Dear diary,
The free local newspaper landed on our driveway. Then it snowed for two days, so the paper got buried. I didn’t even know that it existed, until the sun began melting everything: then I spotted the corner of its blue plastic cover peaking thru the top of the mound at the side of the driveway. So I rescued the paper from the snowbank: I cradled it in my arms and read some of it. Remind me tomorrow to tell you about what I read—I don’t want to talk about it now; I have other things to say. But the part about the War Veteran’s Motorcycle Club was interesting; and so was the letter to the editor from a guy who shared his thoughts on firearms and morality. But here’s the insipid jingle that was in my head when I awoke this morning:
Let’s go float a boat
Down thru the lowest hope
Sticklers for rhyme might substitute “moat” for “hope” in this alt-version of “Let’s go fly a kite / Up to the highest height”. Optimists may think of the boat as a submarine, and pessimists can swap the word “sink” for “float”. Now, on with the entry:
Ever since Easter, my sweetheart has had an awful cold. The day after our family get-together, she awoke sneezing & coughing. Not until today, a full week later, has she felt good enough to live like a normal workaholic. —Besides merely reporting this news, I have nothing to remark about it, except that I am against it: I think that humans should never be subjected to physical illness: the worst that can happen should be a mood of sadness or happiness. And death should be painless, and it should always strike at age thirty-seven. (In truth, twenty-seven should be the universal endpoint; but one needs a decade to write down all one’s imaginations, and one shouldn’t be forced to do this while one still has heaven within.)
Also, just so you know, the way that my sweetheart and I traditionally fortify ourselves to endure each year’s Easter holiday is to watch the film Blue Velvet (1986) immediately before joining the festivities.
*
After penning that last sentence, I got called away from my writing station, and full days passed. I’ve lately had little time to whine here in this journal: please feel sorry for me. Anyway, today I awoke with a raw, sore throat. So, above, it was that earworm, a mental torment; and now the plague is physical. Doubtless I’ll get to enjoy all the stages of our Creator’s masterpiece: the common cold.
Yes, I have nothing to say, and now I’m disinclined to even try… Therefore maybe I’ll list some of the books that we’re reading – that always serves well to waste words.
Everyone who was in straits and everyone who was in debt and everyone who was desperate joined him, and he became their leader.
No, that is not a quote about Senator Bernie Sanders; it’s from the Bible, and it refers to David the eventual king of Israel. It can be found in the first book of Samuel (22:2), just after David feigns madness to escape a potentially worse fate in Gath at the hands of King Achish. As I think I explained before, each day, from sunup to about eleven o’clock, my sweetheart and I read together from a stack of five books. It’s how we maintain the semblance of humanity and composure amid a world gone wrong. Just yesterday we finished this first book of Samuel. Now the LORD’s anointed/christ/king (Saul) is dead, and we’re starting book two.
& we finished Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. That title’s so great that I didn’t even mind having to read the last half of it from an e-book, after our physical copy had to be returned to the library. Thus, that “second of five” slot in our read-aloud stack needed to be filled with a fresh work, so I decided to replace it with another favorite text that I myself have read and re-read but which is new to my sweetheart: Hadji Murad, by Leo Tolstoy. It’s one of the finest texts ever composed, in my always-correct opinion. Here’s part of the introductory passage from the very beginning (in Aylmer Maude’s translation; & the ellipsis between the paragraphs is in the original) – its subject is a tri-branched thistle named the “Tartar” which the narrator, while returning home, spots at the roadside:
Evidently a cartwheel had passed over the plant, but it had risen again and that was why, though erect, it stood twisted to one side, as if a piece of its body had been torn from it, its bowels had been drawn out, an arm torn off, and one of its eyes plucked out; and yet it stood firm and did not surrender to man, who had destroyed all its brothers around it. . . .
“What energy!” I thought. “Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants, yet this one won’t submit.”
