LIMBECK

I’ve been sleeping a bit better, perhaps because I am taking a half-dose of medication to help with that. I still wake up reasonably often, but usually in the near-get-up hours. Listening to audiobooks or podcasts helps to keep the dementors from any demonstrations of power. I have to be careful that the listening material is not too interesting or that keeps me awake, too.

I have dreams that are quite vivid and peopled with folks with whom I have lost contact. Last night featured my old blue 1966 VW, aka The Ship of Fools. I had a turtle that I lost and had to try to save which ended up in me nearly drowning in a big pond of mud. I think I left the turtle there. From there I retreated to B1’s apartment crying and filthy and ready to take a shower. No idea how all of those things go together.

Later that same day.

A person might wonder just how many tears can be shed and how much grief is involved in mourning a wasted life, particularly when it is your own and there is still some to get through. Or not. Just having one of those awful days, rejected again by a few gigs that would have turned around things for me. Trying to not stay here in the sadness, nor venture any further into darkness. But I am crying, crying hard.

And I am so sorry to have been such a great disappointment. I did not mean to be so stupid … this reminds me of a line of Shakespeare I think of often, although it is meant to relate to straying from a true love … I have likely quoted this before as it has been a touchstone sonnet for many years. (#119)

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,

Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within,

Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,

Still losing when I saw myself to win!

LABORIOUS KITCHEN OF LITERATURE

Death and the morning after 

Sleepwalker on a tightrope

All that was left was what never was …

So these were sentences I found in a random word document I had. Not sure if they were song lyrics or things I had written down from listening to podcasts or audiobooks. But I stand by my decision to keep these words!

Just a gate along the road.

The next day ... and now back to The Charterhouse of Parma. I am reading the afterword by the translator, Richard Howard, and an essay about Stendahl by Balzac. There are several nice quotable ideas here.

from Richard Howard

... Grasshopper prose, and there is no pleasure to be taken in it if it is not attended to by presence of mind.

That sentiment certainly echoes the comments of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as quoted in my last post. And that was a challenge for me in reading The Charterhouse; I was sometimes not bringing presence of mind to it.

from Balzac

I am incapable of compromise with the truth, that is all.

Feeling, in short, is equivalent to talent. To feel is the rival of to understand as to act is the opposite of to think. The friend of a man of genius can raise himself to his level by affection, by understanding. In matters of the heart, an inferior man may prevail over the greatest artist. There lies the justification of those women who fall in love with imbeciles. 

That is the lot that awaits all books in which there is nothing vulgar. The secret ballot in which vote one by one and slowly the superior minds who make the name of such works, is not counted until long afterwards ...

Now Stendahl back to Balzac

The laborious kitchen of literature might well have given me a distaste for the pleasure of writing ...

... most rascals are given over to over-emphasis and eloquence ...

I don't always get around to reading the afterwords and such, particularly after such a long slog. But I am glad I did. I am not all the way through it yet, but I have had enough for tonight. And you may well have had enough yourself.

As for me, well, still here, still struggling. That said, there is a soft and pleasant autumnal rain falling outside. AKA made a stellar stellar quiche that the three of us had a hard time not consuming in one sitting. MMA had been to a Fall Book preview in NYC and came back with lots of swag (free books) and plenty of dinner conversation fodder.

SITTING FOR HOURS AND HOURS ...

Readers may be divided into four classes: 
1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 
2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 
3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. 
4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also. 

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic (1772-1834) 

I dunno. I think some of us are a bit of all four. I can rarely remember the details, just the generalities. And I am prone to sharing ...

I have been sad for these last few days, although there has been quite a bit of pleasure and fun in there, too. On Friday afternoon, I woke up from a nice nap and set to work on Friday Night-Pizza Night. I don't even remember, now, what they were except one was vegetarian for AKA and had brussels sprouts and butter-toasted hazelnuts. The other was meat-related for JA and they were both great. MMA, AKA, and I sat around the kitchen table for a couple of hours eating pizza, drinking gins-and-tonics, and planning MMA's birthday cake, Nigella Lawson's Nutella Chocolate Cake. We then retired to watch Jenny Slade in Obvious Child, which was really pretty good.

