He Posted My Comment

What Wood Did to Bolaño

http://contrajameswood.blogspot.com/2009/01/gutless-realism-james-woods-housebroken.html

Magniloquence. Courtliness.

This essay does a good job of locating my unease with James Wood's reviews of Roberto Bolaño.

Perfume Review: Salvador Dali pour Homme

Salvador Dali pour Homme smells just like the mythical Babylonian beast, forget its name, that was supposed to be unwashed bull from the waist up and overripe persimmon from the waist down. He could neither walk nor roll and so tragically took his own life by chain-smoking and wearing too much Halston Z-14. With our modern knowledge of mythical composite creatures, I like to believe that he could now be saved. Alas, we are too late, and all we can do is write copiously and resolve, particularly at this blessed time of year, to be kind to our loved ones, to dumb beasts, and to people who smell weird.

This Little Girl. Roma, I Guess

What was it like? When you're a filmmaker you're always late for someplace else when the real shot shows up. There's never enough money or time. It's cold or it's hot; I'm late; no one will hold still or they won't keep doing what they were just doing that was actually interesting, and then something shows up in shit light or smiles at me, right there, and I don't see it because the film is already about something else.

The girl was about 12. Or maybe older and just small. There was food there and everything but all the people were small and hard, and looked older than they were, although I had no way of knowing how old they were. But even the children looked old. Not old with time but stamped with age to which time only needed to be added. The Roma aren't like the Czechs who age into good-humored cynics, or the Americans who age into surprised children. There always seems to be some chance that an American might escape mortality. On film they mostly look busy or surprised.

The gypsy camp was an ugly maze and I was late and lost. Men kept hitting on me, asking if I would take them home to America. I live in London, I said. Take me to London they said. And then this one little girl. She had very dark eyes, and it struck me enough to check what I was seeing without the camera. Although when it's bright like that the world disappears for a moment anyway when your eye leaves the camera. But it was impossible to see anything but shy darkness in her eyes. I mean their invisibility was palpable. And I couldn't look away. You can see how the shot wobbles. There.

And then I realized that we had surprised each other--my rush and her tears--she was weeping. They were all dusty, and the tears left channels of girlish skin down one cheek that spread to one side of her Roman nose as she wiped her face with her knuckles. We were hurrying away from each other the whole time but we did this dance, which I mostly got on film. She was hurrying back to conceal her tears, and I was hurrying to be wrong about what my film was about.

'Are you crying? Why are you crying?'
She looked away and looked back which was a kind of answer. I think she meant that I wouldn't understand, or that's what I imagined. On the film, she looks away and when she looks back she has decided that her eyes will be less opaque. She looks into the lens and the autofocus flickers and then she is gone again.
'Why are you crying?' I ask, and she shrugs. And then, "What is your name?"
'What is your name?" she says, and her voice is small, only the voice of girl, although very husky.
'Pavla.' And then, 'What is your name.' Now coaxing, which she likes, and smiles.
'Pavla?'
'What's wrong?' again. And she looked at me blackly and answered in some language I assume was Roma. I couldn't understand, of course. I speak English and Czech and some Russian but no Roma, of course, if that's what it was.
She said whatever it was again, looking at me as though it were impossible to say it in any other language.
She shrugged and--although it doesn't seem to show up on the screen--through the lens her face was a child's face and her eyes were green.

The Verse About Blake

Salt for what I can't see,
Sage for the ghosts in me,
Ginger to clear my mind,
Cream almost all the time.
Bowls full of blossoms blend,
bitter then sweet again.
Peppers for a rosary.
Friend, come and sit with me.

Geoffrey Prince, Salt Lake City, Utah, January 4

Mr. _______________,



As we discussed when you called, I am not comfortable with your request to speak to these matters informally, as I believe there is too much oportunity for mischief and error in the transcription, interpretation and, possibly, in the editorial contextualization that inevitably your duties require. Therefore, I require that you publish this written statement in its entirety or not at all, as I have written it here. Of course, I will maintain a dated copy in my records and will contest any attempt to cite me except by including the complete, unaltered text of this letter.



My name is Geoffrey Fielding Prince. I resided near Kolob, Utah from March 15 of last year through the end of November. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Utah, and spent those eight and a half months in Kolob managing fieldwork on a dig near Kolob, located on Bureau of Land Management land. As is generally the case with such work, my crew and I spent nearly all of our time at the dig site. We returned to Kolob Town only to pick up our mail, send and receive e-mail, and meet our suppliers. During these brief hours in Kolob, I met only a few residents: Dotti Lyman at the gas station; Dorothea [whose last name I don't know] at the Post Office; a young farmer named Lauro, whom I picked up hitchiking on 144 on July 4; and Officer R. Lyman of the Pierce County Sheriff's Department, who gave me a speeding ticket [four miles per hour over the posted limit] on July 5. I recall two or three brief conversations and verbal acknowledgements, too, but I do not remember with whom I spoke. I never lingered in Kolob more than two hours, and spent the night there only once, the night of July 5, at the Black Bear Mesa Motel.

In our conversation yesterday, you asked about the location of the dig site. I am forbidden by the terms of my contract from providing this information. Kolob was the nearest town, and we were on Federal land.

As we discussed, I require that all future communications be in writing through the attorney advising the University on these matters. His contact information is attached.

Sincerely,

Geoffrey F. Prince,
Associate Professor of Archaeology
The University of Utah
Salt Lake City

Five Failed Sonnets, FWIW

1.



The lover wants what he does not have.

You know those squirrel-proof bird feeders?

The lover is like a squirrel: have

You seen his eyes? His focus? His ears

Cocked forward, his tiny brain mighty

In concentration, devising a way

to get those seeds? What he wants is right

There but he is confounded, stuck, may

Never figure it out. Something like

A miracle, an act of God, a

Eureka moment, a lightning strike

Is what he needs. He can't hold still, stay

away, or ask for help. This is a prize

He cannot share. He would rather die.



2.



All our desire is poised on an axis

Of paradox, lack and ownership

Its poles, lust and death its steep taxes,

Love and hate in circular orbit,

Strangeness and familiarity,

Familiarity and strangeness,

Round and round with the regularity

Of our backs' heaving under duress.

We pray, ask for help. This is the prize

We cannot share. We never arrive.



3.



In the City of God we built His house

To house His absence. And we filled the

Empty spaces of our hearts with busts

Of heroes, memorials to the

Dead, and monuments to the utterly,

Unutterably lost and insolvent.

We filled the bland domestic quarters

House by house, with grudging affection,

Needing the walls and roofs, but doubting

Their security. We checked out our

Neighbor's wife in the market counting

her coins, her skirt handprinted with flour.

Help her carry that home. Don't be shy.

You'll walk her home but never arrive.



4.



This place is a mere crossroads, a pile

Of coincidence, an eddy in

The torrent of commerce. Some square miles

Of zones of uses held in position

By regulatory agencies

Beholden to the insurance and

Underwriting industries, finance

Interests; and the soulless strip malls and

Secure compounds are from elsewhere, or,

At best, from nowhere, from some ether

Of algorithmic blind groping after

Profit, multiplying to the last sure

Decimal the civic futures sold short

For private gain, a vast edgeless space,

A res publica without a face.

5.

Around the squalid center, [a pit

of pestilential poverty, too

intractable to fix, too unfit

for investment or civic ado],

spread the compounds of the like-minded,

those whose politics are hog-tied, bought

and sold, whose speculation reminded

Pound of lost pride in good craft, whose

Neuroses play out in spas and bedrooms

and restaurants and spasms of lust in

the glow of monitors and dread and

anxiety and sadness too remote

for drugs to fix. They fill their houses,

vast and cheap, with their longing and they

turn up the volume, hold it barely together

with the tight twine of indignation.

On a Hunch at a Tangent

Dearest K.,

I am writing to ask you put your thinker to use and help me fill in the following narrative hole: I have let's say 12 characters in a small town called Kolob, Utah. It's the kind of place you have to choose to be, not the kind of place you stop to get gas or take a telemarketing job. People are drawn here by what draws people along, but these are mostly people who are more powerfully drawn than others, or who are such fuckups out there in the culture that they go looking for something else. What draws them is a sense that things could be better, that something is missing, etc. Some find some satisfaction for a while in religion, or sex, or love, or alcohol, or working with their hands, or leading wayward under-age thugs around the desert, or some combination of these things, but they are still drawn on, always with the sense that they might get to the center of things. So how do I dramatize this unseen-but-sensed center? I've had the vague idea that these people end up in the canyon, but what is the story that propels them there? I mean, I don't think I can have all of them, especially the rancher Ferral Young, just up and follow their hunches until they end up in the canyon. Maybe the hippies would do that. There's got to be some kind of backbone or direction, or something going on that organizes what would otherwise be a bunch of first-person ramblings about feelings, which I can't abide writing. Bolano has the quest of the Savage Detectives for Cesarea Tinajero, which almost seems like an excuse of a plot, the real action being in the daily scrapes along the way; Mathiessen has the overwhelming fact of E.J.Watson's tragedy, to which everything points like to Achilles' death. Tolkien has that Wagner rip-off ring squeezing through the chinks in the ramparts of evil. I gotta have something, even though what I suspect is at the center is nothing except our human nature that can't abide stasis or a vacuum.

Ferral Young, Young Ranch, Pierce County, Utah, January 2.

I never had no trouble with them boys from down at the yurts. They's always been respectful and mostly we don't see them when they come through. First time they come up to the house I stayed half behind the door because not often do people come this far in and with their buckskins and beards and darned sandals and big knives I had no idea what to expect. I always got the .30-30 leaning there and I wanted it in reach when them four come knocking, but pretty soon they put me at ease -not so much as I invited them in, but so's I took a step out on the porch and we talked ok. They introduced themselves all by first name, which here we do not do to strangers, so I made a point of calling myself Mr. Young, being older and unacquainted. Anyways, they was real polite, and all they wanted was my permission to walk through to the tanks at the top of the canyon. Unless you got a helicopter, you're not getting there except through my land, less you walk maybe five days off of 144 around back of Black Bear Mesa, which they was hoping to avoid. I told them to watch for my one grumpy angus bull out there in the junipers and big cats at the tanks and let them go. I never been all the way out there without a rifle and horseback, but if they wanted to walk in sandals and carry just the knives that was their business and not mine.

