Three weeks ago I decided we need to have a party.  Summer’s half over and aside from family, there’s been no contact with people I love to be around. Always some new brushfire or obligation, and nobody invites me, and how can one celebrate in times like these when Claire lost her job and the wolf ‘s at Joe and Amy’s door and mother-in-law Ruth keeps heading downhill, but oh so slowly, and the news is of crises compounded and solutions refused.

Well my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain
¦
I just don’t see why I should even care
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
¦
I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes
Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Time out of Mind, Bob Dylan

But the tomatoes fatten and turn red, and the green beans feed us every night, and we’re between illnesses, and four grandsons grow and laugh.

Both of our birthdays fall in July, Jan’s on a Saturday far enough away.  We wont announce it but perhaps on the day itself.  I send an invitation to 30 people

and fifteen say yes.

In the meantime, while Jan’s second cousin Ivy visits for a few days, Ruth is sent by ambulance to the hospital to get treatment for a bladder infection”perhaps misdiagnosed”and then returned to Garden Creek Assisted Living. In Switzerland, the eighty five year old healthy conductor of the London Philharmonic has just taken a potion to join his wife dying of cancer on the next stage of the journey, surrounded by family members saddened but content.  The British authorities are considering prosecution. The reported scene reminds me of Socrates saying goodbye to his friends and drinking the potion of hemlock. Ivy’s 28 and she’s worked for awhile with the frail elderly.  We agree with what the conductor has done. She’s from enlightened Oregon, where two doctors have to make a determination that death by illness is imminent and inevitable in order to allow any such choice.  Might ending it before such a time, even when in good health, but at a predetermined age, say 85, be an even better idea?

As party time approaches it looks as if the tomatoes and beans will provide food for everyone.

Three days before, Ruth is again ambulanced to the hospital because of blood in the stool.  It’s determined she has bleeding ulcers probably caused by the Celebrex she takes to reduce the excruciating pain in her knees”unsuccessfully. The night before, Jan is  told Ruth will be released from the hospital on the day of the party and cant return to Garden Creek but will have to go to Cabrillo Nursing Home, the last stop for my father and mother and Jan’s aunt.

Early in the morning, we go to the farmers market for fruits and vegetables and Jan marinates the chicken and Greek Salad.  In response to her straightforward request for help, Claire invites us for brunch at her new home and agrees to help her move Ruth to the nursing home. After the brunch of buns and blackberries picked in the trailer park, mother and daughter go to the hospital, and I stay home with the baby cleaning house and preparing the rest of the food.

Tom, my ex-student and then ex-office mate at Cal Poly, shows up early with a friend and a friend of the friend to sit in the backyard and drink beer.  He’d said he couldn’t come because of a prior obligation to attend a baptism in L.A., but the baptism was canceled because the grandfather of the child was hospitalized with a stroke. This is a fine portent.  Our party will go forward despite all.  Tom and the boys go to work moving furniture, buying more beer and helping with the barbeque.  When the rest of the guests start arriving on schedule”including our eighty-something neighbor from across the street making it up the steps with her walker assisted by her sixty-something son recently out of rehab”the merriment ignites, and with the taste of the barbequing summer harvest it flourishes.

As we cook and drink together, Tom, whose memory is total and ineradicable, reminisces about a party here with my father, whom he knew quite well.

Suddenly I flash on some of the only lines I’ve ever memorized”spoken by the Old Shepherd in The Winters Tale, that Tom had taken parts in and helped me stage in the Old Mission downtown in 1992:

You have undone a man of fourscore three,
That thought to fill his grave in quiet, yea,
To die upon the bed my father died,
To lie close by his honest bones

The older I get, I tell him, the more those lines come to mind as I look at the photo of Henry on my wall.  Though his death in 1995 keeps receding into the past, as every year passes I feel closer to where he is now.

The celebration climaxes with the late arrival of Claire and her seven-year-old,

just in time for the surprise announcement of Jan’s 64th birthday with the Beatles song on the stereo.

When i get older losing my hair,
Many years from now.
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine.
If i’d been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door,
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When i’m sixty-four.

