists have discovered that 2.5 to 6 billion barrels of oil lie in Uganda under Lake Albert.  This is the biggest such discovery in two decades in sub-Saharan Africa.  It will not appear in your evening news show.

So it is.  We’re now committed to Uganda.  To “Uganda’s welfare.”  In June we also promised drone aircraft to Uganda, so that assassinations may happen in the hi-tech manner without the presence of a human being.  All as part of a new $45 million military aid package to this place Uganda with the oil.

Your casual driving – and your summertime roar of air conditioners and all the rest of it – are – also – why the ancient city of Baghdad and the Ogoni people of Nigeria have been humiliated and poisoned and decimated.  And the Ecuadoran jungle and the Gulf of Mexico and the coral reefs of the Pacific and the Caribbean and the polar ice caps.

If you’re cold in the evening, put on a sweater.  Don’t crank the heat and then go around in a T-shirt.  This is very basic.

Madison Avenue and the marketing-business exist to “create desire artificially,” desire where there had been no desire.  And they estimated you correctly.

* * * *

October 13, 2011

No work yesterday.  Rather spent day alone in Squaw Valley in winterizing chores.

Left Nevada City in the AM before light.

Came back by nightfall, unpacked myself from pick-up cab, taking pleasure in aches and pains well-earned.

Take-out Chinese food for dinner.

So, for breakfast this morning, mu-shu pork cold from a white carton, standing on dewy lawn.

Nice adjective:

Brett, in nightgown at the foot of the stairs, explaining why she, too, wants to go up to Squaw soon, “I just have all these little diggly projects I’m not handling,” while the tips of her fingers nibble each other.

October Sixth, 2011

Dark days of constant rain.  This is just about the season when the salmon will be thrashing uphill in the shallow fast Yuba, and I think of these days as salmon days, because even up here in the breathable troposphere, everything is wet and slimy and cold and churned-up turbid.  The females (the underwater ones) will be bashing their noses against the cobbles at the riverbottom making nests for their eggs.  I’ve watched this.  They succeed in making shallow trenches, at the cost of a lot of nose-skin shredding.

* * * *

October 3, 2011

Northern Pacific storm system approaches.  Today dawned clear, but with a saturating dew.  All is drenched.  Direct sunshine may never dry the dew.  Distances are misty.

Midday, serious dimness closes in.

Did my duty.  Walked the whole irrigation line in the silence of overcast afternoon inspecting for swampy patches, stopping to listen for air-leaks’ sucking underground.  All is quiet.

Came home with one little forest artifact.  A raccoon mandible (the rest of its old dry carcass lay at a distance).  Had been attacked and dined on by some coyote or bobcat.  The jewel-like tiny incisors and canines and molars, still set firm in bone, polished to purity by the cruelty and greed of the ecosystem.

* * * *

October 3, 2011

Another Hortatory Sermon (like the clothesline thing):

This is about “biodiesel” (i.e., actual vegetable oil) (not that Iowa “ethanol”):

A regular old Mercedes-Benz 240D or a Volkswagen diesel can burn 100% Biodiesel.  (Or, if you like, any admixture with gas-station fossil-diesel.)

Such an old car can be had for 2 thousand bucks on the Internet.  Look on CraigsList.

Go back to the days of no-airconditioning, when you sweated a little.

We’re the problem.  We’re it.  We’re the beast.  We think we’re not ’cause we voted for Obama.  Or we think we’re “recycling” our “Fiji Water” bottles.  We think we’re “green”

What good will be all your rueful, wise insights into the usual evening news report if those insights are to have no consequences?  Try something.  Do something.  One-by-one change our poisonous little lives.  Or our poisonous “magnificent” lives, if that’s how we prefer to see ourselves.  We think we’re not the problem maybe ‘cause we watch PBS.  But we are.

1. A) The old diesel engines don’t require conversion.  Just pour in the biodiesel.  Mix it in with the regular gas-station “fossil-diesel,” if you like.
2. B) Biodiesel is made from any old (otherwise discarded) vegetable matter, agricultural waste.  Soybean, sunflower, canola, non-food grade nuts or seeds, waste cooking oil.
3. C) Biodiesel is biodegradable. (If theExxon Valdezhad spilled biodiesel, there’d have never been any problem, on that day in Prince William Sound.)
4. D) We don’t have to use up important food-crops for its manufacture, like corn.  (In this way, it’s unlike so-called “ethanol,” whose production is causing starvation worldwide while profiting Iowa farmers.  And which causesadditionalenvironmental wreckage).
5. E) Burning vegetable oil, Americans won’t have to systematically kill people and squash beautiful ancient cultures in far-off countries, just for the wherewithal for an errand to the store. There might have been no need for “Shock and Awe” over the ancient city of Baghdad.
6. F) Vegetable oil burns 78% cleaner than regular fossil diesel (EPA figures).  The smoke that does come out of a diesel tailpipe is “attached carbon” (sequestered carbon).  It’s soot, not carbon monoxide, and it settles to earth.
7. G) Biodiesel has higher lubricity, making for longer engine life.  (Also, better gas-mileage, and competitve prices per-gallon.)
8. H) A Mercedes-Benz is a famously unkillable, dependable ride, and also a famously swanky ride.  Some models require ascot.

Cost of an old CraigsList Mercedes:                            $2400

Cost of cosmetic upholstery renovations:              $  320

Cost of minor bodywork:                                          $  160

Cost of complete brakes overhaul:                            $  500

Cost of complete wheelbase overhaul:              $1800

* * * *

October 2, 2011

(Where’s Cavendish?  Haven’t seen him all summer.  Haven’t had any lively conversation around here since “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.” Maybe bad weather will bring him around.)

* * * *

October 1, 2011

The space heater is kicking in, for early AM hours, but I’m still working in the trailer in the woods.  Despite charnel-house smell of some dead mammal under the floor.

Bright cool quick days of October!  The temps are down, suddenly twenty degrees, shoals of scalloped clouds in the sunset are attacking the (fingernail-paring) moon over the big madrone tree.

Mudroom door is now so heavily shellacked with coats of “Man O’ War Marine Varnish,” it will look like a cinnamon-sticky-bun for years.  For dinner tonight, linguini with clams.  (One of Oakley’s old favorites and so we’re all soft-hearted about it.)  Seasoned with ground-up red peppercorns from Tracy’s Arizona bush.

Deep twilight.  Amy Goodman’s radio show in the kitchen.  The little white dog, Frightener of Bears, sits up in Sphinx position keeping an eye on the uneventful meadow outside in the gloaming.

* * * *

September 30, 2011

Next week, rain system coming in.

Temperatures to fall and stay there.

The tomatoes are looking great in this morning’s blazing warmth.

Nine-in-the-morning.  The hour when some things are just commencing.  And when other things have been hard at it for a long time already.  I come around the corner and the almost-empty clothesline is swaying, trembling, Brett disappearing into the backdoor, shoulder mounded with dry sheets.

(Question.  Don’t kittens get bee-stings?  Mornings in the clover, they pounce and bat.)

* * * *

September 24, 2011

Setback.  Sales of “Radiance” have been low.  So while “Innocence” will be published, it will have no hardcover edition.  Goes straight to paperback.  However, “Radiance” will have a paper edition of its own.  So I’ll get my wish: Uniform editions of that pair of metaphysical efforts, Radiance and Innocence, so consonant, assonant, in their innards.

A first autumn coldfront from the Gulf of Alaska makes Sierra weekend cool and sprinkly.  I pull in lawn furniture, decide to return 4X8 lattice to Ridge Feed for refund, pessimistic of the book business, harvest all the apples from that one veg-garden appletree, to keep them from tempting the bear.

(In moving firewood, I used my new tractor-cart with trailer hitch.  The right wheel fell off after fifty feet.  Literally fell off.  It’s new.  From Sears.  I transported the wood instead with Tad’s dependable truck.)

* * * *

September 23, 2011

Irrigation conduit repaired.  Two long afternoons of digging and tree-root-chopping in the woods across the road and uphill.  Big roots were the cause of the break.  In ninety-degree heat I’m wearing the tall sweaty boots because I’m afraid of rattlesnakes.

(Not without cause.  I see them sometimes.  Muscular-looking diamondbacks, in these mountains.  That they’re “just as afraid of me as I am of them” is a truism, and unhelpful.)

I had not been looking forward to the uphill hike, packing in the tools of excavation.  But with Tad’s truck I was able to come close via fire-road, by just barely squeezing under a fallen pine that lay over (above) the road.  Tad’s radio-antenna flexed backward under the tree trunk and sprung back up free.

Manzanita scratches the side-panels, but what’s a truck for?

* * *

September 22, 2011

No work this morning.  Or at all today.  Rather manual labor.

1) redwood lattice for the doors of the old Merrill woodshed;

2) irrigation line. (Deep in the woods, uphill toward ditch, the forest floor is making a gurgling soda-straw-sucking sound, about eight inches underfoot); for this I’ll have to pack tools in, as the fire road is half-mile distant;

3) sun-damaged mudroom door: quart Marine Teak Oil

4) Brett’s Toyota, to Foothill Small Car for oil and lube

* * * *

[RE: bearshit.  Again I’ll never be a Real Mountain Man, because a Real Mountain Man would have stuck his finger into the heap to see how warm it was.]

* * * *

September 20, 2011

Fine day.  Run through goat-escape chapter all morning, swim in river alone, play guitar (loud), pesto-and-butternut squash.

* * * *

My little dobro concerts in the evenings, which for me are just practice, or something to do while dinner cooks, are for Barbara hugely sentimental.  She loves that droopy sound.  Sits out on the brick verandah with moist eye, great sighs, cheered and talkative.

Her favorites:

“Battle Hymn of the Republic”

“Downtown” (a la Petula Clark but very droopy and slo-mo)

“Shendandoah”

“Stand By Your Man” (Miss Wynette)

* * * *

SORGE:

1. A) Long hot days in the foothills.  Mornings are cool.

I’m about two miles out from home and I come across a small bearshit in the middle of the road, very fresh, still wet, surely less than an hour old – which I realize I’d been smelling as I approached – and furthermore that it smelled sweet, like, say, a pie had been left out in the long heat of day.  Hot fruit-sugars in sun.  Half-digested seeds and pits, cherry-stones with red flesh, the little wet heap in my path would be frankly appetizing, if I were some creature much lower on the food chain.  It smells like breakfast.  But I walk on.  Not feeling experimental.

1. B) The older I get.  Greeting a stranger’s newborn baby (as in a Starbucks in San Rafael this week) is a topmost peak life experience, wherein boundaries of self dissolve – (under the pram sunshade the little grouchy Churchill-face wadded deep in the depths) – Greeting a baby is an experience that, for sheer purity of exaltation, is getting to be way up there among or above the top two or three, way above skiing the Prospector run as a fifteen-year-old in Park City in the sixties, or getting book notices, or playing covers in a bar-band to make the girls dance.  The inner storm of joy: Whence comes this fantastic “empathy”?  I am evidently a separate person from that baby in Starbucks; a separate bag-of-skin, with a different fate;  moreover, as a consistent, definable “person,” I am a separate political and legal entity and biological competitor here, so why am I so delighted with strangers’ babies, or the yumminess of bearshit?  Why take any interest, at all, in loss of “self”-boundaries?  The phenomenon “empathy” feels likenot onlyan evolutionary accident/strategy, but rather “empathy” feels central, dominant, originary.  It’s a huge learning tool, for one thing.  Empathy would evolve, in a species, with some survival-advantage pay-off in natural selection, socially.  But also, in the case of this “spiritual” creature “man” (i.e., evolved with the new ability to see itself seeing itself; and to see how it sees itself seeing itself), empathy opens a window back to ontology.  We envision “the love that moves the sun and other stars.”  It puts a spring in your step that you may feel you were meant to have.  For no particular reason.

* * * *

September 15, 2011

By a little Googling, I see I did lift the word “Sorge” from the Blockhead Meatphysician.  An unconscious theft.  A print was left in a student’s memory decades ago, now at last filled with mineral matter.

[However, I think I’m spreading the concept “Sorge” around in ways the Meatphysician never intended.]

* * * *

September 11, 2011

Visit to Mill Valley.  Ghosts of dead friends wherever I go these days.  I treat myself to opulent breakfast at the still-central bookstore The Depot.  Pretty moms accumulate at a table on the patio, parking their empty strollers outside as they’ve just dropped kids off at daycare.  Or their luxury cars at curb.  The talk, at their table, is of how Burning Man was this year.

* * * *

September 4, 2011

Hot days in the Sierra foothills.  A long string of days in the nineties.  People are staying inside in their dim back rooms.

Only the sound of Rainbird sprinklers in the meadows, insects in the hollyhock spires.  Brett, who during June and July sat at her computer under fluorescent lights in Squaw’s windowless rooms, is out in the vegetable garden barefoot in the last strike of afternoon sun.  I sent her out to get summer squash for soup, but she’s been out there for half an hour, plucking and pruning and watering and tying up messy vines.  Tomato plants rage around her as tall as her head.  Corn stalks way taller.  Slap of hose-water on dirt, and bare feet.

* * * *

Sept. 1

Artichokes fail.  They are inexplicably stunted and fruitless.

Asparagus, in raised beds, has a strong foothold and is at last flourishing.

Corn (from commercial nursery seedlings) has done well in raised beds, as if pests don’t think to look, up there.

Unhappy event: It turns out that the leaves of the butternut squash (big as dinnerplates, spiky with bristles) are suddenly delicious to the grazing deer at night.  Never again plant squash outside the fence.

* * * *

August 25, 2011

Back home in the foothills.  Again in the grip of wetter thicker air.  The woods – its paths – are tinseled thick with cobwebs.  The overgrown tall meadows are so busy with bees – the humble little brown European honeybee – it makes a roar in the morning.  If you stare at the grass and let your eyes glaze, the grass everywhere is glittering with bees.  Get the mower going.  Mow the meadows, murder the standing Queen Anne’s Lace and lupine and Shasta daisies and orchidaceous sweet-pea blossoms.  But refrain from mowing the west meadow, to leave something for the bees.

Going back into a rewrite of my end-of-the-world novel is such a scary prospect.  I’ve headed instead into “Cleaning My Studio” for a day.  An entire afternoon.  Clearing wood-rat nests out of drawers, etc.

Curious: the rodent and I have coexisted peacefully over the years (with the qualification that he keeps dying and being replaced by another, while I persist as, apparently, the same organism each day).  And in my sweeping and Chlorox-swabbing, I notice that, as in other years, he has worked hard, lovingly, to cache all the brite green pellets of poison.  The D-Con, from Ridge Feed and Supply, which has reliably brought about the death of generations of his family, has been carefully saved in various favorite niches and grooves of the studio.

Getting a NY Times review used to be such a big deal.  All the clippings needed to be archived.  Where they could turn yellow and brown under plasticene.  This summer I found it irksome just dragging myself out to the 7-Eleven at the highway to buy the Sunday Times where my own book was noticed.  Waste of automobile fuel.  Waste of my time.

* * * *

Free Will vs. Determinism:

This apparent dilemma is just the whorl you get stuck in when you’re asking a badly framed question.

Free will and determinism coexist.  But at different levels of nature’s organization.

Analogy: On a subatomic level there is no “time,” while larger-scale events do take place in entropic “time.”

* * * *

August 21, 2011

Alone by myself in Squaw.  I’m the last one to go.

The valley feels empty.  Living on fridge leftovers.  Taking a last pass at the sister-novel to “Radiance.”  Tomorrow I’ll convert it to a pdf, put it in an email, and click “send.”

Minor repairs and deck-staining.  Broken drawer.  Broken cabinet door.  The window-blinds mechanism remains unfixed, waiting for parts.  The “saddle-valve” has a slow-drip leak under the house.  The missing cover to swamp cooler finally turns up.  Me and one dobro, in the evenings.  Dinner alone at PlumpJack reading Flannery O’Connor’s “The Habit of Being.”

Under the Annex deck: Happy to see the same old jigsaw-puzzle piece as in other years.  It’s still down there where every September I store the old boards that have held down the summertime bamboo shade material.  It’s impossible to tell, anymore, what drama this puzzle piece completes.  The laminated cardboard has been swollen in the Sierra winters and the spring rains and thaws, and then during the summers popped unlaminated, so now in the flinty dust under the deck it stands like a little precariously-stacked petit four.  Since about 1998, a child’s jigsaw puzzle somewhere has lacked a piece.

* * * *

August 13, 2011

The Truckee River sparkles cruelly.  Cloudless sky all summer.  Go off alone and sit on a boulder.  It’s easy to be charitable toward the frail, in society, when they present themselves in the standard cliché form of the poor or the downtrodden.  It’s harder to empathize when human frailty manifests itself as Lady Gaga or Donald Trump, Narcissism Victorious, The Latest Thing.  This is the patience that is asked of a worker in the Culture Biz.  So I’m sitting on this boulder and a small bird, with his own worries and fears and hopes and his own particular anxieties, alights on a dry creosote bush, twenty feet away (possibly a mountain chickadee but with peculiar yellow markings).  As close as I come to saluting this bird is just to keep an eye on him.

* * * *

July 27, 2011

Two new kittens play on the carpet, yet unnamed, and too identically marked to tell apart.

Nobody is here, in this week of lull.  Just Brett and me.  Hunter and Zoey in Nevada City, Tonkovich/Alvarez in Point Reyes, Dash on a long sleep-over.

The bear somehow gained entrance and came into the kitchen last night.  While Brett and I slept, he got muffins, a bag of dry catfood, and a big can of wet dogfood (which, by the tooth-and-claw method, he popped and peeled, leaving the open steel scroll on the deck).

Overturned wicker chair.

It was the brave little white fluffy dog who became aware of him and chased him out of the living room, making the Ursine Mass leave so fast, his weight in getting traction displaced the wall-to-wall carpet.

* * * *

July 24 ——– My annual deep, three-day flu.  A day in bed.  Too dizzy even to read.  There’s a certain stage in a feverish illness where you get so low, you scrape with basic moral and spiritual deficiency: From the perspective of the damp pillow, all my life can look mistaken, futile, and short.  Which it is, of course.