Irregardless, it blew hard that night so's I had to get up and wire down the cowshed roof and out there in the wind and cold I got to thinking about them boys and headed out after breakfast to see where they'd got to and if they was ok. I go to church most Sundays, but tell you what: riding out in the pines of a clear morning sipping coffee, seeing that there's maybe enough grass to get the cattle through the winter is where I most feel the Holy Ghost. Coffee's not what the bishop wants me drinking, but it sure helps put me in the mood for winter riding.

I rode out maybe two hours, out to where the pines stop, and the whole way I was flushing mulies and cows. Cows looked pretty good for January. Out at the first spring I found where they camped, up on the ledge away from the cow mess. They had swept up their fire, which I appreciated, and left the place as it was except for a stack of juniper. I figured they was ok. I don't know what motivates them boys to sleep on the ground in winter. Me, I had to when I was cowboying before 144 was paved, but I couldn't wait to get out of that line of work and back in a warm bed. The way I see it, some people grow up with all the comforts and later need to prove they can put up with the hardship. If you lived in hardship when you was young, you grew a taste for comfort later, not having to prove nothing to yourself or others. Or maybe they like being out of a sunny morning as much as I do, but they don't have neither horse nor coffee.

Right after they paved 144 is when them two New Yorkers bought the upper half of the Wilson ranch and put up the first yurt. They was the first new arrivals except Vermillion brides in Kolob in our whole history, going back 140 years. All these years we been swapping young Kolob girls for young Vermillion girls, so's these two towns have a look all our own, like one big family. Old Lyman, Radar's daddy, brought home a French girl after the war, but she didn't last long and took the baby, so it's been pretty much just Kolob and Vermillion out here below the mountain swapping brides. Then along come the New Yorkers with their money and their yurt, and Wilsons unload that good-for-nothing scrubland for cash, and suddenly we have some new blood, but as outsider as they come: them long-haired boys had no place here, really, though we was ready enough for them so long's they behaved. We joked that the only people's ever moved into Kolob since Brigham Young sent us here way back is long-haired: all them Vermillion brides and now these two pansies. But face to face most of us was cordial, and mostly let them alone.

When them boys first really got a good welcome here was when we had one of our big blizzards, maybe in '90 or so and the Lymans were out doing late roundup and two of their boys got snowed in out to Flat Top. It got so my pond froze to the bottom, only time it ever did that, so it was cold as sin, too cold for skinny boys out all night. We got about a dozen of us together and rode out when the moon came up, and it wasn't ten minutes before my feet was frozen past pain and I was shivering like a aspen. That's when them two New Yorkers jogged by us in the snow looking like old-time Piutes in their skins and blankets. We all thought we'd have to rescure them, too, after finding the Lyman boys, but what happened later that night corrected some miscomprehensions of ours: them two tracked the boys down to a wash we never went in because a ledge kept the cows out, got a big fire going, blanketed their horses, and then jogged right back out and found us and led us back to the boys, who were warm and asleep when we got there. We are a self-taking-care-of people and we take some real unspoken pride in not needing help, but we had to admit these long-haired New Yorkers was tough and smart and knew how to move in the woods and weather, and from then on I kept them in high regard though I did wish they'd stop play-acting the Piute and join the rest of us white ranchers where they belonged. Anyways, it was a good introduction for us to people not from below the mountain, and I think we'll get along fine even though they look like Piute hippies and live in yurts and talk like goddamned college boys, excuse my French.

The Ballad of Bacchus Rosenberg: The Movie

First of all, I want to honor Mr. Rosenberg who is our first reader who isn't family. You are reading this stuff, yeah? We've both read Infinite Jest and gotten tanked up and weepy and recited the last few lines about how the tide was way out, so we're on the level. And nearly come to blows about the relative tragedy (yes, they can so) of authorial suicides and whether Bolano counts or not. Let's don't get me started, shall we?

At any rate. This is just a place-holder for now but I think I can interest some big names in recording various versions of this. It would be a sort of history of 20th C American music. I want Brian Wilson and Richard Simons to do a dreamy surf version (a la "In My Room") and I'm pretty sure Jagger will want to do the disco version.

And if when the time comes to seal this venture, we can all three--you, me and V. (and James Wood can come if you think he can manage not to be a prima donna)--we'll (I'm pioneering this form of recursive long-sentence grammar that assumes short term memory problems in the reader, by which I don't mean you, although you're our only one of those) engage, to seal the venture, in some sort of ad hoc New Age ritual that involves us being reborn from the desert of David Foster Wallace's something-or-other, which even if we can't figure out what it is, we'll be in an actual desert (V. has one) and so that'll pretty much cover the bases, in terms of ineluctable-concept-trumping-brute-physical-reality wise. That is, the half-assedness (sometimes, alleged) of my thinking will be neither here nor there once we're in the desert. Be assured of this.

We're going to need your input (and your John Hancock on a few pro-forma forms) re: the movie trailer. I'm excited.

[Image: John Bellushi as Bacchus in Bob Guccione's quixotic made-for-TV children's version of the classic holiday story. I still have the lunch box.]

Not Tonight, Sweety

I had grand plans for today's post, but while I was cutting firewood I spilled a gallon of gasoline and 2-stroke oil in my backpack, and then I got home and a deer was stuck in the chicken fence and when I freed her she kicked my arm with her pointy little hoof so's I can barely type, and then Bret came over and we drank large glasses of his latest vodka contraption, and now we're going to take my gasoline-smelling one-armed self up to the restaurant for a pork shop. That's all I have to say about the state of my soul and our democracy today. Thank heaven we live in such a place as will give a man the chance to smell like this, get injured like this, and end the day like this, is all I can say. Thankee!

Romans in Sturdy Denim

Marketing is mostly bunkum. Politics is mostly marketing, at least during an election season. And if you are interested in the invisible substrate of our collective assumptions--many of which we individually doubt--then nearly everything is political. So how is it that even if we don't see the world the way that we are told Joe the Plumber sees it, we still feel limited in some way by what Joe will supposedly swallow? Fictitious weathervanes of public opinion. Was it ever thus? At any rate, advertising, mythologizing, self-narration, romancing, bullying, pep-talking, vogueing, bunkum--these are sister muses. Especially in an age as persuaded by the rhetoric of images as our own.

V recently commented on my feeling located vis a vis all this American stuff. And the troof of course is that I'm no more located than him. We have equal rights to America, and similar scruples about the ethics of authenticy, about the misappropriation of images by marketers. And maybe a similar body memory of the sting when we're reminded that we might be wearing plaid or whatever, we might be out in the same heat working for the same shit wage, but we're still college boys. I spent a summer in California heat moving scrap metal and used car batteries that had accumulated for years in the inferno of the narrow alley between two corrogated metal warehouses. Coming in overheated and with my clothes coming to pieces from the battery acid, and the old guys who worked there year around just laughed at me, never allowed me the honor of being one of them, even insofar as I was doing a job even they weren't willing to do because I had to have the money. And I suppose even so I wasn't one of them. But why, exactly?

Their suspicion is not without cause, of course. Think of the "Tea Party" "movement" with its familiar Reagan era rhetoric of an evangelical Christian national founding and a monolithic set of "American values". This is a fantasy of the American past. Americans have always been deeply divided; the Union was always tenuous; our present sea to shining sea thing would have been unthinkable to anyone at the Constitutional Convention. If you don't believe me, o Koch brothers, read the handsome two volume Library of America record of the proceedings. Interesting and scary stuff.

And the Tea Partiers are not alone in their more or less deliberate revisions of the past. Both sides do it. We all do it. "Revisionism", though,--and the quotation marks are buzzing like flies, here, as they always do around this fecund poop--is just one way of slinging it. How about "reinvention"? How about "self-interested reinvention"? How about "interested but historically responsible reinvention as one important mode of problem solving"? How about that?

Levi's and L.L. Bean have both recently taken an interest in their own past. And in the case of Levi's in particular, their past has real significance as an image of what is worth repeating in the American past. This despite a history of exploiting other peoples' ideas and labor and distorting their own history in various ways. Levi's hired an in-house historian, Lynn Downey, in 1989, and the brand has wheeled out variations on old designs, some of them very good, and made their archives available to the public. The fact remains that you can buy two pairs of sturdy denim jeans, which Levi's actually does make, and they will, with reasonable care, get you through several years of multi-purpose use. The popularity of such practical clothing, and the fact that in the West at any rate, you can wear them most places without being discourteous to your hosts, says something good--to my mind, anyway--about one aspect of our national values. It's a strange brand of populism that is so fearful about manipulations of the market by "socialism" but shows no interest in manipulations of the market by corporations. It is also perhaps a strange brand of populism that characterizes the poor as subject to a kind of hereditary illness, and seems--in its public rhetoric, anyway-- to have a hard time imagining that the poor could share the pleasures of work. Work clothes made of sturdy denim that show the line of the body, allow free movement and are reinforced at stress points with steel rivets? That's not a bad start for a populist platform.

Of course it's marketing for Levi's, and they have no particular scruples about where populism ends and bunkum resumes. Their ads are beautiful lifestyle marketing, like so much marketing. But look at this recent ad--short film, really--and this one which uses what is probably a wax cylinder recording of Whitman deliberately reciting four lines of 'America', his voice holding you so close to the four-beat rhythms of the lines that you feel his hairy chest, the cross-tie scratchings of the cylinder clipping through camera frames like a train.

I hate business writing, so bold-face-emphatic and easy-to-summarize, but I recently heard this thing that might actually be true: "A leaders hire A people; B leaders hire C people." So who are you willing to invite into your self-interested reinventions with you? How much of their voice and vision will you let in? Do they get to speak, or will you merely take a couple names in vain? Is this Levis' ad marketing--speech--that dares to enter the room with something truly anarchic and physical? Something like American Eros? To me it is.

