| in america volume 27 part 2 - 2013 august- | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
15 August Mesa Grande 5:18 on the day. The jeep is packed, bike on the back. Washed it so my new landlords won't see it with woodpecker shit all over it. I woke at 4:30 again with my solar stressed in a way it hasn't been since East Pender. What is it, sweetheart? Separation pain. I'm leaving my beloved.
Civil twilight now, the pale blue. In the midst I'm also thinking of many things I can do. O many. [handwriting November 2nd morning work]
- Borrego, Kendall's Restaurant. I crept down Montezuma Grade. Thought the weight would do the work, save gas money. Came through the sere crests, rocks and grey-green clumps, desert light pale and full of invisible buzz - is it? I'll study what it is about it. Stopped at my house. The lot across from it is fenced. The walls are beige. I'll change that and get horizontal venetians. A little table. Put my agaves into the ground. Hang a bird-feeder - yes. Have water for birds. Put a chair somewhere in bare desert. Maybe plant a little shade tree on the corner. Sow wildflowers in that bare foreground. - That chair? No. Though - 16 Tom is preoccupied by the mayor's sex scandal, Greg by a violent TV series. I disapprove. It's vicarious fascination males have with their unlived badness. My new house. Should I go down and paint? And measure for venetians? I should, so it airs before I move. Two weeks. I'm in the chair looking at my famous view with small anger. That's done, I won't love you anymore. Thinking what the new Here can be since it can't be daily natural love. My first thought has been to make it impressive in ways Here is too upfront to be. I've had that thought about being social in Borrego too: come out impressive and noticed. Use my title. Blue streak in my hair. Get some new Doc Martens for height. Question about writing there. More abstract, harder. Question about how to work at all, how to manage myself, and where to find a track. I have less energy and more judgment. I'm supposing that means work from my collection of bits and shreds - But it's strange the way when I read through the shreds I quickly feel as if I'm pushing through a stiffening fluid like setting concrete. That's badly inaccurate. I've called it fuses blown. Exhausted, but specifically inside my head. - Is there a way to make that space lighter and swifter again. The shreds are suggestive, though, even now. Should I lubricate my brain by riffing off them at a lower pitch? I think The fierce sublime or Desert or whatever it'll be called will have writing but not named stories; sound; video; photos. But the Anza Borrego is photographed enough, I have to do something wider. Make something. 'Value added' has said itself in my head, for instance yesterday morning creeping down the grade. Desert, desertness, desert cultures, desert creation, especially what it is about desert light and sound, and therefore the transparent consistency. Desert minds, desert myth, it's that particular desert. Driving yesterday distracted by the heat, what I felt most was the massive harmonious complexity of the mountain south of S2. Late summer colors. The dry grass is burnt to caramel. There's dark green, other dark colors in all different sizes of patch and swathe. [window measurements] 17 Second load of boxes in the jeep - the house is almost down to just what I need - I like the feeling so much I should get rid of everything but what's here now. That means journals too. Films. [floor plan sketch of 760 Weather Vale Drive] [760 from the east] 18 Woke this morning, got into the packed jeep, drove down through the fields of boulders - so much shorter - put everything away - bought gas - bought paint - bought pastrami and lettuce - sat on the floor and ate breakfast - inched around on my bum putting masking tape along tile edges and painting anything that needed the brush - did the same higher up, standing on the guest room bedside table covered with a flannel sheet - rollered the walls, rollered the ceiling. The main room was a grubby-looking beige and now is white all over. Had been sometimes using the AC, sometimes using the fan with bathroom and kitchen windows open. It was fine. - Another two days for the kitchen, corridor, and what seems to be the guest room because I don't really need it. Then got into the jeep and drove home through a long broad tub of hot air - the whole valley wallowing. It cools gradually as the road climbs and is sweetly cool when I get to the gate. Venetians - I've ordered them - 2 weeks. I'll go again tomorrow - Take the plants, a mop - the ladder. Need a table and a couple of chairs. The valley was hazy through the morning and later there was a lot of wind in the trees I could see from the bathroom window. 