September 12

Shingles under the arms, face broken out, insomnia, stomach tightness, irritability, the desire to run away from farm, wife, child, Canada.  Moments of tenderness and intense communication.  Tears close.

Jonah’s crying interrupts my 10 p.m. reverie.  He is shaking in fright, counting “4,5,6,7, 8,10 Mummy, mummy.” Janet is in bed with the flu.  He wants her.  Her involvement with “A Taste of Honey” has been consuming.  For days he’s been shuffled around.  Neither of us have time for him. And he’s just starting kindergarten, a world of rules and crimes and older kids and bullies and beautiful powerful girls and a friendly but harassed authority, and another not so friendly authority. He’s just back from Denver, where his grandparents provided the life he wants.  Today in the car he said he prefers Vancouver to Lund and Denver to Vancouver.  He wanted to hear Lise’s letter and Henry’s story written for him last spring.

The child has such a tie with his grandparents.  If I could be more like them he and they would like me better.  They give lots of support”as long as there is enough money and some professional status.  I fear their loss.  Henry is 70, Lise 66.  I fear them dying.

Autumn blues; the fear is descending. Perhaps with my first week of classes, the first film, it will pass. Or perhaps not, until the play is over.  The potential is here for the order we seek.  The time for each other and our creative pursuits.  Will it come?

September 13

Indian summer has deserted us.  It’s grey and blowing hard this morning.  I sigh with anxiety¦and yet exaggerate.  Jan is under greater pressure and she sleeps.  I fear the chill. I wish to placate and propitiate. When is the day of atonement?

A coffee break between loads of dishes
Evening sun through a gash in the clouds
Goats moving in the rain
Grass green grows lush like June.
Cat Stevens scratchy record.
Jan and Joe iron initials on his new school bag.
Tomorrow the first day.

Hey, let’s go down to Chinatown
And get a bit of Lichee
You say that you’re allergic
And it makes your elbows itchy?
Well, that’s no serious problem
I know just what you should do:
Mash ginger root with ginseng root
And get a sticky goo
Mix it up with some rice vermicelli
That you’ve dipped in a little grass Jelly
Then rub it gently around on your belly
And wipe it off when it starts to go smelly.
Do this and your elbows will never get itchy
Though you’ve eaten your fill of delitchious lichee.

(Written for the Lund Theatre Troupe’s Production of Free to Be You and Me)

Raymond asked: “What do you really want now.  What do you really wish would happen to you?”  I took a long time to answer: “I’d like to live more productively in my head–intellectually, imaginatively, emotionally; to read, study, think,write and digest my experiences, and come up with something, maybe.  Be cerebral according to my leanings and headings.

The five years we gave ourselves in 1970 have finished.  We stand on a solid plateau.  It has been good.  What is next?  The next chunk is ten years. Why?  I think I can tell now what I want for the next ten years.  What are the needs, the priorities?

1.    Peace, space, inner order; not being crowded by excessive fear, anxiety, more to do than is possible. This has been more effectively provided by TM than anything else.
2.    Predictability, so that options can be chosen and followed up.
3.    A sense of usefulness and value to others of my work
4.    Material beauty and comfort, order in routines of daily life.
5.    Options, not feeling locked in–the possibility of change within a steady framework.

TM–for the last few weeks it has helped, I think–and last night missed my meditation, wantonly and for the first time.  Is this why I suffer now? Does it really mean a good thing for my life? Something added?  A direction?

I am cut off. I hate to seal the break with my former life. I hate the idea of becoming a Canadian citizen.  I am still an exile.

Stan told me a story last night.  Several years ago, when he had dropped from sight altogether and his parents and family back in New York had no idea of his whereabouts, his sister was staying with her best friend Joy and discussing her lost brother.  Joy’s father said, “Oh, he’s out in British Columbia with Steven Marx, living with him.” This man said he had been Steven’s Hebrew School teacher: Leo Wolff.

Again to California.  A semester unemployed.  Babysitting, cooking, cutting wood, waxing floors in a perpetually disordered and drafty house.  Going into debt, living off patrimony, forgetting the past, and doing nothing in the present even to forget.

What frustration I feel about expressing myself in writing or any other form for the gratification of others and for the satisfaction of self.

What beauty here can I see? In the rain dripping from the eaves, the stream pouring, channeling under the bridge, the smoke, blue, passing the window, billowing up the hill, mixing with the fog, trapped in the cedar boughs.

The Ashley drying the house.  I sit by it with a purring kitten and a cup of lemon grass tea.  Grey and green.  Rain for the last two weeks.  The sunshine that made us long for cover now a nostalgic memory.  Days when I felt like Adam before the fall:  cultivating my garden, prospering. My response was fear and guilt.

The horses race around the pasture, the beat of their hooves shakes the ground.  The two billy goat kids moan quietly because of the rubber castrating rings I’ve just put on them.  I’m minding the store: the goats, the garden, the chickens, the fire, the laundry, the boy.  My mind spills venom.  Where are my plans and aspirations?

Psalm 131

Lord my heart is not haughty
Nor mine eyes lofty; neither
Do I exercise myself in great matters or in things too high for me.
Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother.
My soul is even as a weaned child.

1.

Midpoint of our years
Summer Solstice nears
Mothers giving birth
Sanctifying earth.

2.

Dawn and Dusk converge
In the sun’s ovoidal path.
Opium days
Like poppy buds engorged,
Violet velvet vulvae
Swell, slit, split, splash out
Orange-red radiance
Petals, pistils, stamens
Fingers, toes.

A lesson I want to teach myself as if a child: that which you want most–maple sugar, gum, great lovemaking, a baby, the ability to write–you cant get it by desiring.  Fate, the tide which brings and takes, is a sexual person, beautiful and proud.  She gives only of her own volition.  Insistent craving doesn’t attract gifts.  So turn your longing elsewhere and learn to do without, only then may it come, a surprise, a mystery, grace.  Its enemies are lust and satiation.

Last night at the dinner table drinking white wine in the wet sunswept yard and watching Jonah.  He’s in the field wrestling with his training-wheeled bike, kicking it, crying, spitting, calling it fucken asshole, finally abandoning it, going up the hill where Ezra rides the toy tractor.  He grabs it from Ezra, who struggles to hang on to it.  Jonah lifts it over his head and threatens to smash him with it.  Ezra goes back to the cabin where Jenny is riding the smallest car, rips it from her and starts hitting her.

It’s been raining for 24 hours”finally.  The garden and the people were getting oversaturated with sunshine.  A new mood: cozy, melancholy, irritable, brooding succeeds the ecstasy of the last two weeks of May.

The sound of rain on the roof. Between sleep and waking.  An intersection of horizontal and vertical, the intertidal zone of the mind.  With eyes closed, the water of sleep and dream washes over it, softening and swelling, enlivening past and future.  Eyes open, the clarity of time, hard outlined form, things to do.