V. in Palm Springs Wearing a Worsted Wool Set of Tails From 1946, and Deluding that He Has a Platter to Carry, If He Remembers Correctly

And that's a ca. 1972 orange silk bandanna/cravat that unfortunately ended up getting sucked right off my neck and into the drain of the hot tub. Pity. It looked swanky. The glasses I don't know who they belonged to. Not me. That was one helluva party, tell you what.

Mr. Wood Inspires Strong Feelings

One Man's Recession is Another's Bright New Beginning

About six months after my taxes were due and I still didn't have work I just realized one day that I didn't really want any and that I could unburden myself of the whole mess pretty easily. I'd been more and more feeling that will to divest myself of my stuff and the many complications of being a citizen, a father, and a business owner. Along with many other Americans, but really feeling alone, I was just tired of struggling month after month, year after year, to keep up with the mortgage, and all that struggle hadn't really amounted to much: minuscule equity in an unfinished house, worth less in this market than I owed on it; a houseful of furniture I rarely had time to sit on; enough kitchen gear to run a restaurant; piles and piles of stuff I never used, just taking up space. So sitting there that day I looked around and just felt crushed by all the stuff. I started listing my expenses in my notebook: mortgage and insurance and child-support payments totalled more each month than I was making. I had also come to hate my career, which had started in ambition and hope and quickly become bogged in soliciting regulatory agencies on behalf of my neurotic clients, fighting for every dollar, and only rarely finding any creative or intellectual enjoyment. I crossed the mortgage off the list, then my business insurance, then half my child support, then all but the minimum car insurance. I hadn't made a claim on my health insurance in years, so I scratched that off the list, too. I kept paring it down, and every time I crossed out an expense I felt lighter, until I was humming with an energy and elation I hadn't felt since I got my feet under me after my wife left. I felt young and alive, actually giddy. I started putting bits of blue tape on things I wanted to keep. Maybe one in five books, my favorite chair, the desk I'd made back when I was creative, my carving tools. It quickly became clear that this pruning job had some half-formed idea behind it, and as I thought, it became clear that I wasn't going to live in this house anymore. When I went to bed that night I lay awake for a long while picturing what would come next. I pictured driving a few pickup-truck loads of my belongings down to Kolob to my lady-friend's house. With this in mind, I saw that several of the things I'd put tape on wouldn't fit in her space and would be redundant, so I got up and pulled the tape off those things.

The next morning I woke up just as energized. I didn't even stop for coffee. I started moving the keeper stuff to the front door, piling it up across the living room by truckload. By supper time I had three truckloads, and had set aside many things that had once felt precious. Everything else I just left where it was. I ate a bit, and then loaded the truck and headed south in the dark. Sometimes a man's got to act alone, without discussion, without compromise, so I hadn't talked with my lady-friend, Blanche. I just showed up there in the middle of the night and surprised her. I had assumed she'd be happy about my sudden un-announced move, and she was. We stayed up for a while and giggled about it, but when she wanted to ask the obvious questions I said I was too tired and we went to bed. Over the next few days I got all the keeper stuff down to her house, and left most of it on pallets under tarps in her driveway while we figured out what would go where.

During the long drives back and forth I started feeling like a fool. There's no radio or cell phone for hours each way, so I had plenty of time to think and question my judgment, and my mania had pretty well worn off, so my mind was crowded with doubt and long lists of complications. I was telling myself why all of this was folly, why none of this would work. Mostly, I thought about the kids up in Salt Lake, and how this might seem to them like another abandonment. But I did finish my move. That last time in Salt Lake, I tidied the house, filled a few more boxes with things I might miss too much, and made a few posterboard signs advertising the house and its contents for the payoff amount of my mortgage. These I posted on my lawn and on the corners. I got no calls that day.

That night I picked up the kids from their mom's and took them out for pizza. I said I had some big news for them, and I told them what I'd done. It was tense with one of them, but the other two seemed excited, happily supportive. The other had become wary of my shenanigans in recent years, and she wouldn't meet my eyes and got silent. I tried not to present it as a done deal, but when we walked in the house and they saw it half-bare and clean, a little echo-y, they started seeing how serious I was. I can't tell you that the following days were entirely easy. Recriminations began in earnest when I pushed a pile of boxes from the liquor store into their room and told them to start packing their stuff to take to their mom's. Seeing their room all bare after years' accumulation of their girlish stuff caused me to suddenly choke up, and I felt the sentimental gravity of this big change.

By the end of the weekend we were moved out. We left enough stuff that a small family could move in and bring only their clothes and food and be pretty comfortable. I received a call from a company that manages estate sales. I didn't like their terms, but I relented on the condition that they have everything cleaned out within the week. Even twenty cents on the dollar left me with a fair-sized check. I cashed it, and withdrew the rest of my accounts as cash. Fifteen years of work, and I walked away with a few thousand dollars. But I did have the sense of walking into a new life of relative freedom. I imagined that my new freedom was a mix of the hopefulness and unencumbered enthusiasm of childhood with the skills, wisdom, and perspective of adulthood, and I was aware that these two rarely come together. Usually, a person growing up trades hope and playfulness for security, only to gradually learn that security is an illusion. To learn this and to act on it, to throw yourself back into the world after years of self-imposed solitary confinement, is a bracing and enlivening experience. You get to keep your accumulated learning while shrugging off the anchor of domestic culture. We're naked apes, so we can't dispense with domesticity altogether, but it is a revelation to know that you get to choose how domesticated you're going to be. It's as easy as letting go of your heavy luggage, shrugging the kinks out of your neck, and heading off to where your curiosity directs.

James Wood: Pros and Cons; a potentially collaborative post which if it works like I envisage will be of greater consequence to lit than James Wood

When I met James Wood he made me call him Morning, which man was I embarrassed when I saw through his cruel hoax, and then he whined until I drove him around to look for malt liquor and he puked on his tux in my mini-van and then fell out by the pool while I was inside trying to make his jacket pass the whoooo-sheesh test, and lay there bleeding from a head wound half the blessed night and damn near froze to death before the paper boy found him.

Io Sono L'Amore Orange Preoccupation Pumpkin Pie

Zest of one orange in the crust
2 cups squashed up roasted pumpkin
1 1/2 cups of half & half
4 oblong chicken eggs
1/8 t each of allspice, nutmeg, clove & cayenne
(Nota bene: as you add the cayenne, briefly imagine one daughter saying that she just likes pumpkin pie regular, and another daughter asking why do things have to get different, and then put in)
1 t of ground ginger.
Then in the whipped cream: ground fresh ginger, crystalized ginger cut up real small, the zest of another orange, powdered shug, and a passing afterthought of vanilla. (Things are getting less precise by this point.)

Serve with Belgian ale or a squinch of whiskey or do what you think best.

The Pumpkin Pie I Want

Butter crust. Roasted pumpkin, so a little bit smoky. Nutmeg and allspice and maybe a little black pepper in the filling. And a tiny bit of cayenne for warmth.
Thick very orange glaze with orange zest and candied ginger. Or maybe the candied ginger is in the clotted cream served over it. Please please make me this.

Io Sono L'Amore

I am confused and a little embarrassed by the responses to "Io Sono L'Amore". Even the people who praise this movie are embarrassed by it. The Manchester Guardian is careful to slobber on Tilda Swinton's Wellies before tut-tutting without eye contact through another 9 paragraphs. Even Manohla Dargis from the NY Times, whom one would think could get this sort of film because she's really hot, is careful to mention that she's familiar with the whole art-film-as-bodice-ripper thing, and that if she wept a bit it was just that damn gorgeous but literate molar twanging away. Ah, yes--the senses. We took a class in those at Fillintheblankfordbridge.

Even Anthony Lane, who seems almost unembarrassable, begins by separating himself from those who may have just wholeheartedly loved it. First line of his review: "The best sex you will get all year, if that’s what you crave in your moviegoing, is between Tilda Swinton and a prawn." Funny, sort of, but also through-away for someone like Lane, and mostly useful as a kind of Purell for sincerity.

Part of what all this makes me wonder is. Well, first of all it makes me wonder if I'm an emptyheaded goof. And it's partly the frequency with which that question comes up that leads to my other, also perennial, question: Is a certain sort of sensual knowingness actually an innoculation against the senses? Because in my experience if you open yourself to the senses they will fuck you up (that lovely mulled wine phrase). We all have our stories, and it's hard to tell them because they are specifically beyond words. They're about how we come to remember that something is beyond words, about how a single full sensory experience can mobilize years of thinking.

"Io Sono L'Amore" is about that. It's also about the growing and preparation and eating of food, about various shades of saturated orange, about the way that gorgeous interiors come to have the appearance of a real world and ensnare us, and about the difference between bodies when they are owned and bodies when they are royal. It gives itself to certain excesses. But I think what embarrasses people is that the camera lingers on the textures of things in the way that the senses actually linger. Before we drag them back to the task "at hand". So many tasks never so much as civilly greet the hand. (I love that cloth also has "hand".)

And but love. It is a pagan eye that ranges from the grasshopper on a tendril to the spires of the Duomo di Milano, and finds oranges and reds everywhere--Swinton's hair, upholstery fabric, flecks of light on skin and on clay, spices and fruits--everywhere shades of orange. And when Swinton makes her final appearance, or disappearance, pumpkin orange and a gold that seems to trap light spread from the saffron wool rug that marks her sudden absence to illuminate the memory of everything you've seen for the last two hours. Please see this.

The New Vorticist Manifesto

That's Ezra Pound. I was going to put up a picture of Wyndham Lewis, too, but I thought better of it. Because of the way I'd end up being presumed to be Wydham, because of the history of this little rewritten Manifesto and the talent differential and all. I hope not because of my politics, which don't roll that way.