19 Rock. I drive through cut banks and am always caught by the form and color of stone. Rock and plants. Lo que no es piedra es planta. 21 Living between - not here the way I was the week I was watching for turkeys. Will I drive down today. I think. - 760 Weather Vane Drive, Borrego Springs CA 92004 I have a table. It is too big for the room but a good simple shape and will be where I write, looking south onto a young fan palm and some badly placed rocks, which I will rearrange. Splendid old palo verde across the street. It's quarter past 10 and I'm alright with just the fan, and door and kitchen window open. - Three trips down Montezuma Grade. I think that'll be all until the evening of the 9th day from now. I was bonding with my new house, that is ready now - white and clean, all shuttered, with plants in the dimness. The storage room at the core of the building is a well of coolness. The shower has white tile with 3 little squares of painted fishes. I have to set the bar of cucumber-scented soap on the window sill. The stove is as ugly as a stove can be, the fridge too. The kitchen cabinets are perfectly simple and the kitchen layout is just right - window over the sink looking toward eucalyptus and an acacia over the fence, and a long side window at the east-facing end of the room. I like that the back porch is like a loading dock, concrete pad 6' wide, raised 18", with a step inset. I like that there's no rail so it's like a platform looking over the back yard grit where everyone parks and three citrus trees have shade rotating around their trunks. Mine is a lemon, says the smell of the leaf. The next one up is a lime, the one at the far end - I don't know. One in the front is an orange. Oh I could do things with the front garden - I'll do a bit, a little agave collection with wildflowers around it. I'll collect some good stone and replace the miscellaneous rocks people seem to think should go around the base of trees.
- value and evaluation in writing about modern art Jonathan Harris 2005 Writing back to modern art Two of these forms of interest and kinds of writing have the names theory and history. Criticism (that is, saying what art is good or bad, and why), theory (that is, mobilizing 'first principles' about the nature of the world, and how it may be understood), and history (that is, accounting for change and development in culture and society) ... forms of attention, understanding, and judgment. The appropriate reading, that is, understanding, of an artwork consists of two possibilities. Either: An exclusive and intensive focusing ... a giving-over of consciousness to its object, or a mobilization of complex assumptions, commitments, and skills, in which the object is always seen against a ground of interest and argument. This epoch, from the rise of Manet and the Impressionists in the 1860s through to Picasso in the 1930s, saw the history of art become really the history of the work of disparate individuals .... A rampant subjectivism of artistic intent ... create their works in near-complete social isolation ... subject of their art becomes what it is like to live and experience life as an artist. showing the world ... simultaneously showing something of the means of showing that world a remarkable complexity ... authority is absolute in the perception of harmonious order we feel the world adapted to our minds - Minds adapted to the world. Raymond Williams committed to what he believed was a wholeness and de-alienation to pompously name 'interrogation' what is only a persistent state of stupor decide that modernism came to some sort of end in the 1960s - the sophisticated flicker of lips and tongue Substandard peacocks cannot fake it. calculated that this mutation happened only about 6,000-10,000 years ago, well after the invention of agriculture, in a particular individual around the Black Sea paler skin, which admits more of the sunlight needed for the synthesis of vitamin D especially important as people in less sunny northern climates became more dependent on grain giraffe ... its neck-growing genes are the same as a mouse's; they may just be switched on for a longer time [Nat Geog piece on evolution] 23 I've had to go down and make the place real to myself so I can know I have somewhere to go. I phoned Mary a couple of nights ago. She couldn't hear me so I was yelling. I yelled that I've retired and have a pension. She marveled at how old she must be to have a daughter who is retired. - Feeling how adults are mostly crazy - I had that sense as a child - I'm feeling it now on both sides of me, Mary shrunk into her own dark head and Luke spun away into bitter incomprehension. 'Flawed'. Networks that have wobbled out of shape. The gloriousness of intelligence at its best. I can remember both Mary and Luke when they were clear and on and real. In the last 12 years I've worked for spirits' sanity and that was good work - "I hate what spoils intelligence" and Tomás saying "I understand you now, you do hate what spoils intelligence." 