At the Bill Lavender reading I challenged a bunch of them to come to my house Saturday night for a party, Sonja and the others I didn’t know, Allan, whom I had at least met before, and Greg, who looked familiar but whom I couldn’t place, and Eileen, whom I insulted with a comment that was meant to be a joke but I’m pretty sure remained an insult. Sonja had introduced me to her and said something like, she’s not a poet or a novelist or anything, and I said something like, well, as long as she’s not stupid or boring it’s okay. Even now I think it was a funny thing to say, but it didn’t really go over well. People that don’t know me don’t get my sense of humor all the time, how dry it is. Additionally, I can be kind of transparent, emotionally, and people can see the anger lurking just below the surface, and think it’s intended for them. No, I would tell them, if I could, it’s just pretty much there all the time.

I just want to clear up what I said about Godot, though there’s the danger that it might get a lot more complicated than I want. I didn’t mean to say there wasn’t more to like about it, but after trying to figure out what it’s about for 20 years, you come to the conclusion that it’s really, really obvious what it’s about, or else it’s really, really obscure, but either way, any of the interpretations you might arrive at based on either conclusion isn’t as interesting as the language itself, the repartee that paints itself into a corner, the borrowed eloquence that shows how truly beautiful simplicity is, and the way simplicity is pantsed by nihilism.

See, I told you. Anyway, I was glad Jake liked it for that reason, and rattled off a lot of movies he should watch, and forgot to mention a raft of others. None of them anarchist or political, not because I don’t believe in those things, but I’ve just never seen a good movie made by or about them. Maybe with the exception of Algiers.

The buzzer on the dryer just went off. So whatever happened to Bill Lavender? Someday I’ll get back into his book about Katrina. The bastards. Not the ones who thought up the hurricane (those whimsical gods of Olympus), but the ones who thought it was a good idea to dig canals up the estuaries of Louisiana, the ones who sold real estate below sea level, who shipped slaves from Nova Scotia, who devised an alphabet to more easily control the sale of cattle, bovine or other.

My Dinner with Andre, The Princess Bride, Wings of Desire, Fanny and Alexander, Seventh Seal, Lars and the Real Girl, Where the Road Bends (Gypsy Caravan), City of God, Delicatessen, 8 ½, Volver.

Yesterday evening, spontaneously, Leah and I went to the Eastman House to hear some music in the garden. Last time we went, year before last, it was out on the lawn; a fiddler and a flautist or guitarist or something. This year it was in the formal garden, and we sat in the back so we had a view of the whole garden and the white-bricked wall of the mansion, and so we could hear each other over the 50s R&B/pop/Elvis of Krypton 88, the warm-up act. And look out over the snap-dragons an daisies and larkspur and whatever they had going on; a very mini-Versailles, with no fountain, only a fat guy making a stone pedestal into a serving table for his family in their folding chairs, and for his friend who showed up later and proved to be excellent at throwing back the offered beer(s) and inhaling the camembert and jalapeño jack on crackers, and the wine-soaked salami, and no thank you to the pasta salad or anything that required a plate and fork.

The headline act was billed as a bluegrass duo, Mike Stevens and Raymond McLain. McLain, the banjo, guitar, and fiddle player, was a short, roundish guy, physique of Wallace Shawn, and he played straight bluegrass (Bill Monroe, etc.), traditional Appalachian tunes (sped up), or accompanied Stevens, the harp player. Stevens was peeled out of a Beat Colorforms set, with pork pie hat, heavy dark shades, natty crimson sports shirt with the vertical black stripe running clavicle to femur, and the requisite hangdog look of Leon Redbone.

They weren’t amped as loudly, so we could have sat up closer to really enjoy Stevens’s very cool solos and crossover bluegrass-blues-spacejazz that he effected with echo, sustain, and repeat pedals; but we got the idea.

Admission got us into the museum, and during the break we saw what we could see in the gallery, running into a new exhibit of political pieces, “What We’re Collecting Now.” A photo by Katharina Mourtadidi: German subway placard of a woman with her shirt off, holding her left breast in her right hand, modestly but not shyly covering it, her right pectoral smooth except a scar where her breast used to be. And, in German in a caption at the bottom, quite small relative to the photograph, a statement (translated, on the wall) of the number of women who get breast cancer a year, what that translates to as a percentage (10%), that there is no known cause, and that governments need to do something to find a cause and a cure. Polemical, but you really have to want to read it to read it. And the photo makes you want to. And to do so, you have to get up close. Real close.

And while, yes, that’s the method advertisers use, it’s also just rhetoric. The thing that was compelling was her expression. It was a combination of indifferent, challenging, blasé, and pissed. I don’t know how she got all that into one expression. A Mona Lisa with a camera, sans chemise. High rhetoric, and high lyricism.

There were others in the exhibit: a girl with a hunting bow, Mexicans nabbed by DIN cops in a field of grass and wildflowers under an unsettled evening sky. A closeup of an ant by a ten-year political prisoner in a Croatian jail. We went back to the music, and after the museum closed I realized I had forgotten to make it to the Ansel Adams show. Oh well.