Dash, in putting himself to bed at night, says he has piled all his “favorite things” in one big heap beside his pillow.  So when he wakes up, it will all be before him.  That was his expression: “It will all be before me.”

* * * *

July 20, 2011

Cavendish is up in Squaw to hang lights for poets’ performance space.

And Cavendish rescues me again.  Old Mercedes diesel has an aging starter-motor – engine won’t turn over – and Cavendish finds a particularly heavy wrench to bang on the metal cylinder bolted to the bottom of the engine.  This, the starter motor, is merely stuck at a point in its cycle and needs a clang.

(Remoinds me of how he showed me, on a day when I was earsplittingly using an electric saw to cut corrugated steel for my woodshed, how a true Mountain Man knows the secret of slicing steel, easy as butter and just as quiet, by drawing a wire through it.)

* * * *

July 20, 2011

For Theological and Ontological Questions obviously, basically, one needs a criterion of “truth.”

What is the essential “truthiness” of something that makes it “true”?

The most conventional theory of truth is the Correspondence Theory (that a true statement “corresponds to” a state of affairs in the world)

About this, Wittgenstein said something interesting.  He said it amounts to “a picture theory of meaning” – that is, statements can be judged true or false depending on whether they match a “picture” representing that reality.

Therefore, if we say that the statement “God exists” is true if and only if God exists, then we’re saying that we have a “picture” of a state of affairs in the world, to which we compare the statement. But in the case of things unpicturable – quarks, for example, and “me” for example – the Truth Criterion breaks down.

* * * *

July 18

Poets in the valley.  Galway couldn’t make it and I really fear we’ve had our last go-round with him.  David Lukas, shouldering his telescope on tripod.  Western Tanagers.  David (as if shamanistically) attracts fly-over of the golden eagle that lives remote in the crags of Granite Chief.  Big eight-foot wingspan circles over us with never a flap of wings, closer than anyone has ever seen him.

* * * *

July 5, 2011

Back in Squaw Valley.  Back on the novel.

Touring new premises of ski resort, trying to imagine workshop spaces, disliking the rumble of the building’s kitchen exhaust fans.

The same old welcome-letter for participants needs to be vetted.

Purchase lumber and hardware for repair of Annex cupboards.

* * * *

July 1, 2011

Today in a mall in the midwest, in Iowa.

I observe a red-haired girl, no doubt a co-ed here at big state school, a typical Iowa Artemis, personifying vitality and beauty and grace, as she crosses the air-conditioned enclosed “food court.”

Since, lately, I’ve been pondering those abortion criteria of Peter Singer’s, I find I’m asking myself why this girl’s life is valuable, or worth preserving, and why I might think so. Why mightn’t she have been efficiently aborted, leaving more resources for the rest of us. (These days, since I’ve published a novel involving abortion, it seems I need to have opinions in this impossible matter.)  I think that the first consideration is: I find I oddly “empathize” with this girl.

– At what moment a fetus becomes “human”

– At what moment a brain-dead old woman ceases to be “human”

– At what moment my paranoid-schizophrenic psychopath friend goes beyond the pale and no longer merits treatment as a “human”

Here is the moment: We enter into “humanity” at the moment we enter into “Care”.  Care is my banner concept, to enwrap also the “empathy” I feel for the girl.  A massing cloud of Care is humanity; humanity isn’t merely the citizenry of bodies, standing around at 98.6 degrees.  The phenomenon of consciousness is a largely social organism (bodies in communication), rather than an individual soitary flickering.  But, more preciesely, Care is the social organism.  This thing “Care” is what we take on, when we live in spirit – slip slowly into it as embryos, slip away from it as octagenarians, in our wheelchairs in the sun.

In response to Singer:

Humanness is not “consciousness” – nor is it or “autonomy”  or “rationality” or any of those desiderata Mr. Singer names.  Rather, Careis the distinction we humans have. And we have it together. We have it only in concert.  We participate in it.  Our bodies participate, via the media of language and society.  I mean this word Care in the tone-of-voice of those earnest theologians of the sixties.  (Tillich-Buber-Eliade fashion, with their Heideggerian mother-tongue.)

So I’m coming to abortion.  This human characteristic Care – membership in it – is a humanness that accrues over time, even long after birth.  Initially, in the years from our first diploid conception to the onset of the age of reason, we possess this capacity “Care” in solitude, almost in solipsism, rather than in community – it feels to us, at first, only that something matters, i.e., something must be cared about. Then in fuller maturity, Care becomes extended as a social phenomenon through language and custom.  I propose Care as a serviceable word for this spiritual humanness because, in its connotations, it combines “worry” (care), “giving a damn” (caring), “responsibility” (care for), a certain “fretfulness” (cares), and “love and desire.”  These are all what we have for each other.  They are the radiant nimbus around the red-haired girl striding center-stage on the mall, because she’s desirable and lovable while also of course troublesome.

In this abortion/antiabortion debate, the biggest stumbling block (the mistake enshrouding the whole debate in darkness and confusion) is the universal misconception that we are supposed to acquire a “self” when we’re born.  This is construed as a legal and political entity, this self.  And a metaphysical entity.  The self is the most popular, most conventional illusion.  As we gradually enter into “Care,” we in fact enter selflessness. We lose our isolate unhappy specious “self,” in Care, when we care.  Care is what I share with the red-haired girl, in the cumulate cloud.  It’s the reason she wasn’t aborted, for one thing.

* * * *

[In keeping with nineteen-sixties theology – I found myself crossing from the mall onto the Big State college campus with the old German word rattlling around in my head “Sorgfáltig.”  Derives from “Sorge.”  If you’re sorgfáltig you’re “careful.”)  (A good thing to be.]

Sounds like a Heidegger Noun.  And I guess, that’s precisely thew sloppiness with which I would mean it.

* * * *

In cosmology, too: before the beginning of time, before time-space, before the possibility of possiblity, Something seems to have “cared.”

* * * *

June 26, 2011

Little two-year-old bear, cinnamon-colored, haggard after winter, comes out of the uphill wilderness onto the road, and Tracy phones me down in the Annex to warn me.  Nico and Aleksandra chase it downhill past the Annex; then we all gather on the Annex deck, like a reviewing stand, to watch it as it rambles around below us on the hill, lifting swarms of scolding jays wherever it goes, sniffing at a garage doorway, then climbing back up the hill, to the east of the house.  Nico throws rocks, but bear is groggily imperturbable/nonchalant.  A neighbor down the road is warned, and he comes out to bellow at it, and it shies further up the mountainside, behind Kevin’s house, then behind the Sproehnles’.  Sproehnle, on his deck with garden hose, is glad to greet it, because he happens to have a gun, “loaded for quail,” and he goes inside for it.  He comes back out and shoots either the bear or the treetrunk beside it, sending it scampering galumphing up the slope.

* * * *

June 26, 2011

Dashiell’s entry into summer camp.

Tomorrow I fly to Iowa City, book-peddling.

Towel on the deck railing.  Jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table.  Wind in the pine mountains.

* * * *

June 25, 2011

The “essential characteristics of personhood”  (Princeton Philosopher Peter Singer’s criteria, for sorting which people society ought to euthanize, abort, execute, or eugenically cull) are Rationality, Autonomy, and Self-consciousness.

OK. So, if something is to be a “person,” it must be (a) rational, (b) autonomous, and 9 © conscious of “itself.”

Of Singer’s three human characteristics, the first two – “rationality” and “autonomy” – are skills that can sometimes seem to slip away from even the most alert of us.  (Or, as concepts, crumble completely under the pressure of a close look.)  “Rationality” and “autonomy,” after all, might be illusions, fomented by society, abetted by shared language-conventions (illusions with practical consequences and reasons for being).  Really, some of us are not rational, or autonomous, maybe not ever, not for an instant.  (I include my sovereign self in that aspersion.)

The third “human” quality – self-consciousness – is perhaps the one characteristic we might feel assured we possess unfailingly and fundamentally.  But under a long close examination, even “self”-consciousness can be, in fact, chimerical.

Tonight, on another of my long luminous sleepless nights, I can hear two things as I lie here: my own heartbeat and the waterfall in the canyon a half-mile away.

Of the two of us, the waterfall will have the greater longevity.  Long after I’m gone, it will be admirable just in the way it is today.  Likewise, in the beauty competition, a thoughtful primate loses out to a waterfall. I’m not as unfailingly wonderful. Well, I may be an unaesthetic and a more rickety thing, comparatively, but I am supposed to be a more subtle spectacle than a waterfall.  I have virtues less visible.  Than a waterfall’s.

Nevertheless sometimes one would rather be a waterfall, objectively.  If it were a clean trade.

(Not that one would want to hasten the day.  For, of course, that is what’s in store anyway.)

==================

February 5, 2011

Two more afternoons pruning.  Dash and his mother go to a movie.

Finally the old pruning-hook of George Merrill’s breaks and can’t be fixed.  Resort to the newer one.  But keep the old one for parts.

 

 

* * * *

 

 

Feb. 2.  Cold. Clear, dry days, perfect for fruit-tree pruning.  Low sun of winter flickering in the pine branches.

Pruned apples severely.  Maybe I’ll regret it but I remember the advice of the Anderson Valley apple man in the San Francisco Ferry-Building market: a real fruitgrower prunes with a chainsaw only.

All afternoon, on the truck-dashboard radio (parked beside me), all the news is from Egypt – of riots, euphoria, revolution.  The perpetual betrayal of the poor seems essential to the cosmic drama.  As if the poor themselves colluded, in their own vindictive satisfaction-by-betrayal.

I’m hacking at branches, not bothering to preserve nodes and buds providentially.  Let this tree have a whole new life in April.  Meanwhile the two housecats – really the same cat in two incarnations leading Schrodinger-parallel virtual lives, Bag-Juice and Aplomb – follow me with friendly vigilance.  Get underfoot.  Tangle in my ladder-footing.  Recline in the meadow exactly where branches will crash down.  Bag-Juice is the kind of obese housecat who, when he drapes himself over a sawbuck, engulfs the entire thing.

* * * *

Something essentially American: homemade engineering skills.

It’s a homesteader thing: I can set out on an afternoon construction project without any kind of plan or blueprint or even a specific thought or vision in my head, yet, and just start banging things together.

I begin by simply dragging the old scrap-metal sheets out from behind the shed.  So I learn as I go along — about materials’ tensile strength, load distribution, bending moments, stress points, etc.  This kind of luxury is available in the American economy.  The guy on his acre.

(and without a single trip into town for hardware!)

* * * *

“Position and momentum do not commute”:

This (the predicament of a subatomic particle) seems to sum up the predicament of Time Itself.

Position and momentum do not commute.

* * * *

January 29, 2011

No work on novel again today.

Fixed the stove’s clogged propane orifice.

Fixed Dashiell’s shorted-out bedside lamp.

Used oil-based primer to paint window-glazing putty (pantry south window).

Wrote sketch of novel for publicity.

Walked the length of the irrigation, checking for wintertime problems.

Watched another exciting episode of Quantum Mechanics.

Framework for raised garden bed.

* * * *

January 23, 2011

Barbara: It’s still going on, the process of her getting younger every day, at eighty-seven.

On her own, she walks across to our place from her cottage in the morning to get coffee.  She makes dry remarks about the television news.  She doesn’t lie in bed all morning any more but gets up earlier and earlier.  Eats big meals.  Yesterday she seriously wanted to plan a trip to Greece.

* * * *

January, 2011

More fine weather. Still trying not to write, not anything serious. Watched another classroom lecture of Susskind’s quantum mechanics. Worked further on raised planting beds.  Took a shot at proofreading the Squaw brochure for Brett.  Chelsea the beautiful au pair comes “back home” for dinner.  Her same old funky car w/bumperstickers.

* * * *

Jan. 23

TODAY:

First of all, didn’t write.

– 1) -The good coffee and empty stomach.  The dark before the dawn

– 2) -Watched ninety more minutes of Susskind’s YouTube explanations of quantum physics.  Wonderful.  He skates back and forth before the Stanford chalkboard, happy and scowling.

– 3) – Started Cheap Meat in the pantry slow-cooker thing.

– 4) – Went to church.  The guest sermon was delivered by the departing Junior Warden of the church, whose name is Rich.  (I think a Warden in a church is the fellow who patches the leaky roof, replaces the defective toilet-flushing mechanism, gets keys duped.)  His sermon was anecdotal, sentimental, and in the end hortatory.  As usual I sneaked out.

– 5) -Ran two miles.  (No twinge of angina during the entire run.  I’m fine.)

– 6) -At the top of the meadow, I did some more sawing of old corrugated iron’s rusty panels, for raised garden beds.  Miserable work.  A special metal-cutting blade is necessary for the Skilsaw.  Sparks fly.  Excruciating, ringing screech.

I don’t want to incur hearing damage, so I went looking for cotton to stuff my ears.

No cotton.  None to be found anywhere.  Shall I destroy 40 Q-Tips to harvest enough cotton?  No, I find Brett’s Tampax supply, of course, and disembowel one of its fluff.  Also headphones.  On my headphones as I work, I’ve got Joanna Newsom’s pixilated sing-songs, performed on her big harp.

* * * *

Jan. 12, 2011

Idaho-Maryland Road for fill-up of biodiesel refined in Reno.  Muddy Mercedes jalopy, with empty winebottles clinking in the trunk because the next stop is East Main St., where three tall metal vats are in a storefront.

* * * *

Extravagant trip.  Great dinner at Macondray Lane: Glen and Alice walked over from Pacific Heights; Jason and Patricia from Sausalito; and Andrew and Lisa had driven all the way up from LA, bringing Louis to play with Dash.  Andrew and Lisa and Brett and I shopped at the Ferry building for salmon beforehand.  Drinks on the roof, looking out at Alcatraz.  This is all good luck.

* * * *

Now that we’ve bought a generator, one thing I’ll miss about power-outages is the squalor.  Candlelight’s perils and pandaemonium.  People wearing the same pajamas for work or play or sleep, with different costumes pulled over.  The parka I’m cooking in might be the parka I slept in.  And sleep in again tonight.

Advantages of such an “upgrade”: the Community of Writers won’t come to a halt.  And I’ll be recharging my computer and working.  All this is good.  Electricity is good..  But I’ll miss the backwardness of those quiet days.  The sabbath.  The boredom and thwartedness.

* * * *

To buy a gas-powered electric generator is to join the country bourgeoisie.  This whole neighborhood under a snowfall., in an outage, used to be silent, dark-at-night, bright-in-the-day.  To leave your hectic polluted kitchen and step outside, into the cold, was to enter sacred space.

Nowadays, whenever PG&E fails, the canyons and meadows all around can sound like a Hollywood movie location with generators roaring at various distances. Well, now the Joneses, on their property, have joined the general din.  But still plenty of hold-outs are out there in the hills all around, and I’m oddly grateful to them.

* * * *

Jan. 4, 2011.

Chest pains continue.  Sharp sun of January morning.

Deciding I ought to stop ignoring chest pains and ask doctor about them.  It’s probably stupid to do otherwise.  I take the midday trip (without mentioning it to anyone) to the Miner’s Family Health Clinic.  Stethescope.  Tapping at breastbone and shoulderblades.  Then lie down on the table on the starchy paper, get pasted with electrodes for a little EKG.  It’s a little toy EKG, just for this rural hospital, wheeled in on a busboy’s cart.  Nurse tapes me up and makes me remove all metal, including my wedding band – which literally hasn’t been off my finger since June 25, 1987.  It’s not that I’m all that uxorious, it’s just that over the years my knucklebone has widened or something.

To get it off, soap and a little skin abrasion were necessary, and I set the golden band on the blue formica, with its suds.  The nurse smiled.

Then, “back up on the table,” I have to lie under the electric tentacles barechested, and I am asked to be totally still for a minute.  In the corner of the ceiling, the acoustic tiles have circles of brown stain from an old roof leak.  The news, in the end, is that my heartbeat is regular, triumphant, slower-beating than most, because I get so much cardiovascular exercise, so I am to be sent away into the world again.  But that moment of lying down barechested without a wedding ring, it was an interesting ceremony of betrothal.  On the way home, I stopped at the grocery store looking for some outlandish treat for myself, something really de luxe, but my imagination failed me and I got an Odwalla drink (Mango Tango) and a locally manufactured whole-wheat bagel called “Great Grains,” that has an elusive sweetness.  Also paper lunchbags for Dash’s lunches, waxed-paper sandwich envelopes, Barbara’s favorite bran muffins, the usual jug of Woodbridge, and and stopped next door where the local syrah is decanted from big vats.

* * * *

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fool is in the house of mirth.  A dinner of herbs and love therewith.  Than a stalled ox and strife therewith.

* * * *

June 21, 2011

Brett has gone back down to Nevada City for the day.

Here, Dash and I hike as high as the third waterfall.  Higher than this, deep snows would stop us.

We sit in the cataract-mist and share our candy bars, then go back down.

All night in the dark, the roar of the melt comes from the canyon, remarkable volume of snowmelt, a constant freight-train of water plunging over cliffs in that delicate meeting of slopes where bare aspens’ distorted knees and elbows are just beginning to stretch themselves after snow crush.

* * * *

First week in Squaw:

Three cords firewood ($800 from Bushwhackers, free delivery)

Shade-structures over both decks

Oakley’s front gate, with cowbells, can be repaired for another year (sagging toward parallelogram)

Steel doors on both bear-proof garbage houses must be bent back into shape, as they won’t close properly

Install Brett’s office in Olympic House

Summer’s provisions at the Truckee Safeway: two shopping-carts-full

Unproductive mornings, picking at Response-to-Hawking essay, unwilling to reenter the novel

(Bit of good news: Newsweek and the Times will notice “Radiance”)

* * * *

June 12, 2011

Arrive in Squaw.

Bear damage in the Annex:

1) Shattered double-pane in door to deck;

2) Cabinet-fronts torn off neatly.  Looks easy to nail back up;

3) The expensive flip-top trash can still works fine.  But he

seems to have sat on it, or stepped on it, while living here, as the cylinder is

flattened in the middle, but I’m able to pop it out fat again and tap it into its old shape, so the pedal-operated flip-top mechanism works again.