6:30 murky dawn over the Mesa. Pink haze, black cow, evenly pale yellow slopes. - Back country: a year in Mesa Grande. Pseudonym, male name. 25 Carol: "Anything higher than 95, I can't tell the difference." Tom: "I taught this woman to drive." He didn't, but I liked that he was an impressed dad. I'd had a pressured day looking for housing and was still focused and driven. I know the Julian road now, and I was slowing into curves and speeding out of them just right. It's actually Frank who taught me that and I do it in memory of him. Sunday morning, last Sunday here. 26 Thick white clouds on the eastern horizon yesterday. Flash floods in Borrego. - What I'm doing these last days - Can taxes yest - transcribing sheets to be able to toss paper - drove the jeep down next to the grandmother pine to be a recording studio for pine voice - checked through CC grants and made notes - set up carpet cleaning for Fri morning. Tia sent video of water rampaging in Borrego - I hadn't known. Thurs the house starts to be taken down. That leaves two days. 27
- two horses are standing beneath a tree and the flanks of the lady horse are quivering. the gentleman horse, seeing this, and knowing how infrequently this happens, gives a snort and ambles closer to the lady and whinnies in her ear. companera, el camino es larga perro nuestro amor es mas. estoy tu poppi bueno y tu es mi hija valiente. tenga corazon. x 28 Re Ellie's edits and comments which I've now finished reading, lucky you!! This kind of sensitive minute attention to language for both sound and grammar can't be bought. I have paid editors who didn't (and couldn't) do half of what Ellie's done here. - Couple of things. One is that it's pathetic to write down that kind of praise but I need it, I have such a sad hunger for anyone to notice how good I am at some things. - The other is that Lise is writing it about a manuscript she had already accepted as finished, ie everything I caught was something she hadn't bothered to catch. - And maybe a peace offering. I drove to the library and Don's Market this aft for the last time as someone who lives here. I was fitting well in my jeans and wearing the tight black Blue Canoe top with cut-in shoulders, the red plaid shirt. I felt 30 years old, trim, deftly physical. I say that remembering when I'd walk across the parking lot to the library with broken glass in hip or ankle, before this place had mended me, and I've remembered, lightly, sitting in the chair in the dark, early on, wanting to die. I'm restored now but I can't look at the hills when I come over the brow of Mesa Grande Road - their marvelous intricate spread of color - with the same glad easy heart of belonging. It's as if the landscape has hardened, though I know it's I who am harder. I stopped at the pie shop to say goodbye to Barbara, had brought her Always coming home and a copy of what will we know. She exclaims. She exclaimed I love her! How did you know? The young librarian who liked my yellow Chucks 18 months ago said We'll miss you. 29 Now I have to start taking the place apart - Maria is coming at 9. Yesterday the sight of immense blazing white towers of cloud to the northeast, a look of huge energy over the desert. - Bed on the floor next to the bookcase - 8:30 - Maria was here from 9 to 6 - I gave her $120 - she tossed my toilet brush, odd - both of us worked all day and it's not completely clean - misery of dirt, having to clean rooms, corners, I've never used - paying for the sin of time with energy - having to press through being done, done, to more dirt - I picked the easier rooms but was sore and grudging - yesterday I was 30, today I'm nearly 70 - the jeep has all my computers in it carefully stacked on the glass sheet - my couple of pieces of furniture outside on the rocks - will it rain? Sore now and will be more sore - aspirin - never want to have to clean a big house again. Now that I'm leaving the curly-haired checker at Don's Market warmed up to me for the first time. It might have been because I bought two Powerball tickets last night, like ordinary people do. It was for 116 million. 30 Awake at 2:30. Cool and windy, clouds, sparse stars. Two mornings ago I was dreaming that I was stepping among rattlesnakes. Carol had said rattlesnakes in the desert are pale. These were pale and there were always more of them - sensation of walking and noticing. - Luke tonight. I went out at dusk with the camera, not hopeful. Had been sitting in the chair briefly, not feeling anything. There was a little rabbit stock still so I wdn't notice. At the wild oat corner I saw the grey road zigzagging toward the mountains like a fairytale road. Dim goodbye photos. I haven't seen them well w/o the monitor. Then sat in the dark with the recorder and talked - I'd remembered I should do that, voice in the place. 