July 1, 2010. Thursday.
Situation: Damn it. Part of my morning routine is to turn on the computer first thing so after I’m done with my walk with Mway it’s finished going through its grinding. But this morning I forgot to click one of the opening icons and now I must sit here and listen to the computer still go through its opening procedures. But at least I think I can use the word processing program – and, there, it sounds to me like the grinding is coming to a halt. This morning, having gotten more detailed instructions from Moi, I better prepared Squeak’s food, nuking it in the wooden dish, her preferred dish, rather than the plastic one, which I used instead as a cover, then breaking up the food with a fork. I let Mway out the door before I’m ready to go out; I pour water for the coffee; then I go outside, let the chickens out and throw out some feed for them. Mway and I are on the path by 8:15.
State of the Path: It’s a cool morning; the air feels real refreshing. Nevertheless, I feel tired. Last night at work when I sat down to do my job, I suddenly realized how tired I felt. People told me I did my job just as well, if not better, than I usually do, and I was able to put passion into it, but in the back of my mind lingered a feeling of irritability which I was unable to dispel the whole night and which undoubtedly adversely affected my job performance. Yesterday afternoon before going to work I took Mway for another walk down to the creek and then I even went into the pool to swim my circle laps – with an early morning walk, it was probably all too much to do. Neither the day lilies nor the fleabane have opened up yet. I take the side path by the orchard, which I hadn’t done at all yesterday. A briar and a grapevine, in one day, have grown across the path; I don’t bother to knock them down – perhaps with all the dry weather, I’m starting to feel sorry for the plants. Nevertheless, through the goldenrod, I step with my foot turned sideways, to act as a wedge to stamp down whatever goldenrod I can. The weed’s hold onto the soil doesn’t seem as great as it once was, and it seems like I’m able to trample some of it down pretty well. Down by the creek, after tripping over the loopy grapevine as I do almost every time (the vine is hidden by some of those plants I talked about yesterday and can’t identify), I run into an especially prickly thistle – this, if it is a thistle (and since it’s not flowering I can’t for certain tell), may be a bull thistle. Moi calls all the thistles Canadian bull thistles; but Audubon makes a distinction between Canada thistle and bull thistle: both are spiny, but the bull thistle is “our spiniest thistle.” I take the side path along the skating pond too. I notice that there are catty-nine-tails (Audubon calls them common cattails) in the pond, and this amazes me, because I can’t imagine there’s any water in the pond to sustain these plants. I think about going over to investigate things further, but between the path and the crest of the pond lies a bunch of goldenrod, and I just can’t stand the thought of walking through more of this stuff.
State of the Creek: To my surprise, Mway doesn’t head into the creek at her usual spot, but simply turns right onto the path; I think maybe she’s deliberately trying to avoid any contact with the raccoons. On our way along the creek, we both prick our ears at something suddenly crashing through the weeds on the other side. This sounds again to me like a deer, but neither of us see anything. I see that the pool under the black walnut tree is starting to disappear; the same is true of one of the pools along the crest of the skating pond. Tomorrow or the next day, both of these pools might be gone.
The Fetch: Up at the clearing, Mway is a ball of energy, going after the “pro-quality” stick more times, really, than I care to throw it – again, my muscles, particularly my thigh muscles, feel sore (too many frog kicks in the swimming pool, I believe), and it’s unpleasant for me to bend down to pick up the stick. At one point, after Mway drops the stick at my feet, I just stand there hesitating to bend down, and Mway barks away at full throttle, the force from her abdomen kicking her body back and forth like a cannon discharging. Up at the house, I hear the chickens crowing, and a sound of a crash like they’re up on the porch knocking something over. I feel the urge to boot Mway -- but, of course, I don’t. Eventually I bend down, throw the stick a few more times; we play “Put it down” till she grows tired of it herself, then head back to the house.
