| volume 27 of in america: 2013-2014 july-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Volume 27 begins when I've quit teaching and will have to leave Mesa Grande and ends after six months in a small duplex in Borrego Springs. During this time there are last posts on Here2012 and new text-photo-sound pages on Here2014 about living in the low desert of southeastern California. Small films. Uncertain betweenness. I begin learning Sketchup. Notes: Germaine Greer, Patrick O'Brian Master and commander, Post captain, The Truelove, The surgeon's mate and The nutmeg of consolation, Tim Stephens, John Haines, Anne Carson, Philosophical investigations, Casals quoted in A late quartet, John Adams Become ocean, Malkovich in Disgrace, rat study at Johns Hopkins, Jonathan Harris Writing back to modern art, National Geographic piece on evolution, Bruce Pavlik The California deserts: an ecological rediscovery, Charles Lummis, Mary Austin, Edna Brush Perkins, review of James Salter in the New York Review of Books, Harry Daniel, Munro Carried away, Story Musgrave, color correction, Bill Viola, Frances Winwar Farewell the banner, Obama's America 2016, Le Guin The telling, Elizabeth Gilbert The signature of all things, Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd Good prose: the art of nonfiction, David Foster Wallace, Andrea Barrett Ship fever, aging vision, Kieslowski on Kieslowski, Vivian Maier, Steven Nadler Spinosa: a life, David Brooks quoting Augustine, Edward Abbey, Scott MacDonald The garden in the machine: a field guide to independent films about place, Peter Liechti The sound of insects. Mentioned: Louie, Judie Bopp and Michael Bopp, Sonja Swift, Luke, Rowen, Tom Fendler, Jerry Reznick, Jody Frey, Margo MacLeod, Angelo Mulla, Ruth Farmer, Jim Sparrell, Paul Epp, Dave Doerksen, Lise Weil, Joaquin Ojeda, Maria Ojeda, Martin Rumsby, Andy Wyman, Mary Epp, Jam Ismail, Greg Morrison, Leslie D, Frank Doerksen, Luisa Konrad, Ed Epp, Jean Morrison, Carlos and Irma at El Borrego Restaurant, Joyce Frazee, Art Pape, Catherine Deschesnes, Willie Epp, Jean Waite, Helen Hattori, Ginger Dunlap-Dietz, Sarah Black, Anne Dyck, Kate Harper, Frank Harris, Mike Voskamp, Ken Sallit, Juliana Borrero. 25245 Mesa Grande Road, Santa Ysabel, Ramona Valley, Cuyamaca Mountain, Ramona Starbucks, Black Mountain, Don's Market, Julian Library, Starbucks in Pacific Beach, Coronado Beach, the Point Loma headland, La Jolla Cove, Adams Avenue in San Diego, Borrego Springs, 760 Weather Vane Drive, Kendall's Restaurant, Montezuma Grade, Borrego Springs Road, Double O Road, Country Club Road, Di Giorgio Rd, Hoberg Road, Borrego Springs Art Institute, Ranchita, 3068 Broken Arrow Rd, Coyote Mountain, Frying Pan Road, St Barnabas Episcopal, Virgin of Guadaloupe shrine at St Richard's, Glorietta Canyon, Casa del Zorro, Clark Valley, Rockhouse Canyon Road, Font's Point, Henderson Canyon Road, De Anza Club, Ram's Hill, Anza Borrego Park Visitor's Center, the Palms at Indian Head, Tilting T Road, Indio, Mecca, Death Valley, Apple store in Palm Desert, The Living Desert, Sprouts in La Quinta, Highway 111, Highway S22, Clearbrook BC, Fraser Canyon, Chilliwack Hospital, the Patricia Hotel, Bellingham, Lillouet, Spences Bridge, Grande Prairie, northern Alberta, the Ukraine, Siberia. Boom Festival, Venice Biennale, Art in America, The children's book on CD, Leo McGarry, Being about, Lovett Simple song, Perception without representation, field & field, what will we know, Motion4, Brian Eno, Carson The glass essay, Alice Notley, Spartan trailers, the Women in philosophy site, Lincoln, Raymond Williams, Always coming home, Powerball lottery, the Veterans' Administration, AT&T, the Union Tribune, Masterpiece Theatre, Wittgenstein, Athanassakis trans. Orphic hymns, Blues Recess, Anne Konrad And in their silent beauty speak, Pravda, Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Nikon D800, Victory at sea, Southey, Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth, Byatt, Peter Carey, Remington cowboys, Avaaz campaign against Kenyan rapes, Mandela, annual chili evening at ABDNHA, Friday night lights, Jarhead, Handel, SketchUp, Oculus, Facebook, George Bush, Peter Redgrove. |