31 Saturday morning - endless detail. It's 10:30ish, Joaquin coming between one and two. What do I have left to do. Pack the foolish radio that never stops talking about Syria. Go through all the rooms spotting missed bits. Fit more stuff into the jeep. Drag the trash barrel down to the oak branches. Clean the sink. Last wipe of the kitchen and laundry room floor. Shower and check shower. Phone about the road - check name of pass. Don't forget stuff in fridge. - Borrego Springs Good thing: scent of creosote. Bad things: neighbour's AC motor near my bed, lamps at front and back. Good: my bed facing into the long room. Closing the window helped. Bad: how much my feet hurt after this day. Good: Joaquin's cheerfulness and kindness, strange light on the mountains as we drove in, haven't heard the orange-car neighbours yet. Bad: two neighbour guys to the east look like thugs. September 1st 3 in the morning. Good thing: the front garden's lights have gone off. Bad thing: east neighbours' lights blazing, their AC stops and starts. Good: Orion at the front door. - 8:16. Mountains at the door muted piles, powdery, with grey-blue shadows. The fan palm in contrast is eye level spikes and shreds, sharp. Front and back door open. A wet night, pillow is soaked. How to live in the desert. I need a desert dress like I had, with red and blue strips. There's too much furniture in this room but I need or want all of it. Today I'll make order. Won't need to shop for a week at a time. Labor Day weekend, my great threshold festival. Don't like these scabby walls. Do like these long-paned windows. This one next to me opens! Made a tea-nook next to the stove. Horrible stove. Horrible fridge. Mesa Grande's excellent appliances have spoiled me for this low-end stuff. I took the wooden chair. It's nice with the table's rectitude. I saw it in the rear view mirror riding high on Joaquin's roped load like trophy antlers. Hope the venetians fit. They were here tucked inside the porch rail. Now I want to get rid of a lot of stuff. I hated all the detailed handling - the cleaning and carrying and considering. Sun on my arm coming over the neighbour's roof. I'll be mopping every day. Carpet under the desk? Wd complicate the room even more. - 'The air moves over the writing of the sentence' - I was hearing it when I woke at night. AC the reverse of winter heating - I mean I have to think of the expense as the same sort of necessity. It's 4 in the afternoon, the sun's due west. - I have a table to write at. Still slow and tired, aching from the work. Don't have phone or internet or anything to read. Not ready to put up the desk's machines yet. Mesa Grande feels gone, abstract. I stepped back after closing it to kiss the gate goodbye but Joaquin was waiting for me to lead and I was not very aware of the fact of the moment. The mountain has been changing steadily as the sun shifts. It's about angle over time. 2nd What are these things - caesalpina pulcherrina. 3 The table looks nice with flowers on it - nice against the long black reflecting panes. Feet haven't stopped hurting - acid ache all over - palms - right foot won't warm up even when I'm dewy everywhere else. Sterility of the front yard - I threw out seeds and no birds came. One crow yesterday morning, one of something on the wire - just one. Neighbours either side are Mexican louts who stare without speaking when I say hello. I hate feeling hemmed in by stupidity. They are watching big TVs behind closed blinds. I hate having to consider whether people can see in. And being careful not to make noise. I wish my feet and bum muscles and palms wdn't hurt. I hate the next door AC grinding on mindlessly. I don't mind the occasional sound of a car on Borrego Springs Road. I love the long window in the guest room and before the yard lights come on I like to see headlights slipping around those walls. There was one cricket in the back. It just stopped. I hate how loud my fridge is. I have to unplug it at night. My eyes are fine for reading print on screens but in books they feel labored, patchy, sticky. Feel out of touch with my work as if there needs to be a vacant transition. Is the ache from electrical fields? The fuse boxes are all on my kitchen wall, I'm under the main power pole. The green tennies are shot, they were good to walk in because they're two sizes. The sandals aren't walkable any more, need to be replaced. $100 for each pair. I don't have the right kinds of clothes. All my sleeveless tops are stained from eating lying down. Need loose light pants. Sleeveless gauzy long dresses. I don't have the open love that made Here - don't want to tell personal stories about being here. Miss representing myself as loving interest. Would gladly garden the front yard, don't want to ask permission. Will be glad to have internet again. There are small gnats. After rain the nursery woman said. Electrolytes. Poor fruit and vegetables in the market. I can see that at some point life will get too hampered and complicated. - Lower Colorado Desert - hottest and driest of the warm deserts - to 1000' - generally 60-100 degrees - rain average 2-4". Drainage of the lower Colorado River before it combines with the Gila and flows into the Gulf. California fan palms native. Design to imitate a wash - smoketree, palo verde, ironwood, torrey and screwbean mesquite, bladderpod, desert lavender, bursage, burrowbush, ocotillo, phacelia, agave, dune marigold, creosote, desert holly, brittlebush, cholla, barrel cactus. 