Category: Moments

July 12. Rotterdam Junction. All over the land, floods and heat. Only breeze and drizzle here. No, no breeze. But that’s alright. Warm. Safe.

And only my broken decades, dammed up joy. Gratitude for having been saved from my even worse proclivities. So far. So many prayers.

Memory. Memories.

Back from Bennington, out the kitchen window, a white butterfly, a grape arbor, grapes green but abundant, the flags slack on the golden eagle-crested flagpole. (No, no breeze.) The river. Thanks God for rivers.

A butterfly, a grape arbor, the river.

Wednesday. Middle of the week, middle of the month, middle of the summer.

Clouds.

God help me. God forgive me.

I will write now. Always write.

Light rain, humid, beautiful river, grape arbor, train whistle. Far from my temporary home. Far from my birth home…

I walk the dog. I don’t like being a dog owner. But I love this little dog.

A professor friend is planning on teaching a course on Love.

What on earth is it?

Who am I? What am I doing here?

Doestoyevsky’s Underground Man defined man as a creature who walks on two feet and is ungrateful.

I am ungrateful if I do not love for, though unworthy, I am loved.

But, again, what is love? A very important question. At least I think I know what ingratitude is. I have been taught, and do believe, that God is love. Actually, if you believe that, then God is Everything, and most worthy of all our love.

Meanwhile…

I know that this is a lovely summer’s day. A day in which one should love and avoid all false things and come to know true versus false love. (It is a day later than the humid, less lovely day on which I began this unlovely ramble.But I loved that day, too. One should love every day. When there are no more days, there can be no more love.)

As I said, I love that little dog whether I’d meant to or not. After all, she’s a lot of bother. Love is a lot of bother. It can make one unhappy, which is to be ungrateful. Therefore, today, I am ungrateful.

On this day, let me gratefully expand love — from dog to all the rest in need of it. (Not something I’m readily inclined to do.) But – expand I must.

My love, that is. (Avoid all what is merely sentiment and sentimentality. What’s that mean? Well, that’s for another day.)

Meanwhile…

Have a lovely and loving day.

A date, far less evocative than the day before, which like the Fourth of July can be rendered, The Fifth of July, suggesting as the latter does, with almost equal seriousness, a state of aftermath, hangover, disillusionment, the slow grinding weels of REALITY turning again.

There is a play by that name (The Fifth of July) that, though I’ve never seen it, probably touches on all those themes — if it lives up to any of my expectation, anyway. I believe it was a Vietnam War-related play, and so, yes, it must deal with the cold, somber, inescapable facts of life after battle.

July Fourth is independence, the wild, riotous delirium of the liberated, the license to blow things up and make noise and get loaded at picnics –or, for the respectable and sober, a red, white, and blue day of leisure and time to sit in lawn chairs or on blankets or on the grass with those you’ve married or sired, look skyward and watch spidery, glorious eruptions in the night sky. Diversion. Escape. Time Stopped in Darkness Spectacularly Illuminated. Celebration.

But July 6? Just the hot resumption of stopped time, second day back at work, summer’s near-median, well across the Mason-Dixon that separates reality from aspiration. Blessed forgetfulness –nearly forgotten. Time Marching On, past the sultry, dank interegnum of summer toward that old September Song.

But, might it also be the hour of that fantasmic Mid-Summer Night’s Dream?

I pray so.

A little dog’s unabated night torments from unrelenting exploding fireworks, very near and far.
Rotterdam Junction, New York. The Mohawk is serene today, the sun out and it will be warm and muggy in this region. I try to be at peace. Walked the dog. She, of course, probably doesn’t remember her terror, as we humans might. But I remember it and wonder how long a human organ like the heart can stand the stress I can’t seem to alleviate.

Alleviate it must and shall.

Prayed overlooking the river a while ago. Let the happy, peaceful images come — river, small rabbit foraging, the birds….

July 5th, 2023.

Summer, oh, summer. 2023

Another June is almost gone. Summer’s prelude, almost gone again. So fast. Florida, not New England. No special blooms here.

My June’s spent in the early times of this century at the conferences at Portsmouth Abbey — they were fine, blessed times, solitary times in which I was being the person I was meant to be, pursuing the kind of interests….spiritual….where, while wandering a beautiful campus at the edge of Narragansett Bay, I was called to contemplate the good, the true, the beautiful…where Our Lady was in her shrine before candles, where it was plain life was real, earnest, because to live is Christ, ( so they tell me) and I will reject and then again embrace that truth hour by hour as I approach the edge of the bay. The Great Bay. The temptations never relent, the sins, too, even as the opportunities to sin deminish. But there are always opportunities, pride being the temptation that never relents, and the greatest sin.

It rained often during those conferences, forcing us indoors. But it was a divine rain. Or so I chose to see a June rain.

If I leave you with one thing, my late mentor told me, it is –to pray!

Pray contantly. Never lose hope.

I will take to the road soon, planned trip, a month away. But still immersed in sin. July away. I’m always anxious, never totally happy.

