1/19/2022

It was a lot to absorb.  The practice teaching part in particular.  The philosophy, that felt like the immediate thing for me to focus on.

I was looking for some grand genesis of spiritual things, a way to bring it all together, writer that I suppose I try to be.

I found the steps I'd made, forward, had to be undone, if I were to really make some progress.  I had to regress back to childhood.  Better to know than not. 

I lost a lot that year, and the next year, and the year after that.  I was forced to move.  I left behind a large framed poster of an old French Bicycle company with a naked red head flying through the air like an angel.  I didn't have room for it.  I left behind a lot of stuff.  Black Converse sneakers, Lucchese cowboy boots.  I lost a lot of books.  I lost a print that reminded me of the Joan Miro painting Hemingway won in a kind of raffle in one of his Paris cafe haunts.  I downsized.  I left behind things that expressed to me who I am, like an old tattered Ike Jacket I found in a second hand shop in Northampton.  An old cashmere overcoat of my dad's from the 1950s.  The books I kept were rare, of my father's, and my own particular interests.

 I lost track of it all.  I moved, without even any money saved, and started paying $1200 in rent out on MacArthur Boulevard not far away from the river bluff, the walk to work past the hospital and Georgetown University's northern border, Reservoir Road.

And then, Covid.  Right before St. Patrick's Day.  And then, the eve of Election Day, neighbors call the Police, mom is disoriented, the paramedics come, and then they take her off to the hospital.  I pack a suitcase, take a laptop, a guitar, winter coats, boots.  I leave my apartment.  Gone.

Now when a death is announced, a musician from eras ago and passed dies at age 78, I feel better, for I am closer to the natural finish line.  Mortality and immortality should not bother one.

So I had a fairly good day.

Music is the Fearie Queen.

At the end of the day, after getting mom her soup, her pills, in the morning, and then later, dinner, turkey meatloaf, plus a decent piece of fried fish from the meals on wheels program, 

Groans of gloom, alight the room.  Poetry is the most satisfying there is for me, along with music.

The bitter gloom has settled in the room,  the dinner made last night, chicken breast in one pan, a sort of meatball and pepper & onion ragout with a good locally made sauce, Rinaldi's.

The recriminations, "you hate me!" mom storming away, the anger, the charges, the guilt.  I should have known she was tired. She was unresponsive to Sharon's phone call, and before that, Trish & Barry's call over the Sandhill Cranes in their yard down in the Lakes of Florida outside of Orlando.  The blame, put on me, the closest human being, as she unhappily picks at her pasta.  I fed her a shrimp before, from her lunch with Mary, before the haircut down in Fulton.

The innate therapy of poetry, and as I write, I still shake slightly, but I feel better.

To be a good poet, one must be pretty stressed.

Purchasing a humidifier, I missed my on line meeting with Todd.  The stupid things we do... I  was doing a price check.  The price listed on the shelf was for the cheaper one they were out of.  Meanwhile the meeting is supposed to be going on.  You lose track of the days when you're facing the same situation, day in and out, when you don't have a place you go to like a job.  You don't know what to focus on.

I'm taking a photo outside the car, of the smoke stacks of Oswego in the distance by the high school.  Then it occurs to me, as the voice mail comes through finally.

Oh, shit.

Finally, I get the little plastic cover on the windshield wiper screw at the base of it.  The one had disappeared when the man from the body shop, Randy, had to take out the windshield for a second time to fix the leak, back in high salmon fishing season along the big river.  Aluminum foil had worked, until the real winter snows came.

To get a little thing done takes so much energy, wrestling with mythical chaos.  The cat, I can't take the silverware out of the drying rack without irritating the cat.  Along with mom, he too is a fussy eater.

The Universe (in the greater more encompassing sense of taking in all things, as in Genesis) is telling us a story.  We have, if we feel obliged to tell the insights we find and see, the tools to tell is.  And I suppose some of us feel obliged, by the duty of having been given life, to return to the Universe our own little accounts of it, as if we truly were a living piece of the whole, broken off to tell that story, of the living Consciousness of the Universe look back at itself, as if the individual must then, without a direct awareness of that being separated from the Whole, a factual ignorance, an amnesia toward that act of Creation breaking you off as an individual to look back and comprehend itself through the small living perspective you are given in life.

A most grim and wintry feeling comes over me, after the birthday.  I think of T.S. Eliot's Preludes.

There is price to pay for having "one's soul stretched tight across the city skies...  The conscience of a blackened street impatient to assume the world...  an infinitely gentle in finitely suffering thing."  

No one really wants to buy this state of affairs, because aren't I have enough troubles just getting through this life and keeping a rough over my head, you need a job.  Being an interpreter and scholar of existence is okay only if you're an accepted religious scholar, but not if you're a Herman Melville or a Kurt Vonnegut, or a Jack Kerouac bum off the street, trying to please the literary types.  There is no grist for the mill unless you feel like Jonah, or Job, or with Moses on a long trek through the desert...  You have to be, as Kerouac said, Beat.

So came my problems with the necessary script of the Ashaya, which you have to do if you want to pass the 200 hour teacher training course.  I felt a buildup of words that I could not ignore and reading any scripted and regimented thing made me feel weary.  It's as if you have only so much energy to devout.