You’ll be older too,
And it you say the word,
I could stay with you.
I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone.
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride,
Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,

When i’m sixty-four.
Every summer we can rent a cottage,
In the isle of wight, if it’s not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera chuck & dave
Send me a postcard, drop me a line,
Stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away
Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine for evermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When i’m sixty-four.

more pics

To celebrate finishing the Bible as Literature article and get a workout, I decided to go on a bikeride. Checked the web for places I hadn’t been and came up with “Morning Glory,” a descent from the top of Cuesta Ridge that sounded appealing.  Jan agreed to drive me to the top of Cuesta Pass and I convinced her to take me and the bike up TV Tower Road until she refused to go further through the ruts and bumps.

It was pretty hot outside the car at 10:15 in the morning, though nothing like the 110 degree temps they were having in North County.  With plenty of water and slavered-on sunscreen I started up the road feeling a rare sense of “No Hurry.”

Once out of the oak forest and into the chapparal, the road stays close to the top of the steep ridge, revealing new prospects at every turn.

First was back down to the freeway going up Cuesta Grade.

clickpic for larger size (more…)

Dear Prof. Marx,

As the arts and humanities section editor for the Encyclopedia for Sciences and Religions, I am writing to inquire if you would agree to contribute an article of 4000-5000 words on the subject of “The Bible as Literature” for this particular reference work. The volume will be published in 2011.

As a leading international publisher, Springer is known not only for its comprehensive reference works, but for the global scope of the knowledge and expertise these works contain.

Your name was selected for this project because of your visibility and reputation in your particular field, and I genuinely hope will you say yes.  In the meantime, I thank you so much for taking the time to look over the particulars of this groundbreaking and highly significant project.
__________________________

1. Describe this discipline/subdiscipline and some of its most recent developments.

“The Bible as Literature” denotes an academic subject taught in high schools, colleges and universities and the academic specialty of a worldwide network of scholars. As a Library of Congress subject category in World Cat it elicits entries for 1252 books. In recent years, practitioners have preferred the term, “Literary Study of the Bible,” which produces listings as the subject of 653 books. There is no professional organization or journal specifically devoted to the topic.
The Bible as Literature/Literary Study of the Bible is a subdiscipline of both Biblical Studies and Literary Criticism.  Its activity is “exegesis,” that is, commentary on and interpretation of the Bible.

The word “Bible” has several meanings. It refers to a collection of separate books and to that collection defined as a single book. The Jewish Bible consists only of the Hebrew Scriptures or Tanakh. The Christian Bible includes the books of the New Testament plus the Hebrew Scriptures, which it refers to as the Old Testament. The Catholic Bible contains, in addition, the Apocrypha, a set of books not included in the Protestant Bible

Literature is defined as “¦artistic writings worthy of being remembered. ¦that are characterized by beauty of expression and form and by universality of intellectual and emotional appeal.”  Literary Study is defined as “the humanistic study of literature.”  “The purpose of a literary inquiry is a better understanding of the text”its construction, its forms of expression, its meaning and significance, and/or its relation to non-textual elements or to other texts.”  Although the text that Literary Study examines is usually concrete and specific, no understanding it produces is exhaustive or conclusive.

The Bible as Literature /Literary Study of the Bible is governed by a set of hermeneutic methods”i.e. certain principles of commentary and interpretation. It takes a secular approach, treating biblical texts as works produced by human beings within human history rather than a theological approach, which treats them as Holy Scripture, Divine Revelation or The Word of God.  It applies techniques of literary criticism to the Bible in the same ways they have been applied to other literary works since the time of Aristotle. These include:

¢    analysis of plot and structure,
¢    discussion of character, including the characters of narrator and author
¢    exploration of theme
¢    consideration of historical and geographic setting
¢    delineation of linguistic and stylistic devices, including figures of speech and verse and prose conventions
¢    categorization of genres
¢    correlation of intertextual references to other works

Some readers within faith communities that adhere to a theological approach to biblical interpretation regard the The Literary Study of the Bible as subversive; others see it as complementary. (more…)

And as an arrow that upon the mark
Strikes ere the bowstring quiet hath become,
So did we speed into the second realm.

My Lady there so joyful I beheld,
As into the brightness of that heaven she entered,
More luminous thereat the planet grew

Dante, Paradiso Canto 5

[photoset]

Tuesday June 16

Grades in. Half a dozen or more thank-you emails from students. Calculating the profit on the Sierra Club benefit: $10K. The agonizing move of Claire from 24A to 16B complete.  Hidden Hills Mobile Home on the market.