Another late mentor told me always to remember the two most important questions: who am I, and what am I doing here?

I pray for the intercession of lost mentors, the fever of life long over for them. I pray they are happy and with God. (I am always teasingly tempted to think of death as ‘lights out’, oblivion, and therefore, all this human nonsense precisely that, absurd nonesense. All is permitted, if only we could shake off the ghosts of theological machinations being worked in our midst by hypocrits. And then I realize the constant unsatisfying groping after justice and love and peace by the very people who would earnestly tell us this is all an empty spectacle, sound and fury, signifying nothing. I heard the parents of a murder victim say the death penalty was too good for their son’s murderer. They plainly must conceive of divine justice beyond this life — and, therefore, a divinely just and good Judge. And a source, untapped, of consolation for their and remedy for their anger.)

I must embrace and enjoy what grace comes wrapped up — in the fever of life, and in my fellow mortals whom I must love endlessly as they love me, and love my enemies.
God is Perfect Love. Try getting your head around that. Don’t despair. Believe.

Darkness in daylight.

Location: Treasure Island (I think)

Hello, Robert Louis Stevenson

The Chamber of Commerce probably came up with the name long ago during early Florida boom times — Treasure Island. After old R.L.S., of course. The Indians probably had a better name for it. No matter. It’s — The Beach. Every long, cluttered, hot mile of it. The Gulf Beach. Less of the Gulf. More of that hot, blacktopped abstraction called…The Beach.

I was waiting outside — Pirate’s Cove.

And the cove, if it really were a cove, would be lovely, pirate or no pirate. Trees, blue water, piers, cottages….mirror smooth water. But that is not this place. This is the unnatural realm of commerce and its chambers. Hot and blacktopped.

Let me invoke, in an interlude, the spirit of a departed, double-hearted, long-suffering ghost of our time who gave himself the name of a state, and always seemed in a state of alcoholic angst, God love him….

Tennessee Williams, in the Notes For The Designer at the beginning of the print version of his play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, writes of wanting a light for his drama like the light in a faded photograph he’d seen of the varanda of Robert Louis Stevenson’s home on a Samoan island where he spent his last years. “There was a quality of tender light,” Williams wrote, “on weathered wood, such as porch furniture made of bamboo and wicker, exposed to the tropical sun and tropical rains.” The playwright speaks of “the grace and comfort of light, the reassurance it gives, on a late and fair afernoon in summer, the way that, no matter what, even dread of death is gently touched and soothed by it.”

Grace. Dispelling the dread of death.

The Sacrament of Sunlight, that visible sign of invisible grace. The playwright knew of grace, wanted his characters to experience it, knew they stumbled about in darkness despite the bright footlights. Wanted grace for himself, died, I fear, longing for it. I pray he has it.

Williams wrote that — when, early fifties? Light is light. Darkness, darkness. Always and forever.

But this was early summer, June 12, 2023. There was dread in the burning humid air alright. Dread of death and all its dark companions, stalking us like that faux pirate in the doorway of Pirate’s Cove. There was boredom. There was anxiety in boredom, touched with despair.

Diane had gone into Pirate’s Cove to see her friend the clerk. I was left sitting in an idling car with Cricket, the little dog sitting morosely in the back seat. Bored. Anxious. Angry. At one point, I got out and sat in the back seat with her, petting and comforting her; comforting myself, my inveterate, unbroken, unnameable, ungrateful discontent smeared, it seemed, all over me like a lotion. We were both bored.

Williams was looking for light for a play about “human extremities of emotion.” (I wonder why the Samoan light would be the light he was looking for, since it bestowed, as far as he was concerned, peace?)

The light of this moment, this Beach moment — sun beating down on motor oil-stained concrete and heaped up plastic and rubber inflatables in front of Pirate’s Cove–suited the extremes of tawdry human malaise and amorality. Of boredom.

The light fell on the blacktop clutter that is called Beach though any beach and all nature (waves, water, sand, blue, distance, breezes) was two hundred yards away, beyond more tar, touched with traffic fumes (thinner now, paradoxically in Florida, now that summer’s here) and steel and mortar cliffs of high-rise real estate. You can’t see the Gulf of Mexico or the blue water. There is that iconic Pirate outside the cluttered storefront windows of Pirate’s Cove. The pirate stands by the door as noted, made of something like apoxy no doubt, or maybe clay, a kitchy memorial to all lawless mauraders “exposed to the (sub)tropical sun and (sub)tropical rain…” Unmoving, unflinching. Fake.

On either side of the entrance and all around our pirate were stacked plastic or rubber inflatable sea turtles, plastic or rubber inflatable birds, rubber or plastic inflatable ducks, rubber inflatable rafts all stacked across the front of the store. The Pirate has (of course): a three-cornered hat, a parrot on his shoulder, a patch over his eye, etc. etc. I guess this is Long John Silver. He stares all day. Would Robert Louis Stevenson be pleased that in 2023 outside a cheesy beach shop and in miniature golf courses throughout the nation his fictive pirate is evoked in effigy? He’d be amused, I suspect.