4 I like the way traffic is one at a time, one gritty line that widens as it nears. It's almost 6, Orion has faded almost away - I can scour for it in the pale blue and find three stars. Sirius burning alone. The mountain's flanks held up facing the east's dim yellow. A rooster. Last evening I pumped up the bike's tires and rode the near streets looking at houses and their yards, their singularity, each set in a surrounding unmarkedness of creosote and sand, such visible assertion of some fantasy of self. There's the house that hunkers down under a complete forest of some spindly tall eucalypt, the ground thick too with bits of this and that, firewood, building supplies, a red car that also seems hunkered into the ground. The whole forest is chittering with cicadas - think they must be. There's another little compound in exquisite Santa Fe taste, adobe casitas, a bell on a stained wood frame, perfectly planned native planting. On Double O a lot of duplex ranchers with Mexican tradesmen probably. There's an odd house on Frying Pan surrounded by junk that spills over its boundary, rock music leaking out of it at twilight. Ah - rabbit crossing the front yard. What was that massive fantastic tree with drooping long blue needles and fancy pale racemes of some sort - down at the far north end of Double O. - It's the windbreak tree, tamarisk, salt cedar. Tumblr site - bits of sound and text. From the church road I can get a clear line to Indian Head. 5 Thursday, expecting Tom tonight, 5:26 at Christmas Circle. It's 80 degrees at 7:30. Both doors open. Sleeping is complicated. I woke at 3 and turned off the fan, opened the door. The house is a lot warmer than the outside air. Step into the shower many times in a day, rinse off in cool water. - Bruce Pavlik 2008 The California deserts: an ecological rediscovery U of C Press Each band was an ancient seafloor, hundreds of million years old Desert shrubs as large as this are often several centuries old, and a few have been known to live for more than a thousand years. Cahuilla peopling of North America at the end of the Pleistocene, approximately 12,000 years ago prodigality in scattering their greatest treasures, which are the seashells shallow wells that coyotes had dug into the wet sands Las Vegas, the meadows olive, orange, lemon, peach, apricot, pomegranate and fig orchards, date-palms, melons, cotton At great depth a marvelous flow of pure water was struck ... scores of wells have been put in from above Indio to below Mecca song cycles entitled Salt, Deer, Mountain Sheep and Shaman's It became evident to every one in the train of wagons that we were traveling in the dry bed of a former deep and extended sheet of water Clearly, Blake had rediscoverd ancient Lake Cahuilla when the cold wave of the Quaternary had passed If these scientists rediscovered the desert's ancient wetness, others sought an understanding of its recent dryness. these shrubs can live in such a climate if they get a good wetting every two or three years in some months, gnats beetles were most abundantly collected, followed by moths and butterflies. Bees, flies, grasshoppers, and even lice ("from a child's ear, Lone Pine") categories of distribution ... dry rock slope, dry valley soil zones, the vertical limits of which are fixed by the temperature during the period of growth and reproduction . ... the temperature at this season in places of the same latitude depends mainly on altitude, base level, and slope exposure Charles Lummis 1884: Over the sandy, volcanic wastes, past the barren, contorted ranges of savage ruggedness and wonderful color .... to extract a great deal of interest and information from every cruel day. ... the appearance of its mountains. ... They are the barest, barrenest ... peculiar in the abrupt fashion in which they rise from the plain ... strangest of all is their color. The prevailing hue is a soft, dark, red brown, or occasionally a tender purple .... The rock bases of the mountains are completely buried in gentle acclivities of sand .... These mountains are not very high - none, I should judge, over 5,000 or 6,000 feet - but