* * * *

June 11, 2011

From earliest youth, a love of the desolate, the insensate, the dilapidated, the dust.

Because intimacy always characterizes eternity.  So it can be seen right here, in gutter litter, rainbleached-dry cigarette butts and oakleaf veins, total asperity.  Or in some common thing like a lost gum wrapper in the dirt — this was at a becalmed Sunday-afternoon construction site — a sawed-off 2×4 leaving its print, in baked-white mud that no one, not anyone, has ever turned his regard to.  Nor ever will!  Such a sight is of course equal to a Himalyan peak.

Nor, even, am “I” present to regard such a 2-by-4.  Nobody is here to see it, such is the moonscape.

Thoreau it was who noticed the prefix “crab-” (in crabapple) (and I, too, in crabgrass, suburbanly) and who wished for such wildness in himself, crabbedness’s sturdy adaptive qualities.  To be crabbed.

Blackberries conquering a fence.

“Poverty” is the aesthetic.  Really “poverty” is an elegance, ecologically.  Leanness and brokenheartedness and good-humor.  A hut, but tidily swept.  (While not neglecting beauty.)

For instance garlic and rosemary are easy.  They thrive on neglect.

The word Simplicity would be the Marketing-Angle “branding” of such an asperity, supposing any Martha Stewarts of the future were to try to interest women (or other of our aesthetic arbiters such as women) in, say, flattening an old tin soupcan to nail over a hole in the floorboards.  Let people think of it as “zen” if they like.  It’s coming anyway: a general peace-and-quiet and maybe even crabbedness.

* * * *

June 10, 2011

1) More soil shoveling.  Another cubic yard is heaped in the pickup.

2) Dash helps spackle the woodbox fascia.  Does a good job.

3) Mesh (galvanized gopher-wire) floor of second raised bed, stapled down with bent-over nails.

4) Brett’s trip to Squaw, to do battle with the CEO of the ski corp.

5) Fettucini.  Canned tomatoes, basil (wilted and singed and holey), a head of the volunteer garlic.  And salad of wild sweet-pea tops?  (Abundant in west meadow.)

Barbara:

At dinner (w/ Sands and Tracy) we talk of Brett’s meeting with the ski corporation.  They’re so big-time now, at the ski corp, they’ve hired a high-powered New York PR firm, and they want us to meet with them, because we’re a cultural asset.  “These are the kind of people,” the CEO says, “who can get ‘Sixty Minutes’ here to do a story on us.’”  Barbara, pulling despondently at her artichoke’s leaf, says, “We’ll have to wash our hair then.”

* * * *

June 8, 2011

Finish Stephen Hawking essay

Attend Dashiell’s fifth-grade “graduation ceremony”

Fill corrugated-iron troughs with commercial soil

Brett’s Toyota is flushed and drained of transmission fluid.

More of filling troughs with soil

Plantings:

Tomatoes

Artichokes

Zucchini

Melon

Butternut squash

Peppers

Cucumbers

Hunter and Zoey are in SF.  And Barbara and Tracy are at Sands’s for dinner.  So it’s just me and Dash and Brett in the kitchen eating ground-tiurkey burgers and broccoli.  Dash is upset, and inconsolable, over the misplacement of a pair of black denim pants.

* * * *

June 6, 2011

Another wintry day in Nevada City.  Rain and wind.  Hunter and Zoey are stuck in Squaw Valley, on the eastern side, as the summit has snowed.  Tracy is to arrive tonight by car.  Her long journey through Nevada in Oakley’s old Subaru wagon.  I will make thin soup of soba noodles, yams, scallions, salmon, snow peas.

* * * *

June 5, 2011

Mt. Shasta.  Heel blister.  2500-foot climb in sun and rain.

Too cold to sleep, in high desert, at lava beds

Coffee recipe of Gerald: dump grounds into boiling water; then, exactly at the moment of return-to-boil, pour a cup of cold water on, and the grounds all magically sink to the bottom.  Coffee to be ladled.

High winds and petroglyphs.

* * * *

Back home.  It’s looking like actual fallowness might be in store for our gardens this year.

Weeds poke through the mesh floors of my fresh-built long corrugated troughs, as they haven’t been filled with soil.  (Rainy cold long spring.  Distractions of “Radiance” publication and travel.  Onset of Community-of-Writers difficulties.)

The row of onions from last year keeps thriving.

* * * *

“For heaven ghostly is as nigh down as up, and up as down; behind as before, before as behind, on one side as the other.  Insomuch, that whoso had a true desire for to be at heaven, then that same time he were in heaven ghostly.  For the high and the next way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet.”

— The Cloud of Unknowing

* * * *

“Nowhere bodily, is everywhere ghostly.”

— The Cloud of Unknowing

* * * *

May 30, 2011

Now comes summer, sunlight to look forward to, peaks still sunny at 9:30 PM, the visits of many friends, the perpetual fiesta at Squaw, guitars unpacked.

But I think when I’m “old and grey and nodding by the fire,” the deepest times will have been the wintertime kitchen dinners when it was “just us.”  Just Barbara and Dash and Brett and me, and not much to say.  Homework involving Egyptians or planets or long division.  Kitchen doors closed keeping the heat in.

* * * *

Great to have Hunter home.  His only evidence is the closed bedroom door and the occasional sound of his car.  But still.  (New graduate-school plans, comp lit.)

* * * *

May 28, 2011

This rainy cold wet spring is going on so long, the Famous Clothesline hasn’t been deployed once yet this season.  All morning, wasted BTUs of heat rise in clouds from the dryer vent.  I can’t find a dry period to prime-and-paint the mud room woodbox.

* * * *

May 28, 2011

Sartre’s big existential formula defining man: “there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and . . . . this being is man.”  So, in Sartre, the human entity is stung into “freedom” and “responsibility,” suddenly towering god-like and mushroom-cloud-like.

Conversely, the religionist turns Sartre’s assertion inside out: “god,” precisely, is the existence preceding essence.

That the two points of view are identical is, unfortunately, visible only to the invisible.

* * * *

May 28, 2011

To be on Mount Shasta again after all these years.  Thirty years ago, alone, it was where I went after New York, in disappointment, I would say in despair, in futility of love, in self-pity, and, too, in vocational certainty that the book business would have no interest in the things that mattered to me.

In those days you could fly coast-to-coast for $80.  I woke up sleeping on the warm dust, in full sun under the blue skies of the high Cascade Range, with a cow standing directly over me, chewing its cud.  String of drool.  Lucky not to have been stepped on.  I actually had a New York bagel in my pocket on those high pastures, one of the Canarsie bagels from along Flatbush Avenue, the old kind, very small, chewy, the kind that surely don’t exist any more, having been crowded out by the swollen puffy light bagels that have, in thirty years, filled up the open spaces between New York City and the Cascade Range.

* * * *

May 28, 2011

Sands is here for dinner.  Chicken soup, sweet potato, asparagus.

Dash’s friend Joe stays for a “sleep-over,” and they insist on erecting the pop-up tent in the far meadow to sleep outside.  The pantry-drawers’ supply of D batteries is plundered, so the boys can reproduce their form of civilization, out in that wilderness.  The older brother opines that they won’t last till ten o’clock, and by ten o’clock they’ve come shivering inside.  The following morning, when the sun is just coming up, they appear from the playroom in pajamas and go back outside, scamper in dawn light, down to resume the camp-out, yanking their pajama-legs up high to keep them out of the heavy sopping dew in the grass.

* * * *

[I used to pity people who ate together without conversing, at a corner restaurant table, say.

I supposed that an endless stream of wit and information was the desirable norm.  I resolved that I would never be that habituated, that senile, that destitute of entertainment, no matter how old or how married I might be.  I supposed that people eating together without talking were impoverished of the spirit.]

* * * *

May 24, 2011

Barbara:

Sitting at her place at the kitchen table, in the warm corner with wineglass and pills dabbing at (miniscule-or-imaginary) tabletop crumbs.  NPR is blathering along, and I’m stirring the pot on the stove, and Dash is dribbling a little rubber ball around the floor.  Brett has disappeared into the bathroom and Barbara pipes up convivially, “Any word from Brett?”

* * * * * * * *

May 21, San Francisco

The Purple Onion is in happy disarray.

After the MacDowell party, a girl with a new book coming out, the bartender keeps pumping fist and saying “You like-a pawnkin’?” and leering.  Which turns out to be pumpkin, with fettucini and eggplant.

* * * *

May 19, 2011

The entire day mowing meadows.

* * * *

Mother’s Day

Back from SF great radio appearance.  The mower is still broken.  The engine roars, but tractor won’t get in gear.  Nowadays Pearson Small Engine is charging $50 to send out a trailer for pickup-and-return.  So for the first time in many decades the equipment on this place will be disloyal to Pearson’s.  An enterprising guy named Don makes house calls — will drive out in his truck, spread his tools, work in the shade of the pear tree.

Dim cool day.  A sign of spring: the manila envelopes accumulating in heaps, submissions from ambitious writers.  All must be “processed” and sent on.

Will recommence work on mud-room woodbox.

Skipped church, kept home by Mother’s Day, the series of Mother’s Day Breakfasts (first here in the big house, then in the cottage) and by general accidie.  Melancholy, (post-publicity?) while I work outside, cloying remorse and futility/mortality intimations are the gifts of the day.

* * * *

Because it’s Mother’s Day and we have extra mothers here, we get a call from beloved village poet laureate, who lacks a mother to telephone.

She has had two occasions for getting in touch lately: to borrow Tad’s Truck (which will always be “Tad’s Truck”), a perpetual entitlement of hers because she and Tad were sweethearts once, and lived in a barn-red house on Nursery Lane, and they even planned on getting married, briefly, so whenever she needs to make a dump run or a greenhouse errand, she’ll always have use of the truck; and to talk to Barbara, to have a mom for a day.

* * * *

Guitar lesson with Dash.  A hendrix-like riff in major pentatonic scale.  Which he takes to.

* * * * * * * *

May 5.

Back from L.A. publicity trip.  A pleasure to have soluble problems, here on a few acres.  The meadows are all unmowed, the mud-room woodshed is only half-built, just as I left it, and the swamp-cooler is colonized by paper wasps.  The mower too is colonized by paper wasps.  Then, moreover, the mower’s transmission gives out altogether, halfway through the job; so there it stands tonight, tractor stuck in the front lawn in the dark.

I wasn’t liking mowing the meadows, slaughtering buoyant levitating choruses of blue daisies and soapwort and Johnnie Jump-up and meadow-bell.  Queen Anne’s lace under the dogwood.  I also wasn’t liking making the little furry bright-eyed creatures zig-zag in the path of my tractor, driven from their established homes where I was slicing away the grasses’ tallest forests.

Dragged the tractor up on slope, to examine its underside, and was eventually rewarded with confirmation of my own incompetence.  Went inside.  Phoned “Pearson Small Engine,” in Grass Valley, and made an appointment for trailer pick-up and mechanical overhaul, then gave up on all problem-solving pretensions and put on sneakers and (wearing an ipod that filled my ears with Alan Watts disquisition on Buddhism) went running through the roads of the doomed new subdivision in the old Erikson Lumber Company woods.

* * * *

Easter Sunday

Bears in the Annex. Two, this time.

It’s raining and I don’t want to make the trip up there, where snow will be falling at the summit.  A neighbor has chased them out and secured the doors, but of course, now they know where the food is and they may be back this very night.

* * * *

Barbara’s Progress

No more sleeping-in all morning (a tendency I understood as a sign of depression).

She gets up early, dresses herself, uses her walker to come over to the big house, enterprising and girlish looking for coffee.

She goes everywhere with us, to every social occasion and entertainment.

[If we’d had our canoe trip on the Little River in Mendocino (tho’ trip which in the end we couldn’t afford), she would have ridden in the canoe with us.  So would’ve the little white dog.

Morning pills, evening pills.  She’s reading the Jennifer Egan book.

* * * *

April 20, 2011

Brett is in San Francisco.

Intermittent rain.  I have to keep stopping work, tarping things over, building the woodshed between little rains.  Unplug drill and saw.  Till showers blow over.  Come inside and kill twenty minutes maybe playing a guitar, poorly, or bringing up email to check on my burgeoning celebrity.

With return of warmer weather, Cavendish ends his tenancy here in Dashiell’s playroom.

Return of warm weather also brings big ursines to Cavendish’s (as he calls it) Woodland Redoubt.  Starting in springtime, there, he has to keep a heavy chain belted around the fridge, as bear deterrent.  Also, starting in springtime, he has to plug it in.  (He has electricity, from dormant construction site over the hill.)

* * * *

April 17, 2011

Fine weather.

Built footing and floor of new woodbox outside mud room

(This particular piece of plywood, for floor, has served as lid for Hunter’s sandbox (in the nineties), then tabletop for writing workshop and a platform covering parking-place mud,

today perhaps reaching its final resting place)

(or who knows, this Recession may triumph, and 30 peaceful years from now, this shed will be disassembled, and its members have further uses)

pandora.com radio plays “The James McMurtry Station” all afternoon.  Alison Krauss sings “I need you at the dimming of the day,” and all the sunny afternoon I hammer and saw and I dwell on all the ways I’ve been inexcusably remiss, over the years.

Women lie out on the little lawn in the sun, on dragged-out couch cushions.

Liz and Jackson stay for dinner of sausage and polenta.

I notice that Brett directed the two hired hands to fill in the old Toaster Graveyard in west meadow.

I’m going to miss the glimpse of chrome in that hole, from the days of manufacture

when Chrome Was Still Chrome.

* * * *

April fourteenth.

The P.O. to get Barbara’s taxes off.  The bank.  School for Dashiell.

Sad errand: at the Wells Fargo Bank, I deposited a check for $93.90, royalties from amazon.com, made out to Oakley Hall III, deposited it into Tad’s “Special Needs Trust” account.

Tad must have spent forty years writing every morning, or pretending to.  At last this year we got a “novel” edited and published.  A month after his death I’m depositing the first remittance from amazon.com

He was alive to see the book itself, its glossy cover, its blurbs.  Dozens of boxes of them.  Now all stacked up in his NY apartment, in towers around the couch and kitchen, where now Hadiya is their only broker.

* * * *

April 12, 2011

Weather is fine but Cavendish is back anyway, sleeping on the couch in the playroom.  (He says he had to do his taxes — it’s tax-time — and so, needed a place to stay for a while.)

Dash solicits Uncle Cavendish for a commitment of fifty-cents-a-lap in his school’s fundraising jog-a-thon.

* * * *

April 2, 2011

Spring.  Overcast day without precipitation.

On the woodpile, a colander full of wooden clothespins.

Wasps in the mailbox, as in other Springtimes.

Taking down storm windows.

* * * *

April First, 2011

The thing to remember when I’m blue:

Dash and I were in the pick-up, pop music on the dashboard radio, on some errand, the truck-bed full behind us, and Dash said, “I know what let’s do.”

(The particular idea was getting a burrito at Alice’s)

* * * *

March 31, 2011

Found 150 old rusty iron balusters, cheap, in Black Bart’s rear wilderness of junk.  Most are plain posts with wrought-iron twist, a few with ornate foliate treble-clef added.  Will bring to SFO to create balustrade on roof of Macondray, where presently everyone drinks and cavorts with no railing.

* * * *

Everyone was sleepless last night. Brett in particular worries about the financial insolvency of Squaw Valley.

* * * *

March 30, 2011

A fifty-foot accumulation of snow above Donner Pass.

Surely, at 6200 ft. it won’t be so deep, but we are warned by email bulletin that roofs need shoveling, or older cabins will collapse.

Here at home in the foothills, I’m the Responsible party, but I’d rather be reading Roger Penrose by the stove’s warmth, and I’m betting on the coming thaw, to save me the trip up there.

* * * *

March 28, 2011

Peach blossoms in abundance.  And snow.

Ground-cover seeding.  The raked-off sweet-pea vines make a great kind of “straw” for hiding the seeds from the thrushes and robins who will peck the seeds up.

* * * *

March 27, 2011

Silly Sunday afternoon. I come inside and deplete what’s left of the day watching Susskind’s Qu-Phys lectures while drinking the sauvignon blanc left over from Tad’s memortial service, getting a bit smashed, in fact, trying to focus.  (Brett, all the while, is spending the Sunday in Barbara’s cottage planning in detail a visit to Spain we can’t possibly afford.)

* * * *

Thinking of Tad and his exit.  Makes me think of me.

The old expression There, but for the grace of God, go I doesn’t apply, as much as “There go I.”

Because I was almost of that generation.  And of those aspirations.  I look around and see how much suicide has been taking people, to the left and right of me.  Tad was three years younger than I in history.  Big difference, in 3 yrs.  He was given a particular epoch. ( I think of Jim Morrison and all those romantics.)  (Tad was very Jim Morrison-like in fact.)  I, younger in history, envying all that, just barely escaped the romanticism.  All my foolishness has gone unpunished, unstoried, my skating on precipices, my stupidity, it was just-plain-stupidity, it wasn’t in some way ennobled.  Also, there’s one blessing I’ve had.  I never was very interested in being myself.  “Being oneself,” “expressing oneself” — those things have always been for so many of my confreres an imperative, but I always found it uninteresting.  My own writing has nothing to do with creative self-expression.  These are probably my first foray into “self-expression,” these dead-end diary entries, in an Internet cul-de-sac.  Each its own little dud.  Just how I like ’em.  Me, I always wanted to be everything else.  Everybody else.  And still do.  And think it’s a bracing attitude.  I think it’s empathy.  Thus I perhaps — pretty ambitious here — had already started living in death, and without caring.  The decades of expecting-no-consequence.  Which most would think of as despair.  Every writer always knows, if only subconsciously, that writing is death.  I embraced it instinctively from the start, packaging up my personal little coffins for padded-mailer envelopes.  I can only hope (more pious sentiment!) to learn to love death the more, making the butter on my toast sweeter.