8 July 2013, Mesa Grande 2:54am. I was out in the chair sitting with my back against cold metal seeing the Milky Way arched overhead diagonally from the southwest. There were no strong patterns among the faint hazy speckles. One brilliant yard light a mile away on the hill beyond the road. Crickets where the ground falls off beyond the pines. I was regretting having no interesting thoughts. I came back in through the house - the stone steps I made showing in the light I'd left on - completely part of the ground now - firm underfoot, drifted with oak leaves - and then the blue-carpet room, warmer - and then the kitchen, very warm, and then out through the side door to stand on the broken driveway looking up - Cassiopeia anchoring the other leg of the Milky Way in the northeast. On slopes I wobble in the dark as if it's my eyes that keep me upright. And then coming back inside I was thinking this house won't ripen with me the way others have, 824 and the skyshack, Burghley Road, that I'd made beautiful by the time I left, the making beautiful also the making my own. Apart from the steps I haven't adapted it so it's still in many ways a wrong house, for instance the tan walls in this room, this stupid beige carpet, and I don't like this big pile of dirty fireplace stones either. But what are the ways it's a good house - the screened half door - the screens everywhere, this wide window and the well-made bookcase-sill under it, the sense of roaming around into different states of mind, having reserves of space on all sides, all of them except this room still strangers - this room too, in a way. The little stone terrace is brilliant. The kitchen's big window. The way it's sited, sighted, is better than the higher vantages above, it's more ensconced, slotted-in so it's looking up as well as down. I like the high ceiling in this room. I love the pretty guest room that smells of cedar and has windows on three sides. The middle room has the charm of east windows, which means that on April mornings it's the warm room of the house. - I'm going through boxes with a different sense than I have ever had when I've packed before, of time closing down. I'm not going to have time for this, I think, and sort a file into the recycle-paper box. All the Being about materials, I'm not going back to that work. House clippings, garden clippings. - What am I going to do with all these journals? 11 July Scent of wet straw and soft patting of rain at the near window when I woke in the dark, sound recording at five windows and then out with the D50. The rain sound is just what I wanted, not harsh and has a few birds at some distance. 14 July I'd done a laundry this morning and left the mudroom door open. Washed the dishes, thought I'd sweep out the mudroom floor. Sun around in the west shining straight in. I was barefoot on the hot linoleum sweeping toward the open door. Had swept halfway across and glanced toward the corner behind the door. There was an intelligent-looking little brown snake, slender and coiled flicking its tongue. I couldn't see its tail but was certain it was a rattler. Poked toward it with the bristle end of the broom to suggest it should slip out through the door crack. It rattled - a nice little rattle. It would turn and raise its head but it wasn't recognizing its exit. I poked some more, gently. Finally it raised its head high enough to flow through over the hinge and down. It was moving slowly. Slipped under the foundation, left a couple of inches of tail tip sticking out. 6 small rings. 29 July Ramona Starbucks, Monday morning. We got to the FLEX bus thirty seconds before it left. We'd come around the corner and seen an inlet of coastal fog filling the canyon under Black Mountain. There'd been light in the sky when we stopped at the gate a bit after 5, brightest in the northeast. Earlier on, lamplight showing on my far wall from Tom's window, something I'd never seen. I could wander in and say Do we have time for a little cuddle? And then the way he snugs up tight, wraps me in arms and legs, wriggles closer, then closer again. The adventure of getting into the jeep and taking a dirt trail down through the wilderness before the sun was up. I said We're going to see the sun reach the top of the mountain, and we did. - Am I going to live in Borrego, in very white new small rooms on Weather Vane Drive? And have a year to learn desert and work in a different way than here. What can I do with ferocious sublimity. - I felt the small taking-care-of acts, lending him clean socks, giving him dessert, cooking him breakfast, bringing him tea. I felt him feeling them, I think. He took care of me too, swept the roof, listened to house worries and options, sat absorbed watching By the lotus and July rain three times each. Read one of my old letters, said You don't love me as much as you did then. Came by bus, went home the only way he could on a Monday, the long way around through Escondido. - I'm not wanting to talk about him, am feeling how gross the saying is and more than that too, feeling I've said so much already and none of it has been much at all. What I feel about photographing this place too, that it's pathetically unable to keep me where I love to be or bring me back for instance to the realness of sitting on the terrace bench in the