From the Notebooks: a Baker's Dozen

 I fall asleep nightly to the sound of the Pacific crashing into the shore. When the tide is low the sound is distant and soothing; when the tide is coming in, I can hear the individual waves, violent and insistent.

 

“All problems about writing have one solution: you had to, you said you would, it was contract you made with yourself, it was your life.”–– Elizabeth Hardwick, as told by Pinckney Benedict

 

A recurrent dream is of a particular bookstore, in a particular neighborhood, in a particular city. It’s a happy place for me.  But I recently realized that the pace does not exist in “real life.”

 

“Of this I am certain, that we are not here in order to have a good time.”––Wittgenstein

 

I found this note-to-self scribbled into the flysheet of my copy of Midnight’s Children: “What was it that was analogous to the arsonist removing materials that are personal from the building, that he, and only he, knows will burn?” Remains unanswered.

 

Lately I have had an uncanny feeling that there’s third person in the house secretly listening to Aisha and I talk.

 

In 1980 on the summit of the Tour Ronde I took my favorite mountaineering photograph: a French climber sounding his barbaric yawp directly into the statue of the Virgin Mary that adorned the summit. Something about that photo I just loved.  But I lost it over the years.

 

Summer 2022. Stopped at the red light at Tudor exiting Old Seward a tall long-haired kid on a skateboard glides by evoking such a profound memory of our son that I burst into tears, until the car behind me taps its horn, and I make the wet-faced turn.

 

Hardwick, I think, was right.  But Wittgenstein might be exactly wrong about that.

 

Reading The Rings Around Saturn, the book of new friend, poet Maria Maggi. Noting her diction. It’s certainly not elevated, and yet I am conscious of never having used many of her words: isinglass, ingot, paperskin, poultice. Maybe poets are allowed to use more words than mere prose writers. So many ways to say it, as my dear friend Eva once observed.

 

Before we moved from Alaska I organized my photographs, slides, for storage.  I go through all the 1980 slides one-by-one. I realize that the “photograph” of “The French Guy Barking at the Virgin Mary at the Summit of the Tour Ronde,” was never a photograph, only a memory.

 

“But above all you averted your eyes from the ones who were in hard grief, whose mouths  were open like caves with ancient  painting inside them.”–– Patricia Lockwood

 

The sound of freeway traffic awakens me.  So many cars on the road. Sirens, too. But we’re not in Anchorage anymore.  The road here is very far away and mostly empty. It’s my dreaming brain mishearing the Pacific.  I am home.