* * * *

March 24, 2011

It’s bitter cold at the time the wet sleet is driving sideways.  Then at last the storm-front low pressure arrives, and suddenly, when the fat snowflakes are falling straight down, it’s balmy, it’s warm, and you can open your jacket, it’s terrifically silent.

* * * *

March 20.

Tad’s memorial this weekend.  Plenty of family has arrived, plus the Old Guard of Squaw Valley, plus Bill is bringing up a DVD of amusing outtakes from the documentary.

This house is full like a hotel. Crepes have been promised to all, this morning.  (Last night until two in the AM, the old minivan sat in the driveway thumping with gangsta rap, three reunited friends inside the smoke-filled car.)

The whole weekend, a festive atmosphere. Wicked stories of Tad are unearthed, enormities and betrayals yet unguessed. This is what happens when we die, the worst gossip about us has been aching to come out. The weather is tempestuous and the windows this morning are jolly steamed up.

* * * *

March 13, 2011

Sunday morning, rain coming in, thrushes in the grass.

Rather than episcopal church, I’m staying in and watching more of Leonard Susskind’s many hours of quantum physics lectures at Stanford.  The YouTube display page has a “like/dislike” button below the video window, and invariably the dialogue captions have an entry: “37 christians don’t like this.”

* * * *

March 9, 2011

Snowshoeing over Donner Pass with Dash.  Leaving the sound of I-80 behind, after clearing just one ridge.  Going cross-country, the creeks lie at the bottom of twenty-foot-deep soft crevasses in the snow, with weirdly sculpted cornices, treacherous-looking: don’t get too close: at the bottom, twenty feet down, narrow cold black water flows calmly.

Up in a meadow, digging snow caves.

* * * *

Dash, at school, has been assigned to condense a scene from the “mystery novel” he has chosen as his reading.  Everybody is doing a mystery novel.  Conformity rules in all “creativity,” as in his age-group, everybody is still trying to be pretty much the same paper snowflake.  (True non-conformity or innovation or “individuality,” which people pretend they want, if it ever comes along later in life, is in fact something of a horror.)  He chose Agatha Christie, and now reads his transcription of her prose to us, by candlelight, proudly.  It’s painful, his own writing used to be so good as a littler child, deep and true in its insights and freely nightmarish in its plots and ideas.  Now, age 11, he treasures as sophisticated all Agatha Christie’s cliches.  It’s hard to see him reduce himself, so hopefully, so much in good faith to adopt the standards of mediocrity.

* * * *

March 1

Post-storm clean-up.  PG&E trucks and AT&T cherry-pickers all over town.  “Indian Billy,” Billy Kelly, was found dead of exposure under the Broad Street Bridge.  Grandson of Maidu chief.  Rumor was, the police had confiscated his sleeping bag and tarp.  The parson this Sunday will sermonize on the irony of Indian Billy’s dying a hundred feet from the church’s cornerstone and threshold where the porchlamp glows 24-hrs-day, lying down the little slope with the candybar litter and the Highway 49 noise.

Here outside town, two oaks lie across the road, trunks big-around as garbage cans, and in the sunny dirty thaw, unfamiliar cheap pick-ups appear at the roadside with chainsaws, people you never see in town (the social-class system of rural places is so mysterious), gleaners, sawing them up for firewood.  Often a woman (here’s a telling difference in domesticity) sits in the passenger seat while the man cuts and stows wood in the truck bed.  (Brett says, ‘Should we tell Anna, they’re her trees, after all’  But of course no.)

* * * *

February 27, 2011

Barbara tonight was about to throw away (!) the aluminum-foil swatches I keep re-using to bake potatoes in.  No more boasting about her frugal habits of the Depression-era ranch.  Like a pair of Flannery O-Conner characters, I and an octogenarian can compete in parsimony.  (Who will be the one to quench the candleflames at meal’s end?)

* * * *

February 25, 2011

Two feet of snow so far.  More coming tonight.  Electrical power is out far and wide, and it’s a lucky thing Cavendish is staying in the back room, as he is well experienced with electric generators.

On its maiden voyage the new generator, bearing the brand-name “Champion,” roars like a pedal-to-the-floor NASCAR engine but remains stationary, parked under the porch roof.

* * * *

Motor-oil stains on the front porch, beside the welcome mat: country people.

(The front door is of course the one nobody ever uses.)

* * * *

Feb. 23

Down in SFO, in North Beach.

Six AM, the only convenient “grand old” espresso place that’s open is Caffe Roma.

I’m the only customer.  At this hour they’re still laying out the heavy rubber floor-mat, moving sweet rolls from delivery-box to counter display.

I pay for my double-capp with a credit card, and the guy runs the card and comes back with a pen and VISA receipt saying, “You wouldn’t by any chance be Louis B Jones the author?  Who wrote Particles and Luck?”

That was fifteen years ago.  He says, “I loved that book.  I was just lately thinking I should read it again.  That part where the two guys are frying frozen hamburger over a campfire?”  A six-am coffee-shop baristo is exactly my ideal reader.  He tells his partner, “See, Tony?  All the celebs come in here.”  Then later, after I’m in my corner, “Hey, Tony.  Did you ever read a book?  Like a novel or whatever?”  I couldn’t be happier.

* * * *

February 17, 2011

Snow on the old 55-gal drum in the far west meadow.

Snow on the ladders under the pear tree.  Snow on the compost heap.

In the cottage, the old lady is sleeping late, this morning.  Her son is dead.  Probably in sleep she’s forgotten that.

Anyway, she will have mostly forgotten it when she’s awake, too – w/bran muffin and Odwalla OJ and the San Francisco Chronicle.

* * * *

How “the World” Works:

Cruelty is supremacy.  Pick somebody to piss on and you’ll be all right.  This rule holds everywhere.  Simply betray/ignore the guileless.

The easiest and most profitable to betray, and the closest-at-hand, are your children of course.  Then, defenseless innocence in general.  Biggest bang for your buck there, right at hand, right at home.  (And of course remotest impoverished.  Whom you’ll never have to meet up with.)

But that’s only the low-hanging fruit.  Move on to degrade culture, moral taste, the language, “the commons” wherever it remains intact.  (Those are all, simply, other forms of defenseless innocence.)  For exoneration, cite the demands of your talent, ambition.  Forgive yourself but ruefully.

(Most repugnant: I myself have done it, surely, on some scale, whether in the Central School playground or in some later bigger arena.  Winning power and comfort by arrogance, you don’t really realize you’re doing it at the time.  This is why “the world” is poison.  If you stand far from the abbatoir you’ll find yourself less esteemed.  Implicated as one is, in the American global politique, there’s no washing oneself clean at the river.)

* * * *

Tad’s interesting half-life.  It was lived out somehow in secret.  And with a Kabuki-theater-spectacle guardedness.  How generous he was, letting me replace him in the role of “son,” in a family fascinated with celebrity.  I the lower-class kid, the bad-luck kid, the survivor, the practical one, enemy of charisma or charm, cheapskate.  Well, I would have to do.  He once the crown prince.  (I think he really was escaping that responsibility, by taking several leaps, in the last one half-succeeding.) (They say he was found last week on the floor with a smile on his face.)

* * * *

February 16, 2011

The weather has turned bad.  Cavendish has moved back in again.

* * * *

Went around the west meadow this morning in the rain and pulled out dozens of little new cedar saplings.  They’re weeds, and in this wet weather they come out of the soaked earth easily, roots and all.  I’m catching them when they’re still less than hip-high.

(I want to keep that messy, isolated little meadow clear, as an open domain for the wild sweet-pea.)

* * * *

My trailer in the woods is far from the possibility of any wireless internet, and I can regularly go to great lakes of solitude and reading and thinking.  Back up at the cottage, the ding of emails’ arrival, the literal “tweet” sound of tweets homing in, the various phones with their various clangs and ring-tone marimbas and text-message beeps.  (My mind perhaps works in an outdated way, because I’m in a backward rural place.)

* * * *

February 14, 2011

Thinking of Tad.  The merciful coroner says it was a massive heart attack and “he was dead before he hit the floor.”  The other standard remark is that such a manner of death is “the Irishman’s Dream.”  Well, it’s reported, also, that he was found with a faint smile on his face.  That latter report I actually do believe.  A coroner, kindly old pro, is the less plausible while the finder of the body had neither the motive nor the readiness to make up a fib about a post-mortem smile.

I tend to think Tad wasn’t “dead when he hit the floor” but got some minutes or hours of consciousness.  Lying on the boards alone.  Ear to the hardwood boards, the old actor, felled.  Coffee spilled.  Hours or days till Hadiya is due to come back.  The sounds coming through the floor from the laundromat below, of pop songs on the radio, big dryers tumbling, voices in tones of the ethnicities of the neighborhood, maybe Hmong moms down there folding clothes, and children playing.  The doctrine of the Tibetan Buddhists would have the soul lingering for hours or even days, still to be spoken to, still listening inside the corpse.  After bodily death there must be some interval of mental activity – enough seratonin in the synapses, enough cellular respiration – so that brain-death doesn’t happen exactly at the moment a heart stops beating or a finger stops twitching.  Not at all.  Tad, there, would have had some moments of contemplation after he’d been betrayed finally by his body and become “disembodied,” the body a dependable but tired old asset (“Brother Ass,” a certain Franciscan monk called it), the body a medium of self-assertion that was with Tad always, even when he was an actor on bright-lit stages of his own set-design and carpentry and lighting, even in dreams – arms and legs and volition – even in the womb before birth, his “body” was the medium of his “existence.”  So in whatever nirvana there was for him, in that time lying on the floor after the departure of the sensible body, lacking that referential frame anymore, he must have had some summary thoughts.  And so the smile.  It’s the forgiveness part, surely.

Lazy bum, cholesterol-clogged.  Cigarettes and cheeseburgers, self-aggrandizing bullshit stories, botched paint-jobs and joinery, cold coffee in moldy cups, manuscripts on foolscap in heaps.  Selfless sometimes, unfailingly kind, handsome still despite everything, liar, laborer in others’ worlds, depender upon women.  Secret pilgrim in this congelation of love.  His bodily ashes will probably be scattered in Lexington, site of his old theater company, site of the legends about himself he kept inflating and enhancing and repeating, near the very bridge indeed, basically the place where he once tried to die.  Since 1978, the extra thirty years he got were pure gravy, and he knew it.

* * * *

February 13, 2011

A quiet day of sadness, as mixed news comes in from the world.

— Michelle’s wonderful book (at an obscure publishing house) will get the front pageof the Sunday Times book review next week.  So says my agent.  I phoned her and left a congrats message on her tape.

— I went down to the cottage to bring Brett these great tidings, and she said, “Bad news.  Oh, Honey.”  And she said, of her brother, “Tad just died.”  Barbara could be heard in the bedroom talking on the phone to Sands, learning of the death of her oldest child.

Me, I’m gathering stones here today.  It’s time to repair the potholes in the driveway.  They’ve been getting away from me.  The lore of fixing potholes in a gravel road prescribes laying in big two-inch broken rocks first, then filling in with half-inch roadbed gravel.  (Which I happen to have a, dwindling, supply of.)  On this day of muffled weather, the women staying indoors, I’m navigating these quiet acres with a wheelbarrow, looking for rocks, tossing them in.  Clanks of stone on wheelbarrow’s steel wall.  Tall pines on a windless day.  Brett, in the cottage, with her many phone calls.

* * * *

February 12, 2011

The Problem of Other “Selves”:

If mysticism leads to solilpsism, then what are these other apparent consciousnesses experiencing?  All these people on streetcars or sidewalks, people in the crosswalk as I wait at a red stoplight.  What is their ontological status.

Well, the problem is not a problem.  Such a paradox is not a problem in this (anthropic) universe, where the truth is, I don’t have a “self,” nor do they, either.  Selves are constructions of society and language, organs of biological evolution, with no other ontological status.

* * * *

February 8, 2011

At last:

Finally filled the car’s gas tank with vegetable-oil ($3.45/gal) from the big polystyrene vat, on Idaho-Maryland Road behind the alternative energy place.

I bought only half a tank.  Tank was already half-full with ordinary gas-station diesel.  Starting gradually on this.  Want to see how the engine behaves.

The experiment is: that’s vegetable oil.  So will these cold mornings make it congeal.  Nightly low temperatures of thirty degrees.  Will the fuel in the engine behave like olive oil in the fridge?

As of today, have set a jar on the roof of the old woodbox outside the kitchen window, containing a few ounces of this biodiesel (which I siphoned from my tank).  In the mornings I can check it to see if it’s congealing.

* * * *

The Big Bang started right here by my kitchen door 14B yrs ago – (though that’s something you can say wherever you are, even if you’re way out around Alpha Centauri; because everything is the center.  My back yard and Alpha Centauri were once the same place.  They’re both still the Navel.)

It was fourteen billion years ago but the Big Bang can still be observed in the sky.  It’s right up there.  It keeps expanding in a fiery outermost shell around the visible universe.  So the actual, ancient Bang, Itself, is still hanging out there, ablaze (having cooled, no longer 3000º), at a distance of fourteen billion light years in every direction, a background glow behind the stars.  The light it sends back is orange in color, but it gets stretched, as it takes the 14B-light-year journey back to the future (i.e., to us).  Therefore the light arrives here in the longer microwave range.  Astronomers say it’s about as dim as moonglow, everywhere behind the stars, evenly distributed.  If our eyes’ retinas were attuned to take in those wavelengths (rather than just the “visible range,” bracketed between infrared and ultraviolet), we would SEE the dawn moment of Creation glowing always in the night, an eternal present.  Not an image of it, but the immediate thing itself before our eyes, if seeing is believing.  We might cast shadows on our sidewalks and in our backyards, bathed in the ancient light of Creation.  In fact, we do cast such shadows.  But without seeing them.

* * * *

Mythological notion is that a “divinity” must come first: that somebody or something had to be there to pronounce a necessary shazzam!

Rather, the primordial idea of “Love” precedes the (perhaps latterly necessary) picture of a divinity.

“Love = Choice” (Divine will)

That is, an existential Choice must be a positive choice.  A negative choice is annihilating.  Even before some mythological “god” is conceived, there exists Love, an axiom.  Like the theorem side-squared + side-squared = hypotenuse-squared, or even 1+1=2, or even 1=1.  Love pre-exists its instantiation in matter.  Oddball idea rather than a coherent proposition, tho’ feels syllogistic.

* * * *

6mg of energy-tingles in 260 billion cubic miles of empty space.

This is the force that is driving the universe to spread, actually accelerating it, esp. at the outer edges.  So-called “dark energy.”  Impulse behind the Hubble-constant inflation.

One butterfly-wing’s worth of energy per Grand Canyon.

It isn’t much but it adds up, over the billions of light-years.

http://louisbjones.com/2011/12/29/all-new-all-new-all-new-adventures-2011/

12-29-10.

Went with the cordless phone out to the mud room, which is freezing cold, to sit in the old couch and talk by long-distance to the nice lady at “Iowa Cremation,” to make the arrangements beforehand for my mother.  This is advised by the nurses at Crestview.  The price, $1675, includes death certificate, medical examiner’s certification, complimentary disposable container, and pre-pays the USPS shipment of cremains to any address in the continental USA.  All around the mud room stove is litter of ribbons and wrappings, tissue and salutations from Santa.  Dog pee on the square stones of the floor.  I can hear laughter from the kitchen, where visiting cousins drink beer with Hunter.

* * * *

Christmas Night. Hush.  Old farmhouse sleeps a lot of people.  My favorite things on the table: Brett’s braided bread, spinach salad and goat cheese, and Aleksandra’s mushroom soup (with wild mushrooms that were gathered in her village and mailed by her mother).

Nights, my chest pain is present, and I lie awake on my back.  (Touring websites, all the prognoses in the world are discoverable by restless hypochondriac).  Calling a doctor would not only make a bore of people’s Christmastime, it would also, inevitably, involve expensive tests.  So I lie on my back thinking what message I would pass on to Hunter if.

I’d really only tell him that he already possesses all time and space.  And that he already has faith, whether he knows it or not, and yet will never know what faith is.  [Such thinking makes sense only at eschatological moments]

My preference is: chest pains are only indigestion and bad posture.  This particular heart attack is just a nerve-pinch of thoracic vertebrae.  (Plus, a Yuletide visit from the metaphysical, rattling its long chains).

It will vanish next week when I stop eating Stilton, and beef, and fudge under its round metal lid.

* * * *

Nice account from an email (names changed to protect the eminent):

“I just spoke to him. He asked what was possible. I said same arrangement

as last year. He said, I see. (Pause). And what was the money last year?

I don’t seem to recall. And I said, I’ll check with Alicia, but I think it

must have been $3500. And he said, $3500, I see. (Pause). And I said,

Maybe we can do better. I’ll have to check. And he said, That would be

helpful, and, let’s see, there is the matter of a car. And I said, Oh,

yes, a car. Well, you had a car last year, so I assume you would have one

this ear, but I’ll have to check. I could also drive you, if you’d prefer

that. And he said, A car would be nice. And the airfare, that would be

what class? And I said, Carl, we would love you to come. I’ll see how

much money we have and get back to you.

   So–this may be the last go. Is it possible to give him $5000, a car,

and business class or first class travel? I would yield $1000 of my

honorarium for that purpose. Would be a way of saying thanks.”

* * * *

Xmas is coming.  The shiver of K-Mart polyethylene in the back of the minivan.  The desk-calendar in the kitchen is illegibly crowded. The weather has halted all painting on the south wall.  At least all the priming is done.  The Community of Writers bank accounts are empty, and the printers didn’t get us our thousand begging-for-money postcards in good time, so the whole bulk mailing plan may have to be scrubbed, according to Brett.  The transfer of rescue money went awry in the bank.  The deep-freeze weather is “spalling” my brick patio, popping chips off the top surface as big as scabs or (once or twice) as big as cookies.  The chandelier is still on the coffee table.  The roll of duct tape – which this morning was useful in mending Dashiell’s sneakers for school, while his carpool-ride waited out at the road – has fallen into the remote cat-box diarrhea [and for an instant I actually contemplate whether to rescue it and frugally wash it, and then do nothing about it, and move on].  Then Brett has to go to the bank.  But she is in a panic because the necessary document (containing routing numbers, etc., to get us out of our financial tangle) can’t be found.  “Here it is,” she says.  “Under the tortilla.”