I complete the touch-up painting, mulch tomatoes and cukes, break down the bikes and pack for the trip. After spending the day together, Claire and Ian and Dennis and Lucas come for pizza to Albert Drive.  Jan to City Council at 6:30.  Ian and I watch Aristocats. I wake up at 3:00 A.M. and complete the article on Green Building and Joe’s spec house that he asked me to write for the Sun Valley promotional magazine. [click images to enlarge]

The holy crusade for sustainability converted into marketing strategy and composition class writing prompts.

Wednesday June 17

7:30 A.M. departure.  Ian in his sleeping bag, watching Spider Man in the back seat.  We listen to Garrison Keillor reading his new novel Liberty borrowed from the SLO Library.  Buy cherries, peaches and apricots from a farmgirl at a fruitstand on Hiway 5. This is our fourth June trip with Ian to Ketchum.  He is carsick twice, but avoids messing the car. This time, no dallying at Donner Lake or Yosemite.  Sleep at the Elko motel after a late Chinese dinner.

(more…)

By the Eucalyptus Grove above the hairpin rail turn in Stenner Canyon.

Yet another pipeline coming through, this time the Nacimiento project.  A great berm topped by the two excavators that piled it over the place where wildflowers and snakes flourished in years gone by.  Behind me the rush of skidding mountain bikes coming down from Shooters on this temperate May afternoon.  Aaron L., the new Cal Poly ranch manager we met at the trailhead says forty or fifty a day pass his house at Serrano.  Rockslide Ridge lit from behind and to the left, Poly Mountain.  The oat grass swaying, creeks on either side tumbling lightly, peaceable murmur of student conversation, while some write and others gaze.

The new trail up here from the tracks on land just acquired by the city switchbacks through oak groves crossing and recrossing Stenner’s central fork on artfully curved, banked wooden bridges.

____

The students leave at 5:20, after I read a parting prose-poem by Mary Oliver

Look, it’s spring.  And last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness.  The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their curvaceous and pale bodies.  The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

Chad back from Japan and Nancy back from Germany have joined the hike and have brought food to share  somewhere down the trail.  He called at 3:15 to ask if the class would go today and if they could join it. The fellowship of Focus the Nation revived. Alex comes along to explore the section between here and the great oak, where I plan to stop for dinner. As we traverse the three-dimensional curves of the path through grassland and oak canyon, they relate the night before’s adventure of staging a Renewable Energy Education Program for the Sierra Club in Atascadero.  The POPRs (Protect Our Property Rights) turned out en masse, some to harrass, others to learn.  I try to turn their attention to the long prospects down the canyons to the sea, to the the colorful Jasper boulders, the little wetlands, and then the tree.

They discover a dramatically lit canopy under the kneeling limbs and unpack a wine bottle, fresh produce from the organic farm where I went this morning to pick up veggies with Lucas, a little baggie of bulgar wheat and a campstove.  While they prepare the feast,

I climb to the top of the tree, salivating now at the thought of eating something more than the trail mix in my pack.

I’m invaded by memories: the Durand Oak, and the meals of vegetables and rice with students and ex-students at Columbia in the Sixties.

As the sun goes down, I direct them to the path looping back to Serrano, happy to find the solitude I was anticipating yet grieving for their departure.  Nancy is leaving San Luis for good within weeks.  Chad has graduated. They are trying to maintain the bonds of Empower Poly and Focus the Nation against the entropy of dispersal with plans for a California Energy Tour and  other world-changing enterprises. I look for them on the trail below, but it is too dark and too late.

I hoist my pack and walk through tall grass over a rise into an encounter with a black-tailed doe.

She poses for me then prances off, then poses again.

The full moon rises fat over East Cuesta Ridge.

As the dusk deepens and the wind picks up, I pass from the Stenner watershed to Poly Canyon’s and find a relatively flat spot beside one of the springs that source Brizzolara Creek. I’m too tired to read or write or even look at the stars.  The northwest wind has picked up, harrying the trees and grasses, recalling Muir’s description of “A Windstorm in the Forest,” which we read last week:

when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees,…and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way,–singing its own song, and making its own peculiar gestures…The profound bass of the naked branches and boles booming like waterfalls; the quick, tense vibrations of the pine-needles, now rising to a shrill, whistling hiss, now falling to a silky murmur; the rustling of laurel groves in the dells, and the keen metallic click of leaf on leaf.

