Pond

~
You turtle, you
have nothing
to do
but
float.

At peace
drift from
shade to shade
pad to pad

finding food

The dragons fly
like spies.
They threaten--

we watch
as though
we were
at home.

--JM, San Marino, July 1980

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.