MANIFESTO:

1. In Action we would establish ourselves, given half a chance.

2. We start from Failure. The violent structure of adolescent clearness hasn't worked, except for the past administration.

3. We thought we would do the Work, but we were stymied by the System. About this we are still more or less certain.

4. Mercenaries were always the best troops, we thought, but now that we are paid, we're not so sure that Money is better than Belief. Besides, we're not paid very well.

5. We imagined we were primitive brawlers. Now we are Mercenaries in the Modern World, skilled but doomed to the trenches.

6. Our Cause is NO-MAN'S, ideally.

7. Remember that one night we set Humour at Humour's throat? We totally LOFAO!!!

8. We went after Humour a bit desperately, like Tragedy.

9. Look who's laughing now.

10. One possibility is to move to a little stone shed, preferably subsidized, on a provincial hillside in a distant country ruled by a sympathetic regime that appreciates Truth and Beauty, and hearing it from the likes of us.

Instructions for the Build-Your-America Kit (The final project for my Constructing America course)

You're going to assemble your own kit. Sources include everything ever done, said, written or made that seems to you in some meaningful sense American. You'll need a problem to work on, a collection of sources that offer possible solutions, and finally you'll propose a solution to your problem through a work of your own that draws on your sources and also includes your own best shot at an answer.

1. A persistent grudge or great hope to guide you. As you go through a day or leaf through a newspaper, what bothers you? What do you characteristically rant about or dream and plan about? Work on that.

2. Your own anthology of texts and test cases.

Once you begin to have a sense of what your area might be, begin to look around and see what has been tried before. If you're interested in American experiments in communal living, you might want to read about the Quakers, the Oneida Community, child-rearing customs among the Plains Indians, etc. If you're interested in vernacular architecture you might want to read about barn raisings, or Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater House, or the connections between Navajo adobe dwellings and modern passive solar rammed-earth houses. If you're interested in American forms of feminism you might be interested in reading about Puritan female healers, Mormon female priests, and the Seneca Falls Declaration. If you're interested in American health care, I really have no idea, but the school and the city are full of people who know stuff.

So many more things have been attempted on this continent than one could be aware of. Before you conclude that American music is only rock and country, check out shape note singing, the hammer dulcimer, and Ogalala chant. Become an expert on things in your chosen area that no one has ever heard of. Begin to gather a shelf of books, clippings, web links, diagrams, artifacts, recordings--whatever seems helpful. Begin to keep notes about what possibilities they suggest. These are your working materials. We'll ask to see them so we can talk with you about them.

3. Now make something that seems like a sort of answer to your problem or question or hope. What we will want you to present will certainly need to include historically grounded writing of your own, but might also include other sorts of work if it seems demonstrably connected to your research. We will want an essay but we might also be sold on the need for making songs, a barn, a health care plan, etc.

You'll have lots of opportunities to try out parts of your thinking with people in the class. For now, just dig in and start gathering and thinking.

IKNOWYOUHATEMEBABYBUTDON'TBREAKTHENEEDLE

When George W. Bush posited that "thee hater freedoms, thee hater wayalife," my greatest fear was that a bunch of American religious radicals would combine with religious radicals in other parts of the world and that they would collectively take aim at the mid-tempo alt-country rocker, which is the freak flag of guys like me, and is the only vessel fit to enskull the mythy conscience of my race, narrowly defined in the 19th C sense which guys like me know what that means.

The idea as I understand it is this: if a given song could not be discussed in a conference session entitled The Dust Bowl and the Radicalization of the American Folk Ballad: From Dust to Grit or Is the Answer Still "Blowin' in the Wind"?, then the songwriter must keep revising. And if, in mid-discussion no one raises an index finger, pad up, to the dropped conference room ceiling and mentions Springsteen in half-ironic reverence or reverential irony, then keep revising--(note bene: prolly needs cars). And these conferences really are worth something, a lot maybe. When Pete Seeger, who really was pretty fucking courageous, sits all knees and elbows and chin and bangoneck across from Hugh Hefner and has a televised conversation about the history and implications of playing an African instrument at a groovy televised sexual liberation party with bunny ears and cotton tails and Hef is really listening and asking groovy perceptive questions, then something good is happening. This really happened and I suspect it could not, now.

And I like all this stuff, truly, but it smacks of tourism.

(Why is it that we need to keep coming back to poverty in order to say anything smart about democracy. I think we do.)

But so. A couplethree weeks ago I went on a whim to see a local(-based) band called J. Roddy Walston and the Business. I'd heard a couple songs on the radio and I liked. Reminded me of a sort of cross between early Cheap Trick and Dr. Professor Longhair. Boogie-woogie piano and mic-assaulting caterwauling a la Aerosmith or James Brown or Bon Scott. And I'd been listening to and writing (Gawd hep me), yes, mid-tempo alt-country rockers for so long. In fact I graduated to them from G-major artmurmur poetgurgles that I wroted in the dry well of my soul. I do my best, really I do. But I'm really not sure that the message of rock and roll is :be here now", John Lennon having made the ultimate sacrifice notwithstanding.

This is a little bit interesting: the opening act was this guy who looked really good in blue jeans and wrote mid-tempo alt-country rockers and who it was real easy to tell rode his wallet in his front pocket and made a big point of being intimate good friends with the next opener, Shooter Jennings. Now Shooter Jennings is the more photocerebral--and somewhat shrunk as if abandoned in the parking lot of a Sunglass Hut in a steady drizzle--son of Waylon Jennings. And he wroted an album demanding that the O be returned to "country" and has pursued this whole plan of wearing country duds but more beat up (cf. 'poverty, fake') and being photographed in psychedelic colored lighting from arty angles. But his latest plan involves a concept album co-written and dramatically narrated by Bangor, Maine's own Stephen King about the last era-closing broadcast of an independent rock and roll radio station before the Total Take-Over of a Rock and Roll Hating (because duh) Totalitarian Regime that curiously resembles Abercrombie & Fitch except without those louver blinds. So Shooter strapped on one of them Madonna mics (even less plausible in a tiny club in Baltimore) and straddled a little crotch-level keyboard with also a guitar dangling from him and counseled us rockingly to abjure our conformist ways. He had one of those guitar players with girl-long hair who can't be fucking serious but who maybe is. And the thing is, Shooter just screamed and kept screaming, hitting some serious notes with complete and desperate conviction. And the guitar player just shredded scales and doubled big notes with power chords until I sort of stopped smiling and began to think, fuck, these boys mean it. They're goofy but that's not the issue.

And this has gotten so long because I don't even know what to say about J Roddy Walston and the Business. It was they who were the second opener. But what they really opened. Was my heart. (I mean it.) J Roddy swung his dirtyblonde ringlets at his (actual upright) piano and pounded and pounded and screamed out the sum total of all Anglo-African horror and longing, and spattered us with the cumulative effluvia and sifted gold of all patient river deltas. It was just blues and only rock and roll but Professor Longhair was there with magnolia breath, and I saw Jerry Lee Lewis with his half-kidnapped brides, Blind Willie Johnson testifying in oil-skid feathers like a pigeon, Dylan or maybe Jehovah in a prayer shawl of lightbulbs and hubcaps. And when I walked out ears ringing as if the room still hung ringing around me, there were thunderheads blowing in, and the storm smelled like rust and like honeysuckle and like the sea, and it descended in black tatters over the harbor and Fort McHenry until the last of summer broke in sheets of rain.

What I Thought When We Were Doing 'Heart-Openers' in Yoga Tonight

All I ask is a perfect meal with you without hindrance. No history. No story. No tomorrow morning. Just to sit there and face you and eat and drink and step outside what hard habit requires and to allow the possibility of a few more nights like this before I'm old and beyond repair.

Death to Everyone Is Gonna Come

So, is it morbid or just the kind of journalistic seeing that comes from a long education that makes me see death in every little moment between any man and any woman? I've had this idea to write 'obituaries' for couples, in which the entire history of a relationship can be reduced to a moment? It doesn't much matter whether the moment is final or fleeting or casual or dramatic. I mean: that Katie and Tomasz piece is sorta dramatic, in a small way, but his back to her, her leaning toward him, his beer-prop, their attention to their clothes seemed at the moment like ten million romance novels, long lifetimes of tragedies, and, inevitably, death. Not that I mourned as I watched them, but I did have the sense that the whole flirtation was weighted with doom, and that's what made it sweet? Love feels like fall. Fall feels like autumning in love. So beautiful and so sad and so neither here nor there but sort of suspended between what was and what will be, so lightly balanced like that bar trick with the saltshaker that you can hardly breathe, which I suppose accounts for the lightheadedness.

A Song Like That

We took a mortal roadtrip with West under construction
we had a good gas station map but we steered by intuition
I thought that I was some machine age brujo
and you were already pregnant though we did not know

you sat shotgun with your knees drawn up, your back against the window
you talked from Truckee to the Bay nonstop, til it all sounded like Basho
the breeze was slow like how you'd do me when we'd do
the sea was green like how you're eyes were blue

So make up your own version and don't get all offended
if mine has everything except the truth to recommend it
It made no sense the way it went the first time
So much betrayal and lies in your version and I'll but fire and trains in mine

So we got a place in Santa Cruz, you started waiting tables
and we barely paid the rent on time and I wrote when I was able
but the silence there grew smaller every day
I learned to live in it and had nothing to say

We had hunger, we had stars, you had her in September
and when she died the light went out, the world lost half its color
I think that's the last time I stayed up til dawn
sometimes it's almost cruel that life goes on

A Chinese landscape painting of the Blue Ridge near the Tri-cities
a double-exposed photograph where the the light is just like anti-freeze
It swirls bright and salty as the sea
and you lean in close cause you're in love with me

You make up your own version, it does not good to get offended
if mine has everything except the truth to recommend it
It's full of holes the way it goes the first time
so put betrayal and lies in your version but you're the fire and trains in mine

Brief Lectures on Knowing: Part 2

The image presented to the brain by the eyes is not a continuous picture but is actually full of gaps, maybe not an image at all but perhaps more like a page of computer code. The brain decodes the data and fills in these gaps without our noticing. This is curious and troubling. It does however offer promising possibilities for understanding how other people who are not oneself can be so deeply and importantly wrong about things. No, wait. Forget it.

