Postmark

~
The benches here are made
of redwood. Pedestrians
are always gullible, yet here
they were suspecting faces.
It's much too cold for June.

It doesn't matter
which of these words
the postmark will obscure
or whether I was here at all;

without your chaste responses
and golden streak of hair
I observe nothing, only absence.

—JM, Stanford, California, June 1, 1983
~

Its own reward

n hot weekends, I retreat to the garden. The garden is out, down, around, down some more, and back. I don't want to make more of it than it is, but it has been a satisfying creation over the years. When we came here, there was nothing but dirt, excepting the walnut tree. g Growing a garden from scratch is the closest activity I know to writing a novel. What luck in life to have been able to write novels and grow gardens! g I used to read anywhere, everywhere; now I mostly read in the garden. I take mere pages at a time, do something else, take a few more. Last week, it was Henry Miller on Writing and the collected works of St. John of the Cross. g Miller always says something that is curiously both remarkable and forgettable. Last week, he caught my eye with this: In one of his essays D.H. Lawrence pointed out that there were two great modes of life, the religious and the sexual—the former taking precedence over the latter. The sexual was the lesser way towards salvation he said. I would not even say there were two ways. To me it seems that there is only one great way and that is the way of truth. g Remarkable and forgettable. The observation is stunning but the addition of truth into the mix is simply gratuitous, and ultimately forgettable. You need to keep re-reading Miller not because he is valuable to re-read, but because his energy is naked writing energy; it is like listening to a favorite performance of a favored musical piece once a year or so. He says writing is its own reward and it is. g He's the spiritual touchstone of Durrell, with whom he corresponded extensively (another book to read this summer? I remember being a student at UCLA when the correspondence was published—I think either both men or one were nude on the cover, crawling on rocks at the sea—but I didn't pick it up). Durrell is somewhat like this too, someone to return to over and over, for the energy, and I do; I also read some of Mountolive this week. But poetic language is language made memorable, and you don't forget Durrell as readily as you forget—and therefore continue to reacquaint yourself with—Miller. g The religious and the sexual: I had Miller and St. John of the Cross. I don't have much to say about St. John of the Cross. The poems are magnificent but they are poems, and nearly his whole work explicates his own poems, either directly or indirectly. Beyond a Saint he is a writer first and foremost, and his diagram of Mt. Carmel is astonishing for its pragmatism. For St. John of the Cross, a contemplative discalced Carmelite, writing is also its own reward. As is any garden, one element of life safely preserved from status.,

Summer Reading

~
he thoughts about books you have right now, mid May, will likely inform your reading list for the summer. g I am about to commence Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (better in German: Macht und Masse), a book I've been meaning to read for about thirty years. I began Auto-da-Fé last week. Crowds and Power has always impressed me as a sui generis, as Canetti was himself. I think I will also explore Nancy Huston, another sui generis (how many can there be if they are one of a kind?) and if her then why not her husband Tzvetan, and by extension an excursion, into Cazotte, the way one goes to Sade after Barthes. That's a fair reading list already. Consciousness of Lifestage: what I read in my fifties will have to have some practical application to my vocation. How many more years will my vocation last? g Maybe twenty or twenty-five if I'm lucky. If I'm lucky I'll read a hundred or so good books in that time. I'll pick up and put down a dozen times that I'm sure. At fifty, people start to either cement the real plans (the ones that don't involve ego) for their lives, or they start to settle for something comfortably numbing. g Though of course I regret nothing. And today as I pounded more edits to the novel I wrote last summer, I took a look at the correspondence on which it is based, and still know nothing about what really happened. g It was terrible to live through; maybe terrible to live through is a good prep for Cazotte–indeed, Silver Strand even told me that the woman looked like the Devil, and once you see the foto, everyone agrees, everyone except those who think we can fight evil with superior numbers of good, and I would like to be among these but I have a hangover of faith from my days in the Drunken Old World, the most recent repealing of which came a scant eight days ago. Eight days of auto-prohibition! g "Don't we want the devil?" Silver Strand added hastily later, and I agreed, but also what we want always is to learn something, to wit, something transformational, a conversion story; to wit, a story, a story magically fictive enough to be a real one, and if five and a half months of chemo is not a conversion story, to wit, a real one, then nothing is. g For it is well known that acting as a man in love, you become a man in love. Hallmark Mother's Day is always marketing-awful enough–we see the world we live in, right? is it not at least to some degree the consequence of mothers and mothering?–and I mean that in the sense that mothering can be practiced by male and female–but what a Swiss and English day this is, so gray and so cold for May, such a sui generis of a day, as they all are, as all books are, to contemplate reading Canetti.