very vigorous in outline, and, at certain stages of the daylight, very beautiful in color. Mary Austin 1903: Every plant has its perfect work. Edna Brush Perkins 1920 on first glimpse of Death Valley: that thrilling repose, that patience, that terror and beauty as part of the splendid life that always encompasses our turbulent littleness around. Before terror and beauty like that, something inside you, your own very self, stands still; for a while you rest in the companionship of greatness. With rapid ascent, the air mass expands and cools, allowing the formation of impressive thunderheads from relatively little water vapor. The sea came and went many times. Paleozoic rocks - more than 505 million years old - sedimentary rocks full of fossils - maybe metamorphosed into marble - or maybe gneisses formed by slowly cooling magmas metamorphosed, uncovered by faulting, uplift and erosion Mesozoic - 65 to 245 million - result from cataclysms associated with continental drift, either as rising masses of granite or basalt heated by subduction along the western edge of the North American plate - basalt violently extruded from volcanoes The land flexed upward, building low hills with wide intervening basins. Erosion of the hills filled the basins with great heaps of sandy sediments that rusted under rain and sun. These reddish or orange-brown sands became heaped up into dunes that congealed into the characteristic sandstones of the desert southwest. Cenozoic - up to 65 million years - a new violent wave of volcanic eruptions - hot ash fused into welded tuff - lava an extruded granite - more erosion, sediments in deep strata containing mastodon, camel, and horse fossils - youngest layers battered by glacial epoch Orogeny, mountain-building - collisions between land and sea plates, batholith intrusions from below Fractures in the bedrock, extending miles deep and miles long, are the faults along which mountains are uplifted and basins are dropped. ... movement of crustal plates ruptured the base of nearly every mountain range in the west, creating steep escarpments and exposing millions of years of subterranean structure. also been created by folding of bedrock layers. Sandstones and limestones are particularly plastic and can be scrunched and buckled into wavy, usually low hills. flash floods begin to carry away clays, sands, gravels, and eventually boulders that wash down into the valleys. Great triangular fans of these alluvial materials are built up at the mouths of canyons, often a thousand feet high .... Only the finest suspended clays and sands, along with dissolved minerals, wash into the center of the valley, where they form flat, saline deposits over long periods of time. faultblock mountain cañons the steep-sided cracks carved by faults and floods cut in the bajada surface are arroyos, which turn into a wide, braided wash Cenozoic bajada or playa alluvia, Cenozoic volcanics, Mesozoic granite bedrock, Paleozoic sedimentary, Precambrian rocks of all types intrusive igneus rocks such as serpentine Where the fetch is long and the rock particles small wind can propel them with scouring force ... sorting by grain size occurs whitish cemented layers known as caliche a tablespoon of water can wet a coarse-textured soil of gravel and sand to a depth of 30 inches, but only to a depth of five inches in a loamy mix of clay, silt and fine sand. Shallow storage results in three times more water loss due to evaporation than deep storage ... deep-rooted trees and shrubs associated with arroyos and upper bajadas, shallow-rooted perennials in the fine soils of lower bajadas and playas ... desert tortoise prefers lower bajadas with soils that are easily excavated yet strong enough to resist collapse salt accumulations in playa soils - plants that can extract water from brine dark-brown glossy varnish added by bacteria - microbes live between the varnish and the rock - thick coatings of varnish may exceed 100,000 years infiltration through desert pavement depends on animal burrows or accumulations of fine particles and leaf litter beneath shrubs groundwater recharge occurring during the cold, wet Pleistocene, two million to 12,000 years ago the names of Pleistocene water bodies are preceded by the term Lake while the names of modern water bodies are followed by it Palm Springs are seepages of local groundwater that flow from faults exposed in canyons fossil waters fallen during the Pleistocene, stored in gravelly reservoirs - California desert contains very young ecosystems assembled from very ancient species. Many of its characteristic plants and animals originated millions of years ago under conditions that were warm and relatively wet ... their long history may have preadapted them to conditions of high temperature and drought that did not completely develop until the end of the ice ages, only 