The sense of being in a room with other people is a couple more levels of complexity and data-collation up. You have the sense-of-sitting-in-a-room-with-people. If you're a teacher you scan the room looking for whatever seems important: signs of questioning, comprehension, the desire to speak, boredom. And you hold in your consciousness all these people, and they--along with your own physical self-awareness and your awareness of your objectives in the class, and the annoying colleague loitering unaccountably by the doorway, and the desire for prime rib and beer and some other stuff--constitute a total social situation. And then this combined with the Chinese economy, Bruce Springsteen, the Shroud of Turin and stars dying or being born, constitute Reality.

But actually as you look around the room you can only see one face at a time. Or really you have to assume that it's a face because you can only focus, can only verify the precise visual print, of some small region of one face. And as you attend closer to this, even this becomes less certain. You begin to the notice the imperfections in your field of vision, the difficulty the eye has when tasked with seeing only one thing exactly. The whole machinery is build to survey and interpolate, not to isolate and verify. Writ large, this seems the condition of knowledge(, man). What we assume is the world is actually an unmanageably vast river of stuff gathered into a small number of familiar-shaped jugs. It only takes a small number of images and experiences to constitute a world, and most people seem to resist admitting new ones. Although there is a sneaky doubleness to how Nature has us respond to strangeness.

But so here's what I want to come back to:
1. In much the same way that consciousness creates (or is?) the simulacrum of a seamless reality from fragments of perception and fragments of memory, so political awareness is composed of isolated data run through a filter of assumptions.
2. Another thing this seems connected to is the experience of beauty. Particular key fragments can evoke responses to enormous complexes of experience: I see a basketball and remember the total experience of walking on a fall day down to Yreka Elementary to play in the crisp, woodfire air until my fingertips split along the prints. Or sometimes I see some small thing and think that maybe the world could be remade according to some pattern that it suggests, as if you could extrapolate from a cup of coffee to a just society. Which seems like something we both sort of think.

Driving the Baby-Sitter

He drove the mini-van through the stonewall streets of suburban Wellesley. She sat shotgun, shoulders tense but otherwise her demeanor was more like an anthropologist that an actual babysitter. At a stop sign they sat for a minute, blinded in the slow rhythm of passing headlights. He tried to see her face in the shadows and beams; her face was all shadows and beams.

She read somewhere--some novel that fell into her flickering attention during the chemo--that adults gradually lose their faces. The responsive and unselfconscious face that children have hardens into a shiny mask. That made some sense. He seemed all gauzed over with care and a kind of eager safeness, but still nice. And still sort of like a kid, or maybe it was only the studied appearance of vulnerability, although she wanted it to be real. He was trying to see her partly-collapsed face without looking.

And then they were driving along one of the last stone walls and the turn at the swing set was familiar and they were talking about her next surgery and the waiting and rehab. And she said that she was done with being afraid of death. That if she died that was okay but that life was so good, so so good, and she was done with being afraid to be corny.

He seemed to be thinking about how to respond, and then only pressed his lips together in place of a smile and they pulled up to her parents' untouched lawn. She was used to this, to the look of faces trying to see her face, and it didn't bother her anymore. She wanted to see their faces, too, and maybe it wasn't so different. For just a moment his face was his real face, and she had to get out of the car.

Katie and Tomasz.

She slides a tight triangle of paper into his massive hand. His other is on a half-full beer and he's looking diagonally away from her, at the band, at the bassist whose left hand is up and down the fingerboard. He made some awkward weather talk when they first sat down with the others, but the music started and he'd turned away. For such a big man he sure seems shy and self- conscious, she thought. She had been passing him here and there around town since she arrived, two weeks ago, and learned here and there in bits and pieces that he'd been with several town women but hadn't settled on one. When she was getting ready, washing, putting on perfume, dressing a bit but not too much, getting her good jeans out and brushing her boots, one of the girls from the restaurant had dropped in and they'd had a bottle of wine so she is pretty well pre-loaded and now she's drinking a beer and feeling the heat coming off his arm, which is why she passed the note. All that plus the encouragement she's received from her new girlfriends at the restaurant, who say he's sweet and who already have their own men. She wrote: can I take you to Pines this weekend? and folded it junior-high-style in a tight triangle and on the outside wrote: open later! because right before handing it to him she felt shy through the alcohol. Now he's looking at her over his shoulder and looking at the triangle, and then holding it out a ways to read it, which makes her think: maybe he is older than he looks because he reads with his arm almost straight unlike a young man. He smiles a bit and looks unsure what to do and the music is going up and then he just leans so he can put it in his jeans pocket and smiles again and goes back to looking away, studying the band, watching the bassist. What she promises herself to remember is the way his shirt is ironed and the way it stretches across his back and the way the red late sunlight under the poplars runs up his neck.

Jim and Terry

Jim and Terry met at a dance the day before he was drafted, in 1968. They wrote letters almost every day the whole time he was in basic and then when he went overseas. They got to know each other letter by letter over the first few months he was away, asking and answering questions, like a stop-motion conversation. A year in, he was assigned Apache gunner which he did for 40 missions before the Viet Cong shot off his right hand. In the hospital, he taught himself to write with his left, and those letters are noteworthy not only because his handwriting was suddenly like a child's but because he was on large doses of morphine that played hell with his attention span and allowed him to say more than you'd expect from a usually tight-lipped boy from the U.P. Till the day she died these letters made her blush, even when dementia left her unable to remember if they were from Jim or from Jim Junior, what with the childish handwriting and all. After the war, they got married in Ann Arbor, where he worked 40 years at inside sales in the tool and die industry. Terry raised 4 boys. When the youngest left home, she went to school and got a biology degree and worked in a lab into her 70s. They are known for their spring bulbs, maybe the nicest display of daffodils and tulips in Ann Arbor.

Chingadera: a Proposed Etymology

Something to be used up, or of little consequence. The word that stands for the word you momentarily forgot for the thing you're pointing at. A pile of split firewood, as in: "una chingadera de len[y]as". An example of the kind of rubbish I think about late at night. Archaically: noun cognate of the verb "chingar", to split lengthwise. "Chingar" now means to harshly disrespect, to treat like trash, sometimes to rape. One must never call a Mexican man "hijo de la chingada". This is sometimes referred to as committing "suicide by dishonoring".

Silence is Complicity! A Fascist Parable.

She wore a veil made of the stretched skin of pelicans' throats and a kind of sombrero of white feathers, but he could tell she'd be beautiful. He was hounded by moths and was always swatting and flinching and scratching but she could tell he'd even out in time. She was at home above, on, and below the water as long as she didn't spend too long in any one place. He wore heavy wool all year and smelled of lanolin, but whenever he got snagged, on a branch or nail or fence, he was quite good at getting everything re-ravelled so his sweater never entirely reverted to sheep. She had a steady job, and he liked the way she threw her head back to swallow. He avoided eye-contact and obligations and certainty like the plague, and dogs. They spent a year together and then got married. It was a small ceremony on a grassy hillside overlooking the ocean, and everybody was there. One photograph shows the two backlit, the sun bright white through her hat and his woolly suit and shining on a roundish white cloud so you see three indistinct haloed whitenesses, without definite edges. They had a child who, as of this writing, fifty-five years later, has still not spoken.

Kolob, Utah

To give you an idea, one came saying, without irony, that she'd come to find her voice. I can think of only one other year-rounder who would, I imagine, find this funny. For some, this rationale [or declared mission or quest] is entirely unembarrassing. A few may even think she's on a truly sacred pilgrimage. For the rest, the majority, the old Mormon ranchers, the hangers-on after the drying-up of the old Mormon ranches, the aging remnants of the pioneer culture that still lives by gardening and slaughter and canning and sharing in a pinch, she is a silly child of modern times, a risible but possibly dangerous invader from the city, from America, from the credulous, sissified, misinformed, arrogant but contemptible liberal elite.

Another arrived by way of Cedulosa [where she'd hawked handmade jewelry and post-card-sized watercolors (abstract meditations, she called them) of the redrock desert and worked on and off at the Right Eating to put gas in the car], looking for work at the restaurant. She said she'd do anything and was affable enough to be believable, but they let her go within the week for smoking grass, which here can get you put in jail for a very long time, so everyone is strict about it in public. Now she is taking care of The Mysterious Joseph Mary's horses while he is gone doing what we can only suppose and gossip about since we have never met him except K who works stuffing P. O. boxes and claims to have handed him heavy piles of reloading catalogs and IRS notices every few months when he comes through. This one is still in town maybe sleeping in her car and maybe with one of the guides from The Unwashed, the survival school.

This place sometimes we say it has an invisible fence, more like a series of filters that get finer and finer as you get near town, around it that keeps the tourists away, or at least from stopping for long, and that admits only the desperate, the impressively-lazy, and a few that don't have the real-life skills to match their idealism, which means the town is basically two-in-one: the ranchers who are all skill and no idea, unless you count conspiracy theories as ideas, and the recent arrivals who are mostly good at only useless things, like making stone arrow points or hand-carved guitars, but have many very big ideas indeed. All of us are in the same spread-out place mostly agreeing to disagree and going to sometimes-elaborate lengths to avoid each other. Picture, if you will, two of our citizens: one, "Radar" Lyman, is the Troutfield County Sheriff's Deputy in Kolob, and the Mormon Bishop. He is state and church here. He is the youngest son of one of the old Mormon families, and he owns maybe half the valley. He is tall and boyish and clean-cut and nobody has ever seen him smile. Two is Firefly Pems, who came from Flag looking for organic farmwork that doesn't involve weeding, because the plants were calling out to her in pain and who are we to judge which ones stay and which ones go, but she couldn't find anyone looking for that kind of help so now she is living on a hillside waiting for the mothership. When you talk to them and keep it shallow and friendly, these two seem fairly normal, well within the fat belly of the American bell-curve, but they are never sitting down to talk politics, I believe it's safe to assume. Even if Radar maintained his most stoical gentlemanly reserve, Firefly has told all of us that the energy field of his gun gives her labor pains if he even comes near, and he's never withouit his gun [except when it was stolen] so there will be no conversation.