dark with oak branches spread three storeys overhead, the toyon's dark mass a north wall, the tiny marks of crickets spaced in their black directions, the bat zipping back and forth through the light from the open door. 31 July Bought a zoom lens today, an 80-400. I'll need it for the mountains. August 7 A week from tomorrow I'll pick up the keys. Squeezed heart about leaving. Haven't been falling asleep easily these nights. I've cast myself adrift. August 13 Do I have my turkeys finally - was everything right - exposed for contrast - interesting light - right frame - not too long or dull - very psychological, the one and then the other. The first is shy when the second barges in and jumps onto the rim, but comes back briefly. Meantime the second is very aware of being watched, startles, stares. They come in near the beginning of the shot and after they leave there is a minute and a half of just watching after. Shadows move, bugs flash through in the sunlight. Paradise mythos, spring at the foot of a tree. August 14 5:05am. Nautical twilight. The Perseids. I was out in the chair looking toward Orion. Cygnus was almost at the horizon. Angelo's headlights came on and I heard him backing down his drive. There was no breeze but the pines were sounding a dark low even breath. Tom said You've blissed me out with Here. He also said You've been living in heaven, hardly anyone gets that. Now your karma account is down, you'll have to go out and fight. That was the pep talk he'd prepared while he was out of touch. August 16 Two weeks. I'm in the chair looking at my famous view with small anger. That's done, I won't love you anymore. Driving back from Borrego 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. August 18 Woke this morning, got into the packed jeep, drove down through the fields of boulders - 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 guestroom 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. 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. August 19 Rock. I drive through cut banks and am always caught by the form and color of stone. Rock and plants. August 21 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. I've had to go down and make the place real to myself so I can know I have somewhere to go. August 31, Borrego Springs Good things: scent of creosote; my bed facing into the long room; Joaquin's cheerfulness and kindness in helping me move; strange light on the mountains as we drove in; Orion at the front door. September 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 seems hunkered into the ground. The whole forest chittering with cicadas. 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. 6 September 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. It went on for a long time.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'd be near the top of Montezuma Grade. It's dark enough so I can see a dust lane in the Milky Way. Writing by the blue light of the camping lantern. My skin is like rose petal velvet these days, sweat. 7 September Still no power. It's toward 6 in the dark. A bird beginning, 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. 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 really so few birds - hens clucking - the gnats will sometimes sound a sharp tiny screech inside the ear . "Siehst 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. 9 September 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. 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 yard light I darken by throwing a blanket over the bulb. 16 September On an upper stretch of the Montezuma Grade butterflies whirling across the road like small dried leaves. When I stopped at that stretch of road on the way back I saw them better. They didn't seem in a hurry. They'd light on a brittlebush leaf or a pair would dance alongside for an instant. There's a moment after the high dry incoherent Ranchita plain - 4000' it says - where the road passes through two heaps of rock like massive gateposts. The road crests exactly there and beyond it the extreme drop ahead is suddenly visible. So dramatic a road, such folds, such roadcuts, such wraps and falls. What 4000' looks like, the tininess of everything in the flats below, all the tiny messy human structures. 