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. maximum potential energy for biological harvest - light harvest - evolved by bacteria and inherited by the majority of sun-harvesting species cacti have a different kind of photosynthesis that performs some of its carbon-gaining tasks at night when less water is lost from tissues when when they open their stoma to absorb carbon dioxide Plant bodies are 90 percent water by weight Overlapping root systems explore the same soil volume .... As water moves through the soil and into the root system of one plant, it can pull the water away from, and out of, the roots of another. Below ground, the soil water is thus stretched like a web of rubber bands between competing root systems. The strongest competitors are those species that can generate and withstand the greatest pull Competition for nitrogen - decomposition of litter, bacterial fixation, deposition from air pollution a pulse of winter annuals energy flow from the sun through the ecosystem - a complex food web - the number of feeding relationships is astronomical black-tailed jackrabbit the only mammal that tolerates creosote resins - often stand high on their haunches to sample many stems, preferring those with the highest water and lowest resin content. The rejected stems are scattered about like sloppy pruning generalist and specialist herbivores - for instance the Creosote Bush Grasshopper and more than 20 species of bees feed exclusively on creosote nearly all dominant species in the desert have roots associated with mycorrhizal fungi - supply roots with nitrogen - If the carnivore were about the same size as the herbivore it consumed, it would need to kill and eat at least 10 for self-maintenance. Consequently, the predator will always be much less abundant than its prey because of the inefficiencies imposed by respiration, digestion, and harvest. The Western Blind Snake uses its sense of smell to follow the pheromone trails of ants and termites back to the nest. The top tier of the food web pyramid is so small that higher-level carnivores can use the desert to hunt but cannot live there full time. ... travel long distances between desert lowlands and forested uplands ... coyotes have been known to make a 30-mile roundtrip in a single night, following canyon trails down and up the side of an adjacent mountain range ... adult mountain lions travel about six miles per night while hunting deer and desert bighorn ... the desert kit fox tends to locate its burrows near those of kangaroo rats 6 Tom's house is gone. The VA took $200 out of his check and he couldn't make the rent. He borrowed the money but gave notice. It's his right decision but I'm grieved. He had seven years of calm and beauty. I put the place together for him in love and hope and he can't sustain it - he did sustain it, often with great valor and hardship, but he's come to the end of sustaining it. He didn't tell me while I was moving, that was good of him. But his voice in this small hard-surfaced space was unbearable last night. I kept taking him outside because he's not so loud outside. He did what he does, repeats the sentences he says to himself to prop himself up, with energy and without attention. I can't do what I need to do while he's discharging. He went to sleep and I lay here sad not only for loss of that place but also for the whole series of losses of that place. The ways he has spoiled it, the misery we came to in what I wanted to be a love nest. I'm sad for him too, he learned housekeeping there, he learned to keep it clean, he was learning to cook. There were times he'd get up in the morning and sit down to write at his beautiful desk. He had a place for his family's little things - he had his family around him, Vic's painting, Mac's plaster cat, the silver crucifix, the holy water bottle from Ireland. There was the painting he found for over the couch, the shell nightlight for the bathroom. We sat on the guest room bed and he pulled things out of his backpack. He's given me the moon lamp and a drinking glass I liked. So he was here - he came a day's journey - to be here from 5:26 in the afternoon to 7:45 in the morning - and I was distressed and wouldn't look at him and hated the sound of his voice and when we were sitting on the concrete edge looking at Scorpius blurted that it's because I'm a cripple I don't have a man with money. This morning I said one of our options is to separate gently and lovingly. He did what he does, declared that will never happen etc, but later when we were driving toward coffee along past St Barnabas he said he's stop his sales pitch and say maybe we could be the best of friends and make a ceremony of declaring ourselves unhooked. I said then there'll be other people. He said There'd have to be. When he leaves I always feel at a loss even when I haven't liked him.