But that’s not mainly what I wanted to talk about. After, I took Leah to her car that she had left at her East Avenue office, then went on to the Little, to see what I could see. At Little 1 was Paris, Je Taime, which I figured I’d see with Leah; nothing else was familiar, and two looked downright bad (crocodile wrestling and overwrought anti-establishment type stuff), but at Little 5 was something about gypsies. A documentary about their music, a tour, Gypsy Caravan. Huh, that sounded intriguing, at least.

I won’t say too much about it because I want you to see it, and you don’t like to have anything but the purest experience of a piece, but it was interesting timing because last Monday, when I was on Long Island at my Dad’s condo, giving the buyers some old furniture for their grandson who lives upstate and letting in the contractor to fix the problem in the attic, the day it rained like hell all day, the day after I’d been with Brian to see some experimental videos at the Abingdon on West 36^th, I took a cab to the Lake Grove diner (the big shiny Greek one, with patriotic bunting), then walked over to the Waldbaum’s plaza to Linens N’ Things to get a better umbrella, then to Waldbaum’s to get vitals for Tuesday morning (coffee beans, raisins), then back across Nesconsett Highway (a sure place to get killed by assholes in Humvees and Hondas with bullet mufflers) to Sears to get primer to touch up after the attic work, then back across Nesconsett to Borders to find something to read after William Matthews, because Banana Yoshimito turned out to be a bust. Tried to find some prose I could mix it up with, but gave up and headed to poetry. Lorca, In Search of Duende jumped out, and the collected Roethke. So I read Lorca in dry clothes on the remaining half of the sectional while the rain poured down and the contractor hammered and drilled upstairs.

Duende was on my mind from reading Tracy Smith’s book which I got from the Academy, which I haven’t finished. Stopped halfway, I got frustrated with it. I’m not one of those readers who can finish a book he doesn’t really like. I’m too lazy/distracted/slow a reader to spend time with something I don’t really dig. Maybe only reviewers do that, though I don’t see how.

Roethke writes, in “The Longing,”

I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form.

That’s what I didn’t hear, though I think it’s what she intended. It’s probably my tone deafness.

So this film was a two-hour meditation on duende, basically without seeming to set out to do that. Sorry if I gave away some precious discovery. I didn’t tell you anything about the plot. Still, life is loss.

I take what Lorca says about history with a hundred grains of salt, but mainly I was interested in his view of duende and hoping it helped me understand his work better. Since duende is essentially undefinable in words, and can only be conveyed in song and dance, there’s no way for him to succeed in a book, but one has to try, and it sets up sort of a boundary (permeable, a net) around the idea, or sense (sentido).

I’m not sure if I’ve chosen this theme or if it’s chosen me. Surely I’ve felt a lot of loss. It’s strange, my feelings about Dad’s death. There’s loss, though not in the same sense I felt when my mother died in 1988, when I felt a palpable tear in the fabric of the universe, “an unhealing hole.” Death had never come so close. My grandfather died when I was in ninth grade, and though I wanted to feel sad, I mostly felt badly for the people around me who were grieving, mostly my for grandmother who, although they’d rarely been happy together, had made a life with him. I didn’t witness my mother showing a lot of grief, though sometimes that is done privately.

As mine mostly was when my mother died; I was sad, but cried infrequently, and usually alone; once with Leah, which she doesn’t remember, and thinks I didn’t grieve at all, and so maybe my mother grieved her father privately too. I know they were very close. She was his pet, which was another annoyance to my grandmother, since he showered the love he withheld from her on my mother.

So with my Dad I got more practice grieving, though it’s still incredibly hard to cry in public. Even when distributing his ashes, at the beach, I was bursting with grief, but couldn’t let it go. I don’t know why; I guess I’m afraid of making huge retching noises and getting all snotty. It shouldn’t matter, but somehow it does.

So there’s that, but there’s also the anger and embarrassment at who he was, his unbelievable romanticism, which I’d say tipped over into an extreme silliness which people found endearing or cute or even meaningful, but which just made me feel mostly ashamed. And there were things to love about Dad, his candor, his ability to accept, but this stuff got in the way. I suppose because my early identity shared in those traits, or at least in their form (though not temperament, tone). And probably still does, or at least in some residual way.

And finally, cleaning out his house. I’m not sure I can say why that was one of the hardest things. It wasn’t any attachment to his stuff. Maybe it was more that I was further ashamed at what he had kept, what it meant about him that he kept tax returns from the 70s, trinkets from all over, books he never read and couldn’t possibly ever get to. Maybe it was that after a long school year I hadn’t quite recovered my senses, or had just barely, and that experience, mundane as it was, following Dad’s death, watching him die so ignobly, filled with tubes and his chest heaving for air to quiet the hospital-borne infection raging in his system, just kind of peeled the skin off my psyche.

