Dear diary,
A card was given to me by some religious missionaries: it has a picture on it which I assume illustrates a scene from one of their scriptures. I use it as a bookmark. To begin this entry, I placed the card on top of the cover of the D.H. Lawrence collection (which we recently finished) and photographed it; then I bisected the photo, giving it a line of space right thru its middle, to let it breathe.
Now I will begin to write in my diary.
Today I checked out some new books from the library. One is a biography of John Ashbery’s early life, titled after one of his poems: The Songs We Know Best. The book was written by Karin Roffman. Here is a fragment about the beliefs of Ashbery’s grandparents:
They believed in public school, shoveling one’s own driveway in the snow […], and Republican presidents. They were against the New Deal and “that man,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
I zoom in on this fragment because it caught my attention: its mentioning of FDR’s “New Deal” reminded me that I myself referred to the same [insert concise term for “series of programs”] in yesterday’s entry, and that simple act of matching – yes I know how silly-superstitious this sounds – sparked a boost in my self-esteem. For I thought: If my poet-hero’s grandparents can hold opinions about their government’s statesmen’s actions without lessening the appeal of their descendant’s poetic achievements, then a blogger won’t be ruined by one indiscretion.
That’s why I’m back here so quick after recently posting. The words I’m now writing are like dirt that I’m shoveling over my last entry to bury it. And that last entry is pretty long: it’s a mountain of words; therefore I’ll have to heap “millions of acres on it, till our ground, / singeing his pate against the burning zone, / make Ossa like a wart,” as Hamlet says (5.1.275).
No, I’m kidding: I’ll keep this entry short. I need to learn to be more… what’s the opposite of longwinded?
Anyway, so I’m reading this biography, and it’s talking about the early life of my poet. Now it doesn’t matter if this name John Ashbery is familiar to you or not, beloved diary; the thing that matters is that I, even I, love the fellow. (I take that phrasing from Isaiah 43:11, in the King James Bible: “I, even I, am Yahweh; and beside me there is no saviour.”) That’s why I call him MY poet; I actually own him. Seriously tho, we all have our idols. Mine is legion; Ashbery’s one: so when I read about him, the words mean a little more to me than if I were reading about, say, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. (Yesterday, before picking up the bio, I suffered thru a blog post by a prim & prudent scholar who was praising the writing style of a conservative judge. That’s why that example was on my mind.) What I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to share my taste in art to find interest in what I’m…
This morning I awoke at the crack of dawn and spent the next few hours reading about a young poet’s first attempts at keeping a diary. Examples of his earliest entries were provided. These excited my mind: they made me want to write some entries of my own. But the thing about a diary is that you only get to write in it once per day. Plus you must limit your focus to actual events that happen to you: you can’t just make stuff up. So if your life is dull, like mine, and you happen to write at a time when you’re uninspired, as I am doing now, the resultant entry will be a flop, and you’ll have no recourse to correct the mistake until tomorrow: you have to wait for a whole extra boring day to pass, before you get another stab at it. And, once that opportunity arrives, the pressure is on: so it’s an uphill battle.
That’s where I’m at, this instant. I want badly to write a good entry, detailing my adventures at sea. (Why the sea? Aside from allowing me to violate the “keep it real” rule of diary writing, clichés are in easy reach of lazy authors.) I want to say that I awoke on a beach with the sun blazing in my face; my ship had capsized! And when I stood up, immediately two tropical birds landed on my shoulders, a devil bird and an angel bird, and began squawking at me, advising me how to live my life: “Go to church tomorrow!” – “No, don’t go to church tomorrow!”
As I was in the middle of trying to scribble down those last thoughts, my biological mother sent me a text asking if I’d attend the holiday service with her and my sister. Hence the bird-dispute. Here I’ll quote her message verbatim, to add authenticity to this confession:
Hey Bryan, here’s my Christmas wish. I wish you would come to 4:00 church with Susan & me tomorrow. We can sit in the balcony or far in the back. It shouldn’t be crowded because so many people have quit our church because of dislike of Maria & Pastor Tim. Anyway, then we will all hear Tim’s message together & can talk about it without Susan & me trying to remember it to tell you about. Would you consider it?