He says the positive and I say the negative and then we don't come up against the true state together. It's always been like that with us. - Storm. First overcast and then wind blasting in from the west, chasing tall dust straight down Weather Vane, beating the fan palm sideways. That for a while and then a few large drops dashed against the window. A while more of that and then heavy rain driven from the southwest against the window, pouring off the roof, soon a sheet of water running down the street. Lightning, loud long thunder overhead. I liked it, felt the complete safety of my little shoebox of a house. It went on for a long time. I was too wiped out by preoccupation and not sleeping last night to give it good attention. Went to sleep, but with the window open next to me. It was noisy but silent, the power was off, all the AC motors silent, all the neighbours away. It's hours later, now, mud on the streets, pink wisps above, power still off, someone's generator growling. - Last night seeing headlights sloping down the sky. They wd be near the top of Montezuma Grade. - My skin is like rose petal velvet these days, it's mysterious. - T and I both say a lot of things. At the time the talk is a misery but afterward I notice good things have been said, we've shaken down some. - It's dark enough so I can see a dust lane in the Milky Way. Writing by the blue light of the camping lantern. 7 Complicated dream of trying to get back to my middle-floor apartment in Choy's building. Was it 41 or 49. The stairs were gone. There was a ladder but it wouldn't reach. Chinese men on the top floor, a club. A man comes forward to ask what I need. Leads me to a place with belongings stacked. They aren't mine. I explain, I had stripped floors. Am still thinking I'll find it when I wake. Earlier dream that I had a little daughter I didn't live with. Etc. I don't have the energy to go into it. Still no power. It's toward 6 in the dark. A bird beginning, generator motor still, looks like a mist against the mountains. Can't make tea - could, if I get out the camp stove - is it too much trouble? Maybe not. - Back porch - tea - marrow soup cooking at my feet - sun risen but dissolved in sheeny mist - pale pink light on the page - rooster next door - wheels on the road - something chipping - my neighbour comes out his door - I change my mind about him - he has a big round innocent face - he says it's going to be all day - his name is Chui - "Nice to meet you" - "Nice to meet you too" - the gnats take a while to find a sweaty body but then they're quickly too many - the library probably has a generator - I've made the soup but I can't grind it. One dove silent on the wire - eastern sky a broad platinum sheen - there were blackbirds after the palm's water yesterday before the storm but so few birds - hens clucking - the gnats will sometimes sound a sharp tiny screech inside the ear - there's a bird with a liquid trill. "Sehst wie er giest und tut und streut" - I'm hearing Oma in her 80s peering at her neighbour the way I'm now always wanting to peer through the venetians to see what that neighbour's noise was. - Afternoon rain, no wind with this one. 8 The thing that finally makes [a woman] irresistible is what she says and what she does not .... Looks, fine legs, these are things you can find in the street, but listening to an intelligent voice talking of things lived and seen - to feel the experience in it, and, for want of a better word, the gallantry - there are not many things in life more seductive. New York Review of Books, review of James Salter. - Every work of Carson's recent career seems ponderously arty on the surface, and yet from every depth shines speech, and sadness, and empathy, painstakingly measured and represented with a straightforwardness belied by the arthouse veneer. - a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction. - The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings. - Preface to Phil Invest. - The papists were given to laughter, revelry, high sadness, their own clichés. long stretches of argumentative intent 9 Out south on Country Club another ecosystem, ground green, ocotillo, barrel cactus, cholla, desert lavender, bladderpod, catclaw, couple of other shrubs I don't know, both sparse and spiny, and a tiny yellow-flowering thing. Better houses on larger lots, many with roof terraces. It's blowing from the west, rain clouds in the northwest. I haven't said that Tom - - Tom jumped back up onto the cliff after the bus ride home. Conversation with women in Florida, Idaho. I call them about an AT&T question and they talk like Stepford saleswomen who are being monitored for any flaw in their obedience to the script. When there's a little wait on her end I ask her where she is. Immediately her voice changes, there's an intake of breath and sound of relief, she steps into herself for half a minute. I ask her about the weather where she is. I want to give her that half minute relief of being someone somewhere. But then at the end of the conversation she has to go back onto script. "Have a good rest of your week." Today there was also a plague of security system cold-callers, about 6, mostly men. I'm not nice to them. There was a Union-Tribune salewoman I liked because she laughed when I said I wdn't read the UT if it were free and delivered with a supplement of ice cream. If I'm outright rude the caller-slaves can't be faulted for not making the sale. It's better to be colorful than apologetic about it I think. Maybe it's what she thinks too. Figured out that I could throw the green blanket over the yard lamp's head, tie a knot under its chin. It works. I could see Cygnus such a distinct emblem almost overhead. Pleasure this morning and other mornings of making this little house ship-shape: sweeping, wiping down, washing the sheets, carrying recycling and garbage to the curb. The sky is another desert, a dry reach, they are kindred archetypes, something like that, homologues, I thought, sitting on the wall next to the hooded lamp. Midnight, nearly. Masterpiece Theatre.
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