September 22, 2010. Wednesday.
Situation. I work tonight. Shortly after I get up, while I’m restarting the computer over and over to try to get the wireless connection to work, Moi tells me that she’s concerned about the poison ivy under the pear tree. The past couple years she’s been canning these pears; last year I clipped the poison ivy down, but since I didn’t pull up any of the roots or runners, it of course came back again this year. “Okay,” I tell her, “I guess I can go out there this morning and pull it up.” Since my gardening clothes are the same as my walking clothes, I decide I might as well also take Mway for a walk, even though I believe Moi has just fetched stick with her in the back yard. I first walk down the lane to mail some bills. Mway’s already outside, and she follows me down the lane. I go back in the house to put on my gloves and safari helmet. I decide to take Mway for a walk before I pull up any poison ivy, because after doing that, I’ll have to immediately take a shower and wash my clothes. Mway’s lying in the yard, peering at me. When she sees me grab the birch branch and my walking stick, she gets up and runs over to the chicken coop to bark at the chickens (at 9 o’clock Moi has still not let the chickens out; she’s trying to make sure they lay their eggs in the coop and not hither and thither in the weeds).
State of the Path: I stick to the main path, down to the creek and back. There’s a little bit of dew on the plants, and my pants get spotted. The crack in my boot picks up a briar branch I cut down the other day, and it gets dragged for a few feet before it comes off. A rough-looking black bird (a starling?) gets spooked as I approach and flies out of the touch-me-nots into the maples. In the field across the creek going up to the ridge, I see purple flowers and I wonder if it is ironweed; most of our ironweed has turned brown. I continue to be impressed by the New York or New England asters, which burgeon in the swale, in the feed channel, and along the ridge around bug land, often shooting up through other weeds that were already there.
State of the Creek: The bowl of water at the log jam has disappeared, but there are still the two little puddles at the narrows. I can’t yet say the creek is completely dried up; today there’s more water in the creek than in the driveway.
The Fetch: I toss the stick mostly within the clearing, trying (since my mind’s on pulling up weeds) to get Mway to beat down the goldenrod that’s there, but I make a few tosses into the higher goldenrod down the path. It seems to me that today there’s an understanding between Mway and me that she’s already just fetched the stick with Moi, so Mway limits her fetches to about five, not even bothering to play “Put it down.”
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I just spoke on the phone with Katie, who owns the tavern where Moi and I usually play Saturday nights. The tavern is still not up and running after the flood -- the septic system remains damaged, destroyed coolers have not yet been replaced, the cellar weeps water, brown wellwater still runs out of the faucets. I don’t know when the place will re-open. Today I was hoping for an email requesting my services on my day job, but none has come. I haven’t had any day work all week – that job too has been slow all year. This might serve as a reminder to anyone who has work to be grateful for that work, even if it is not the job for which one is best qualified. Despite my diminishing income, I had to write out checks this month to the taxing authorities for our quarterly estimated taxes. The estimated tax is based on income from last year, and I have a feeling I’m paying more than I will eventually owe. I suppose with all the free time I have I could recalculate the estimated tax or pay my tax accountant to do that. It has always struck me funny that the IRS considers me a “proprietor of a small business.” It seems to me that for me, and persons similarly situated, the IRS should have a special form, say a Schedule CT – Profit or Loss for Mass of Men Leading Lives of Quiet Desperation. Then, of course, there are those workers who, for whatever reason, pay no income tax at all.
Following is an abstract of a recurring event of most of 2010, which I refer to on January 22 but did not have or take the time to mention much in my journal. I include the abstract here, as a framing device, because the event has some sort of relation to the journal’s central action.
Court of Common Pleas
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania vs. Sisyphus A. Gregor
Conditions of Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition Program
Condition #8 “The defendant will report regularly to his Probation Officer, as directed. Your reporting date is the [22nd of the month].
Each month you will phone the CALL-TRACK number. When you call the automated system, you will be asked to enter your social security number, then state your name. The questions are answered by pressing the appropriate key to respond “yes” or “no.” If your answer requires clarification, you will be prompted to respond.