21 September Saturday early. There's world at the door, a small palm, a blue-powdered mountain, an early chill, two lines of wires, a rooster's voice, a woman's, a long slant of shadow on grit. Ways this place is sterile. There's no flower shop, no Chinese food, Vietnamese, Thai. The desert land between lots has mostly only two kinds of plant, creosote and that dry scratchy little silver brown thing. When it's hot there's nothing to do but go to the store and the post office and the library. There's nothing to eat. I walk around the market not wanting anything but the romaine lettuce and passionfruit juice. The fruit and vegetables seem dead things. The good Mexican café is still closed. At the cool ends of the days I can bike but there are few roads with not much to see. There's a lot of open time in a day and not enough mental strength to fill it. Dry minimalism. There are few birds. Poor fiction at the library. - I'm saying these things cheerfully enough. At night when I'm sitting under a light moths flood in, scores of them, little brown things, and bumble against my head. 22 September At 5:30 this Sunday morning I was outside in the dark about to go fetch the blanket off the lamppost. Heard light footsteps, two people walking west along the empty and dark street. They came past, an Indio Mexican couple, small, he slender and white haired. We looked at each other. 23 September The other night I was sitting on the edge of the concrete at the front of the house looking at stars. There was wind. A car came past on Weather Vane, stopped, backed up, made a three-point turn just past my gate. Its headlights caught the palm's broad crown from behind. For an instant its many spikes were lit up blowing and dazzling in white light. 5 October The frame I found for butterflies is eye level with the asphalt because that's where they were. One sharp plane of focus faded out before and behind: they flap in and out of existence it seems. The camera quivers a bit - do I see heat waves. Sound peaks of cars passing. californiapatch.mov. 23 October House arrest, desperation. On days like these I keep checking into gmail, don't want to do anything else, just halted waiting for someone to come for me. 24 October There was an amazing light. I was antsy after talking to myself about email, mind very jumpy, cornered. Got on the bike and went to the St Barnabas labyrinth. Stepped over the white lines, sat cross-legged in the center, closed my eyes. Felt the jumpiness, tracked. The dark hold was in the forehead. When I held there the right side opened. What was left was a sharp patch at the inner end of the left eyebrow. I stayed with it. It shifted to a spot toward the back of the crown and stayed. There might have been a line to mid-back. The bells had rung just after I sat down, it was five o'clock. I opened my eyes. The sun was low and almost directly behind me. There were unusual clouds above, a finely ordered array of small cells that spanned the whole sky. The small palm directly ahead of me was throwing a shadow on the white wall. The light on the palm, the wall, the trees standing around the circle seemed over the edge into supernatural. Pellucid. Intense and rapturously clear. I went home and made supper, and when I was sitting on the front porch step looked down startled into a stunningly beautiful bowl of salad. Looked again. Felt I'd never seen anything so vivid. 25 October T and I sat in the lit yard at El Borrego and then I took him along Church Road in the dark. We stopped at St Richard's; I thought, take my Catholic boy to his roots. Then sat by the labyrinth with open sky above. We could hear a bamboo flute somewhere to the south. This morning were on the stoop drinking tea with the sun rising behind a palm trunk. What I liked best though was showing him pale hill.mov. He saw it, felt it. He felt the pathos of the little car and the anachronistic humor of the blue truck. The use of the airplane'sound. November 1 Farmer's market finally - persimmons, lychees, yellow cherry tomatoes, Mediterranean cucumbers. Olives pickled with garlic, pink grapefruit, free range eggs. Small shitake mushrooms. November 3 [Letter to Greg about James Wood on Updike] Its panes were strewn with drops that as if by amoebic decision would abruptly merge and break and jerkily run downward, and the window screen, like a sampler half-stitched, or a crossword puzzle invisibly solved, was inlaid erratically with minute, translucent tesserae of rain. - Of the farm 1961
> I'm not so taken by the 'amoebic decision' part
> I wonder if the virtuoso aspect is what eventually puts people off Updike? At a certain point, does the reader become surfeited
> Oscar Peterson, one of the most brilliant pianists ever, in terms of speed, precision, attack ... Art Tatum, widely regarded as the having unequalled pianistic technique ... you also have players like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, who could wipe out other sax players technically, but whose emotional intensity, unique musical personality and stream of ideas sweep away any doubts.
> Can one consider the enough-ness of beauty in terms of actual people? Did you tend to feel that that quality was sufficient (in some way or another)?