Jane called yesterday to say the meeting of the cemetery association board will be August 7, but I apologized and said we’d be in Provincetown that week. She was telling me that Uncle John had fallen in one of the fields and was knocked unconscious, and also that Volney had passed out at home and had fallen and gotten hurt. And I said it’s time to start looking for some cyanide for “later,” but I guess at least Uncle John is working to go the way he wants to go, at work in the fields, instead of in a hospital bed.

We’ll be going to Tanglewood to hear Yo Yo Ma on the lawn on the way to P’town. I’m looking forward to some time away.

Laurie liked that I played guitar, though I didn’t play well at all. The guitar was a cheap Guild copy (“Madeira” — that’s Spanish for “wood”) that my mom had bought for me from the House of Guitars for $105 when I went off to college, and the neck was warped out of the box and the action too high I learned not by playing with friends or an instructor, but working alone in my sad little bedroom on songs from my Bob Dylan songbook, or making up my own songs when I was feeling blue. But I think it approximated Laurie’s need for an educated cowboy boyfriend, though I was a far cry from cowboy. Still, my grandfather had raised sheep and my brother raised cows, so at least I knew some of the lingo and had worn manure on my boots. Our breaking up was a torrid affair, and on my way home from New Haven I stopped at a guitar store and traded the warped Madeira for the black Martin copy (plus cash, of course). I started smoking Marlboros to remind me of her (though I switched over to Camels, and then Dunhills). I started on and off for the next twenty years, though for a while it became more like stopping on and off than starting.

She didn’t give me a lot, besides that bad habit, but she gave me this plectrum.

I like it because it reminds me of candy, of taffy to be exact. The pink, red, and orange bits especially. It looks like a bunch of pieces of Turkish Taffy were pressed flat and then sliced to make this pick (though, I have to say, mint is my least favorite taffy flavor, except maybe coffee; and I don’t know what that dark blue would be — way too dark for blueberry). You can’t see it in the picture, but pressed into the plastic is the word “Japan.” High quality mass merchandise.

I can’t believe I still have it.

My wife and I had been having significant problems in our marriage, so I was surprised when she took me into Animas Traders just before my 35^th birthday and told me to pick out something I wanted. Things weren’t so bad that I thought she would just forgo the formality of giving me a present, but they were still so raw I thought she might get me a book or CD or something similarly impersonal.

Our marriage had been getting more difficult ever since we moved to New York in 1990, and we were both struggling now more than ever. With each other, and with the ghosts of our pasts

For me, it was the ghost that had compelled me to come back to New York from Colorado after my mother died in August of 1988, two months after wife and I married. Except for brief vacations, until then I had avoided the old homestead near Rochester for all of my adult life. But when my mother died, I felt a sudden need to come back and begin taking some responsibility for the legacy her family had left – in this case, the farmhouse on the Oatka Creek that my grandfather’s mother, Marion MacPherson, was born in. The property had first been built on by her father around 1815, and it had been in our family since then. If I didn’t move in, it was likely going to leave the family.

For my wife, it was the anger at having given up the life she had begun to start for herself in Colorado, and all the ghosts that lived down where that anger lived that hadn’t yet been exorcised came rushing out with it. Most immediately, by moving to New York with me she gave up her first new house which she had only just bought the year we met, and complicated her son’s life, whose father still lived in Colorado.

It was a battle between families living and dead, and between two temperaments that were defining themselves as more and more disparate, in spite of some common interests.

Much of what was in the store repelled me as derivative, touristy rip-offs from various native cultures around the world. I saw a collection of carved ironwood, and remembered my trip to Baja Kino, Mexico, with Virle to trade with the Tiburon Indians there who made it – an apparent rarity, according to Virle. On our way back across the border, I saw panel vans and lunch wagons selling loads of ironwood figures and other “authentic Indian” crafts by the side of the highway.

I was getting ready to leave the shop, despairing a little at another example of our apparent differences, but my eye fell on this particular bola, and it called to me. I asked the owner and collector if he knew what the angular figure was on the left. The katchina, as I knew, was a ceremonial dance figure in Hopi ritual dances which represented the border between this world and the other, between the conscious and the unconscious life.

What I mistook for a cornstalk, however, he told me was a stylized figure of a whirlwind. “It means whirlwinds bring change,” he said, looking into me in a way that made me feel naked. I felt two things simultaneously: that I had misjudged the owner whose junk helped pay the bills for treasures like these. Treasures, at least, in the eye of the beholder. I suppose to another, with different needs but still in a crisis period in his life, the dolphin carved out of ironwood stained with brown shoe polish and imported from the one side or the other of the Sonoran desert could likewise be transformed from kitsch into talisman.

The second thing came with a feeling like something was opening in my chest, similar to the feeling when I had come to the realization a few weeks before that we were caught in a net not of our own making. And now, that maybe these whirlwinds which had felt so destructive might blow away all the dead litter of our misunderstandings and hurts.

When I wear it on special occasions, people sometimes snicker and remark on my “cowboy” outfit. If I say anything, I just tell them what the figures represent. The throat-piece is in the shape of a shield, and though I’m too often sensitive to others’ comments, there’s little they can say about it that bothers me.

April 9, 2007