The wind is warm, but not as dry as the hot sundowners that make you feel like wildfire is just a spark away.

Next day I find out that while I thought that the hills above Santa Barbara were burning and much of the city was evacuated.  I burrow into my bag and the unrlenting wind tugs at it all night, shaking me awake every hour or so to see the moon progressing across the sky.

Friday morning I drop down cross country into Poly Canyon, knees and ankles grateful for the bracing of my heavy boots. An interesting bird in a dessicated Sycamore lets me take its picture

At 6:30 am the rising sun spotlights the top of Poly Mountain, just where I slept two weeks before.  It’s greeted by a group of students!

This one-hour movie is about, among other things, the life and work of Ernst Haeckel and his mission to integrate science, art and spirituality.   It’s subtitled “A Nineteenth Century Vision,” and it weaves threads of cultural and intellectual history with mythography, art history, and literary criticism into a pattern of emergent form based on the growth of radiolaria.  The film chronicles an alchemical quest that incorporates quotes from Goethe’s poems, letters, and Faust, with a provocative reading of Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner,” and an account of the vessel, Challenger‘s voyage of scientific research.  This is accompanied by music, sound design and animation graphics of extraordinary precision and quality.

There’s little discussion of the film on the web.  The New York Times review is dismissive and wierdly tendentious.  I’ve ordered my own copy of the DVD to keep exploring.

In the equine unit where we assemble, a filly born at 12:15 a.m. that morning.

The arboretum in full flower.  This morning I biked up here with Lucas in the backpack and we ate wild strawberries under the redwoods.

Out through the back gate, up the little creek still flowing from a single spring at the junction of the serpentine and the lodo soil.

Through the gate at Indonesian Reservoir, where ducks take off and thoroughbreds run over hoping for a treat.

Dylan shows me a picture on his phone of the fat bass he caught here.  I asked if it tasted good.  He threw it back, he says.

Bedrock mortars under the hollyleaf cherries. Volunteer artichokes spreading in the meadow.  At the divide between Horse Canyon and Brizzolara watersheds,  half the group remains and the rest head upward.

We have 40 minutes to get to the top and back.

Dylan finds his own stopping place and calls out that he’s spotted a bald eagle.

At the summit, we take in the big view.

I read out the first paragraph of John Muir’s The Mountains of California:

The Coast Range, rising as a grand green barrier against the ocean, from 2000 to 8000 feet high, is composed of innumerable forest-crowned spurs, ridges, and rolling hill-waves which inclose a multitude of smaller valleys; some looking out through long, forest-lined vistas to the sea; others, with but few trees, to the Central Valley; while a thousand others yet smaller are embosomed and concealed in mild, round-browed hills, each with its own climate, soil, and productions.

Five minutes to write in  journals.

Edge of escarpment–feels like looking into a volcano, but it’s just rotten serpentine slumped down into the melange through which it floated to the surface 100 million years ago.  The blinding green of the grasses three weeks ago has paled, fitfully retaining some chloroplasts, the drier areas now tan yellow after releasing seeds to the wind.  Soon all the grassland will be white against the black of riparian corridors.

The call of a meadowlark fills the big valley:  key-ho-trillabittle.

Endorphins released by the scramble up the mountain tingle through veins in my chest and flow toward my heart.  Sweat drying in the warm breeze cools my brow.

Photo by Ben Taylor (click for large size)

On the way to class on a gray chill Thursday afternoon overloaded with the lesson plan in my head and the computer:

• to complete discussion of last paragraphs of Thoreau’s “Sounds”– the negative formula divesting the saunterer of worldly encumbrances: “No yard but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills, A young forest growing up under your meadows.”  The irony of 600,000 people a year visiting Walden today, the edge of the  pond “restored” with rebar grid and imported rocks, sand and tree plantings. My afternoon there in the rain, in 2003, swimming in my underpants.
• moving on to “Solitude””its insistence on the refusal to grieve”for the lost younger brother and the lost beloved, the only two people Thoreau was really close to”and the insistence on the cockerel’s joyful exuberance felt even by the “misanthrope and most melancholy man,” except for the one hour of “a slight insanity in my mood,”  after which “every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.”  The desire to dwell not in a neighborhood but rather “most near to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction.”  The conclusion of that most transcendent chapter, the cry for a drug to repair the rent that tears us from our essence: “What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented?” And the answer””a draught of undiluted morning air.”