[Defendant receives no response when he dials the CALL-TRACK number and, desperately rummaging through his ARD Program packet, finds what follows.]
REVOCATION OF ARD
The anniversary date of your placement is your maximum date and all conditions that you agreed to… must be met by then.
Condition #4. YOU WILL COMPLETE THE DUI COUNTERMEASURES PROGRAM. If your charge is a DUI, you are required to attend the DUI Counter Measures Classes. This is classroom work, 10 to 12 clock hours, done in two or three evenings…IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to be sure you are enrolled in class within the first three months of your ARD.
If you have (1) not paid in full all financial obligations of the ARD Program or (2) if you failed to complete any other Condition…then you have failed to successfully complete the ARD Program and your criminal charge cannot be expunged.
A Petition to Revoke ARD will be filed which states the violation and the date and time of a Revocation Hearing before the Court….
In some instances this provides enough time for some violations to be corrected. This packet contains the information you will need for compliance and you should take advantage of those two months to make a last ditch effort to earn Expungement.
As I post these (what I call) framing devices just a couple days before the end of this blog, I realize there’s nothing preventing me, despite what happens near the end, from going back to earlier entries and adding more comments, just as I’ve done recently under the September 1 entry. It seems to be coherent to end everything when the last post is made on December 24, 2011, as are my plans – it seems natural to do that, but really it is just arbitrary, and I have to recognize that the form of the blog lends itself to a certain freedom of internal expansion, even as it comes to a close. December 24, 2011, might be my last post, to correspond with my last journal entry of December 24, 2010, but I might afterward just want to go back and comment on a point I made on such and such a day, or comment on a comment, and go on and on for as much as I like or as long as I like, free from the constraints of diurnal time. Working on this blog, I’ve learned that my easy-going but capricious publisher limits each comment to 4,096 characters, but so far I haven’t found any limit to the number of comments that can follow a post. It might be worth contemplating, and acting upon, that which is “without a frame.” I don’t know why I’ve just put those words in quotation marks. Maybe I will if I comment on this comment tomorrow.
And it doesn’t have to be (shouldn’t be) (isn’t supposed to be) limited to my comments. Maybe Moi, early on bored, will someday discover her proper interest and lend her volubility and flair for drama to the affair. Maybe Jazz and the Boy, mercifully kept to the background as their situations and the restraints on my time and my sense of their privacy required, will someday step forward and lay claim to their rightful importance. Wade Miller certainly has good reason to want to give his own perspective on himself, if he can ever find this blog on his computer. Maybe Barb Dennehy, who Moi tells me is always saying bad things about the people she cleans for and people we know, would like to get on here and say those bad things, or maybe talk about her groupie days with pop star Iggy Pop, as she tends to do when she gets drunk. Alma could complain about her husband, who, from what Moi tells me, in fifty years has yet to finish the flooring or dry wall in their house. Ezra would maybe like to discuss the fine processes of the various illegal operations he has going on his land. Kyle Kantz might want to rail against cars that use electronic fuel injection systems rather than carburetors. Dennis Dennehy could paint a fascinating picture of what it’s like to get up everyday and have nothing to do but get drunk before noon. Arnie and Connie could explain exactly what it is they see in those ugly dogs of theirs. David Chalmers might like to argue that he is not an overpaid consciousness, and Edward S. Greenberg that he is not a profiteering revolutionary. Maybe Pond Leaks and Company would like to further pitch its garden ponds and garden pond supplies. Mr. Bernstein could come on and denounce as dishonest a document that does not explicitly avow its ethnicity. There is no end, given its form, and despite what happens later, to how this blog might implode with information and persist into the twilight of humanity. Though I probably should print out as much of it on paper as I can before then.
By the way, Aristotelianism should not be spelled “Aristotilianism.” The importance of this remark will be apparent later.
Lately I’ve been struck by the thought that our two cats (the second cat, Wood, will eventually make his appearance in this blog) are sort of like our two kids, Wood, who likes to fetch a little cloth rat with Moi, being somehow like the Boy and Squeak, who wonders around the house in her own little world, being somehow like Jazz. I wonder if Moi has ever thought this too.