November 6 There's been a time change and it's colder at night. It's the season honey bees drop dead on the floor. The roof cracks hard at night. I'll get out the winter duvet. Sunrise has been a narrow wide band, orange and then gold. That dimmed and now there's hotter local orange in the sun's direction. Chosen emergency. I've been lost, feeble. I don't know what to do all day. I'm lonely. Dull company, wanting to hide out all day in novels. Relieved when it's night and I can allow myself to watch movies. Relieved to go to sleep. Sorry to wake. Don't get email since there aren't students. Not grabbed by work thoughts. Not driven by love. Flat horizon. Told Tom I'm a limp flag waiting for a wind. Don't have a context for work. Don't have a current aesthetic. Don't know what needs doing. No one wants to know me at this plain age. Meetings don't lead to anything. Correspondents drop me. I'm not saying those things in despair, I'm laying out the new circumstance I have to work with. I've leapt into vacancy because I want a last best enterprise. It's completely bootstrapped though, and I don't have the energy I did for long focus. I'll work for an hour and then fade. So much depends on will, now, and will itself depends on energy. Meantime this good house. I'm at the window with my feet on the table. Sun through the bedside venetians straight onto the fern, which is waving in the heater's breeze. Now sun broadside through the front window where the blinds are up for solar heat. Queso fresco in the blue bowl for breakfast with cucumber, yellow pear tomatoes, red pepper, capers. The refrigerator humming. Something has lifted, I think. - Isn't my aesthetic what it always was, to make things that give people a sense of human life as worth something. 12 November Last night I was working on finishing the turkey movie, which I am going to call here because of the way after the turkeys have left I relax into the sound and zipping golden flies and the dripping tap. Video album. 19 November Do the crickets like me? I could hear one - it's been like that every evening - near the front door after I turn out the lights. There it is again. Is it outside or inside? I'd just herded it out. It's in the little gap between the front door and the screen door. Wanted to say too how much scents have been pleasing me. Small whiff of lilies from across the room. Slightest little rag of grapefruit from the bowl in the kitchen. Drying petals on the car seat after I'd stripped them from a lavendar rose in the Casa del Zorro courtyard. Lemon flowers when I open the passenger-side door of the jeep. 2nd December Yesterday I drove through corners of three counties. What if anything was that worth. I liked that ditches we were crossing on 86 had names on little boards. I wanted to remember them but don't. I was boxed in on the inside lane by immense RVs and toy-haulers and RVs pulling toy-haulers, marveling at the money spent and supposing all those men with money listen to Rush Limbaugh and would want to rise up to form the Republic of Gilead if they weren't diverted into rushing around the desert on off-road vehicles carried around the country in hugh white vehicles called Weekend Warrior. It was a bit startling to be in 2013 inland SoCal again - in La Quinta, Indio, Coachella - box stores in malls packed tight along 111, degraded desert, roadsides thick with dried-out non-native weeds. Then S22 winding lumpily through badland gashes with RV encampments, and then the broad - the sublimely broad - reach of Clark Valley up between the Santa Rosas and Coyote Mountain. Then the orange groves of Henderson Canyon Road, many oranges I could see from the road scarred or blighted with black rot at one end. Then back to the little town where people over 65 are living in 1956. December 4 Finished by the lotus.mov or at least a complete first try at it. Plunged into Gwen & Sel - so much motion so little focus - is the solution slow mo - there's Gwen's sharpness and humor but what shd I do about sound. I'm feeling what a deep editing exercise we made this is, make something elegant of this very patchy amateurish footage, with no rules except needing to hold attention and not be ugly. I worked all day today, longer than I have. December 7 Tom: "still thinking about the old folks. the more I think about them the more sublime that sequence becomes. silence gives it the poignancy and distance of old photos, motion vivifies the poignancy, making it immediate, concretely ectoplasmic and haunting". 15 December Luise Braun [my Konrad grandmother] learned to crochet in 1908 in Rückenau. I have one of her crocheted runners under the pedestal of my monitor. 