7 comments:
Not that I don’t consider this journal to be, in a very humble way, influenced by Joyce, whom I count among my favorite writers, but that influence must be considered in light of the modification enacted by Joyce’s one-time and most eminent disciple, Samuel Beckett. Beckett, who in his earliest writings, by most accounts, stumbled along somewhat too much in the shadow of Joyce, finally stepped clear of that shadow, though not necessarily into sunshine, when, with his Trilogy, he realized that if Joyce exemplified supreme competence, he must represent incompetence, if Joyce wrote about everything, he must write about nothing. As stated in the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, Beckett then and henceforth carried forth “an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence,” committed to the ideal of failure, to the notion that there is nothing to express, no ability to express, no desire to express, nothing but the obligation to express. In his most famous work, Waiting for Godot, for example, he wrote, as one critic has famously quipped, about nothing, twice. Not that writing about nothing did not have its precedents; Lawrence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy is widely considered a novel par excellence about nothing, Flaubert has explicitly stated that he intended Madame Bovary to be about nothing. But Beckett, by all accounts, has taken the notion of writing about nothing to its most profound heights. As a young man, I read both Joyce and Beckett a lot: I found Beckett slightly more infectious. The cadences of his prose, his stutterings and sputterings, his commas, negations, and contradictions, seemed such as dropped most naturally from my own mind. Whenever I tried to write anything, it was hard for me not to mimic this genius, not to be the dabbler hanging onto the tailcoat of someone he admires. Those writings, consigned to the dustbin, might be considered pragmatic failures. For most of my adult life, I’ve tried to read, or write like, other writers, whenever I’ve found it possible to read or write at all, but now that I’m in my mid 50’s I realize I can’t ignore the two who have made the biggest impression on me. This journal, even though it might not look like it, traces its lineage to Joyce directly though Beckett (although it remains wrong – I must emphasize -- to expect any Joycean pryotechnics in it). Beckett started writing in French to destroy any style. I can’t write in any foreign language, so I’ve simply tried to destroy any style in English, as honestly as can be done by a state-college-educated native American speaker. Indeed, it is one of my intentions by this journal to present one of the most boring pieces of extended prose written in English ever: a certain blandness of prose befits such a task. I fully realize the risks I’m running. But I hope it may be possible, in some one who stays with it long enough, for the effort to induce the state of mind in which the poetic question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is passionately raised. There – I’ve no doubt said too much.
Boring? I’m sure I’ve said it before – I think what you’re writing about is the most interesting thing ever written. Just need some Joycean – I wouldn’t call it “pyrotechnics” – just a Joycean examination of what things are doing what to what. And I’m still thinking about your question: no one’s ever asked me before why I like Joyce so much, even more than all the dog stories in Moi’s library. It’s true. And it is a good question – you’re right: Joyce doesn’t write a whole lot about dogs. This morning, when you let me out, I sat on the back porch, looking over the lawn at the peeps milling about outside the cage while the bigger chickens squawked inside, thinking about this. M.
You wouldn’t happen to have any literary criticism on Joyce? – other than Ellmann’s biography I mean. M.
Been re-reading this blog since I finished it last December. Guess I can’t quite let it go. Here, I feel compelled, for the sake of clarity, to furnish an example of the writing I talk about above, something from the dustbin. This is from a story (well, it’s a little over 17,500 words so I guess you could call it a novella) begun, before I met Moi, in 1978, written first variously with pen or pencil and paper or a typewriter, and after revision after revision and splattered cigarette ash after splattered cigarette ash, through 10 different residences, finally finished, some 15 years later, when Jazz and the Boy were about 10and 7 respectively, on either a Mac or a PC. For a long time Moi called it my “statue story” – as in “You still working on your statue story?” The narrator’s name is Ammrrrrrghhrlgblahbleh, a mysterious being with a resemblance to Cupid conjured accidentally to the page by an even more mysterious doctor:
I fell in love. How could I not have fallen, even if the doctor did not so order? I say it, admit it. Why should I deny it? I fell in love, whether anyone wants me to or not. Whatever motivations and aspirations have sprung in him, I will wind downward as I will -- for this is, indeed, despite whatever I might have said before, my own mouth that is speaking. This noise drums and toots in no one else's. Blisters erupt on my tongue; aches stiffen my lungs; my lips, not someone else's, are tender with bruises from perpetual smacking. It is my mouth that is flapping, my mouth that is hurting (though when the noise has ceased, when this task is done, it will be my mouth, my mouth alone, and no one else's, which will be soothed, for in the void from which I have been rudely wrenched I will soak my mouth in a bath of silence, and in that darkness blotched with blood and drifting pus, I will lower my head and never speak again). It is my mouth and my noise, the doctor's words and urges, the latter of which, however strong they may be, are beginning to be dampened by my own. He crams the word in my mouth, and I mash it between my gums, spitting out a bolus sponged full of saliva. But could I have ever begun to chew and spit like this without your help? Hardly. You, who grimace best when you speak -- I've learned so much from watching you. My profit from hearing you curse is that now I can speak, though I understand not a word I say and though my learning comes too late. It has taken hundreds of years of forced observation, of watching the mouth throbs of long, difficult partings and endless, impossible greetings. Love you. Love you too. I say it. I say it, as if I were you striking out the tones of your passion into the cauldron of your cacophonous home where your loved one's goodbye bubbles to the surface of cries and other shouts. I say it, as if I were you shouting through the doorway above the heated sounds of the sirens and jeers of brawlers down the street. I can pronounce words. Where your nose puckered, so does mine. Where your upper lip flipped upward to bare your gums, so does mine to bare mine. Where your top teeth pounced upon your lower lip, so do my top gums pounce upon mine. I fizz just as you did. My gum flies from my lip just as your teeth flew from yours. A growl rises from my throat just as one did from yours and is kicked out of the mouth by my soft palate same as yours was. And I round my lips and huff two times, spitting before the second huff, same as you did.