Speaking of remarks, the importance of which will become apparent later, it’s remarkable to note that the word “ashplant” doesn’t appear in a certain document (appearing later), despite its notable relevance to that document. Could this be simply an oversight? Or does the author of the document not know the meaning of the word? The word does not appear in either Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (of easy access in my office) or Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary Unabridged. But you’d think its meaning would be clear from its original context.
The other day while re-reading through this blog since the last post on December 24, 2011 (still doing this despite my best intentions), I got up from the computer to go to the bathroom and there had an idea for a short story. It seemed like such a good idea that I was angry with myself for not having it before and with spending so many hours instead on writing this dumb journal and blog. (You’d think I would have been able to finish it in the same amount of time.) As I sat on the toilet, sentences streamed through my head, but since I had work to do I had to get ready for that. By the time I got to the tax assessment office, however, I was still thinking about the story, and I took a little time to jot some words down on a piece of scrap paper. The idea is to tell the story of the myth of Sisyphus from the rock’s point of view (the literal rock, not any metaphoric one). Here’s what I managed to write down:
But what about me? Don’t I have feelings too? Is it because your language contains such thoughtless expressions as “his face turned to stone” and “my heart’s like a rock tossed into the sea,” that you focus all your attention on him?
I haven’t had the time to write any more. But I do have a clear idea how the rest of the narrative would go. First the rock would argue, as if using language were not sufficient evidence, that, despite what humans think, consciousness is manifested in the very basic laws of physics. Anything under their influence, anything moving or changing, is a sentient being “though the powers of awareness, affect, reasoning, and volition may operate at a considerably slower speed and lower intensity”:
I did not at first understand why, when upon reaching the summit he slipped and lost hold of me, I felt so much joy. But after all these hundreds of thousands of years, I came to know! It was because the next moment I was rolling home to rest with family and friends.
The rock would then rail against the gods for forcing it to be an unwilling accomplice in another being’s torture and castigate humans for viewing it as an obdurate and malicious instrument rather than a person “just trying to live my own life”:
If I am a daily burden to him, it is only because I throw all my weight into trying to return where I belong.
At some point there would be an elaboration of what it’s like to be a rock in its particular situation:
Up that long mountainside, as he grunts and strains, sweats and curses, I resist, resist because I long to be in that valley from which he purposelessly pushed me. I can’t see its rubble strewn field, I can’t hear its snapping heat, I can’t smell the scraggly flowers or taste the dirt, but I can feel its sheer presence pull at every molecule in my body. The higher we go, the heavier I become, the greater I incline. Not because I can look back down the slope and see my home disappearing, but because every inch, every foot, every yard, the entire ever expanding space of ground between it and me, is tugging.
Anticipating the criticism that it never seems to exhibit free will (supposed signpost of consciousness) but seems bound to the laws of physics, the rock would put forth the succinct rejoinder “just because I follow my desire each time doesn’t mean I can’t choose not to!” Bristling over its perceived inferiority, it would make a claim of moral superiority over “more lively consciousnesses” by pointing to the consistency of its actions. “Unlike you vaporous minds, combusting and jostling all the time, we are always faithful to our intentions.” It would contrast its own simple “unwavering commitment” to the frivolous ideals of “do unto others as you would do unto yourself,” “live and let live,” and “know thyself.” It would cast its minimal activities in a favorable light in contrast to creatures who “prick a finger, sting an arm, or slaughter other creatures wholesale just to stay alive.” “’Do the least, do the least harm’ is a maxim we do not have to put in words.” To the argument that rocks sometimes do do a lot of harm, in landslides say, it would scoff: “Yes, how often does one of us really roll down on one of you? Besides, if you would just take the time to recognize what we’re up to, you could always put yourselves out of harm’s way. If anything, you should appreciate what we do for you. Upon us you build your house and roadway, upon us you tread and flop down your fancy-pants ass.” (Also, mention good metaphors: “solid as a rock,” “rock of ages,” “rock’n’roll.”)