25 December In the late afternoon today we drove to Glorietta Canyon and walked up the draw where I gave the gods my earrings. I had the little stone heart Tom had found on the gravel in my pocket. We walked as far as the path went before it was blocked with stones, chose a boulder above the wash, labored up the sandy slope. I dug a hole under the boulder with the point of my stick. Held out my palm with the stone on it. Tom covered it with his for an instant. I reached it under the overhang and covered it. We'd sat alongside each other on a rock just below the boulder. Tom had his thin hound face. He said he was remembering our wonderful times, "so many memories". He was sitting a bit ahead of me so I could see just the long side of his face. He was crying. 26 December I think something hit him when he saw me pick up the little stone heart to take with us. He was silent on the way up the pale dust road, staring ahead. The canyon was already in shadow when we got there after 3. We parked next to the Virgin's shrine rocks and there was the wash - I think the wash - I'd chosen before, a beautiful sand path winding up between rising banks, a garden with agave, desert lavender, barrel cactus, catclaw, ocotillo, beavertail, cholla, chuparosa already beginning to bloom, brittlebush too. We both struggled to climb the bank. We're so much older than we were. I was using the stick, staggering and hauling up with my arms, and he was worried about falling into a cactus. We sat looking down the valley, which was still in golden evening light, and then crawled down and left the wash. I said the stone heart might still be there a million years from now. We drove very slowly back down the road in 4 wheel drive and the lowest gear, the road now partly wrecked by last summer's flash floods. We met a young man who stood aside to let us pass. When I was alongside him he looked in my eyes and said very quietly Hi. Tom said he was a good omen. I was thinking oh Tom is in ritual time. Then when we were on the last long stretch toward the highway I saw an animal on the road ahead of us. A coyote? A dog? It faded into the desert to the left. When we came even with it, there it was, a dog it seemed, because it had on a yellow collar, a handsome dog turning his head looking at us. Tom said It's me. He followed it a little way, stood in the desert looking after it, a tall narrow man with silver hair. We'd rolled so slowly down that last incline that the light was gone by the time we got to the highway, strapped on our seat belts, put it back into two wheel drive. Other moments. We were lying on his bed seeing the sun slanted on the wall. He said it reminded him of his room in Okinawa. He'd had his own room because he was an NCO, a room half the width of this one, with slats in the windows. He'd lie there on weekends, twenty years old, hung over, watching a gekko climb the wall. When I think of him as my man I get to seething with refused hope and anger that the man I have is so incompetent, such a grabber and bullshitter, cursing, dropping his g's, so tight-looking, with hair plastered down, belly fat spreading in his pyjama gap, leaving a mess wherever he eats, perception eternally tied up in old movie references, always clamouring to be praised, flying into unjust intemperate rage. Etc. When I let him go I'm touched at heart the way I used to be, by his long lonely story, his long faith in me, his riffs, his company in adventure, his energy and eagerness, his love for his own moments, his willingness to be happy wherever he is, his realness in tears, his affection, the adventures we've had through all these years. By how hard it is to be him, especially in the always-dissolving fluidity of intention in him, he so controlled by his moment that he can't form a plan and follow it through and feel a strong bridge from past to future. It has made me feel unloved, unwanted, that he doesn't do what he could do to have money, that he doesn't finish To the buoy, that he doesn't write the family history he keeps saying he will write, that he doesn't get his driver's license. But it hasn't been that, it's just Tom, his unbearable lightness of being, the way he dissolves out from under himself. There was one more thing, what was it. The half hour we had sitting beside the AA desert clubhouse liking it together, its small simple '40s design with schoolhouse windows to the east, pale green paint under the long eaves, nicely lettered address numbers on red boards, fine sand parking lot, tamarisks and palms, concrete pad with picnic tables, barbecue stove. I left Frank at Christmas too. I have moments when I think I've never liked him and then when I lose him - whenever I've lost him, the many times - I see and feel again the pilgrim soul I've always adored. The tall narrow man standing with his back to me in the desert, alone looking after a dog running west. So now it's 1:15. He's at home feeling what he needs to feel. I've cleaned my house and told the story. 31st December Last light.mov. I like the track - it's distant traffic stripped of everything above 600 and offset a bit on R and L tracks so it becomes the sound of the mountains, dark dense standing and surging air with a song in it, a suspended chord embedded in its fiber. I like the way intensity shifts from side to side to make a surrounding. An acceleration at the end. The whole piece is 7 min - slowly fading - may not have the right rate of fade yet. 9 January 2014 OB pier 5 - 3 movements.mov. Fast slow fast, 8 minutes. 