Champagne brunch

J. Regardie, Lynn at Brunch, 5.4.08

The Red Balloon

JM, The Red Balloon, 4.30.08

Yesterday, walking up Scott Street, this red balloon fairly followed me for a block, exactly as in the children's classic of the same name. The red balloon was dying---it had dropped altitude recently---but it still had some life left, enough to follow the wind that carried me up the hill.

Today I was a guest on KCRW and having fun. I called in from Forest Lawn Glendale, and parked there. I figured a cemetary is quiet; and I liked the idea of calling in from inside my car, with the sunroof open, parked. The reception isn't good up there, but what the hell. When I got home and listened later, I heard a couple of dead spots, and wondered if they were the station's fault or mine. It didn't matter much, because Jack Kyser took up so much time anyway.

The red balloon is haunting. How long does it follow you? It is a shock when it follows you at all. Maybe this has happened a few times in my life before, maybe it hasn't. It sure has felt like it has, however. It feels like it happens once every decade.

The new blog I'm doing, street-hassle, is not yet a month old, but these days I'm putting all my best photography there. They mentioned it on the air. Five years ago, I would have corrected the host if he got the name wrong. Today, I just let it happen, indifferent, and the station re-taped the part where they mentioned the blog and got it right anyway. Not to say anything, and have it happen anyway: that felt like wisdom.

But I've learned in the past year that wisdom is simply what we call it when we're too tired to chase. I even wrote a poem about it a little before turning 50.

Non disputandum

JM, Tiffany, 4.24.08

Tiffany is one of my favorite roses.

A favorite essay: Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero.

A favorite history: Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence.

A favorite detective show: Inspector Morse.

A favorite spy novel: Smiley's People.

A favorite sequence of English language novels: The Alexandria Quartet.

A favorite collection of essays: Paul Fussell, Abroad.

A favorite book for which there is no category: Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana.

A favorite beer: Modelo.

A favorite wine region: Bourgogne.

A favorite newspaper: The New York Times.

A favorite literary critic: George Steiner.

A favorite literary magazine: Granta.

A favorite composer or two: Mahler. Messiaen.

A favorite blog: Carver's Dog.

A favorite non-fiction book or two: Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus.

A favorite year: 1979.

A favorite season: summer.

De gustibus non disputandum.

an empty wind

JM, Coral tree, Vermont meridian, Griffith Park, 4.21.08

So I lost my anger, all of it; like a broken heart, it happens suddenly. You wake up one morning and it's healed and you look under your pillow wondering where it went. But it has been a good thing, this anger that has kept me marching for over a year; it made me more observant, more aware, maybe even more alive through times when sorrow often was the dominant emotion and I didn't feel alive at all.

We all get to spend our consciousness mostly in the way we like. A lot of people encounter problems when they wed their consciousness to specific results, like passing the bar or owning a home; as Sartre said, consciousness is an empty wind, blowing towards objects.

To spend consciousness on anger seems like a waste; peace and love, man. But anger is the most certain path to catharsis, to purgation, and after the purgation comes the beautiful time.

It's no less than walking out of the ocean: you were wet and in rushing water, for too long; then you got out, shook yourself like a setter, now you're dry in the warm air. The sand feels most comfortable of all after an exhausting swim.

Wincing

diagram of our rose garden from my garden journal (click to enlarge)

I was a judge at a high school journalism conference on Friday, and I enjoyed doing that, because for me it was a full-circle moment, having participated in so many of them when I was in high school myself. But what I wonder about is why more journalists aren't involved with these.