Haiku

Young men wrestle ang-
els. Middle-aged men wrestle
habits. Old men rest.

An Oath I Swear on the Anniversary of D.F.W.'s Infinitely Sad Death

Dear readers,

By the shade of D.F.W., I will attempt my best to sell you nothing, or to not sell you anything. I will try my hardest to avoid irony, parody, and ridicule, because he was his characters' God and he loved them. I will also do my levelest to be honest about my experience, which is probably more honestly spelled experiences. He made me love being an American, and I'll keep at it until I'm an honor to my country.

Thank you, D.

Signed: V.

Drinking With My Notebook, Part 1: July 4, 2010

11:00 PM
Venus is in the west, low and hot.
Juniper and pine play their perfect fifth.
The stream is running, our guests are stumbling
in groping pairs through the dog-yard gate.
The wine was perfectly adequate.

12:00
I am writing this by blankest moonlight,
by what could not warm the moon,
by what its cauterized dust could not absorb.
This wrecks me because I am drunk.

1:00
Better to get up and help you
shut in the chickens, wash a few glasses,
brush my teeth. Better to set aside
this notebook and drop my clothes
and dive down to our bathyspheric house
at the bottom of the night.

2:40
This valley is full of black. The coral looks like
juniper and pine. Barracudas draped in dog-skins
hunt in packs. Schools of moths
recite Goethe's last words. We will surface
at sunrise and have to inhale.

Brief Lectures on Knowing: Part 1

I have to say this; that's the first thing.
(Wllm.) Blake says, and maybe I'm misremembering this
but I've already said it this way maybe a dozen times, that
everything that can be thought is an image of truth.
So for starters, a distinction: there is a difference
between my self-serving schemes, altered as the occasion unfolds,
and the thoughts that arrive like light-and-geometry at the eye.

And are held there tenuously by an art that no one can teach you.
We can certainly argue about an idea but we are not arguing
with each other, exactly. And if we are we aren't attending to the idea.

And if an idea-object does arrive sometimes you are helpless not say it.
Maybe because it has not fully arrived until it is taken into the mind.
The words that you find for it are not to be confused with the idea-object itself
but they are an important point of ritual, a kind of listening that is at best
collaborative, revised in the space around you, occupies the senses like good bread.

Un lloro, un grito, y el crujir de dientes

Brother Orbison Will Now Lead Us In Song

Oh Thy Mighty Awesome Face, Oh Thy Mighty Awesome Face
It's the single leading factor that is causing wide-spread praise
And preliminary findings offer ample cause to raise
Hymns of rowdy supplication to Thy Might Awesome Face.

Whether driving down the highway or researching high explosives,
I shall never cease from praising both with fricatives and plosives.
Lord it's just a dang no-brainer, it's like asking where my nose is.
Let our praise flow to Your face as with buckets and with hoses.

I put Luchre in a hat along with Modern Medicine,
The US Attorneys General and The Hulk and the X-Men.
But my hand it felt around until it found the moistest place
Which I believed to be the breathing of Your Mighty Awesome Face.

Oh Thy Mighty Awesome Face, Oh Thy Mighty Awesome Face,
It is that than which to mind nothing greater can be raised.
I take no pleasure in this world, Lord, I dress in Dockers that are beige
In giddy anticipation of taking my dapper place,
In a waxed handlebar mustache next to Thy Awesome Face.

(solo)

Oh Thy Mighty Awesome Face, Oh Thy Mighty Awesome Face
It's the single leading factor causing all this wide-spread praise,
And preliminary findings offer ample cause to raise
Hymns of rowdy supplication to Thy Mighty Awesome Face.

(repeat and fade)

Uses of Perfection

I was just informed that scrunchies have been inducing fashion despair in your better class of girls for, like, ever. Didn't know, and now I have that sort of post-car accident feeling of being hit by waves of the reality of the grim nearness of disaster. Because the fact is that if I had gotten a bald spot on my crown I would probably have grown a ponytail and held it back with a scrunchy.

The second thing is that we have a channel on our no-cable setup that plays bad movies continuously. It's called THIS. I don't know why. You would think that if you watched THIS you would find out the pun or catch phrase that THIS is meant to call instantly to the viewer's mind. As far as I know, there's nothing like that. It's just THIS.

But so if you want to watch TV and don't have much time, it's a pretty good option. You can walk in, turn on THIS, watch two circa-1972-AfroAmericans being blacksploited in bell bottoms with vertical stripes and groovy vests with no shirts underneath, and big moustaches, watch them go after each other by kicking kungfu style very near the edge of a tall urban building. That is maybe in a slum, probably. And one of them has a Zulu spear that he bends his knees a lot and thrusts out at the other guy and the spear flexes and wobbles at the furthest point of the thrust where he holds it for a minute so you can see his tricepts and the spear wobbles and the feathers near the tip fly about in the urban breeze with a tribal jauntiness that goes great, weirdly, with the bell bottoms. And you can imagine the evasive capering of the spearee well enough to need no assistance from yours truly.

Anyway, my real point is that I was just watching the opening credits of "Raiders of the Seven Seas" (1953), a title suggesting a degree of organization and follow-through that you would expect from a newly anointed Superpower. Sheesh: all seven? It has Lon Chaney Jr., Donna Reed, and someone named Yvonne Wood. So this all comes around to porn star names, as so often. But in this case the pieces don't quite fit together, if you'll pardon. That is, if it's Yvonne Wood (which it is) then she doesn't really have wood to deliver. And the whole near-medical bravura of the porn idiom is immediately punctured for your thinking viewer. And if it's Ivan Wood then he's saying right up front that he wants wood, when it is his job to deliver it. So on the one hand this would seem to be a movie about uncommonly competent and organized pirates: no starry-eyed rabblement, no casual hobbyists, no flighty chargers off on some impulsive tear with the oven left on.

But no sooner have you begun to enjoy the possibilities, amid the glow of the opening credits, of Yvonne Wood as a really workable porn star name, than you're disappointed by the suspicion that, for reasons too complex to twig all at once, it doesn't quite work. Like right after you break into Jello that has actually formed in the little bowl, and maybe been covered with prophylactic cellophane. Pure potential energy. And then--unalterably--absence: absolute nevermind: the uninterrogatable goneness of the utter, unrenewable, glossy plane. It was going to get mixed up in your stomach, anyway, but that's the sort of consolation unavailable to the cognoscenti. Jello is always eaten in a state of close-but-no-Kewpie-doll heaviness that is almost a metacliche. A cliche about a cliche. And maybe it would be possible to punch out the other side of this heaviness. But that would require giving up on perfection in this world. The movie gets five stars out of ten from IMDB. It's pretty good.

Perfume Review: Terre d'Hermes

We've known each other for years, Terry and me. He was best man at my wedding, and right afterwards my wife pointed out that he smells like rotten oranges. No way, I says, what do you mean rotten oranges? Swear to God, she says. Well. So after the honeymoon I see Terry at work and go up to him, you know, to catch up or whatever. And he gives me this big hug, right? And for the first time I smelled it. The top of his head smells like warm stones like since we were kids, but sure enough wafting up from his armpits there's this rotten orange smell. Not real strong or nothing but once you notice that a guy smells like rotten oranges you just kind of can't let loose of it, you know? And I don't know if this is like some Yoko Ono, ESP, woman influence thing. Because I can't figure how come I didn't notice it before. And now I find myself compulsively walking by his cubicle, especially on warm days, like how you can't stop smelling your hand sometimes after you've been chopping garlic or whatever.
And then recently the dreams start. There's a stone throne at the end of this long, low underground chamber, right? And Brenda, my wife, right? she's being forced forward, towards the throne, by this group of small but very strong and serious oranges. Or I think they're oranges, maybe they're like tangerines or something. It's dark. But they smell like oranges. Or like the armpits of oranges. I know this sounds crazy but just listen. And the oranges have this strange, serious, sort of angry, reverent look on their faces, and their eyes are glued on the throne. And Brenda is struggling and looking scared and disgusted but also kind of fascinated. Almost like she wants them to drag her over to the throne. And then I look and sitting on the throne is Terry. Friggin Terry that I've known since 6th grade, only now he's on this throne with these servants that are oranges. Or tangerines, maybe. And did I say they were in long robes?, the citrus I mean. What do you think it means, Doc? I'm not crazy or nothing, am I?

Another Edge

This can't be right. It seems like there is something just beyond my courage and that if I had courage or if I could suspend some sort of false conscience or tension I would be able to understand something important. It would be very clear. It's not complicated, just needs to be looked at squarely.

This something is a source of great energy, or the condition of seeing it participates in some great energy. Or that's the feeling. As of something right there that I'm not willing to take hold of.

Often I read something or hear something and I think, That can't be that hard to write, it would just require commitment to seeing this something, seeing clearly. And but then, my intuition tells me, my life would fall apart. And so I can't decide, and keep waiting for something to happen to me. Instead of deciding to see. Meanwhile, much of my competence, such as it is, is directed towards making sure that nothing happens.

If I were to pursue this in a more limited and practical way, there would be something to say about listening past the momentum of false language before trying to find words for much of anything. So much carefully marshaled falsehood in me. What is it? I keep saying these things: I'm sorry. I don't know. What do you think? And I don't mean them, V. I actually think I'm a creative force in the midst of reality. You know, not more than other people, but an actual and free determining force. Why is that so fearful?

It's late, as you'll have guessed, as I'm writing this. And you're probably driving to Boulder.