As I approached the English building I was distracted by a gaggle of bird calls overhead. In the flat backlight I couldn’t make out their shape”were they starlings or grackles?  One bunch was rustling in the top leaves of the holly trees alongside the door, while another was spinning cartwheels just above it, and several individuals dashed toward Eucalyptus trees back by the Plant Conservatory.  Then the group overhead descended to the hollies, the group in the trees blasted together to the Eucs and different individuals shot up and down over the building.  I noticed the birds in the tree were gobbling the red holly berries. Now it registered: a migrating flock of Cedar Waxwings  drunk on fermented fruit.  I had seen such a flock seven or eight years ago on the sycamores where Via Carta crosses Brizzolara Creek, but they were sitting at rest, illuminated by the morning sun, their chamois-smooth bodies glowing, their graceful crests  and eye masks on stately display.

I begged them to stay  for another ten minutes.  As the students assembled in the classroom, I googled “Cedar Waxwing Drunk” and put up this webpage on the screen.

After the’d all arrived, I led them through the long corridor of building 10 and out the door on a sixty second hike. The party was still in full swing.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance, as it has never set before…where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it

¦ and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst ¦ We walked in so pure and bright a light,

gilding the ¦ grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright–

I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of elysium,

and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman, driving us home at evening.

April 16 7:15 pm

Sun dropping toward mist on the horizon.  Temperature dropping as the sleeping bag warms. Bits of remaining light in the needlegrass awns. An hour and a half since I departed from the class down in the oak grove and its words still echo”the words of Thoreau’s essay  “Walking” and his chapter, “Sounds,” along with our improvisations upon them.

The longing for the wild and the new, the demand for fresh and expansive experience, the unfamiliar, the virgin. The westward march and its ultimate demise with humanity’s dark dominion”the “End of Nature” in anthropogenic climate disruption. The sound of silence in the snap of sumac twigs too heavy to support their own growth.

Sounds now of the invisible traffic on Cuesta Pass and my stomach growling. A meadow lark.  A cow’s moo. A haunting ullulation across the valley. What is that familiar call”like a loon’s, but no loons here. Perhaps not a bird?  I struggle to find the memory, fail,  surrender to another diminution of capacity.  Shifting my gear to support my shoulder recalls previous sleepouts and the line “My pillow is my boot,” which I put on Tuesday’s reading quiz.  And the preceding stanza:

The silence of the valley
Breaks with a coyote’s sound
That’s followed by responses
From all the hills around.

Hello! it’s coyotes.

The sun dips under the cloud bank behind Hollister Peak.

I told students I hadnt planned on camping tonight, but rereading “Walking” seduced me again with its invitation to saunter, to wander a creek or scramble up a mountain with no plan or destination, to sleep where I felt tired. The sensation of freedom at 6:00 p.m. Thursday, the end of my week’s classes compounded with such a walk enabled “a fair return to my senses.”

Ironically, so does the camera and computer. The viewfinder provides concentration, the monitor focus, the harddrive memory. The pictures of sunset I just took recall those I took six years ago from a spot close by after another April class on Thoreau and just last week placed in a slideshow to accompany the first movement of Beethoven’s pastoral symphony.

Would William or Henry David or Ralph Waldo allow for technology to be the agent of this return to the senses? Not if Nature is the Wild or the “not-human.”  But also, yes,

the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and … all that we behold
From this green earth;… all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,–both what they half create,
And what perceive

Thoreau exults, “Man and his affairs¦I am pleased to see how little  space they occupy in the landscape.”  But as Dylan observed as we sat in the deep  grass above campus, yes if you look north, but not if you look south, at the city and the freeway extending to L.A.

Now against the background of  darkened peaks and glowing sky emerges a panoply of orange lights: the state prison.