This is my worst nightmare. I really hate church. But I said yes, because “Damn, braces: Bless relaxes.” (Remember I recently quoted this “Proverb of Hell” from William Blake.) So now I’m committed to attending a blah with some blahs. I cannot wait till I develop a spine. That’s my wish. My worm shall not die, and the fire shall never be quenched. (Mark 9:48) But at least it’s not spineless! For, if thy family offends thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than blah-blah-blah…
Every good journal entry must mention the weather. Or at least the temperature. So it’ll be minus ten degrees tomorrow, and we’re going to be sitting outside on bleachers, in stadium-seating pews, watching a guy toss darts at a bull for two hours. (By “toss darts” I mean sermonize; and by “bull” I mean God. —The insinuation is that the Deity does not like modern preachers.)
But the important thing is that the bull’s blood be captured in a sacrificial vessel, whose metal is both precious and fractured, so that it may easily shatter, and its contents can then spill freely over all… Thus the LORD gets blinded by the [words missing] which congeal into scales upon his eyes…
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken… Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
I’m tethering two stray Bible passages to the end here, as proof texts. The above was Ecclesiastes (12:6-7); and this is Exodus (24:8):
Then Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant, which the LORD hath made with you concerning all these words.
P.S.
Since I quoted my mom’s text message earlier, and my phone is still lying before me here on my mahogany writer’s desk, I might as well quote two more text messages before I sing off—oops, typo: sign off.
This is my answer to my boss, which I sent mere seconds ago… No, wait—first I’ll give my boss’s message, which I awoke to. Here he smarmily hints that I’m late for our weekly work-meeting:
I don’t remember if we said we were skipping this week on account of the Christian victory celebrations, but I am here and not celebrating today.
So I answered:
Good!! I’m free & eager not to celebrate! But my taxi’s behindhand; so I can only arrive by noon, and I must leave around five... As usual, I’ll text when we pass Oak St... Ho, ho, ho! Merry bank holiday (unpaid)!
And, to conclude, the following instant message was sent via phone circa 3 p.m. Thursday to my sister, who was born at almost exactly the same moment as her savior Jesus (tho a different year, of course – and I mean the Apostle Paul’s Jesus, not Saint Mark’s); due to which coincidence, every winter solstice, our family must clamber to differentiate the anniversaries of these respective scandals.
Hey I’m worried cuz I don’t want Xmas to overshadow your B-day; but in past years we’ve established special plans, whereas this year all anyone has talked about is gathering on the 25th. So I wonder where you’re at in your thoughts & prayers… If you wanna celebrate your holy day in any way, fancy or not, like skeet shooting (didn’t we go bowling one year?) or just visiting as old people do for an evening at home, I’m eager to make it happen (or at least to avoid ruining everything) – & yet I know you’ve been extremely busy lately, therefore feel no pressure; I just wanted at least to drop a line before all time drains away. Big blessings from brother Bryan.
5 comments:
I like this post a lot, although it's a little disappointing because I think you make a much better son and brother than me. I would've said no to the church thing. Any Christmas present but that! ahahh. BTW, I am really curious about what you do for a living. You don't have to tell me if you wish to keep that part of your life private, but my brain is swirling with possibilities.