At the Very Edge

Right after my then-wife left, I found myself suddenly free to do what I had postponed all those years of marriage. We worked out a schedule with the kids that left me free to take long weekends twice a month, and, since I am self-employed and the recession has all but gutted my business, these weekends have become longer. I have spent most of them, in all seasons for the last four years, in the wilderness of southern Utah, carrying minimal gear, sleeping on the ground, and navigating more and more by instinct, without maps and without any destination in mind. I can’t claim to feel any profound peace in those remote canyons, though they are indeed very quiet and almost entirely untracked. My experience there is intensely internal and meditative, and the turbulence of my thoughts does not allow much peace. Also, in wild country like that, where the topography contains endless mazes and dead-ends, dense thickets and gripping exposure, hot days and cold nights -almost all the inhospitality that nature has to offer- there is almost constantly some fear, at least while I am moving. I tend to move quickly through the places that threaten sudden floods or a sprained ankle. And, of course, I rush to avoid mosquitoes and cedar gnats. I make wide, exhausting detours around poison ivy and thickets of tamarisk and Russian olive. When I come to a place that feels right, often where I can lie under a piñon, with my back to a wall of warm sandstone, facing a view of canyons and mountains, I sit in soft sand and make a little fire and try to do nothing at all. My mind returns over and over to my children, back in Salt Lake, and to my lover in town managing her restaurant, and to my unpaid taxes and my clients who resent my frequent excursions beyond the reach of the cellular telecommunications network, but I can in fact relax and set aside some of my worries and attain a kind of precariously-balanced peace.
About a year ago I was walking up a small canyon several miles from town, a place not mentioned in any of the guidebooks and, thanks to a vertical ledge of basalt, ungrazed, when I smelled burning juniper. There was a faint blue haze in the air, pouring slowly downcanyon on the moist, cool air of evening. I didn’t want to see people, and I had just found a nice spot for camping, so I rolled out my sleeping bag in some sand above the floodline and sat for awhile. From that bench above the bed of the wash I could see the tops of cottonwoods catching the copper light, and a jumble of massive boulders, and the sun reflecting back to me from the snow on the Henrys. I took out my watercolors and did a quick sketch, working more and more from memory as the sun set and left everything but the sky black. I didn’t want to light a fire of my own that night, so I got in my bag and just lay there thinking and listening for a long time before I fell asleep. I woke up when the sun reached me and had a slow morning without coffee, just sitting.
Late in the morning I smelled juniper smoke again and decided to walk upcanyon, but stealthily in case I could get by the other camp unseen. Around a bend, the canyon became straight and wide. A massive dam of boulders lay across the upper end, and several side canyons full of cottonwoods and willows spilled into it. I walked along the hard gravel between the sand and a bank of willows for some time, until my new vantage showed me that the smoke was coming out of one of the side canyons. Two very large and almost symmetrical cottonwoods framed the canyon mouth, shading it and almost enclosing it. Cattails and willows ringed a wide pool at the roots of the big trees. I could smell the water.