14 January O'Brian's wonderful reach and grace. He seems to have been ashamed of his own story - he was brutal to the wife and children he abandoned and it seems abandoned the truth about his young self too - but built so much truth and loving loyalty into his books, built himself able to flow out so honorably in truthful observation and love for all of earth, that his debts were paid - not to the victims, no, but at large - more than fully, and long before he died. He made himself, durch sich Selbst, and what kind of story is how he did it. I read him always feeling him: what mind can do this, what mind can know so much. It was an ill-regulated mind and if it were not carefully watched it would mourn Diana's death, or at least the death of his infinitely cherished myth; a dark, bitter, monotonous grieving. Yet the mourning was not pure - it no longer invaded him entirely, perhaps because often and often, in the most unexpected ways, the old myth and the new reality tended to coincide. Perhaps, he reflected, this had a certain relationship to marriage: they had been together a very long time and although they might essentially be strangers they were inextricably entwined. Diana Villiers: he stared into the declining fire, and Cuvier receded, faded. 18 January Alright: I'm going to finish laying out In English now that I have the cover. 19 January 8 hours focused work today, hardly looked up. Layout and notes. Smitten by play of the weather. winter interference is another kind of place, leaner, less spatial-tactile, more social. field & field is two fields, loving present and rounding-up thought/realization. Its title is exact. 20 January Pre-print of Juliana's and my translation piece arrived tonight. It looks nice. I like the clarity of what I said. 21 January The Living Desert. Mountain lion. Rosy boas. Cozy badger. Turkey vulture, roadrunners, grackle. Peccary. 22 January The badger was lying flat as a little fur rug on the warm dirt breathing peacefully, dozing. After a while it stretched forth two black hands with sharp claws, laid its head down between them. There was a young woman standing next to me against the wall who said He's my favorite, he has a lot of personality. What she meant was that he seemed happy and easy, a darling little being. The rosy boas weren't pink, they were lengthwise-striped pale copper and silver. One was coiled loosely over the crotch of a dead branch asleep. Most of the other's length lay along the sandy floor but its upper quarter was held upright supporting its small diamond-shaped head so it could lie against the other's long shoulder. The two small heads motionless close together seemed loving, like Tom and me in our head-joined beds. In the big tent-peaked aviary a roadrunner with a bad foot fluffed himself up and stood still near the man with the barrel belly who brings them food. It had a turquoise bar next to its eye. Another was running the way they do, beak sharply forward like someone intent to know. Meantime a sad-looking turkey vulture with a broken right wing was hopping clumsily onto a log. The peccary had coarse long black hair like a porcupine, trotted on little pointed feet carrying forward what seemed a very large serious face. I came home on S22 in the dark, Handel blasting, switching onto high beams when I could, cutting a lit swath ahead of me through the Gothic blackness of dips and curves feeling the strangeness of there being somewhere on the earth's surface I was going to with so much trouble. I mean the arbitrariness of these homes where no one is waiting for me I suppose. February 1st Looking at the pink lilies on the table and the iris on the modem's table just now I was remembering hospital corridors at night with flowers set on the floor outside the doors. They don't do that now, it's something people may not even remember. The dim gleam of the terrazzo floors, a bulky Ukrainian janitor pushing a large round polisher trailing a long cord, its motor's roar. Yesterday I was working on SketchUp again, all day fervid. I modeled this house and then I made up an improved version of it. I furnished it. Installed a gas fireplace, a fridge, a wall oven, a toilet, a sink, glass doors on the washer-drier compartment. Put a plumb line here, pull up a guideline, always specify your axis, rectangles are better than lines. When I stopped yesterday to talk on the phone or go down to the botany society's junk sale I was seeing geometrically as if I were modeling. This house felt different when I stopped last night because I'd built an alternate space in it. I was enraptured with the guestroom, where I'd built the Mesa Grande window bookshelves and put a writing table under the west window, painted it black, brought in a quite lovely chair. 