* * * *

Average Critical-Thinking Skills:

1. A) Folks who throw religion away, citing the Spanish Inquisition and Islamic terrorism.  Or citing scandals like the popes’ forbidding birth control or the Jewish settlers’ impoliteness about territorial rights.

(If you want to watch yourself erase a “god,” first chalk up on the blackboard an old bearded human male on a cloud peering down at earth watching out for forbidden sex-acts.)

1. B) Our Complacent Pacifism.  In San Francisco at the semi-regular “symposium” (where mostly the wine, not the philosophy, is featured), one old guy at the table raises his countenance and announces the old conclusive piety, “Well, the fact is, no war has ever accomplished any good.”  And around the table, all the guys hang their heads in assent.  I sit there thinking of a few wars: the American Civil War, which got a start in accomplishing one of the hardest improvements in the history of mankind; and of the Nazi concentration camps that were opened in WW II (a personal friend of mine, an elderly gent now, was a sergeant who walked up to the gate at Matthausen and lifted the hasp on that padlock while people watched from within in total silence); and the American Revoltionary War, which even the English seem to have oddly countenanced, and not fought with much ardor, maybe looking on with a certain kind of avuncular interest almost, ambivalently, at the ambitions of the new people.  A “war” is a paroxysm.

* * * *

[The wars I’ve seen in my own time do seem to have been ignoble; but they have brought megasoline and prosperity, and rattan furniture made by simpler people.  Here I sit, implicated in that.]

* * * *

Patience, patience.  Last week I ran into yet another agent who is chagrined by certain of her famous client’s writing.  Client has a huge reputation with young hip readers.  Voice of a Generation, etc.  Agent doesn’t even read the manuscripts in full when they come in, says she finds them boring and pretentious, and she just moves them on – as with a pitchfork – to a publishing-house editor; and presumably the editor in turn moves the manuscript on, pitchfork-style to the printers.  A number of the highest-reputed writers seem to be treated this way in NY.  Often traces of shoddy editing.  All this in turn perhaps invites a reader (a readership) that isn’t reading closely or lovingly.  This is a strange atmosphere to be working in, but I think it’s always been thus, in the book business, maybe since Gutenberg.  Always a strange atmosphere to work in.

* * * *

December 9, 2010

Back in Nevada City.  Back in my uncomfortable sweaty mucking boots.  Behind the house the light is failing fast, dark at 4:30pm, while I split kindling to replenish the mud room woodbox.  At such a time, the most luminous object in the universe is the garage wall, in the meadow beside me, old clapboard, painted last summer from a paint-bucket labeled “Brilliant White, Low Lustre.”  (White, at the moment, is blue.)

Last week I was at harvest party in Marin, and during a break I was talking to a, maybe, thirty-year-old hedge fund manager who perhaps didn’t belong at that party, standing all by himself in an Italian-looking suit, leaning on a guyline cable that supported a tent.  He had drunk too much wine and was feeling discursive.  His girlfriend was sitting with her friends at a table, and for a while he and I waxed philosophical in conversation, and waxed geopolitical, and waxed socioeconomic, all in about ten minutes.

From his vantage point as an investor, “Everything’s pretty much shit-fucked out there.”  He meant the economy and the global problematique, though at that moment he was looking out over Nan McEvoy’s pretty new groves of young olive trees multiplying over the hills of Marin.  He swirled the red wine in his glass.  “I’m about ninety percent in commodities, I’m in copper, oil futures, lithium and zinc and shit, and gold.  Gold, gold, gold,” he spoke with distaste for gold.  “Everything’s going shit-fucked.  We’re not facing the population thing, and we’re not facing the global-warming thing.  The food thing.  This is what I tell people in my letter, too.”  (He publishes a bulletin of investment advice, expensive to subscribe to.)  He again swirled his wine in his glass and almost took a sip, but an ankle buckled, so he got a better grip on his slanting tent-line in the sunset.  This is a guy who went to Harvard and Wharton and devised a certain kind of dream-life for himself in California – the German sports car, the bunker on Nob Hill from which to publish his financial letter, the girlfriend, the ski lease.  Now I here I am back home in the blue twilight at end of day, clatter of cedar kindling, and I wonder, was he only saying the kinds of things he thinks I’m used to hearing?  Or prefer to hear?  Because I live in the country? He can’t sincerely believe what he was saying, can he?  Is it possible he got back to Nob Hill from Marin with his girlfriend (car goes in underground garage) and went back to his routine telling people to invest in Duke Energy and Chinese Internet start-ups?  Yes.

* * * *

Dec 1st

Beautiful day.  Home from travels.  Tired.  Garbage and recycling are out at the road.  Dry firewood is in.  A warm storm will be coming up the slope, a weather system arising in a warm long South Pacific fetch (meteorologists’ term) rather than Gulf of Alaska .

Ignored work and, instead, answered misc old emails, wrote the begging-donations letter for Squaw, assembled the new elecrical generator out-of-the-box, raked the lane to keep sodden leaves from killing turf, wrote and sent four letters of recommendation.  Dinner of sausage and potatoes.  (This is the day the Lord made, exult the faithful and they’re right.)

* * * *

* * * *

Piety: If you count any event as unfortunate, or unpropitious, or a setback, you’re not “loving the Lord your God.”

(You could never have suggested to Nietzsche that his amor fati was the same flavor as Judeo-Xianity or Buddhism’s Third Noble Truth.)

* * * *

Amazing success in butternut squash this year, in a new-cultivated patch by Barbara’s cottage. Tough-stemmed vines roam the edges of the pavement and get a grip on Barbara’s old walker in the sun.

* * * *

The first harbinger: They adopt the British spelling “Neighbourhood” for their mall.

Second harbinger: At the valley entrance, the Olympic eternal-torch shrine from 1960 (sooty dirty-gold oil-flame flapping in the night beneath the statuary five-rings Olympic device) is now outshone by a towering white fluorescent-luminous rectangle, big enough to advertise a Wal-Mart, proclaiming “Celebrating Our Olympic Heritage!”

* * * *

November 26

Bought a generator at last.  $700. I’m ashamed of expenditure, but the power outages are irksome and make for inefficiency, and with Barbara here in delicate, declining health, we have to be responsible.

* * * *

First good storm of the season, 11-23-2010.  In two days, there’s four feet of powdery snow.  Then after a few hours’ break, two more feet are added on top.  We arrive and I have to swim through this to get to the shovels stowed under the deck.  And then use the shovel to make a channel to the woodpile.

I’m reminded of Paul Radin, the wild “Jewish Indian” who lived in these hills all his life, mistrustfully and shyly, wearing the same greasy brimmed hat in all seasons, a frail-looking figure, Bob Dylanesque in heeled boots, to be glimpsed sometimes walking on Highway 89.  Bear-claw and chamois pouch of “medicine” tied at his throat.  Paul in wintertime used to keep a rope strung between his house and his barn, so he could make his way out to feed his horse during blizzard conditions.  And not get lost in the forty-foot gap.  Out at Ramparts, where the cold came fast.

In summertime Paul used to ride that horse over the mountain to visit the Writers Conference.  And insist on reading his shamanistic poetry, hijacking the Follies stage, mistaking the audience’s derision for warm encouragement, going on and on, until beautiful Sands had the inspiration of coming onstage and embracing him to get him off.

Name of that horse: . . . ? . . .  Zumgali!

Horse died.  Died a couple of years before Paul himself died.  He buried it directly before his cabin, shallowly, amounting to a big mound there.  I was one of the few who ever went out there.  He used to sit before the mound smoking in the evenings. Ornamented the mound with rings of stones.  Eventually he took to sleeping beside the grave, nights.  Then a bear moved into his house and displaced him.  This went on for the last year of his life.  If ever he wanted to go into his house to get something – a poem or a book or a cooking pan – he first gave a blast of his loud air-horn to scare the bear.  The bear would pour out the back-side and go irritably up the slope (I was there to see this happen, once); and Paul , on the front side, would pry back the loose plywood and go in.

In his dying days, Andrew Tonkovich and I used to bring him marijuana that we could scare up from some friends, as a balm for his cancer.  He would sit by the horse-mound and smoke, his little air-horn alarm at his side, in all weathers.  Propane space-heaters in the outdoors.  Sitting between two propane space-heaters.  After he died, we explored the cabin and found that the bear over the months had pretty much leveled everything to knee-high rubble: Paul’s bedding and furniture and cookware, and loose sheaves of poetry and books, all tossing together to make a bear’s-nest.  Now his brother the Boston banker will be trying to develop Paul’s property.  Putting condos by the river.

* * * *

Thanksgiving.  In the tall snowbank outside the window, bottlenecks stick up in a row, Two-Buck-Chuck pinot grigiot, chilling there.  Henrik and Barbara are reportedly stranded on the summit, held back by a CHP road-closure in the blizzard, in their backseat twenty pounds of cracked crab from the North Beach wharves.  Cavendish does arrive, in a hazardous truck because it lacks heat.  Lacking heat is a privation which, ordinarily, he wouldn’t mind; after all, he’s got a scarf and gloves; but the problem is, moisture condenses on the inner windshield, then freezes to a glaze of opaque  ice.

Cavendish has brought Cassy, the Nevada City poet laureate.  She is the feckless attractive artist whose car broke down permanently, and who therefore began borrowing friends’ cars, eventually to take up sleeping in them, upon being evicted from the apartment she’d stopped making rent-payments on.  She arrives looking beautiful.

Various tables are lined up, and candles located.  The lace tablecloth must be withdrawn from archives and spread out.  The old oil painting of Brett, nude, must be stashed in a closet.  When the Bulls do arrive, they have a Norwegian method of cleaning the white flokati rug from before the fireplace: spread it face-down over a snowdrift, and whack at it with a broom handle: you really do leave a grey rectangle.

The table is at last seated, all the usuals, with no one excluded, always a few new faces, a couple of bluegrass musicians, one cancer-victim on short lease, still wearing hospital bracelet and hospital smock, one visiting software-designer’s family, Cavendish and Cassy and others, the several older folks with their prescription pill bottles amber-plastic and child-proof.  Outside, in the rest of the world, North Korea has begun shelling South Korea, Haitians are getting cholera post-earthquake, the Israeli Knesset has just voted never to give back any of their settlement areas in the West Bank, and Washington is gridlocked, and somewhere a glacier is shrinking.  How apocalyptic is every instant.

Clink glasses.  Nobody will “say grace,” as this crowd is too agnostic.  But Cassy has a fresh substitute: she will sing the Kiowa Death Song.  (The reasoning, of course, is that Thanksgiving commemorates the decimation of Native Americans.)  So, while all others’ eyes respectfully fall, Cassy lifts her face and belts it out in a very convincing Indian style, Hey-Yuh Hey-yay-yay-Yuh, with yips and shouts and sobs.  It goes on forever.  I catch Dashiell’s eye, and the merriment there is so contagious, I have to bow over my plate, taking deep slow breaths.

* * * *

Original meaning.  “Charisma” in Greek-language X-ian philsophy was simply a “talent.”  A charisma was a gift of God, to be put to use.

In contemporary usage “charisma” is a technique of seduction and self-aggrandizement.

 

November 23, 2010. In Squaw by myself, putting the cabin away for the winter. All alone here with the romance of the big fireplace, I miss my family’s alarms and melodrama and wit. An old paperback of  The Sickness Unto Death has been dislodged from a bookshelf, and I’m gladdened, to greet again that miserable old Dane.

So I’ve thought of rereading it tonight, with the “highly intellectual” project of, maybe, discovering likenesses between Buddhist dukkha doctrine and the Dane’s painstaking analysis of despair (which I recall to be as detailed as the dharma).
Stop with the red wine at eight. But then I discover that, because tonight I’m granting myself the rare medicine of a Unisom gel-tab, as I settle down with my book before the fire, I’m really looking forward most to the sleeping pill. Like I’m dropping acid: a sleeping pill is the big event of the evening. Not the whitewater rapids of Kierkegaard. Not at all.

* * * *

(November. Dumped-on by early snow, at 6000-foot elevation.)

Dash will be 10 yrs old soon, and today he went out alone carrying a few paper dollars he’d earned, to walk all the way, by himself, to the store to buy a toy with his own money. After two days of snow, the sky dawned clear and a summery sun has melted all the snow on the roads, which are now shining-wet in the warm air. He has been given his mother’s cell phone, lodged deep in his jeans pocket, and been instructed to call home when he arrives at the store. He has been warned to stay far to the side of the road “if a car comes.” And he’s dressed warmly. All around him, as he walks alone by himself, the world will be shining as it only does in mornings of fast snowmelt and blue sky. Pine boughs will be dropping their ladlefuls of white.

* * * *

Clear sky all night. Stars are pebbles at the floor of the stream. Before sunrise, on the high old-snow places (Squaw Peak, Granite Chief, KT-22) snowcaps come up as violet first. Then peach.

* * * *

November 17, 2010
Tracy arrives in Nevada City with elk in her luggage, frozen hunk.
(epicurious.com counsels disguising it with sauces; fatiguing it by many hours in slow-cooker.)
The misery of the hunter. Tracy says the guy who shot it and, miles from his truck, knelt before the carcass with his knife for the winter afternoon’s work, got himself a hernia in the long process of dressing it.

* * * *

[I’m getting the sense there’s a white-trash aristocracy in this: ALL of my male friends up here seem to have had at least one hernia operation.]

* * * *

Fantasy: The entire American population adds woolly socks and dumpy sweatshirts to their bedtime costume. The immediate result: 11,000 hectares of rainforest per year are saved.

* * * *

…For the high and the next way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet.
–The Cloud of Unknowing, 14th C.

* * * *

Far out Newtown Road, there’s always been a big hand-lettered sign:

For Sale, 32-plus Acres
Three Buildings On Four Separate Parcels
Well and Creek
OLD MAN READY TO DEAL

It stands illegibly deep in bluebells, lupine, Scotch broom, wild lilac.

* * * *

Winter nights.

Don’t enjoy movies just now. Can’t sit through them. My boys over the years got accustomed to being disappointed with their dad, in this way.

A longed-for movie is rented, the mud room stove is stoked up, maybe even popcorn is popped – all settle in – and soon (this usually happens around the first plot point, where what’s-at-stake is being declared) – soon Dad is climbing out of his prized comfy chair. Slipping away. To go read a book. (I could sit through an entire movie if I were to drink red wine steadily the whole time and kill off a whole half-bottle.)

Well, dad just likes the establishing shots.
I take it as a general principle that, as an organism, I’m like an apple on a tree, fulfilling my appleness in good order without my own having to fret about it too much. So when I find I’m too impatient even to sit through a movie, and take no interest in any of the inside-industry or outside-industry products – or even pictures my own friends have somehow gotten made, even artistic small celebrated pictures – I assume that it’s in my nature at present. I’m seeing everything as beside-the-point. So who knows. Maybe it is.

* * * *

Nov.  14 –

A joke from a sermon: “The sin of ‘evil speech’ is the one sin you could do all the live-long day and never get tired.”

(As a novelist well knows.)

For a novelist, the delight of evil speech is vocation.  Practiced indeed all the live-long day.

* * * *

Nov. 12

“Advice,” for a writer, is abundant.  Especially from those closest to you.  Urging success.

I’d rather drink muddy water / And sleep in a hollow log.

* * * *

Nov. 7

Week-end.  After way too many hot, dry days, a winter-style rain is coming.  Brett has been up in Squaw alone – hemming curtains, re-covering couch cushions – stays in touch by phone to get my interpretations of the NOAA weather predictions for snow up there.  On my prompting, she makes the trip back down here just in time, before the storm arrives and they close the pass.  As she comes over the summit, the Highway Patrol at Truckee is beginning to set up the orange cones, to start turning people back.

Here, Barbara and I have  been making sure we take our pills, watching British-produced situation comedies on TV, getting the laundry in before the onset of rain.

* * * *

You can write to advance a notion, you can write to be admitted to a “canon” of “literature,” you can write to revenge yourself against your parents or schoolmasters, you can write to please the judges of big prizes, you can write for the critics’ approval, or for academics’.

But can your work withstand the scrutiny of a reader’s love.  I don’t mean adulation.  (Which does not look so closely.)  Or even respect.  I mean the reader’s love.

* * * *

Our friend the piano teacher, whom I see around town, has emotion welling in her eyes at all times.  I run into her by the dairy case (the yogurt, the cottage cheese, the artificial creamer).  She’s a pretty woman of about 65 or 70.  Freckles.  Grey hair in braids.  In a two-minute chat, I make her tear up sentimentally in various ways.  “How’s Barbara?” she says, “I’ve been meaning to visit.”

I tell her Barbara keeps getting younger – (not kidding: it’s not exactly untrue) – that because of her diet or just her natural recovery from stroke, she’s getting younger every day.

This makes happy damp shine in her eyes, under IGA’s fluorescent dispensation.  (It’s as if everybody is this woman’s own personal family and she’s getting news of them posthumously in the Afterlife.)  “How’s Hunter?”

Oh, he’s great.  He’s so busy with his studies, we don’t hear much from him.  He’s living right in the middle of Amherst (her husband’s alma mater is Amherst) – got a girlfriend – studying Greek playwrights, physics – and all the maples on the quad are changing color.

That last detail especially makes her eyes brim.  As I half-knew it would!  So I think I ought to let up on her, change the subject.  Do a little healthy griping.  About the abandoned septic tank I had to unearth and nobody would help.  Easy thing to gripe about.  Nothing poignant about it.

* * * *

In fact, though, Barbara isn’t that simple. She’is still speaking very little.  At meals only very quietly.