It took me 15 years to write something I’d forgotten I read 17 years earlier!
This reminds me of what I used to say about my father, during the last two decades of his life, when he was losing his hearing. He, my mother, Moi, and I would be having a conversation at the dinner table. Somebody would say something, and my father, a few minutes later, would say the same thing, as if he had just had the idea himself, “I think you should plant Christmas trees in your field.” “That’s what we were just saying!” everybody laughing. I would tell Moi later that it was as though my father, hearing someone’s voice at a low decibel, mistook what that voice was saying as his own thought.
“Why is there something rather than nothing,” which I call a poetic question above (thus including the implication of a literary judgment to be made), is more commonly considered solely a philosophical or religious one. Martin Heidegger, in An Introduction to Metaphysics (often considered, wrongly I believe, a debasement of his earlier work), discusses it at length as a philosophical question. He calls it the most fundamental question, “why is there being rather than nothing at all?” a question which can neither be satisfied by a pat religious answer, nor asked fully when raised in a mechanical manner. He speaks about people being “grazed” by this question at certain times in their lives, in moments of despair or joy, or even when bored. As such I can remember three times at least when I really felt this question – felt it very intensely, that is, to the point of madness, or mystical ecstasy, satori, nausea, I don’t know I don’t want to quibble about such words right now. They weren’t when I was the saddest or the most joyous. One time was when I was a first-grader listening to the hum of the heat registers in the classroom on a foggy autumn day. Another time was when I was a teenager relaxing in my parents’ screened-in back porch and trying to imagine “nothingness.” A third time was in a grove of trees outside the music building when I was a college student and had just finished practicing the piano for hours. Although I feel the question beckoning me all the time, I haven’t in some time felt it seize me with the force that happened these three times, probably because of late I’ve been more often asking the question’s converse. If anyone who might be re-reading this blog has ever felt it (or those of you reading here for the first time), I’d be curious to hear about it.
Those of you reading or re-reading this blog may have noticed that I’ve been plugging into it here and there – what I call at least one place – retrograde comments – comments, like the several above, made after the blog has come properly to an end on December 24, 2011. I don’t mean to be doing this. It seems to be beyond the scope of my plans, of my original intentions. It’s like Ishmael going on to describe his life after the destruction of the Pequod, or John Steinbeck continuing on about himself and Charley after he’s made it home safely in Rocinante. Despite what may eventually happen in this blog, I should simply be glad that the truck-trailer made it back home intact, and I shouldn’t go on describing it sitting in the driveway, its tires going flat, its trim turning rusty, its insides being filled up with boxes of junk from the house. I’ve done what I felt I had to do. I’ve made my little protest, I had my hour of consciousness, I should now go silent. I should be like George Dorn in Shea and Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy and forgo my diary, “the usual defense against silence and aloneness.” But it’s hard to let go of this blog, whether it’s just habit drawing me back or the allure of the infinite PA of cyberspace. This past week in Wade’s New York Times Book Review I read a review on a new popular science book on cosmology and quantum mechanics, Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. What relevance to what I’ve been saying here! Perhaps the fundamental question will be this year’s catchphrase and I should just hunker down and tell the world all I know about it right here. (Wonder, by the way, if M. has read, say – looking over my shelves – The Dancing Wu Li Masters, The God Particle, The Fabric of the Cosmos? In the World Book Encyclopedia, there’s an article on quantum mechanics in Q, but in N nothing on nothing.)
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