7 February The later pages of In English - I've sometimes known what little thing to do with a text that's been hung up for is it now almost 40 years but I often feel the mediocrity of the mind making the whole piece, that it can't be fixed. At the same time I remember people who have felt something about those pieces - and I have - so I decide to let them stand as the work of a younger person. I keep having such opposite feelings about the whole project, that the work is exquisite, that the work is nothing. Going forward with it is like closing my eyes and throwing it into outer space. or so it seems at the moment, as my fire dies to a twist of smoke and a heap of rubies - That's Abbey. 14 February I open this book against the edge of the café table, sound of traffic, taste of coffee holding in my mouth, shade of the umbrella, warm breeze, and instantly a sense there wasn't before, of travel and sweet leisure. There's my dusty jeep parked nose-up to the fudge shop's platform. Friday morning. It's a young feeling, I mean a familiar one, normal, but uncommon for a while. So many palm trees, a lot of traffic and motion in a surrounding quiet. It's Borrego's high season and the beginning of a long weekend. I have the feeling I used to have in the oak tree's chair at Mesa Grande, of resting in a vast warm bath of perfect peace. 17 February Posted a lot of bits yesterday - 3 new photos I like - one of a little lump of rock on the desert floor. There was good light soft from the west, sun behind a thick sheet of haze that was luminous as a panel not a point. Chips of rock scattered on coarse sand each so particular and lovely in that light. What I like in the photo is that there's a narrow plane of sharp focus, narrower than the lump of rock itself, something tactile, sharp grain on the curve of its back and on the translucent milky bit just at its base. - Haven't said it. Two from the waste ground west of Hoberg Road. The air was so milky it faded the base of mountain. In both photos I've made sky of that. Sky with faint volumes. The D50 made something subtlely lovely of the color in both. It's a lyrical machine, it pushes colors toward pink and orange and saturates them a bit. It's embodying a prettiness algorithm. I don't approve of that, it flatters me, it gives me more than I saw, and yet I like that the photos look like love. I like them on the Here2014 site. They made me interested in the site again. - The Palms at Indian Head. Noticing what this new shirt and my hair shorter feel like. Sunglasses. I feel like a local, I mean a California person. Lighter. Glamorous. Palms' ancient legs. A lot of conversation behind me so I can hardly hear their dry quiet - what? - as if pale fine lines in the air, a faint streaking. When the breeze comes up, more of a rattle. So dry. I like this ledge above the valley. 5 steps above the pool deck, and then a row of palms, and then pale desert, and then a green strip, De Anza? And then on slightly rising ground citrus farms, and then the Coyote Mountain ridge, brown, and behind it the higher bluer more hazed further ridge beyond Clark Valley. The sky today has a frail tissue of cloud, I mean thin and organically formed with a faint spine and cellular dabs, exquisite like tissue in an x-ray. Flaked paint on the edge of the roof. The palms need water. A sweet relaxed sense - strong sense of architectural place, which is era too. Someone's intelligence a long time ago still holding. 20 February Second day not succeeding with the D800 but hours in desert goodness. Wide space, open silence. Bite of my footsteps on firm sand. Chuparosa blooming, here and there shreds of the same orange on the tips of dead ocotillo arms. New cholla limbs shining almost white. Barrel cactus in fresh pink, most not in bloom, a few in green circlet of bud. Desert lavender loose and foamy swaying its bitty tips against the breeze. I'm in El Borrego at noon. What a lot of gut buckets. What a good smell.
Why are these people eating hamburgers. Peter Liechti The sound of insects 2009. A Japanese man in his 40s walked for an hour carrying various supplies to a place he remembered from an excursion when he was a student. There he used branches and plastic to make a room in the forest. He had a radio, some books, a notepad. On August 7 lay down on a bed of dry grass to starve to death. It took 62 days. He was found, with the notebook, by a hunter, some months later, not decomposed, dried to a mummy. I found the movie last night when I was tracking a documentary about a sound recordist. Sat with it on the big monitor for an hour and a half elated. I could see it fulfilled the years of experimental work in film and sound; he had those experiments as options in telling a story worth telling. There was forest, slight camera motion finding beautiful frames. Pattern on the plastic, that got dirtier, was rained on. There was the text's long steady interest in what it's like to die. There was beautiful sound design, complex. Interposed super 8 material in black and white exquisitely telecined to show grain, which I thought must have been drawn from footage Liechti had collected over years.
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