Tonight, post-Halloween, Dash brings his entire pillowcase of candy to the table after dinner and dumps it out in candlelight — to sort it, to spread it out, to fondle.  I kid him (“The Life of Buddha” used to be a bedtime story), telling him while he gloats over his candy, “Remember what the Buddha said: Desire causes Suffering.  Suffering can be overcome by overcoming desire.”  Barbara perks up, grins in relief and hoists her glass to mine and says, “I’ll drink to that.”

* * * *

(Mu-shu-pork lunch special at Fred’s on Broad Street)

I tell my friend the Episcopal minister that, it seems to me, anyone who takes an ‘inordinate’ interest in religion has ‘something pretty basically, deeply wrong with him.’  It’s surely an imprecise and misstated idea, regrettable to blurt out in vague half-baked condition.

But in pleasure he puts down his chopsticks: “Exactly!”  (This from a graduate of the seminary.)  In his wink, leering fraternity: I’d just veered near, yes indeed, the nice, awful, little secret.

* * * *

Nov. 2.  Voted.  Got Roto-Tiller going.  Restrung the good guitar.  Went to grocery store.

On the meadow are heaped tomato vines.  Brett has cleared and raked the enclosed garden.  Scoured of stubble and stalks, the soil is bare, a sight which always pained me.  Those and blackberry cuttings must all be carted off into the woods somewhere.

* * * *

Oct. 30.  Saturday.  Quiet and Sunny.  Dash will instruct Aleksandra this afternoon in the art and method of pumpkin carving, so tonight (out on this road where no one will see them anyway) we’ll have three Jack-O’-Lanterns flickering tonight, one for Nico, one for Aleksandra, and one for Dash.

* * * *

October 27, 2010

Started sunny.  Got colder and darker all day.

Put up all storm windows.

Dug leaf-detritus out of all gutters and downspouts.

Covered and drained swamp-coolers at our house and at Barbara’s.

Cavendish is still sleeping here, living in the playroom, peeing into a strainer, expecting crystals to come forth in his pee.  (Boasting post-operation that he will produce a small dune of crystals.)  Tonight is the first game of the World Series, and because the SFO Giants are to compete, the event is important around here.  Cavendish’s laptop, while I cook, is on the kitchen table competing with candlelight, bringing in the pictures of the game, and he exults over base hits.  Giants are taking the lead and holding it.  Chili is on the stove.  Barbara stays away from loud baseball, in her own cottage with the PBS “NewsHour” and her stemmed glass of non-alcoholic white wine.

* * * *

Re: The “God’ whose existence is affirmed below:

It’s not much of an affirmation.  To affirm the existence of any divinity that might be visible to the rational faculty involves subtracting, from it, all its qualities.  The thing exists only in its unknowability, and is affirmable only to the extent that it stays invisible.  As a proof, it’s like saying “Existence implies existence.”  Or, “Look! Zero equals zero!  And one equals one!”  Such a diviinity is like an algebraic placeholder.

Subtracting “God” thus (as an unnecessary unknowable), the only left-over quantity is that odd emotional addition, the “love” motive of Creation.  The rational part self-cancels.  And the only remainder is the irrational afterthought.  The anthropomorphism.  The mythological.  The “caring.”

In the metaphysician’s lab, after the explosive poof, the retorts and beakers are suddenly empty and sparkling-dry.  But there’s a scent in the air.

* * * *

October 27, 2010

Sharp october sunlight. It’s 9:55 AM.  I’m waiting for the morning frost to thaw on the slopes of shingles, so I can climb up there with heavy storm windows.

The most interesting news recently, meanwhile, is that a galaxy from 13.4 billion years ago has been photographed by Hubble.  13.4 billion was almost the “beginning of time.”  The blurred pinpoint-fleck of orange light, as reproduced in the NY Times, is a signal from the early period when light itself hadn’t existed long.  Those photons started their journey 0.5 B after “big bang,” so they’re bringing an eschatological minute right back here for our inspection.  In the photograph it appears as faint, red-shifted, and it’s upstaged by newer closer stars, but it’s still out there, hanging out where the Big Bang continues as a present-time event.

This universe’s Big Bang of course wasn’t necessarily the first thing.  So say cosmologists.  A singular, unique “Big Bang” is a suggestion we favor, as “our” special origin story (particularly we in the West, far from the Upanishads).  The scientific likelihood is that before our own little “Big Bang” there were bazillions of Big Bangs over trillions of Kalpas.

I do continue to be interested in “Rational Proofs” of God’s Existence (cherishing particularly St. Anselm’s so-called ontological proof, for its clever gimcrack fake-out abracadabra.)  There’s one obvious logical problem in positing a “God” as an ultimate First Cause.  It’s a problem of “infinite regress”: What preceded Him, or created Him?  What were the prior sufficient conditions for the existence of a “divinity”?

Nevertheless, a kind of ultimate theism seems necessary, because, from all I see of cause-and-effect in the world, I infer that something initiated this endless cosmic inhalation and exhalation of fireworks.  Something outside chronological time and causation.  Surely it was a “something” never to be limned by myth nor by science nor even in the liveliest hallucination.

Yet, let me suggest furthermore that if something “caused” existence, then something “cared.”  That additional bit of anthropomorphism seems inevitable.  Something had to care.  That’s how we must imagine events’ teleology.  Oddly, this emotional (!) premise of “caring” seems even more axiomatic, more deeply, logically originary, than the cause-effect nexus.  So it is that we are inclined, helplessly, to capitalize this Something.  At the beginning of the “temporality” that provides the matrix of all subseqent epochs, a certain Something must have “cared,” “cared” to do something.  Or had a “motive,” or an “impulse.”

On my five acres life, meanwhile, seems comprehensible.  That a nutritional material is formed in chloroplasts from sunlight and soil; that it enters my mouth; that it sustains this trance I think of as objectivity, before exiting “my” body (me being, in this case, the 165-lb collation of cells that, during a period of a few decades, has foamed up temporarily and mostly held its shape), all these principles are treated routinely around here, with no special astonishment.  My coffee in the morning.  My red wine at the end of a day.  My eyes’ thirst for color and distance.  My absorption in lust/gluttony/envy/wrath/pride.  My endless dissatisfaction.  I see that “I” am an illusion, yes.  But one thing seems clear.  It seems clear that “I” wasn’t the thing doing the necessary caring back at the “beginning” of “time.”

* * * *

Beef stew: a bay leaf, shitake mushrooms, soy sauce, port, black pepper.  Cavendish arrives, on the eve his big “lithotripsy” operation, to spend the night here.  We have agreed to give him a six-am ride to the “Surgery Center,” a storefront in a mall.  And pick him up afterward at ten-thirty groggy.  As for the scab on forehead, he has no explanation.

“Oh, hey.  Would you pick up my antibiotics prescription?  Sorry.  I spaced it.”

* * * *

Rewards of cultural exchange.  Aleksandra (her family in Krakow made regular mushrooming expeditions, etc., smoked their own hams) informs us, helpfully, that our lavender, out back by the garage, can be brought indoors and scattered in the cupboards to deter the moths that infest the flour.

Reciprocally, she enters the kitchen this morning proclaiming, “Brett!  I googled your shoes!”  In fresh English of European speaker, the syntax pops

Your shoes got googled.  Something that happened to your shoes was googling.

* * * *

Saturday Night. Oct. 23

My worries are over, everyone got home safe to me.  Brett and Barbara and Dash and the dog, all in a car arrive in heavy rainstorm, driving down from Squaw Valley on winding two-lane mountain highways in the wet dark, and I’ve got pesto and bockwurst and cauliflower, the windows all steamed up, and my anxiety over their routine imperilment (apron, ladle) housewifely.  Only a few flakes of snow attacked their windshield coming over the summit.  Dash with flashlight flickers in the meadow and woods, looking for the missing cat, the color high in his cheeks.  Barbara by candlelight stalks the kitchen, looking for glass of wine, disgusted as usual by Garrison Keillor’s mellow “Prairie Home Companion” on the radio, a cane in each hand these days to support her.

* * * *

For subsequent use: A Jewish feminist agitates in favor of genital mutilation, clitoridal excision for herself and her entire sisterhood, as sign of covenant equivalent to (privileged males’) circumcision.

[With reprise of Texas psychopath who kidnaps, etherizes, and circumcises-and-releases folk, to save their souls.]

* * * *

Oct. 20.

Dry, sunny days are back for a while.

Aleksandra is living here, while Nico returns to SFO for construction labor.

All the furniture in the living room has been pushed up against the walls to make room for quilt manufacture.  Muslin backing, then batting, then the quilt-face, are to be laid out in a large loose (term of art) “sandwich.”  Then poke-stitching is to begin in the middle.

However, the batting material – the single great rectangular pad of it – was first fed into the washer, with the thought that it should be shrunken before being enclosed between two panels of cloth.  Of course it broke up into a slurry, which in the spin cycle was pasted evenly in a cylinder against the inner walls of the washer tub, to be dug off by fingernails in scoops.  Brett asked in despondency, “Do you still love me?”

* * * *

Sunday afternoon, arriving home, as I came around into the driveway, a red-tailed hawk flew low across my windshield danglilng in its talons a loopy snake.  A weird sight.

Cavendish shows up around dinner time.  He has some frozen “chicken pot pies” of his own and insists he’s only stopping by to pick up a package that arrived for him at this address and is driving out to his forest blind to heat his pies.  (To power a microwave out there, I think extension cords run from old dormant building-site hookup.  His trailer is just over the ridge from it).

But he is easy to persuade that my soup is preferable.  Falls asleep at the table.  Goes to bed in cottage.

* * * *

Nico and Aleksandra are back.  Success in the Big City has eluded them, at least temporarily.  Finding work and living-quarters is hard, in that (no longer so inclusive or forgiving) town.  She will stay here in the playroom for a week or so, while Nico will drive back to SFO to work as a hod carrier in the construction of a strip-mall, sleeping nights in the Dodge van, subsisting on 7-Eleven provender.  Both wear simple gold wedding rings.

* * * *

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Up at four.  Work well.

By dawn, the first drops of rain.

Bring in patio furniture.  Plug in the car (this old diesel business).  Bring in summer-dry kindling from cedar split 2 or 3 yrs ago.  Cover firewood with tarps.  Clean up tools and materials of summer projects (the façade for Barbara’s porch overhang).  Set up Barbara with coffee and Sunday paper.  Dash is awake, watching TV in the mud room, with his hands clapped over his eyes, because the hero is about to kiss a girl: the two of them onscreen linger brushing slack lips, breathing into each other’s mouths.  I offer Dash a wedge of pear, which cheerfully (“Sure, yeah!”) he accepts with his one free hand while keeping his eyes covered.

* * * *

October 16, 2010

Saturday.  Rain is predicted for tomorrow.

Lit the pilot lights in wall heaters for winter

Refrained, yet, from putting up storm windows

Window-screens go into the garage

Tarped over the stacked wooden garden furniture

Tennis with Dashiell

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

First thing this morning, I stepped on – and broke – the hourglass that has been rolling around the bathroom floor.  These things come into Dashiell’s hands at school as gifts from oral-hygiene demonstrations (they set a child’s two-minute standard for how long you’re supposed to brush).  It’s been rolling around underfoot for some days, and now the capsule is broken, and the dose of pink sand, two minutes’ worth, will be sifting into recesses in the bathroom floor, as I didn’t sweep it up.

The other epochal event today.  I noticed that my temporary paper driver’s license calls my hair “gray.”  It wasn’t me that changed the hair color record, I would have only reapplied routinely as “BRN, BRN, 5’10”, 165 lbs,” and in fact it still is mostly brown.  The very friendly girl at the DMV counter must have changed it to gray, and without mentioning.  She must accomplish this little kindness often, many times a day, because I’m sure most people, not out of vanity but just negligence or indifference, let their hair-color alone on official records.  Also, the girl must make a custom of not mentioning it, as she makes the little change, there at the counter she occupies in the world, moving people on through the system.

* * * *

Sunday afternoon occupation.  The big bookshelf culling here.

Three card tables in the garage support small towers of hardcovers and paperbacks –The Color Purple, Lattimore’s dog-eared Iliad.  Light in August.  Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre.  Field Geology.  One small stack, on the right, is the keepers.  The rest will go to the Eric’s bookstore in the coffee shop.  The garage radio plays NPR.

* * * *

The man from the county comes for the periodic, routine test of the groundwater in the well.  He’s only interested in the gallons-per-minute productivity, not e-coli or trace minerals like mercury or lead.

His equipment:

Tin cup.  Short length of garden-hose.  Stopwatch.  Graduated beakers and plastic tubs with calibrations.  Aluminum clipboard.

He kneels at the well-head in the pumphouse.  He’s patient.  Chats about the fish in Hirschman Pond.  I see he’s got a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, but refrains from lighting one up to kill time.  Anyway, the well tests out all right.  Five gallons per minute.  It’s fine.  And he tastes from the tin cup.  “Granite,” he says.

“Granite?”

“I don’t taste soil.  Just granite.”  And he explains.

This water is melted snow which has seeped through fissures in underground stone.  This cupful melted about 500 years ago – long before radioactive fallout, or even soot – up around Big Bend, where the “Rainbow Lodge” exit now is, off I-80, at the five- or six-thousand-foot elevation, and then it spent some centuries seeping toward us.

And my first, reprehensible, craven thought is, how can we keep this water supply out of the hands of the coming hordes?

The opening sentence of the Dhammapada: “Mind precedes its objects. They are mind-governed and mind-made. To speak or act with a defiled mind is to draw pain after oneself, like a wheel behind the feet of the animal drawing it.”

* * * *

October 11 –

Spray for blackberries with heavy-duty OrthoMax solution.  Only the north and east property lines, experimentally.

* * * *

October 10 –

Sunday.  Apples.  The crop is skimpy, but enough.  Dash wearing old shoulder-strap bag of woven grass likes to climb high in the limbs and flouts all warnings from the ground.  In the kitchen, the juicer makes its dynamo hum.  Carafes of cider stand around, with grey sudsy foam.

* * * *

Oct. 7 –

Spread “MOLEMAX” pellets (castor oil) w/rotary broadcaster.

Broken garden chair: brass screwplate, clamp, epoxy.

Oven door: purchase cable, springs, cable ties.

* * * *

Oct. 7.

The apples this year are the best ever.  Largely worm-free.  So I realized something.  This was the year I neglected to put out the pheromonal traps for coddling moths.

Of course.  Those traps attract moths to the trees.  They’re enticed by the sexy pheromone, then discover apples, for their eggs to dwell in.

* * * *

The Nature/Culture thing:

Seems like every time I pass thru the cottage, in the flickering blue light of a TV set, a crime drama is playing: a bad guy is being tracked down.  And at the murder scene the camera is obsessively lingering over the corpse, relishing the little lake of blood.  Or by flashing jump-cuts (thigh, throat, temple), the sense of a “forbidden glance” is provided upon corpse.  Or the moment of the slaughter itself revolves in sick dreamy slo-mo.  Or we’re in the morgue and the coroner is standing by a gurney with a cop (usually it’s a young woman cop; on these TV soundstages the lighting gaffers use the actress’s nipples as a reference to set the depth-of-focus on the cameras, which must be evidence of what matters centrally in this medium), and the coroner is lifting the naked corpse’s sheet and he winces, saying, “Sorry.  Some things you just never get used to.”

I’m only the guy passing through the room, on my errands.  These are channels aimed at a demographic called “women,” the ones who, if Atticus brings in the trophy of a dead vole, send me out to dispose of the little soft body.

* * * *

Cavendish shows up for dinner.  He says a fine-looking furred mammal has been living with him in his trailer.  It’s shy.  Seldom seen.  He has identified it as a ferret, by Internet research.

His news is, he will need an operation.  His kidney stones, he says, are as big as olives.  He’d always known he was kidney-stone-prone, and has passed several in his life so far.  But these are too huge to pass.  He says, “I’d always thought of myself as a crystal maker, now it turns out I’m giving birth to moons.”

* * * *

War on moles and gophers:

1. A) Castor-oil.  They hate it.  It repels them.
2. B) A product called “The Giant Destroyer.”  It looks like a small stick of dynamite.  You light the fuse, drop it in the burrow, and cover over the entrance.  It releases a noxious gas.

* * * *

The oven door last night, revealing the roast, flopped down heavily with a clang.

A spring had snapped, and now the whole thing must be wired shut at the door-handle, to stay closed.  Today, a new spring must be bought at the hardware store.  This is a great old O’Keefe & Merritt, everything fixable, by any average-intelligence amateur who simply uses his powers of observation and a little fortitude.  One side of the range is a skillet you can burn kindling in.  We’ve never used it but it’s there to play its role in our Total-Environmental-Collapse schtick one day.

* * * *

6:30 AM, working in the basement of Barbara’s house in Squaw Valley, I can hear Tad’s voice droning overhead in Barbara’s bedroom. It sounds almost as if he’s reading aloud to her, at this hour of the morning.
Later I see Tad on the road and ask him what was happening. He says his mother had had a sleepless night – (her daughters are all out on highways driving to far places; she is alone at home with Tad) – and she asked him to come and tell her a story. So Tad pulled up a chair by her bed and launched into an hour-long redaction of the Wyatt Earp gang’s story, with Doc Holliday, the Clanton gang, the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral – and Wyatt Earp’s “incredibly dysfunctional family, the Earps” – and Wyatt Earp’s subsequent career in the West Coast movie business, where he became so wealthy he bought the entire town of Hollywood.

 

September 20, 2010.
At this time of year I can tell fall is coming by a new sound in the trees. I remember it from other winters. It’s a big ocean overhead, coming from the big slopes all around, a steady surf. It’s a sound you don’t get in the summertime here. Meteorologically, it’s probably the announcement of “the arctic low” dropping into the Gulf of Alaska. The paint on the southeast side of the house is peeling. Out back behind my trailer, in the upended pollen-dusted Sony cassette-player, wasps have built their nests, wealthy papery mound of hexagonal nurseries, inside the open jaw of the player deck. The tomatoes this year are ripening too slowly: it’s September and they’re still shiny-green.
Have replaced the old Volvo with a (even older) diesel-engine car, to be converted to biodiesel as non-corn fuel starts coming along: there’s a fellow out on the Ridge who is starting a business distributing vegetable fuel. He plans to offer a $3/gallon contract, to home-deliver fuel in drums, to be mounted on an angle-iron trestle here, so maybe I’ll have my own filling station beside the garage. A diesel vehicle turns out to be an inconvenient, tractor-like thing, which will take some getting used to. Different pace of life, even slower than ever.