Some advisers (that's what they call the high school teachers who handle their school's newspapers) told me that the perception is that "professionals" are too hard on students. That doesn't sound right.

I was far harder on other judges, in fact, than on students, even though everyone was very nice to me. One told me she didn't read the LA Times---I couldn't understand that, even if, like I do, you don't like the direction of the paper and haven't for some time. I suppose I winced too visibly for comfort, and later came a correspondence at 3:51 a.m. seeking an apology.

When I was in college, my father even used to include the newspapers of the past week in my care packages. And I'm glad he did, because I got to follow most memorably writings on local architecture, and it was a key time in LA for developments such as the Pacific Design Center and also megastructure downtown. And Sunday without the New York Times was unthinkable.

I did apologize---it's easy to grab an apology from me---but I still don't understand being in journalism and not reading the local paper. This morning I was clicking around the local blogosphere and I just couldn't find anything nearly as interesting as most of the local newsprint news I found.

~~~

Yesterday Bill and Sherzad were over and I overcooked a lamb loin. I rarely make that kind of a mistake but I wasn't even thinking about the time. I have roasted so many chickens lately that as soon as sticking something in the roaster I automatically thought, "OK, I'll just check it in 45 minutes." So the lamb, which was just under two pounds (chickens are generally between three and four) ended up a little dry. Stupid mistake.

It disappeared anyway.

~~~

We are coming out of a time in which we fairly had some blinders on. Before Lynn's surgery there were people, places, issues; now, after six months of chemo, we're rediscovering these, sometimes joyfully, sometimes painfully. I still haven't set foot in a church---"Lynn didn't deserve this," I keep telling myself. Nobody does; so what's the point? The Pope visits America, it's Passover, etc. and I'm indifferent to all of it.

April, spring. Lynn is just starting to grow some hair again; the rose garden is full of blooms, but it pales next to the tense rebirth: from patient to survivor.

Beebe

Mr. Beebe has shuffled off his mortal coil.

Mr. Beebe was a foundling, found near Pico and Arlington in 1990. Do you remember where you were that summer?

Beebe soon grew adventurous and mischievous, always maintaining a poker face through his varied nettlesome antics. A calm cat, he rarely seemed surprised at anything, though he could grow quite indignant very suddently.

My own relationship to Beebe was tangential. He recognized me as a competitor, and usually walked away from me, though he maintained a circumspect eye on me. He seemed very satisfied that he had enough dander to make me take a pill whenever I was visiting.

The other notable cats in my life, notably MieMies (with whom I am pictured, in the sidebar) and Isabella (here seen drinking a margarita with me on her couch and here seen expecting a lamb lunch), are girls. Mr. Beebe was a tom and therefore more jealous than the others, but also less demanding. The relationship to Izzy in particular has grown a bit strained over the past few months, as she forgot my birthday. I never felt such emotions from Beebe.

At the time of Mr. Beebe's departure, I hadn't seen him in over a decade, and missed two opportunities last summer. One day I was on his block and looking at windows, but no Beebe.

So hug your cat. As Mr. Beebe's nearest relative once said, "They only break your heart in the end."

Mr. Beebe was a week shy of 18. He leaves behind a poetess on the Silver Strand.

Hiatus

JM, swordferns, 4.12.08

Roses at their apex. A good week for that. Unseasonably warm with spare spring shade; bagels, lox, cream cheese for breakfast; watching the Masters, in and out of the garden.

Where is everybody going? It's still impossible to know; it's always impossible to know. Consciousness is never tedious but sometimes it is a burden, especially when you're obliged to measure it in time, or measure it against a trapping. So many stories of so many people going badly all around; the economy is bad, the City is bad. A day like today though is a hiatus.

A severe episode of anger and suddenly I realize how I've been operating on an unnatural cycle of my own, of pain followed by anger, for well over six months. But pain goes away slowly, like a fog; anger, when it comes, it grows and then bursts, it's over, you wonder how you can freight it for so long. You never wonder that with pain.