Tuesday now. Back sitting by the window overlooking the Lake Mahopac and a stormy sky. I am also overlooking a marina where boats are being prepared for the winter. I don't have a lot of music on my laptop, and I need to move more off of it, but I was listening to a song I downloaded off of Noisetrade by a fellow, Neil Halstead. I decided to look him up to get some biographical information and I found this: 

Neil Halstead knows what all of the different ways are to feel comfortably bummed. He’s studied them and has made it part of his songwriting expertise to get as intimate with those variables and conflictions that lead to a dynamic that just lets the blemishes and the disappointments play a part in the decoration of a space, to offer their own specific tastes as integral pieces of the ensemble, like the legs that keep a table level enough to host the gravy train and a pitcher of water or a pot of coffee. He lets his music take its shape sometimes through the advice of a chemical haze and the visions that begin their wavy ascents to the eyes, when there’s nothing to see in front of them but a hallucinogenic rambling, a smear of frozen darkness suddenly waking up and getting loopy and demented.

and I had to laugh. It is dizzying in obsfucation (another word this dictionary does not know) and Williamsburg-worthy emo-hype. Except that he is British. But here's the rest if you want a good chuckle and a head shake.

I'm in a dark dark place and I hesitate to chronicle it for you. But among the "amusements" here is being part of the unemployed library culture. And there are some characters. I tried to get a picture of this, and perhaps I mentioned it before, but in this area of the library, where there are tables large enough for groups to sit and work, there are numerous signs saying "FOOD or DRINK is permitted in the CAFE AREA only." There is a fellow there, of indeterminate age, but not young, who sits there often his boxes of Special K and Fiber One 90 right next to the sign. 

The best window table was occupied when I got here so I chose another table. Not too long after, I was joined by another "regular", a man who I would call old, but what do I know? He uses a PC and is grizzled. He and the cereal fellow just talk, as if they were sitting in a coffee shop. They know one another. Cereal man is on the 'phone again, perhaps talking to a doctor or something, he seems special needs (as if I'm not?) but I can still hear him though I am wearing earbuds.

Ah well. the clouds are not moving at all. Kind of how I feel: dark, threatening, and stuck.

One of the books that is taking me forever to finish as I get continually distracted is Seven Lives and One Great Love: Memoirs of a Cat. It's not that it isn't a good book, it is. Things just take precedence because of other factor, like book group or research. But here is a taste. 

Nature, see, has blessed us with living in the present. Whereas you, stuck in the past and therefore unceasingly anxious about the future, are unaware of the freedom of the present tense.

They sit as we do, for hours and hours on end in the same spot, unmoving, unspeaking, undoing. They are thinking, they claim. I very much doubt it. I think that they eventually get abstracted from all the thinking and fall asleep inwardly, the way we do. I don't want you to misunderstand me, I count this in their favor. Doing nothing is, in all seriousness, one of the hardest things in the world. Plato and Aristotle even pointed out to their students that the principle of nonaction is one of the most spiritual in the world.

Okay, back in the fray of trying to make a life. (Get a life?)

ACTION AND INTERPRETATION

The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

— John Locke, philosopher (1632-1704)

That’s another one of those quotes that I hope is not true. I feel deficient in both thought and action.  But I am going to think on it some more. (I can hear CB quoting Yoda: There is no try, just do.)

I had another frustrating day. On the other hand, I could say that I had a successful day as I did not fall all the way under the spell of either megrims or dementors. Maybe that was my work, my progress for today. I admit it: I am fighting off a down, a disappointment from the job that did not work out last week. I didn't even talk about it as I didn't want anyone else getting to excited, but a job would really help about now.