Maybe at some point the narrative would even reach an anagnorisis, as the rock, in arguing for recognition of its sentience in defense of its actions, suddenly realizes that the very situation it complains about is the cause of that sentience. “Yes, it’s true. We tend to grow forgetful in that valley, thoughts slow to a complete stop, unchanging rest lapses into oblivion. Until he shoves me up that hill, I don’t know what it is I want, don’t even know that I don’t know. It’s only when he’s pushing me away from what I desire that my desire comes alive, and I suppose – I suppose, ho! -- I should be grateful to that stupid clutz and to the gods who have condemned him” – the old Jobian Miltonian justification of injustice. “Oh, if only while I was crashing back down that hill, I could forget that he’s already charging behind me, and that, just as soon as I land among my loved ones, he’ll be applying his shoulder against me again! Happiness is nothing but the ever present feeling of its opposite.”
But, you see, as soon as I write out this outline I realize – this story’s already been written by somebody else. It sounds like something John Barth wrote in the 60’s or 70’s (see the philosophizing sperm cell of “The Night-Sea Journey”) or something written by my former professor Paul West. In fact, I probably got the idea, the germ of it at least, while reading West’s “The Universe, And Other Fictions” (a book I picked up from the Strand bookstore on the same trip I got “The Myth of Sisyphus”). In that book West has a story (which I’d read before a long time ago) from the point of view of one of Shakespeare’s brain cells (“Brain Cell 9,999,999,999”), another from the point of view of Moby Dick, another, as the title suggests, from the point of view of the entire universe (two versions, one on each side of an LP, one for a “steady-state” universe and the other for a “big bang” universe). Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Very clever! Take something that doesn’t speak and have it speak – an idea as old as Aesop. Ha! Ha! Ha! (In Circe, Joyce gives all kinds of inanimate objects lines to speak: bells, gongs, Bloom’s bar of soap, wreaths, gulls, bedsprings, buckles, Bella’s fan, The End of the World). It’s the type of thing I’d like to write, if only it were 1972. And just now I’ve leafed through a book I have of Francis Ponge’s works called The Voice of Things. Sure enough, there as part of Le Parti Pris des Choses is The Pebble: “Ever since the explosion of their enormous forebear…the rocks have kept silent. Invaded and fractured by germination…none of them…makes a sound any longer. If I now wish to examine a specific type of stone with greater attention, its perfection of form and the fact that I can hold it, roll it around in my hand, makes me choose the pebble….the pebble is stone at precisely that stage when it reaches the age of the person, the individual, in other words, the age of speech.”
The last I heard anything about Paul West was what I read a year or so ago in the Book Review section of Wade’s New York Times: that he was suffering from aphasia. Of all the things that could be afflicting him there is none more ironic than this, for I remember how Marion and I and other friends of mine who had him in class marveled at his eloquence and volubility, shaking our heads in wonder when we learned that the verbal gymnastics of his ever growing list of novels were the result of pure dictation into a tape recorder (writing with a pen or typewriter was apparently too slow for him). I was always struck dumb in his presence and recall my silence when one time, in casual conversation in his office, he asked me if I liked weather. Before I knew how to reply he was going on and on about how he preferred an artificial environment such as that on a commercial airplane. Years later after college, I was bold enough to call the busy man a couple times on the phone, hoping he might read some of my writing (my piece about Ammrrrrrghhrlgblahbleh probably), but he told me, after complaining about the migraine he was having, that I should simply send the stuff out to publishers. Marion, at least, after becoming established as a poet and a book critic in NYC (years after I moved away from East 3rd Street to live with Moi, who could not take the soot heat of the steps of my five-story walkup, the M-80’s in the alley shaft) got to know “Paul” on a first name basis and even helped him to gain wider recognition by writing a review or two about his latest novels (some of which are on my bookshelves). I’ve been thinking about emailing Marion to let him know about my blog here, not because I expect he’ll have the time to read it (you’ve got to read the whole thing or you might as well not read it at all), but only because I had mentioned it to him in an email before and I should now tell him I’ve finished it (if indeed I am done futzing around with it). I had told him that I was going to use the last sentence of Camus’ famous essay as an epigraph. He had remarked that he thought the most important part of that sentence was the word “imagine.”