After Tolstoy’s story we read from a book-length, diary-style poem that I love, called Tape for the Turn of the Year, by A.R. Ammons. Ammons composed the thing on a spool of tape from an adding machine, so the narrowness of the paper dictated arbitrarily the length of the poetic line; he wrote a new section daily (at least roughly—I can’t recall if he skipped any days) from mid-December 1963 until mid-January while the year turned to ’64 (later he revised that initial draft), and its sections are named simply by the date: “6 DEC”; “7 DEC”; etc. . . .
art casts into being, the
glow-wobbling metal
struck by a
difference of ice:both necessary:
without flow, there’s no
resource for crust:
without ice,
no sharp steel:
death is life’s
prerequisite:this is that & that is this
& on and on: why can’t
every thing be just itself?
what’s the use of the
vast mental burden
of correspondence? doesn’t
contribute to the things
resembled:except in the mind: except
in the mind: there’s
the reality that needs to
hold
(This minuscule excerpt cannot do the piece justice; I love Ammons’ longer poems best, because they allow the reader into the flow of his thoughts – & that’s hard to relay in a super-brief online snippet.)
Thus saith the publisher’s website: “The tape determined both the length of the poem’s lines and when it ends.” Also: “Ammons chose this method as a serious experiment in making a poem adapt to something outside itself.” (Side-thought: What if the “Occupy Wall Street” movement were “Occupy ART”?) I’m attracted to this idea because it forces the so-called low or mundane matter of everyday life to enter (more than it otherwise would, at least, I assume) the lofty realm of poetry. I like the democratic aspect of that. It also reminds me of this blog format—although bloggers are not forced to compose rapidly or frequently, there’s something about knowing that your words will appear as one unbroken, annoying glow-scroll on a computer screen or nagging phone display, and thus you’ll be read with the attention those environments deserve (that is: you’ll be skimmed cursorily by impatient inferno-slaves), I say, the awareness that one’s thoughts, conceived however immaculately, must be born into this blog·o·sphere, subtly sways the way one blanks.
Next, speaking of infernos and journaling, we read the piece called “Fragments of a Diary from Hell” by Antonin Artaud. Tho I’ve read about him, I’ve never read anything by Artaud; so I requested a copy of his selected writings; but it arrived along with about seven other thick books, so I only got through a couple of the texts that were included before having to return it. I’ll certainly check it out again, or just purchase it. (The other title we read was his passionate appreciation called “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society”.)
So this fourth slot in our daily five books, held briefly by Artaud, was, before him, Apollinaire’s, and, before that, Giorgio de Chirico’s (the holy scripture Hebdomeros): you get the picture; I indulge my fetish for surrealism – tho, you’re right, I tend to prefer the works on its outskirts: the unofficial, the excommunicated, the proto (Alfred Jarry; Raymond Roussel) – however, since I momentarily ran out of surrealistic texts, this time I filled the spot with a selection of the letters of D.H. Lawrence. I couldn’t be happier with this semi-random choice (I found a tome of his in a discount bin for a buck—one U.S. dollar—and decided to throw it into the mix on a whim): Lawrence’s correspondence is as excellent as everything else I’ve learned to love from him—his poems, his novels (not the ones your friend X told you about, I mean the sacred texts: Sons and Lovers; especially The Rainbow and Women in Love), his travel journals, even his biblical criticism.
Settled here at last, I can live cheaply enough. This money business disgusts me. I wish I had two hundred a year, and could send everybody to the devil.
(—D.H.L. to J.B. Pinker; 30 June, 1916.)
And place five of five is always Blake. We’re in the third chapter of Jerusalem. There are equal works, but nothing better. Every day I feel almost guilty that we inherit so much wisdom, just the two of us here in this nondescript room in Minnesota.
For the Sanctuary of Eden is in the Camp: in the Outline,
In the Circumference: & every Minute Particular is Holy:
Embraces are Cominglings: from the Head even to
the Feet;
And not a pompous High Priest entering by a Secret Place.
Now I’m out of time. Dang, instead of only mentioning their authors and titles, I always wish I had copied out actual passages from all the listed books. I’ll do that next time. Or maybe I’ll go back and do that now… So, if there are quotations sprinkled throughout my remarks above, it means I did that – if not, remind me to do that.
P.S.
Here is one more never-before-released track from my ancient rap demo album Happy Songs of Love.
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