Anyway. I just wanted to capture this. I’m not doing a very good job of it…and will do no better when I tell you about the girl and boy who came idly wandering up to the Pirate’s Cove …Tourists, probably — those eternal wanderers.

They were maybe in their twenties, maybe late teens, idling in the heat, licking ice cream cones they’d bought at the little emprioum next door. She had a bathing suit top that barely, just barely, cupped her lilly white breasts. There was a tattoo across her chest. She had dark hair, an unpretty face that frequently moved between smirks and frowns and giggles. They strolled, stood, licked, strolled. (How can I describe it? Why do I feel the need to? )She and the boy seemed to align with some dry, empty emotions overtaking me, along with anger at being left in a car that needed to be cooled by a running engine with a sad, bored-looking little dog in the back seat.

How did this day’s journey begin? As a diversion. That’s what life can be on a Sunday — a grand, hot diversion.

I had offered to go see a guy about donating our two gold fish to his Wet Pet Store that, upon arrival, was close and cleaned out and gone. I was sad to see this. The guy was an affable young Asian, knowledgeable and cheerful. Guess his tropical fish business failed — or moved. Whatever. And our gold fish will remain.

Also:

I’d offered to bring Diane to the little village of Gulfport for ice cream, but the ice cream shop was closed and the whole little village was pretty much hot and closed except for a somewhat busy open bar around the corner, and the old casino looked out on a little inlet and it was all hot and mostly empty and begged for the Hemingway in me to describe it like some Caribbean port, all as I’m describing the girl and boy now I encountered at our next and final Sunday destinaton, but I am failing. (Ernest, this needed you.)

Or it needs Kafka. Gulfport was like the silent little port where the long-dead Hunter Gracchus comes to shore. Where boys are sitting on the seawall, playing dice (or playing games on their Androids), and a man is sitting on the steps of a monument reading the newspaper (or scrolling through his iPhone). A girl is filling a bucket at the fountain…or, since there is no fountain at Gulfport, washing her sandy feet of at the beach shower nozzle.

Maybe you get the scene…

We went on wandering in my Subaru. Gracchus and his girl, I now just wishing to be here, quiet and cool in my room…and we wound up on either Treasure Island or St. Pete Beach looking for Diane’s ice cream — and found the open shop right next to Pirate’s Cove.

Back to the couple outside Pirate’s Cove…

She wore a skin-tight, dark, see-through pull-on gossimar covering to from ankle to waist –essentially a pair of pantyhose, studded, like as some hose are, with little decorations, that did not disguise her very brief thong underneath tucked in her rectum and her basically bare very large buttocks. The impression was of something ugly and unpleasant and of a soul unawares. The boy, by contrast, was dressed very conventionally — bermuda shorts, button-up, shortsleeve shirt. Don’t know if they were boy friend/ girlfriend. Doubt they were sister/brother. They stood and licked. They were both pale, as tourists often are, if not burned raw.

They worked the ice cream down, strolled back and forth in front of the shop, maybe waiting until they finished and then would go inside. They were among the colorful inflatables with their fake animal faces. Inside there would be bags of seashells, t-shirts, sweatshirts, bathing suits, postcards, costume jewelry, lotions.

So they were: the plain girl whose nakedness was barely concealed without evoking anything resembling the normal reaction of lust, the boy dressed in shorts and shirt, content, perhaps not to be alone and to have a companion, however she was clad, and an ice cream.

But some French word is needed to describe their…ennui? And mine. The English words would be — insousiance? Boredom.

Malaise. Yes. Malaise.

For me….Invisible, unreal, inflatable sunbright birds from a deceptively sunbright plastic ea of wretchedness –denatured and odious — seemed to have descend and roosted, filled with the air we craved, preying upon us, feeding on our souls and minds, even on my dog’s canine consciousness. Air conditioning didn’t help. Was it Henry Miller who wrote of the air conditioned nightmare?

And it was so hot. Almost indescribable. And humid. (And, come to think of it, I believe it was at that hour that a little titanium and fiber capsul was being crushed in the far depths of the Atlantic and five subaqueaous sightseers were vanising in darkness near the ruins of the greatest of sunken human aspirations and dreams of leisure, diversion, and travel, the HMS Titanic. )

Hear us, O Lord

And it was ice cold at that depth where they vanished like human bubbles. Cold and dark. And here on the beach, we were so cold, all of us, though it was hot. And I was so empty.

One good thing came of it: Diane had gone next door and gotten her ice cream. She had found it too sweet and too much. She gave it to me. I finished it.

Life after a the sweetes ice cream is still life.

This, outside the Pirate’s Cove, was Still Life. Tennessee Williams, I hope you have found that sunlit veranda and that you and Robert Louis are together and with God.

We are still here in this Still Life with rubber inflatables. Toys and capsuls and promises of diversion all around us.

And the fake pirate, as he has done for hours and days and years, stares with his one good but no less blind eye.