The last couple days I’ve been re-reading one of Marion’s books of poetry that he sent me in the mid 90’s, and I’ve been trying to figure out where things take place in it. I figure that’s a very important question because the morphemes “geo” and “graph” both appear in the title of the book and also in the title of the prose poem that is its centerpiece. I’m looking mainly at that centerpiece prose poem. It’s not easy going, though, because Marion is as adept as Joyce or Miles at hiding an object and as risible as Beckett or Monk at trying to find one. I have to even resort to a photograph on the cover of the book to get my bearings, a photo of two block buildings, looking like a pair of dice, on a street in what looks like an irrigated town in the western United States or a village in the Caribbean. From this, and from a bio in the back of the book telling me Marion lives in NYC and an epigraph from the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (“You will find no new places, no other seas, The town will follow you.”), I get the impression that Marion is writing about trips he’s had the chance to take outside the city, weekend excursions to places in the United States and longer vacations outside the country and overseas, maybe over a nine-year period (“Nine years tracing the geography of one night’s sleep. Mud colored thoughts stuck in my mouth’s hive.”) I also get this impression from the fact that there’s little or no imagery of NYC per se (no park trees, hot dog vendors, or taxis) but there are mentions of means of transport out of the city, airports (“The bus trip to the airport takes me through the mid-town tunnel…” “…but now I would be stuck with [a book] for a seven-hour flight.” “Which knob do you pull for soft-soap?”) and what sound like car rentals (“At the tollbooth I paid for the car behind me.” “After the tires had burned themselves a black gutter in the ice, I began trying to rock the car free.”) But if there’s nothing about the place where he lives, there’s also very little about the places he visits – just fragments, I guess, of those “mud colored thoughts.”
The poem proceeds in eighteen steps (step one, step two, and so on (in lower case), with some even murkier half-steps here and there cropping up), indicative of an instruction manual, but also suggesting that very basic movement most people have to adopt to get from one place to another. In step one, it sounds like Marion has just come back from attending someone’s funeral outside the city: “And what a cremation that was. Now I can mark my exact place in the etch-a-sketch bible of conclusions.” But it’s not clear where the funeral was. There’s mention of rocks, gulls, electric wires, and snow falling, and mountain towns where “they gather to trade calendar beads and decorate the thorns.” And it’s not clear who died, although there’s a whole paragraph devoted to some “he” who sold insurance and whose laughter was “recorded for playback by border police” and in step two there’s a “she” who “couldn’t bring herself to untie the knot tied by a now dead friend.” Sounds like Marion had to leave NYC to go to the funeral of a friend of a woman he knows -- could it be a former boyfriend of the woman he now loves, the someone he addresses sometimes as “she” and sometimes as “you” (could this even be his wife, Julia?) I don’t know. Throughout the poem there are all these personal pronouns, “she’s,” “he’s,” “you’s,” “we’s,” “they’s,” without any clear reference of who’s being referred to, and unfortunately there are no photos other than the one on the cover to help me. I assume the “I” is Marion (albeit with a recognition of the displacement that occurs when “I” is committed to paper), but only because I’ve associated the “I” with the author of the book – I could be wrong about that, but I’m not going to question that assumption now. After step one and step two, I haven’t found any other clear mention of the funeral, and it seems Marion is writing about other places he’s gone. In step two, after being home for a while and seeing a “Niagara-sized fire” in his living room, he then goes back outside the city “during planting time” among “grassland people,” both “poolside” and “in a parking lot behind Sears.” In step three, he looks at “some distant cliff” through binoculars and talks about how “we” (he and Julia?) “reclined in the impossibility of saying anything that might change the lay of the land we were about to cross.” In step four, after a “seven-hour flight” he describes “coastal towns” where “daylight withers” and a courtyard with “sounds of an afternoon barbecue.” As you can see, it’s impossible to tell where he is, except that he’s somewhere outside of NYC. But finally in step five, after describing “antennae [that] lie buried beneath the floor,” a moon that is “a crooked tooth,” and a “miniature horse” that circles a track at an “old hat factory,” he lets drop a place name: some “she” (again) waves “from our porch down in San Berdoo,” which is a nickname I guess for the city of San Bernardino in California – maybe this was where he was before? maybe this is where Julia and her dead male friend are from? But then in step six, he mentions a “balcony,” “beveled glass doors,” and courtyards “on the Lido” – and Lido is an Italian term for beach, so maybe he’s in Italy? Then in step seven, he mentions a “sugar house,” a “tangle of dogs in an asphalt lot,” a “constant noon,” and “Friday nights [riding] into town for the special kind of stains they sell there” (again an unspecified “they”), and this is also where he spins his car tires on some ice. In step eight, he’s among “buildings in this ancient town,” near a stairway which he calls “my Via Sacra” – this definitely could be Rome – and here or near here there are “hairpin turns” and a prison surrounded by a moat and barbed wire. In step nine, he’s back in a car, “dented miles going nowhere,” “an accident at [a] bridge,” “some poor bastard [having] a heart attack in the center lane.”