August 18, 2010.
Back home in Nevada City, end of summer. The air is heavier down here than at the high elevations, more humid, and a mulch dogshit smell permeates the extremely cobwebby woods. The garden is late: tomatoes all unripe. Another “zilch” year for pears. Rodents have eaten through the line providing electricity to my trailer. (It’s just an orange 100-ft extension cord on the forest floor, originating in the pumphouse, which is the nearest juice.)

* * * *

The trailer under the oaks. The windows crank open against the strands of summer-spiders’ architecture. Those spiders now grown and gone. The heavy-metal space heater still works, making its strange (inexplicable!) elephant-trumpeting noise in waking up and electrocuting its toaster coils. The usual rodent pellets all over the desk and the trailer’s sink and the three-burner stovetop. Each birch-veneered drawer (I slide each open) is filled up with a mouse nest, so it’s like an apartment building. Which I just leave alone. I slide each drawer back in place. The little plastic tray of D-Con bait, heaped levelly with minty-green pellets, is at my elbow, as always. My fingertips are so calloused from handling my ten thousand old bricks, their touch won’t stimulate my laptop’s trackpad, which doesn’t recognize the electrostatic touch of my skin.

* * * *

September: Mowing largest meadow, I feel fat raindrops on my forearms, but I keep on mowing. The wind picks up. On hood of tractor, wet freckles evaporate fast, having appeared.

* * * *

Fall, 2010. Good to be back from Squaw, back in my trench. Hunter will be leaving soon for sophomore year, and Dash is back in school: fifth grade. I’m in my fifties now.
A month ago in July, Dash and I played miniature golf – at the same old place as ever, along a shabby Tahoe tourist-strip by the lake. Most cherished and dorkiest of mini-golf courses, the old green felt shrinking away from the cement channels, the girl dispensing scorecards and pencil stubs across her window-sill with open boxes of Baby Ruths and Butterfingers, its course’s plywood obstacles (Indian chiefs, clown-mouths, eightballs) hand-carpentered and hand-painted, or -varnished, by an old man in the 1950’s, unrenovated over a half-century.

An increasingly interesting reward of having had children: During this our brief hallucinatory witness among clouds of apparent particles endowed with “mass” and “energy,” in the midst of the ongoing, rumored Big Bang, if we have fostered biological children, then we have actually taken a dip into “matter.” We haven’t just groped spectrally through the particle-swarm for a few decades. We seem to have augmented the whole thing by a few pounds. It’s a sort of metaphysical event. Apparently, there will be consequences to our apparent existence, in the form of the continuity of the mystical thing flesh.

What made me think of this: the scorecard from eighteen holes of mini-golf (actually 36 holes; we went around twice) is still riding in my car’s door-pocket with suntan lotion and candy bar wrappers and a little replacement bulb for the dashboard display. The rainy snowy cold season will come, and there will be many pick-ups and drop-offs at school, and that paper scorecard will go on riding along indefinitely, the record of 36 holes outlasting me.

* * * *

Zen saying:

“Between the basin and the basin, I utter a lot of nonsense.”

[the two basins being: the basin the newborn infant is washed in, and the one the corpse of the very same being will be washed in]

* * * *

August 7, 2010.
Today’s the day. The 150 writers are due to arrive for the annual week of ambition, tuition, disappointment, romance, festivity. It’s dawn here in Calif. butmy people’s planes will already be in the air, and cars on the roads.
Woke up with the vibrant sensation of time’s sand-grains dwelling in my bones. How much of bullshit, I wonder, is in my feeling that everybody is already a “saint or at least mystic,” though unbeknownst. – [The Mormons do that thing of theirs: they make you be a “saint” right away, right when you join up, no kidding around.] [Like it comes with your certificate and your secret decoder ring and your T-shirt.  You’re a saint, stop pretending you’re not.]
Coffee has already been brewed. In the Annex living room Brett and Lisa, the Executive Directors, are in long white nightgowns in dawn light. The scissoring hum, rising and falling, of the sewing machine on the dining room table. They are up early hemming broad swaths, to serve as tablecloths in workshops.

* * * *

 

 

 

2-8-10
Whatever all this is, none of us will ever have the slightest “understanding” of it, though we are in constant uninterrupted contact with all its voltage every instant. Fascinating predicament. Absolutely fascinating.
Coming up from the mailbox in the cold February sun. Lots of heavy, glossy magazines for Barbara. (Or for Barbara’s demographic):

LifeExtension Magazine: Is Your CoQ10 Obsolete?
Increase Mitochondrial Support with a Newly Formulated CoQ10 – Now with Shilajit!

On a telephone pole down the road, an unusual woodpecker (perhaps an intruding species) taps with a rapid rhythm accelerating the decomposition of that particular telephone pole.

* * * *
2-14-10
My anti-film-festivals crack. It’s not the festivals themselves, nor the movies. Movies are great. So are movie-makers. The problem is: what happens to the towns over subsequent years: Park City and Mill Valley were both once quiet lovable places. H’wood injects its virus. Twenty years later you’ve got the actual panthers and cheetahs of Rodeo Drive slinking in the very streets, or rather their imitators. People think that can’t happen here.

* * * *

Fruit of late-night conversation in the cottage, as endless boring luge competitions flicker on televised Olympics:
Everybody is willing to perk up and say, “Well, yes, ‘love’ as a Prime Mover, sure, I’ll go along with that. That’s my religion: God is love.”
Anybody is willing to say it. The god-is-love thing could even be considered “true,” if semantically risk-free. I.e., meaningless, in the sense of being non-referential. But how radical are the implications of the remark. Upward theological implications (suddenly you’re a mystic!) and downward practical (suddenly you’re a saint!).

* * * *

The town’s movie theatre.

It’s a storefront. Flat non-sloping floor. Armchairs. Charles has only one projector, so the reel-change requires a long intermission, including reel-rewind. Charles bakes brownies, something to serve to his patrons during the unavoidable break. We can all smell Charles’s brownies baking during Reel One. Then comes intermission. All stand around out front and eat his hot brownies, while Charles, behind his velvet curtain, rewinds the first reel and threads the leader of Reel Two into the sprockets.
Charles’s big interest, personally, is in short subjects. He is a connoisseur and archivist of cartoons, public-service spots, newsreels. So the audience must be patient with his opening lecture about the provenance and significance of the Loony Tune were about to see, before the feature. He stands in front of the screen as he lectures, in his characteristic twilight wringing his hands with ardor for his subject.

* * * *

End of day. Out on our road, as I drove by in dusk coming home, two vultures were taking turns, pecking in the now-famous little carcass at the roadside. Early dark of winter days. Cold. I use old Squaw submissions as tinder for the stove.
(Something like a “rush hour” is audible these days, from the direction of Highway 49, now that Erikson Lumber has been selling off parcels on its tracts for development.)
On the deck railing, a plate holds rainwater and one bloated pizza crust: Brett’s yeasty homemade pizza dough. Dew on the wheelchair, even this late in the day. Brett reports she thinks Barbara may have had yet another mini-stroke in the art gallery today after I left them: an awkward moment of listlessness. However, she smiles symmetrically. Lifts her two arms symmetrically. Knows who the President is. She’s fine. At 87, as charismatic as ever, if still inconsolably sad.
As I came up the driveway, Cavendish’s truck stood parked in the grass. Cavendish has gone in hospital today for a routine colonoscopy involving anaesthesia. But he is still living primitively out in the river canyon, so has asked if he may convalesce here at our house for one night. It’s a privilege: to serve as a lamp by the side of the road. He arrives, post-colonoscopy, looking debonair as ever, looking as usual like Andrew Jackson on the Twenty. At dinner he is very knowledgeable and informative about polyps, villi and microvilli, lipid metabolism, bile. For Dash’s entertainment, Cavendish has a joke:

“Why don’t wild animals eat clowns?” he asks Dash, and immediately tells him, “Because they taste funny!” causing delight in Dash.

Barbara across from him in candlelight, digging her way through her polenta, chuckles grimly to herself and remarks, “Hm. We should’ve thought of that.”

* * * *

In comparison to my solar panels, my clothesline uses photons with maximum efficiency. And with the lowest-tech implements: string and clothespins.
[I continue to indulge these clothesline remarks because the clothesline is such a happy emblem of everything we’re in for. As we’ve, quite justly, exported our so-called “middle class” overseas, we will import a straitened wise frugality from the peasant villages of Mexico and China and Nigeria. This is all for the good. This is all wonderful.]

* * * *

Another sweetheart: Dead salmon lay on its side under two feet of swift clear water, thick-as-my-calf, long-as-my-arm, on the underwater cobbles, its black parchment fishskin fluttering in the current, lifting away in squares, its eye sockets filled with white sauce, its whole surface shivering in the current, fragile from putrefaction

* * * *

Big epiphany: I don’t need, anymore, to practice my fond old superstitions. (penny discoveries; the recurrence of 11:17 on clock faces; my lucky coffee mug; etc.)

Here is why superstitious practices are fallacious: they are premissed on the notion that I have any desires.  Or that is, desires whose consequences I can intend and prefer.
Therein lies the traditional “error” of the astrological chart, the rabbit’s foot, the horseshoe, the burnt offering, the found clover-leaf. The problem is not that superstitions are an “idolatry.” (Such is the childish objection: that one seems to be “worshipping another or false god” – the god of pennies – or the leprechauns.) Rather the good-luck ritual involves the mistake that I might, wisely, want anything at all.

* * * *

ON SUPERSTITION: The Father of the Uncertainty Principle

The physicist Niels Bohr, as an old man, had retired to his cabin on a fjord. But he was sought out by an interviewer. The interviewer asked about the lucky horseshoe nailed over the cabin door. “You’re a scientist. Surely you don’t believe in that stuff.”
Bohr’s actual response. “Oh, no, I don’t believe in it, but that’s the kind of thing that works whether you believe in it or not.”

* * * *

March, 2010.
Got unstuck with my L.A. 1946 novel. Featureless characters finally showed themselves.
The arbitrariness of the process: All I needed to do was be brave and sketch on an eyebrow. Then the one little creature started provoking the others. The eyebrow was what started it.

* * * *

March. Two feet of snow in a single night. Up at 8000 feet they’ll have more than three feet.
Cavendish showed up, in his tall battered truck, and we added to the spaghetti.

* * * *

When, as a young man in the 1960’s, Cavendish left school and “came back West,” it was to come to Relief Hill, a remote inaccessible spot on the Ridge, once a mining encampment, where his family had owned, but at some point sold off, a tract of land with some empty cabins. He and a gang of friends rented those cabins back from the new owners – this is after Woodstock, after the protests, after VISTA in Philadelphia, after Chicago, after cab-driving in NYC. The particular virtue of the Relief Hill place, the thing he’d come back for, was the spring under the live-oak, whose water was sweet and abundant and dependable. Tonight here, by candlelight, taking refuge here from his unheated, snowbound trailer in the unfenced canyon, he boasted that the watercress around that spring was so lush, it was a great bog of watercress as big as this room (swinging an arm). He says some day when the roads are clear he’ll show me Relief Hill.

* * * *

March 23,24. Snow continues.
Buckets of muddy water, to refill the toilet tank. (The electricity at the pumphouse is out.) Nobody’s been to Trader Joe’s lately, so we’ll be getting into the better-than-usual wine. Silently the flakes, big-as-moths, seek earth and stay. Everywhere else, the Dow and the Nasdaq will take care of themselves.

* * * *

Spring, 2010 (SAN FRANCISCO) –
Driving the pickup truck out Lombard toward the GG Bridge and out of town, I’m carrying funereally the last dust of Oakley’s small empire, plaster-chunks, painting debris, rotten splintery lath, carpet tacks, the carpetpad-sponge’s stale toasty-orange dust-crumbs, the whole heap under a lashed-down remnant of carpet. It’s been two years since his death; and Brett and I spent this week working, clearing out his old office in Macondray Lane. Today that little room has two fresh coats of paint, of a shade commercially called linen. Freshly assembled furniture that was purchased by clicking on an “Add-To-My-Cart” button.
The room feels bigger now. One thing you miss about a man when he’s gone for good: everything he knew. (That he knew what a “shibboleth” is; or a decent restaurant in Reno; or Bob Dylan’s real name; that he knew Henry James’s invidious remark about the size of Wharton’s advances; that he knew what an “objective correlative” is; that he knew the point-of-view tricks in Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” and Miriam Makeba, and Keith Richards’s solo albums, and the treacherous coast road to Hana; that he knew the clever left-turn strategy off Newport Boulevard; that he knew how to be patient and forgiving.) All of it is gone, gone with him. “Everything he knows” is an element essential to a man, more essential than the heartbeat, or the 98.6 F degrees, or the characteristic smell, or the misshapen old chair, or the Subaru that went to Tracy and lives now in Arizona. Everything a man knows is a quantity hard to enclose. It’s a vanished, immense, galactic genome. Twenty-five boxes of books came out of that cramped room, freckled with mold, histories of San Francisco and the West, accounts of the Mormon migration, cowboy tales, biographies of eminent Californians, the Iliad and Parsifal, John Wesley Powell, “Men to Match My Mountains,” Wallace Stegner, Ambrose Bierce, “Champagne Days of San Francisco,” “Resumés of the Great Operas,” maps of European and Mexican towns, books by his old friends whom nobody would find collectible anymore, gold-rush anecdotes and accounts of the Dakota range-wars, all the scholarship of a serious writer of historicals and westerns. On Lombard Street, afternoon traffic is fast and orderly, and my heavy-laden pickup truck fits into the flow. Near the GG Bridge ramp-up, among motels and tourist-seafood dens, a towering billboard displays a photograph of a baby, a gigantic beautiful infant girl, rosy and alert and warm, with the message (the work of a pro-life group): “HEARTBEAT: THREE WEEKS AFTER CONCEPTION.”

* * * *

April 15, 2:30 am: A late spring frost. The temperature has been sinking all night, while outside, the pear and apple and peach blossoms are at their most vulnerable. This year I pruned and composted them and hung out pheromonal traps for coddling moths with particular care. Now that we have a heavy-duty centrifugal juicer, I’d planned on actually trying to have a big harvest of cider this year.
4:00 am: Found a website at a Michigan State ag school with a chart showing “critical minimum” temperatures for fruit trees at various stages of bud or blossom at risk of frost damage. The lowest among the various categories is 27 degrees. Now already tonight, the temperature has hit 24, and still sinking.

* * * *

In my fifties.
How I’m a hobo. How I practice my so-called “hunter-gatherer” lifestyle, bringing in only occasional trophies, but mostly depend on my wife, her good will in the world, her steady work. Old story: poor boy marries classy girl. Brett’s father was always a good breadwinner (and as for good will in the world, he had a vast network of it). He always had a great-paying job. Barbara never did work. So Brett has no experience of improvident males but yet is patient and forbearing and quite non-judgmental and also (here’s the thing) unfailingly joyful.

* * * *

Have located a hand-crank coffee grinder ($4.50, at a Goodwill in China Basin). Little wooden drawer below with dovetailed joinery. An S-curve in the wrought iron crank handle, with porcelain knob. Not only for power outages, but for the practice of ever-more-perfect Environmentalist Kashrut/Sharia. (In case I ever get serious about that.)  (It’s extremely slow in creating its black powder in the drawer.)

* * * *

May 10, 2010

Winter’s gone. Balmy days. Nico and Aleksandra are living in Dash’s old playroom, trying to get a foothold and green-card legitimacy. They’ve displaced Cavendish, who has gone back to his blind. But he’s obliged to come out of the woods every day, dressed and groomed, because he is providing his technical help to an amateur Sondheim production in Grass Valley.
So. Displaced from his bedroom here, what does Cavendish do for his dinners? A Grass Valley supermarket has a “Deli Café” which offers, among the buffalo wings and macaroni salad, two soups du jour, plus chili, in lidded stainless-steel dispensaries. The place also provides wireless internet, so he can labor over his magnificent emails in the evenings. And his appraisal of the chili is: “It’s dependable.” He was sighted this week at one of those Fiberglas-resin picnic-table benches out in front of the place, working at his muddy old Apple Powerbook in the twilight, beside an untouched paper bowl of chili – but dozing over his laptop – his forehead coming to rest at last in the keyboard. At this point Cavendish is approaching seventy, though wiry and tireless, and is pretty-much famous in this town.
Then, yesterday we were having a party here, and he showed up. He carried a supermarket bouquet (awarded to Brett as hostess), and a potted supermarket orchid (for the Mother Superior, Barbara, as it was Mother’s Day) and took sovereignty of his end of the table, full of happy boasting about Sondheim, interviewing his table-mate neighbors in his usual way, condemning as crap the wine we serve here chez Jones and recommending highly, instead, the bottle Sands had brought, making observations about Sondheim’s use of the story structures of fairy tales, even the grisly, gory old chestnuts. The fairy tale, Cavendish says, is all the education we need, as preparation for life. Call kids home from their colleges, retire the liberal arts and sciences, put away the Torah and the catechism and the 3 R’s, and just study fairy tales, squeeze those little turnips for their drops of blood.

* * * *

With Aleksandra here from Krakow, we get a break from my cuisine. Beets and potatoes and cabbage. Bitter rye bread. Mysterious tall ceramic jars with fermenting, souring processes going on. She puts on an apron, ties back her hair.
She immediately took to the garden, too, having arrived at the right moment of spring. On the window sills stand old egg-cartons, each carton containing a dozen dollops of black soil, with sprouts expected, destined to be cucumbers, expected in turn to become pickles.