I kept in the willows and walked a wide arc around the pool and climbed up into some fallen boulders above the lowest branches of the trees, found a comfortable place in the shade, and sat. Soon I could hear voices, not clearly because of the echo, but I caught a few words. Two men discussing something. Their conversation had the slow, intermittent cadence of deliberation, of trying to figure something out. There was the sound of rock moving against rock, gritty and not very hard. Also the sounds of scraping and tapping.
***
As I sat there, keeping still and quiet, I tried to remember ever having spied on someone before, but the only memory I could come up with was from my early childhood, peering out of our front-hall coat closet at a drunken party of my father’s students, feeling the thrill of the voyeur: hoping to see, certainly, but not entirely hoping to remain unseen. Hoping, maybe, for some complicity, though unable to ask for it. Caught between desire and shame.
As I remember, most of my father’s students were poor objects for a young boy’s secret watching: almost all were men, and mostly of the weak, unhealthy, misshapen kind that made it into the inner circle of a young professor of abstruse theories at MIT in the early 70s. Their awkwardness gave me no pleasure, and I couldn’t understand what they were discussing, probably something about the mathematics of orbital trajectories or the upper-atmosphere chemistry of Venus. But I do remember that one of the students stood out. He was more graceful than the others, fairly handsome and athletic, stronger and more fluid in his movements, more confident in his speech, more self-assured. He dressed well, as far as I could determine at that age. He certainly was not one of the nerds, yet my father had a high opinion of his intelligence. Most importantly, he had a girlfriend, and she was beautiful, as I saw her. I think what this meant for me then, as it did for so long, even into my adulthood, was that she looked healthy, and that she glowed with smooth, unblemished, golden-brown pulchritude. And from where I crouched under the wet coats that smelled of lanolin and rubber, I could see, intermittently, the entire length of her perfect legs, from sandaled ankle to white underpants, as she leaned back into her boyfriend from her perch on the arm of his chair.
To see what you oughtn’t compresses the lungs, shortens the breath, and fills even a little boy with longing. And even a little boy knows that this can never be spoken, and suspects that he may be alone in this forever.
***
I sat alone, but not completely alone. There, miles from the nearest town, which is very small, and which is tens of miles from the next town, which is also very small, I had chosen to sneak up to the only others in the area. I had set out to be alone and unmolested, and I assumed that these two men had set out with the same goal. This is a strange kind of aloneness: I couldn’t speak or even stand up for fear of being noticed, but I stayed because I wanted to, and the want was fierce. Partly, that want was curiosity, and partly it was the thrill of evasion. I think I also relished the sense that I was gaining secret knowledge that I could, conceivably, use against them, whoever they were. They were sneaking, I remember thinking, for a moment without irony. They must have something to hide, and that something must have value to them, so maybe I could profit from it. My invisibility was powerful, and immediately corrupting. My heart surged with adrenaline, my mind raced with stories, the canyon became an unfocused backdrop for the workings of my imagination, and the two men in the side canyon took on villainous traits that, as far as I knew, they didn’t deserve.
After maybe an hour, which is a long time to hide behind a rock keeping silent, as any hunter can attest, the men moved closer to the mouth of the canyon and came into view for the first time. One I immediately recognized from town. He was, and still is, a part-time guide who works for a local outfitter. I had seen him every so often in town, sometimes washing dishes in my lady-friend’s restaurant, sometimes doing yardwork for the lodge. I didn’t know much about him. The other was a stranger to me, and a startling sight: he wore only buckskin leggings and thin sandals, he was tall and rangy, and his long yellow hair was twisted into a thick knot on top of his head. They squatted on a wide flat rock to wash their hands in the pool, and when they stood I could see that the stranger had thick ropy scars in a chevron design down his chest, not from any accident, obviously, but for decoration.
Now I could hear them, but they didn’t say much. They talked briefly about how to move a large rock. Later, after they snacked on jerky and drank straight from the pool, the one I recognized, whom I’ll call Lauro, said he was getting wood, and he hopped down the boulders and walked off picking up branches as he went. The line of willows was full of gray-weathered wood that had come down in floods from the piñon-juniper above. The stranger shredded some juniper bark, piled it on a circle of blackened sand, moved some charcoal around, blew for a minute, and soon had a small fire going.
As the sun climbed, I had to slowly circle the boulder to stay in the shade. In the early afternoon, when Lauro and the stranger were back in the canyon making their inscrutable scraping and tapping noises, sometimes discussing their project, every so often swearing in pain or frustration, which are hard to tell apart when you can’t see the sufferer’s face, I stretched out and took a nap.
Not much of what happened that day is interesting except that I ought not to have been looking. Doing what is forbidden is, of course, exciting. But the excitement I felt wasn’t enough to make their snacks and occasional conversation and washing and fire-making –in short, their domestic routine- interesting, and I was bored. Also, I was beginning to think unkind thoughts about myself, such as: what kind of man, in his 40s with three daughters at home and a professional career, spends most of a day spying on two men? And what kind of sick motivation kept me glued to their uninteresting comings and goings for most of a day despite discomfort, boredom, and, now, as the sun lowered, clouds of gnats?
The day stretched on. I saw the men a few more times, when they walked downstream from the side canyon to pee. When it was getting dark they knocked off work, built up the fire, sat, smoked grass, and ate. After their smoke they got jokey for a while, but then fell silent, and I don’t remember anything else from that day. They slept under wool blankets around the fire and I slept in my bag under my boulder, under the wall, under the stars.
I woke up early the next morning. Usually I would have relieved myself and tried to go back to sleep, but I woke up quickly and completely, because the men were nearby and my sense of transgression had me alert and wary. I listened for any sign of them, but couldn’t hear anything. I slowly slipped out of my bag and looked over the edge, and saw that they were asleep, the mirrored arcs of their bodies like a pair of folded wings around the smoldering black of the fire-ring. I quietly stuffed my bag into my backpack, put my socks in my shoes, which I would carry until out of earshot, and slowly, precisely, went boulder to boulder in the halfdark till I was well upcanyon. There I stopped to brush my teeth, put my shoes on, and get set to walk.
Over the next two or three days I found my way out of the canyon and then around it up in the piñon-juniper. As you’ll know if you’ve ever walked this country, you can go a long way on quite flat gravel, winding between the trees, thinking that you’re getting somewhere, when suddenly you’re standing at the very edge of a canyon, and there is no way down without ropes, so you walk next to that canyon until it’s crossable, and you continue along the main rim again until you meet the next sidecanyon. There aren’t many chances to see the land ahead of you, so you follow the edge of a canyon and only rarely strike off cross-country on a compass bearing. One of the mainstays of my backcountry meditations is the constant conflict between my idea of the trek and the actual lay of the land. Either I make this conflict meditative, and somehow instructive, or I am always butting my head, so to speak, against unyielding stone, which, maddening to some, never fights back, but just sits there placidly and immovably being stone.
As I walked, I skirted several of these side canyons, but always stayed parallel to the main canyon that I had walked up a few days before. Most of the sidecanyons are boxed, in local parlance, meaning their upper reach is a wall of stone, not just an eroded channel, and these box canyons are rarely explored. They tend to be steep, deep, wet, and overgrown. One might force into the thicket from below, on horseback, wearing leathers, to flush a valuable cow, but only if one is better paid than the average cowboy. Another might rappel in from the rim, but who would ever walk there with that much gear? After skirting several of these box canyons I came to a wider canyon that looked easy to cross, and too long to walk around. With a bit of clambering, sometimes lowering my pack on a short rope I carried for that purpose, I made it down to the sandy bottom, which was flat and inviting. With no goal in mind, and no particular schedule, I strolled down the wash. The cottonwoods kept the sun off, the stone walls held the shape of wind and water, and the sky was cobalt. Here, off the map, I was in my own perfect, private National Park, forever to be unnamed and unnoticed by the Nation, I hoped. There were a few pouroffs, steep enough to have kept the cattle out, but easy enough to climb down, always with that faint anxiety about how to get back up later, if I had to.
I walked downhill in this perfect canyon for some time when it abruptly became humid and green, greener than the willows, far greener than the sage and piñon. The palette wasn’t right. A hard, straight edge of impossibly-lush green separated the pristine canyon I‘d been walking through from a broad field of marijuana plants, as tall as me.
Again I was seeing what I oughtn’t, but now by accident. It felt different. I remember noticing a moment of connoisseurship, almost, as I quickly weighed the differences between voyeuristic watching and accidental witnessing: the voyeur feels shame and longing and a possibly permanent aloneness, while the accidental witness feels the powerful urge to disappear, to get into the shadows and then to flee, to avoid being seen seeing. Sometimes we crane our necks to peer at the forbidden from a secret place, and sometimes we stumble upon it and wish we hadn’t.
Of course, I am describing a fleeting moment a year later. I was not slow, or quick, enough to put all of this in order right then. I think I was motionless only long enough to see the scene: the neat rows of shaggy green plants; the sky reflected in the irrigation water that flooded the field; the purple, glossy solar panels against the north wall, the tidy hoops of black hose against the beautifully-made stone retaining wall; the little garden of tomatoes, squash, beans, and corn; and to sharply inhale before turning quickly, and taking a few long strides into the willows, behind a garage-sized boulder. I had to gather my wits, an apt cliché, because they had scattered. So, somewhat breathless and witless, I crouched hard behind the boulder and tried to think. I imagine that animals try to think sometimes, but mostly they excel at doing what I had just done in getting myself hidden and safe and alone.
So: what to do? The wash above the straight green line was open, completely exposed to view except for the little triangle of willows behind the boulder. The field of marijuana stretched wall-to-wall and was probably watched. The walls were nearly vertical, and too smooth to climb. So I waited. I spent another day crouched behind a boulder in a state of excited alertness, my head clear and focused, my ears straining at every sound. I didn’t take off my pack, because I might need to run. I stayed crouched as long as my knees allowed and then settled into a more relaxed position though my mind didn’t relax at all. I stood for a long time, too. Late in the afternoon a sudden whir and click set my heart pounding and my thighs twitching, but it was only a timed irrigation valve opening, I think. I could see a corner of the field, all of the vegetable garden, and the solar panels from behind the boulder, but by sunset I hadn’t seen or heard a person. As the sky darkened, I stretched and drank water and had a snack. Then I used a bunch of willow shoots to brush away my footprints while I stood on a rock. The moon would be rising soon, so I peered around the boulder as far as I could, and then dashed out into the wash and ran back uphill as quickly as I could over the uneven ground. After the first pouroff I slowed to a brisk walk, and kept going for maybe a half hour before climbing out of the wash and settling under a piñon. I sat still until the sweat dried, then unrolled my bag and stared gathering sticks. It seems strange to me now that I made a fire, but I don’t remember hesitating then. Maybe the lay of the land offered me some sense of security that calmed me. Anyway, I did make a fire, and I did sit facing it, so my eyes adjusted to the light, and I couldn’t have seen into the dark even there where it never gets very dark, where the stars alone make enough light to walk by, and where, that night, the moon was a round mirror. A moment ago I credited for my confidence, in retrospect, the lay of the land, but I should have added that I usually carry a compact .45 auto pistol, for mountain lions, I say if asked, but also because I like to carry a gun. Or, to be clear and forthright, I like a good gun’s weight and power and the way it extends my power out into what I can see but can’t otherwise touch.
***
A few years ago a friend was walking with his dog not far from here. The dog is an affable Labrador, always game and inexhaustible. When I’ve walked with them, the dog ranges widely, often out of sight, often following scents and running. She covers ten times more ground than we do. It’s a good, and, I imagine, ancient feeling to be walking in the woods while your dog scouts a vast area, flushing game, extending your reach much more deeply into the wild –and closer to the ground- than you will ever go. One day, on one of these hikes, the dog started barking and wailing in alarming tones off in the woods. My friend jogged off the path to see what was wrong, assuming a coyote trap or an eye injury. He came to a rockfall, where a mountain lion had his dog cornered and was moving in. Just like a big housecat stalking a mouse, he said. My friend is a big man, and he loves his dog, and he carries a heavy hardwood walking stick, and he stepped right up to the lion and broke the stick over her back. She ran off. I don’t know anything about mountain lions, but people who do know, ranchers and trackers and guides I know, all say that my friend was lucky, that he could have been killed, that he should have thrown something or made a loud noise or, according to the ranchers, at least, let the lion have the dog. The way city people love their dogs is a mystery to the ranchers, they want us to believe, but I secretly think they love their outside heelers and hounds as much as we love our pets.
Anyway, I spend a lot of time around that mountain, so I bought a bigger pistol. My ethics forbid shooting a pinnacle predator, but I could do it to save my life, or even my dog’s life, I suppose. I tell myself that the first five rounds of .45 will make enough noise to scare away the someday lion, and the sixth round is in case she comes back.
***
So I sat there blind in the firelight for a good long time, holding my gun. Later, I propped it up in one of my shoes, which I always keep in reach when I sleep out, and went to sleep. Nothing happened that night. The next day I walked back to my truck, way back at the mouth of the canyon, and drove back to town for a shower, a steak at the restaurant, and a sweet reunion with my girlfriend.
***
Back in Salt Lake I used Google Earth to map my meandering hike. I looked and looked, but the images didn’t show the marijuana field. Either the images were too old, or the depth of the canyon kept the lush green from sight. I’m fairly sure I’ve mapped the right canyon, but I can’t clearly see much where I spent those two nights, one hoping to see, and one hoping not to be seen.
This spring, before the trees leafed out, I went back. I parked my truck further up the road, at the mouth of a parallel canyon. I walked up that canyon, looking up side canyons until I found one I could climb out of and up onto the flats above the canyon I’d had my adventures in last summer. From the rim, I could see the long straight section of wash maybe 200 feet below. I was directly opposite the sidecanyon with the symmetrical cottonwoods, which looked like enormous gateposts from here. There was no sign of people or smoke. I found a way down the scree and crossed the sandy wash, heading straight for the pool. When I got there, I suppressed my trepidation, and walked between the trees, into the shade. The black sand of the fire-ring was there, but smoothed by snow and rain. A neat pile of juniper was stacked between two stones, dry and waiting. I could see no sign that anyone had been there recently. I walked further in, noticing how cool and pleasant it was. Several massive boulders formed a colossal stairway under over-leaning walls of orange stone. At the top of the stairs was a broad sandy channel that led, in steps and pouroffs, up into a narrow slot. Above the channel was a flat sandy bench, supported for maybe 20 feet by a pitched wall of carefully, and, I acknowledged with some pleasure, artfully stacked chunks of squared sandstone. Someone, Lauro and the stranger, had set the wall well and straight, and had wedged the larger stones tight with chips. They had also driven two pitons into the wall above the bench, I suppose to hang a tarp. My sense was of a comfortably beautiful place that had been carefully, even lovingly, converted into a camp, or a sort of seasonal house. I was full of admiration. I had expected something, I’m not sure what. Nothing specific, but something less than this. Something not so fine and well-done. I walked further up the canyon. As it narrowed, into a fairly narrow slot, I found a high shelf, what was once maybe a pocket of softer stone long since washed away, high above my head, maybe 15 feet above the sandy floor. Dished steps, almost rungs, really, were chipped out of the vertical rock face. I climbed and found a tightly-wrapped tarp, heavy and full, lashed with tentcord to a pair of pitons. I didn’t open it.
Maybe 100 yards further upcanyon the walls flared out and the ground became rocky and steep. Up a high rockfall, I followed a worn path, where the rocks had been leveled and wedged into place, and swept clean by repeated use. At the top was the field, now muddy and bare, but I recognized it instantly. There, on the other side was my boulder. The solar panels and the irrigation equipment weren’t there. From this side, I could see a small shed made of juniper and adobe. Inside everything was tarped and tidy.
When I think of an unpleasant person, I feel free to make up stories. I suppose all sorts of nasty things, backstories that explain their unpleasantness, childhood traumas, abuses, losses, laziness and corruption, stuff like that. In recent years I have tried to stop doing this, and have largely managed to stop making up stories about my friends. I treat pleasant people with something like deference, but also like reverence. I hold out on judgment and try to let their goodness shine. Standing there in front of that shed, seeing the care and intelligence and resourcefulness of these two men, I couldn’t suppose anything at all. I felt an unexpected warmth for them arise in me. It’s hard to feel foolish in the wilderness, where no one is there to judge, but I wasn’t right then in the wilderness. I was in a strangely cultivated place, on an edge between the wild and the domestic, and I felt shame. I pictured myself as a DEA agent, perhaps rappelling out of a black helicopter into this canyon, having received a tip from a hiker, having to destroy this order, burn the crop, restore this place to its natural beauty, and I felt shame.
***
Not long ago I bumped into Lauro in town. We chatted a minute. I made no mention of having spied on him, of course. We barely know each other, or, I should say, he barely knows me. I feel that I know at least something important about him. I think he was maybe a bit startled by my warmth. We’ve always said Hello, how are you?, in passing, but I engaged him. I looked him in the eye and asked about him, and he was I think a bit startled. He was warm, too, but we were headed opposite directions.