In step ten, he’s in a waiting room and in a long line at customs, which he sums up as “death and afterlife in modern France,” but this is also where he pays the toll for the man in the car behind him, who “pulled up close enough to squint at the sliver of my face visible in my rearview mirror.” In step eleven, he’s somewhere where “the grasses that have been stored are adequate to work with” and there is a “sect” who “when the floods came” “slept along the ledges and among the cliffs.” Could he be in Amish country somewhere in Pennsylvania? But this is also where “Rufus Thomas does the Sophisticated Sissy taking all Memphis by storm” and some “he” looks through a telescope “at a man on a streetcorner holding what seems, when he looks hard, to be a map.” In step twelve, “dirty snow gets piled up, “nothing rules this place except the memory of the surgeon who performed here,” there’s a “Doric column at the bottom of an expensive well,” and some “they” blow a “blast” for Marion at an airfield, with a calypso band, doughnuts, and a guy giving out hashish. In step thirteen, some “they” “saved Cave Rock” and a guide tells some “us” that “this is where [some his’s] bed had been” – again all those pronouns with no clear references. In step fourteen, he’s on the “rusted outskirts” where “some of us arrive while some of us leave.” In step fifteen, “a guidebook will be nothing but a blur” and it’s “left alone on the windowsill to block winter’s leakage.” In step sixteen, some “he” “lays down tracks like Little Rootie Tootie” “in Hackensack” – this time I know who the “he” refers to: it’s to Thelonious Monk recording at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio – could Marion be on Interstate 80 traveling again to Pennsylvania? In step seventeen, though, he’s back up in an airplane – this is where he wonders what knob to use for the soft-soap, and at some point he looks out the window: “Far below the fat grass rolls out until rock starts, then rock rolls out until grass again.” In step eighteen, it seems like he’s ended up in Las Vegas (“Pillars amid the Vegas gore”) and perhaps somewhere near the building pictured on the cover, but all he describes is being stuck in some hotel or waiting room (“I switched channels, switched chairs, and tried to fit within a more practical instrument of control”) and being pestered by a Jehovah’s Witness. Eighteen steps, and where have we been? But it could have easily been 9,999,999,999, and things wouldn’t be any clearer. It’s as though after nine years Marion had a billion pages of a travel journal (“I saw that stars are worlds”), and with no justifiable way of condensing it, he cut it up, Burroughs-style, into pieces, out of sheer common courtesy. Indeed, he tells us as much at step three: “The earth is a book….But this book was immovable, frozen thick with piled up winters. So I sliced the pages into thirds and divided the portions among each of them who watched me.” An act of noble belletristic kindness – and you can easily guess how that makes me feel by contrast.
Furthermore, in his poem Marion mentions, without hesitation or remorse, “goldenrod, “a choir of starlings,” and “cicada drones.”
Thinking about our cats again: perhaps Squeak and Wood are really more like Moi and me – Squeak confidently asserting herself into every comfortable spot in the house, Wood, by contrast, warily creeping from hiding place to hiding place.
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