O I’m glad that I come off like a good son & brother, but believe me I’m as much of a failure in those departments as I am in all the other realms of NORMALCY. Probably, without intending to do so, I excerpt only the best instances of my familial exchanges, which present me in the finest possible light – that’s, I argue, the privilege of an author; there’s enough that is thankless about our lonely writer’s task, so one fair reward we can nab for ourselves is the right to truth-bend. I don’t mean outright fabrication (tho I have nothing against that, either, now that I think of it!) – just a tweak here or there to correct reality; as Zarathustra always sez: to make time’s “it was” into “thus I willed it.” If you could see me in person when I interact with my mother & sister, you’d note myriad simmering undercurrents of tension; and you’d exclaim “Ah! I see Bryan isn’t exactly the saint that he paints himself as being… in fact, he’s kind of an asshole.” (Now I realize that I’m swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, to be self-deprecatory; I really hope that the ultimate truth, when it comes to kinfolk, is that I’m just a social klutz and pretty average.) …& YES you are right to say NO to church: Now that I’ve returned from my tribulation, I am in 100% agreement with you. I even told my mother & sister that I’m never setting foot in there again, that this year represents them spending their very last chance. I got pissed and berated them after the program – but it was only at the end of the night, when, after trying multiple times to “cash in” on my mom’s promise of a good conversation regarding the sermon, she reneged on her side of the deal. (In fairness, the Christmas eve “message” of her pastor was Hallmark-Card bland; so there wasn’t much anyone could say about it; BUT after decades in that church, she should have expected that, and I could tell that she and my sister were not even trying; & I had too much terror invested in attending the event to let them off the hook without a protest.) …& re careers, I always joke that I do nothing for a living, because one cannot LIVE on what I’m paid, but I make just enough to afford my square plot of city concrete, so I labor not for a living but for a suffering hahaha; seriously tho I work with an old friend whom I’ve known since high school, or rather he pays me to tag along in his burgeoning field, which is computer programming and consulting – this friend of mine is the one I call my “boss” in these diary pages: that’s why our clashes are usually on the casual side of business relationships – this friend of mine owns his own company, it’s just very very small, three employees including me (and I’m the least of them, more like a janitor of the programming realm than an actual programmer; it is rather like welfare for me: they pity me, so they let me do what I can; I’m like the member of the rock band that is utterly inessential or like a mascot)… [to be continued: I got the red alert TEXT TOO LONG warning…]
[2 of 2] …this company does consultation for various types of computer work… like, a mom-&-pop store will need a website built, or they want their website to have this or that functionality, they need some way of managing orders for their website, or they need a bunch of emails formatted, or etc. – just boring computer shit that everyone needs done but normal people don’t understand the programming side of… my friend/ boss is one of those guys who’s loved computers since back before the Internet was even a thing (I mean before it was popular with the masses), so he’s well-loved by every business that ends up contracting him; he’s built up a decent base of clients for this type of work, and he allows a lot of businesses to rely on him to fix or create cyber stuff for them, instead of having to employ a full-time I.T. guy, which most of the places couldn’t afford anyway… (forgive the longwinded explanation, but the operation is dinky and there’s no official NAME for my part in it, so it’s easier to spill many words out than to try to hunt for some pithier summary) …& where I come into the picture is that altho I’m totally uninterested in THINKING about computer shit, I’m really good at executing repetitious tasks once someone else has thought thru or solved a problem, so I’m like a teachable robot; I can do a lot of the email and website fixes & changes, because, over the years, I’ve learned a little about the different behind-the-scenes tricks that my boss has taught me… so when jobs come in that would bore my boss to tears, he’s happy to pass them off to me – the repetitive tasks that a monkey or dog could do – and I’m happy to get these jobs, because I want to dedicate my mind to thinking about what next text I’ll compose, or about what poet I’m currently reading, and this type of work allows me to daydream easier than customer service, or god forbid fast food, where you actually have to listen to someone’s problems or race around filling orders… So that’s that: I do enough work to get the money that I need, and then I abstain from working as long as possible because I only love art… & yes this type of setup is precarious, which is why I’m always yearning to get out and do something different, go to school, etc… but everything’s a catch-22… I hope this explanation is passable. Now that I’ve penned it, I’m reminded of a passage from Blake’s “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” which we just finished reading – I can’t say exactly why, but these lines feel apt:
. . . her soul reflects the smile;
As the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure & smiles.
Ah, thanks for the detailed answer. I had a feeling you were somehow involved in computer programming... don't ask me why. Maybe because you remind me in certain ways of some of the IT guys I know in Berlin. The bar I go to is packed with IT people, probably because it's an expat bar and IT is a really popular in Berlin. It's practically only non-minimum wage job a non-fluent expat can get over there. It sounds to me like you've got a good deal going with your friend, even though you're low on the totem pole. Your position seems pretty secure and low stress.
Ah well thanks for accepting my never-ending answer: it's only "detailed" because I can't figure out how to condense all my hems-&-haws out of it! And I've long wanted to move to NY or Cali or Berlin or Paris (etc.), so now I have a new goal, or rather new goals (plural): To escape from IT and also to be a fluent rather than non-fluent expat. I say this assuming that "fluent" means "understanding the native tongue well"; and that is something that interests me immensely, so I should set it as a goal... remind myself that every language is a new poem.
Post a Comment