* * * *

June 6, 2010

A few little teleological observations (occasioned by the wedding, here at home, of Nico and Aleksandra):
We mortals believe that our deeds have (A) discernible origins and (B) discernible consequences. That is, our actions have “causes” in the past and “results” in the future. It’s how we feel anyway. We feel that we are enmeshed in a teleological (cause-effect) net.
But truly, moment-to-moment, our “consciousness” – our intentionality – is in fact a chip tossing in choppy currents, deep oceans, our consciousness just a sequin of reflected light on the surface. Our so-called “reasons” swell and press from outside ourselves. Likewise, the inward “intentions” of our actions are flooded and swamped by creative accident. Many “ad”-ventitious “ac”-cidents were actually born inside ourselves. And grew inside ourselves. We have only a deluded grasp on the causing reasons and caused results of all our deeds. And so we ought to relax. Each of us is an apple hanging on a tree. It’s easy to fulfill one’s appleness.

* * * *

The veg. garden’s elaborate Maginot Line to defend against gophers: galvanized mesh is buried three feet underground, ringing the vegetable garden. However, I seem to have walled in at least one gopher, who now lives there, in gopher heaven, dining on the most succulent roots, fresh ones continually transplanted there for his delectation. Brett takes comic pleasure in this fiasco, while I begin to see real insolvency in all my operations.

* * * *

Couplings for 1” poly-pipe
Hose clips
Patch copper feeder tube: evaporative cooler
Insect repellent

* * * *

Now a plague of drowned mice in the irrigation system. They pop out slick and bloated at the lower gate in system-flush. Or they meet their end as paté grotesque, squashed into sprinkler head, or hose-bib valve.
So I hiked up to the weir and found somebody had left the springbox’s iron lid up. I closed it over and weighted it down with a big stone.

* * * *

Yesterday: a great day. The mysterious irrigation clog has been cleared.
For all the winter months, seeing summer coming, I’d lain awake nights, with Job-like considerations of what would happen to this place without irrigation-district water. (We’ve still got our pumphouse, for drinking and bathing. The irrigation is what’s been broken.)
It was the fire department that unclogged it. Guys from the Coyote Street stationhouse actually came out here, as if they didn’t have anything better to do on a Saturday afternoon [station captain’s response in phone call: “Well, sure, we can be there in ten minutes or so, barring an emergency”], in their big truck, hopping down and setting tire-blocks routinely under the wheels, and they unrolled their 130-psi hose, of grey fabric folded-flat, extending a quarter-mile up the hill, and they blasted the clog uphill along a quarter-mile stretch of pipe, firing brown water out the top end. Then we all stood around and watched while, in the old dry hole in the dirt downhill, clear water welled, and spilled over, and started running downhill in the dust.

* * * *

June 1st
Gutter repair. Replant ruined tomatoes. New tires for Hunter’s car. Spray all buildings’ foundations with Diazinon solution. Start up irrigation to see what leaks. Sort among my kindling-pile like Croesus, restacking it.
Diazinon has been long-since taken off the market by the EPA, but I’m using up this old brown-glass bottle, bequeathed by George and Ginny, from the cabinet in the potting shed. (I just have to keep it nowhere near meadows or gardens.)
(Regret not having sprayed pears and peaches with dormant solution, as now leaf-curl and canker are attacking leaves.)

* * * *

Sands is back from her teaching job, so Cavendish has moved to her place for his pied a terre, in her spare room among stacks of fileboxes. Staying in town saves him the long trip on dirt roads at night, to his deep forest fastness. (At least you’re not sleeping under the Pine Street Bridge, we josh him. Pine Street Bridge is where the orphaned, feral hippie kids from the Ridge sleep.)

Night before last, Sands called from the emergency-room to say she couldn’t come to our little dinner get-together, because Cavendish had showed up at her door in convulsive pain after a closing-show cast party. Had to be driven in there, vomiting, worrying. She had already spent some hours in the waiting room – no doubt editing some client’s novel, manuscript on her knee, cell phone at her side.
Kidney stones were suspected, but he was sent away with a handful of antibiotics and painkillers. Has no insurance, of course. Hasn’t had insurance since he dropped out of Yale forty years ago and went to Woodstock. Was put to bed among Sands’s cardboard fileboxes. Maybe it’s just a urinary-tract infection.
So yesterday I emailed Sands to ask after him.  Received this response from her:

He arrived at 6 this morning saying he was almost out of gas (he meant the truck) and didn’t think he’d get home. He’d been striking the “Fantasticks” set all day/night. He’s currently asleep in the guest room. I was awake when he rolled in—he seemed in good spirits.

* * * *

June 13, annual Meadow Party, the music fizzles early, but the food is plentiful, the summer air warm, the little kids rage in the dark woods all night unsupervised, far from the bonfire, with their glowsticks, like goblins. Amy Tan has brought an ipod containing reproductions of birdcalls, and the following morning she has set it up behind the cottage, driving local birds to confusion, sending amplified calls into the trees. David Lukas arrived with large pail full of morels he found around the North Fork of the Yuba. One day later, linguini for twelve, ON MY NEW BRICK FLOOR.

* * * *

June 16, 2010, move to Squaw for the summer.
Snow still in hard drifts at elev 6200ft on mountains’ north slopes. The creek thunders all night long. The paths up the creek are strewn with snowload-felled trees.

* * * *

June 22, 2010

Structure repairs at elev 6200ft. It’s been an unusually stormy Sierra winter. Wrought-iron raillings have been bent under the creep of glacial snow load. Bears, during the depths of winter, have been unseen and unheard-of. A sheet of blown-away plywood lies on our hillside. In the valley meadow: the chickadee’s chirrrrr.
On the house, structural wood after sixty-one years has been shrinking. It starts losing its grip on the old hardware. However, during the same sixty-one years (esp. on the south- and west-facing exterior walls), the beauty of unpainted redwood’s grain intensifies, a red-golden toasty corduroy, a woodgrain big-as-matchsticks, scorched in the grooves, radiant-blushing from the many sunsets it has faced down.
So the good-as-new old brass screws lose their grip in the wood – on, say shutter hinges and door hinges. And I think of Oakley on these summer afternoons as I work, slot-head screwdriver in hand, brown paper bag of shiny new brass screws by my knee. Oakley used to say with a chuckle wherein all mortality and futility are foreseen, “You just keep putting in longer screws.”

* * * *

6-21-10 – My agent calls with good news. Counterpoint Press, hardcover, lead title on spring list. This agent, of lo these twenty years, her patience and forgiveness make me think of some “Higher Power,” or is that just her?

* * * *

Barbara. Her pacemaker operation and her stroke are falling behind her into history, and she shows all the old wit at dinner with old friends. Even a new aloneness in the world is a stole one can wear with a noble bearing.

* * * *

End of June, 2010. Hunter and Nico tear down the old shed on the south side of the upper house. Little pre-fab cedar barn, a kit, purchased no doubt from some hardware store’s parking lot. Crappy two-by-two construction, staple-fastened, the whole structure goes down in a single morning under their blows. Suddenly the view of Granite Chief returns, and Squaw Peak returns, because of course they’ve been there the whole time.

* * * *

That “Just keep putting in longer screws” joke was, on the irony scale, exactly like Oakley’s similar remark about a novelist sustaining his career over the years: “Just lower your standards and keep on going,” he liked to say. (But the irony there isn’t quite as darkly acquainted with the deep full, liberating ocean of futility and mortality. Because I really think he half meant it! So it would have been a kind of despair.)

* * * *

On the topic of the big anti-abortion billboard in SFO proclaiming the heartbeats of embryos. (Which has been on my mind.)  ——–  It guess it’s an irrelevant consideration (but an interesting fact) that the embryonic heartbeat is, strictly speaking, a half-heartbeat. In utero, only two heart chambers pump blood, not the full complement of four chambers. Until it’s born and takes its first gasp, a fetus’s lungs are collapsed, as is half of the heart. So that little heart is a prototype engine.

(Something pro-life billboard makers perhaps ought to be told, in case it influences their view.)
[Liberal tho’ I am, I find it hard to be entirely unsympathetic to “pro-lifers.” If you really believed that our louche society casually murders unborn babies en masse, then it makes sense that you might be alarmed as we think the average German citizen ought to have been, during the days when people were being removed to death camps systematically, rationally, deliberately, discreetly, hygienically.]

* * * *

Suppose you want to suggest that a fetus isn’t “alive” yet — because it isn’t really human until it’s conscious. Or aware.  You want to say that “conscious awareness” is what’s lacking in a fetus. The thing will continue to be only like a sort of unconscious kidney, or abscess, or loaf, until it is “breathed-into” by enlightenment, filled with ideas and perceptions.

Well, if you define the beginning of life as “consciousness” or “awareness,” then the larger question, is: Did Life Ever Begin?

Has It Begun Yet?

* * * *

Who among us (whether born or about-to-be-born) is worthy of preservation, if we accept that “un-consciousness is characteristic of sub-humanity?”
I, for example, personally, travel around inside a blinding, deafening, numbing storm of delusion-solipsism-lust-gluttony-sloth-envy-pride (et cetera). Immediate “Actuality” is something I’m seldom (or, of course, never) in touch with. The Buddhists would say I am in ignorance The old Christians would say I am in sin, as a measure of my distance from Truth.

In any case, I’m not sure I exactly possess “awareness.”

(Human “awareness” and “cognition”  might be a merely social phenomenon that accrues, and a semiotic phenomenon, a constant burble, compounded of inward language-rules and outward social conventions.)

* * * *

June in Squaw. The book biz.
Pulled out an old novel from the Annex bookshelves, and wow. The first chapter, at least, announces a great writer: Sara Vogan: her 1981 novel “In Shelley’s Leg.”
According to the jacket copy she was (in 1981) teaching creative writing in Milwaukee.
Only a few pages in, I want to send her a note of admiration – if the rest of the book can carry on like this, there’s another really good novelist in my generation. Or send a note to her agent, to be forwarded.
So I Googled her name. The first two “hits” on Google were, of course, younger, newer Sara Vogans on Facebook, but the third one read: “Sara Vogan, 43, Dies – Novelist and Teacher – Obituary – NyTimes.com”
The dateline on the story was 1991, ten years after In Shelley’s Leg was published. She “was found dead, at her home in San Francisco. There were no immediate survivors.” Cause of death had not been released pending coroner’s toxicology report.

* * * *

Sleepless night. Awake at 3 am, orbiting the lower rooms in my stocking feet, not orbiting near the scotch bottle, which never has been much of a temptation anyway, and doesn’t allay sleeplessness — I bring up on my computer the 24-hr webcam in NYC at 43rd and Broadway. I love this thing, this NYC webcam, and visit it often, mostly at ungodly hours. Watching New Yorkers.  In pewter streetlamp glow, they walk past a USA Today dispenser box (some striding, some ambling: it’s six am there).

Ding: in my email stack is another MyLife Search Alert arrives: “I’m looking for Louis Jones,” reads the subject line.
One keeps getting these things, tho’ one belongs to no social networking site. The person searching for Louis Jones, intended to tantalize me, is described in the email as a 28-yr-old female in Flushing, Minnesota.

* * * *

June, 2010.
For Barbara, at her age now, just to get up out of a chair and cross a room is an adventure requiring courage and strategy and resolve, as well as a clear prevision of wreck. I compare her tribulations – pains, embarrassments and inconveniences and darkest perplexity, and the prospect of good-old death always ahead – with ten-year-old Dashiell’s tribulations (we tend to forget the miseries and anguishes of children, for whom the prospect of life looms ahead; which, too, is a “room” to be crossed at peril). And I’m frankly not entirely sure which form of tribulations I’d pick for myself, if I had a choice.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

* * * *

July 18, 2010. Squaw Valley.
Poets are in the valley. Hunter and Zoey, as poetry elves, must wake at 7:15 for Xeroxing. It’s fine to see them, way before their usual rising time, a pair of 19-yr-olds sleepily trudging with coffee-cups to the car.
I’ve ordered two cords of firewood (at inflated mountaintop prices; but they’re full, unstinted cords), which yesterday were dumped off the bed of a truck.

In the afternoon Tad and Andrew and I set up the usual bucket-brigade-style system of transporting it all, by tosses, to the shelter of the deck to be stacked. If you’re the man on the catching end, you have to look lively or you’ll get a log in the belly, or in the back. After an hour of repetitious work, conversation takes on a different pace and protocol. Longer uninterrupted speeches. Longer intervening silences.

* * * *

7-23-2010.
The usual annual party tonight for eighty visiting poetry devotees. Right now it’s two o’clock on a hot afternoon (I am in the cold shade of the basement), and party preparations are stopped till five, by Sands’s decree

In the high Sierra, one may lay out outdoor place settings only partway. During the afternoon, wax candles will slump, and stemmed glasses might possibly set tableclothes on fire by focusing sunlight, burning holes. I saw it happen once. A smoldering at my elbow.

* * * *

The book business transmits Gossip with orgasmic immediacy. For some reason I particularly am entrusted with all such reports whispered with level Schadenfreude, so I find I’ve become, in my 170-lb frame, a treasury of atrocious information about famous or beloved people. I don’t even tell my wife. All the most appalling news of the celebrities, I’m a graveyard for it. The Talmudic tradition: Gossip is murder.

* * * *

2-8-10
Whatever all this is, none of us will ever have the slightest “understanding” of it, though we are in constant uninterrupted contact with all its voltage every instant. Fascinating predicament. Absolutely fascinating.
Coming up from the mailbox in the cold February sun. Lots of heavy, glossy magazines for Barbara. (Or for Barbara’s demographic):

LifeExtension Magazine: Is Your CoQ10 Obsolete?
Increase Mitochondrial Support with a Newly Formulated CoQ10 – Now with Shilajit!

On a telephone pole down the road, an unusual woodpecker (perhaps an intruding species) taps with a rapid rhythm accelerating the decomposition of that particular telephone pole.

* * * *

February 1, 2010

Found some bricks! On the Ridge across the river, the gold-mining enterprises left behind a brick mansion which today is in ruin. Vigorous cedars stand in its center. Bricks can be dug out of the forest soil, to come here and pave a footpath I’m building. Irregular, manufactured on-site in 19th C., fired in Chinese-built kilns at the riverside.  Now 100 yrs later, they’re eroded in little loaves, muffin-textured, they’ll be tender under bare feet.
The forgetful, unlettered West. Memory persists in mute artifacts. I built the bookshelves in the mud room out of old three-by-eight timbers from the falling-down barn at the end of Cement Hill Road where the legendary Antonio used to sit and drink red wine, contemplating his one beloved cow, dreaming of Jalisco and Sinaloa. (Whence finally he vanished again.)

* * * *
This week at A.P.P.L.E. (Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy) Neighborhood Readiness workshops are being offered, teaching “easy low-cost ways to package bulk foods in nitrogen at home,” so that when the peak-oil apocalypse arrives, we in the mountains will still eat.

* * * *

Tad’s Stocking-Cap Takes Shape
Brett has been knitting a stocking-cap for Tad. He’s living in Albany, where it’s cold, under the care of his new woman, no doubt chain-smoking, talking brilliantly, happily, at leisure all day every day. (Tho’ his old translation of a Jarry play will be performed! By a puppet theatre-troupe in Albany!)
It turns out the stocking-cap Brett has been knitting was emerging as a Möbius strip. (This can happen easily to an amateur knitter. It happens through an error in the first row.) So she’s going to pull out all her stitches.
But I wish she’d send it to him as it is. Because Tad would get it, and he’d love a Möbius-strip hat, possibly somehow wear it.

* * * *
From the novel:
“Fundamentally everybody always knows everything: it’s a basic working principle of society: everybody knows literally everything and instead there are just layers of self-deception.”

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January 24, 2010.

With bad weather now upon us, Cavendish seems to be taking up permanent residence. (The plaid fold-out couch in Dash’s playroom, on the NE corner first floor.)
Beside his bed, his scarred muddy laptop and his boxed “household gods”: books and magazines, vegetable oil, flashlight, pancake mix, potato chips, old rusty chrome ratchet-and-socket set, whole-wheat Fig Newtons, duffelbag – all are stacked up before the drawers of Legos, Tinker Toys.

His large, long shoes by the kitchen door, with their associated puddle. His health drink in the fridge. His different (better!) brand of coffee beans. His question at the cupboard Where does this go? His dependable yeomanly contributions of cottage cheese, wine. He makes a trip out for potable water in this power-outage emergency.

I ran into him tonight in town. Before the little David Lindley concert, I’d stopped at a café on Broad Street where Luke and Maggie have a regular dinner-music gig – and there was Cavendish at the counter, wearing heavily swagged scarf and tam-o’-shanter beret. Picture Andrew Jackson in tam-o’-shanter. (Or Samuel Beckett, more like.) He took the stage for a while. It seems to be the season of Robert Burns’s birthday, and Cavendish “Can Sometimes Be Prevailed Upon” to recite Burns’s poems. Which he’s committed to memory and delivers in an astringent Scottish burr.

The “wee sleekit tim’rous cow’rin” mousie made his appearance, and also a fine poem – “An’ a’ that” – about the dignity of the lowly common fellow compared with the transparent tinsel vanity of the superior folk. People, to applaud, put down their knives and forks. He lifts his arms in a harp-shape at the end of a poem, presses one heel into the other foot’s instep.

Much later that night I’m home from the David Lindley show and Cavendish is still up. He says he’s had “a transcendent evening.” Around the corner from the café, they’d all gone to Friar Tucks, he and the musicians. There, he was again prevailed upon to recite (this time the entire long one about the Cutty-sark, which he’s got by heart), and the very old scotch whiskey was brought down and passed around in salute to the great soul Robbie Burns.

(It’s true. There aren’t many great souls that pass among us. Burns was one. Cavendish another.)
Time for bed. Time for Cavendish to go to work on his laptop all nite composing emails. Time for me to join Brett in the cottage, where she’s keeping her mother company. Cavendish says goodnight, but he has to pee first, and heads out the backdoor into the storm. I tell him, “Wait, the power is on. The pump is working. You can use the toilet.” But he says no, he prefers peeing outside. Always has. More environmental.

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http://louisbjones.com/2010/11/10/more-of-the-same/