So, it is time to leave the library so that I can have a few minutes of calm before JR and I do some Monsterwood work. The rain has begun.

Saturday morning ...

So this has happened in, I don't know, probably 25 years. I dreamt about writing a novel, I was writing in the dream and I could see the words. The title of the book was This Is Going to Be My Year. There was a character named Gale Jewel ... the last name will be Irish. Then I did a segue into another book I worked on where the main character was Henry Lafayette and I was working on the back story. 

And now it is Monday afternoon at the Ruth Keeler Memorial Library. It's busier than it sometimes is. I came here because I spent the morning packaging up a bunch of items to be mailed to various folks. I needed to get them out of my room. I did laundry, changed the sheets (much to Cooder's chagrin; she was a bit indignant that I interrupted her morning nap), and read in the second book I am using as reference material for the Monsterwood novel. Louise and I are interested in trying to write it from more than one character's point of view so I have a small stack of YA books that do just that. The one I am reading now, Like No Other, is mostly interesting in that one of the protagonists is a Hasidic teenaged girl. 

Okay, this is short and not very philosophical so I will see if I can't just get a little work done.

STUBBORN EFFORT

The zinnias, five feet high, were waving, shocking in the yard. That magenta against the golds of the trees and the grey sky were lovely. Not easily photographed, however, in this light.

I started re-reading Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place. I recall having quite liked the book, and, of course, the movie with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. The book is far more disturbing than I remembered, but I will carry on. One fun thing, though, is that I learned two new old words: beldame for housekeeper, cleaning woman, maid (although well-known in French as grandmother); and megrim …  depression or unhappiness, though it can also mean migraine. I think megrim is a word that will be back in my vocabulary.

A little later ...

trying to get out the door for a decent walk and some work. I have 22 items out of the Mid-Hudson Library System ... (plus 4 out of Brooklyn, and 2 out of Westchester ... a librarian's dream or nightmare?) ... so I am going to return a few things as I cannot possibly read these in a reasonable amount of time (many of them are YA books) ... but one I do want to read (sometime) is The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance which I had started listening to and then realized I needed the hard copy, too.

Here is a random note:

The psychologist William James once described philosophy as 'a peculiarly stubborn effort to think clearly." This is a rather dry definition, but is more nearly right than any other I know. True, clarity is not exactly the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of philosophy. There is no denying that philosophers' attempts to think clearly have often rudely backfired. (Any subject that is responsible for producing Heidegger, for example, owes the world an apology.)

A bit later ...

Storm King.

Made it to the library after some meanderings. I had to drop by the Putnam Humane Society to give them some of Tupelo's medication and some cat food mine won't eat. I did manage to leave without another cat. And they were grateful for the donations. 

The wind is rippling the water across the lake and the sun is trying to shine through the grey clouds. There are rumors of rain for tomorrow. 

I had a great day yesterday. I expected a pleasant day, but not a great one. MSS came up from Manhattan and we took a long country drive over to Cold Spring and then up river road to Poughkeepsie to walk over the Hudson. 

Breakneck Ridge.

Breakneck Ridge.

We stopped along the way here and there. We did a short walk. 

We were going to see if we could just get a drink and look at the sunset at the Mohonk Mountain House but no luck. You have to be a registered guest to get anywhere near it.

MSS did take me by a very cool roadside attraction which really has to been seen to be believe. It is a little park of redwood tree stumps that this guy collects ... or used to. They won't let them out of California. It's kind of a natural Storm King Art Center. These snaps do not do the place justice but there just wasn't enough light to do much more. 

We drove down the mountain into New Paltz and had a terrific dinner (Main Course Catering). 

All in all, a very relaxing, amusing, and beautiful day, saved from focussing on my problems. I even got a good night's sleep and woke up at a reasonable hour (though, of course, it took me a long time to get out of the house). But I am ... well ... megrimmed, I suppose (although using that word makes me smile).

The ripples across the lake look like a sky filled with birds.