July 9, 2006

It occurred to me today that perhaps there can be a Calvinist Darwinism. X apparently likes to believe that “it’s all in the genes”—is this necessarily so different from believing that God has set everything out beforehand? Ostensibly, at least the notion of “good” and “evil” has been removed. But the determinism is still there. (It’s thoroughly contradictory, of course; X wants to be captain of fate, master of soul even more than many others.)

I feel quite peaceful, for the moment—sad but peaceful. I feel very much disinclined to hurry. I feel bemused and a little worried—maybe unsettled is a better word—by my lack of a “project.” I feel as though maybe I’m not a writer anymore. I feel that homage to the moment, and all the passing moments, should be my project for the entire rest of my life with words.

My only two (vague) ideas are the book about writing/reading on the brink and my sense that I might be able to write something about Y’s family—if I could find the place to stand—and then that my family, too, it might be possible to get a grip on finally.

I feel very much about both families, actually, that they resemble mighty rivers that have traveled over thousands of miles to sink anonymously into the sands of a random desert.

I don’t think I feel very upset by this. It’s so accidental, what anyone manages to pass on.

A wonderful quotation in the TBR, in a Francine Prose review of the Chilean exile writer Roberto Bolaño (from story “Dentist,” in Last Evenings on Earth):

“That’s what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It’s the only thing that really is particular and personal. It’s the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular. And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home. But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story….the secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter. But every damn thing matters! It’s just that we don’t realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don’t even realize that’s a lie.”

Confluence of Families

1. Maybe it was only the moment of empire that made each of these families seem to burgeon, to surge—that made it seem such prospects awaited.
2. When did you come to these shores? [To these realizations?]
3. We have come this far like a river, to sink into the sand.
4. Mobility. [moblesse oblige?]
5. Everyone never living where the old people are dying.
6. At home.
7. In Wisconsin.
9. Just in March. She took a long time making breakfast. She didn’t seem to understand that I needed to return the rental car—although, in the event, I got lost in PA. She hugged me at the door. In May, she fell in her apartment. She became confused. They took her to the hospital, expecting her to be very upset about being in the hospital—but she was not.
10. A mother who was thwarted.
11. Everyone culminating in me like so many rivers that sink into the sand.
12. They came from Odessa—to this.
13. Everyone culminating in me like a river in which the sturgeon are especially contaminated with PCB’s.
16. How do I flow to the sea with this?
17. With all of their striving.
18. He would tell how you would make farine.
19. Or kill the pig. How you would scrape the scalded skin to get the bristles off. [which he enjoyed.]
26. “The whole drama of history is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management.”—Reinhold Niebuhr (quoted Andrew J. Bacevich, The Nation, July 18-24 2006 issue).
28. Story of some epidemic in a German-speaking farming valley. He lost a whole family. Married again, started over.
31. “Endless repetition can be considered erotic.”—Eva Hesse (diary, quoted Arthur Danto, “All About Eva,” The Nation)
32. Accept endless repetition of “there really isn’t any control after all.”
34. She never did like Belmont.

7/11/06

35. She remembered going to see “Ninotchka.” Her friend George was a Party functionary. He had okayed it.
37. She said her father had got on well with the black people—Negroes that were—to whom he sold life insurance policies and from whom he used to collect monthly payments.
38. The Nazi-Soviet pact.
39. Brother Fred and Brother Jim had bought the land with money from working in Aruba.
41. So far the stories have trudged—the stories have staggered—to lie down and die.
50. I don’t write from the point of view of the father.
54. There are blank spots about everything. Such as, for instance, when the mother was taken away and was it done forcibly?
55. How do you forget pain and remember love?
56. How do you cut yourself off at the roots and plant yourself as a stalk?
58. Their lives in words in me.
59. And I only a porous expanse of sand and gravel.
60. They needed someone to contain the stories, so they made me.
61. A vessel.
66. I think that everyone deserves to be remembered.
67. I think that reality is what you and I perceive, moment to moment—and, changing, forget.
70. The great catalpa beanpods hanging down so suddenly.
71. Laugh, gliff, gliff.
72. I think that someone will care about this trace but it will be a random someone.
77. He apologizes for his genetic material.
78. She tells me about an aunt who got lung cancer in her 80’s and lived to be 95. Took her own life. She didn’t stop smoking, either. The cancer never progressed. She finally took pills. She was a very unhappy person.
79. She was an unhappy person. Not close to anyone. Not to her own daughter.
89. If death were single.
90. But it comes mingled.

7/13/06

91. I learn of these things from a distance.

7/14/06

“I can’t even vent without her bringing in the God stuff.”

7/17

My attitude of aggressive indifference toward events in the Middle East has been replaced by high anxiety—not yet quite all-out panic.

Fragments while walking—early, early, to elude the heat:

the sound of a leaf striking my hat

writing about a forest and leaving out
the wars that surround it

perhaps information that will save you
is flying at you
and you don’t even know it

Uncompromising heat. I sit in the kitchen by the window feeling the hot air pour in—front rooms are cooler but I need at least to feel close to outside.
Hezbollah. Omert. Thinking of M. in Haifa.

Tired of the ways we invent to end minds & bodies
Tired of the inventions and the acts
Tired of the news
Tired of the fear
Tired of the complacency
Tired of the perennial newness of death

a praying mantis nothing
greener on the window
screen this morning