Analect 2.128x

30 June 2007. A Friday--April, June and November... Beautiful gray skies, my kind of morning. Massive cloud bank wedged over the hills at dawn, middle warm gray, sunlight pouring in to one side. Yesterday--much belated, learned of the memorial for Harvey Stahl... Doves in the afternoon, at twilight--a pair of them, chasing through camphor branches, magical hour. This morning, across the way--painter's truck, flatbed Toyota with low wooden siding, worn tarp held down with yellow rope. A rusted sign, slightly askew--stucco--nailed onto the back...

Like something out of Ovid--which story I'm not sure, the combination of volupté and doubt. Always that way--life surging ahead, trailing us in its wake... Nevins Street, the IRT...

Analect 2.127x

29 June 2007. Sun, and a preternatural blue sky. "It's too blue," Harvey Stahl once said, having moved out from New York, as he surveyed the panorama of the campus from his Doe Library rooftop alcove... But today, it's still blue, even with tracey whisps of cloud over the 7-eleven shingles. An American invention, where good fortune produces wealth. Roll of the dice, South Lake Tahoe, the gambling's on the other side...

Leigh and Jeremy, from far across the street. Each one animated in his/her own particular way. Newer model car, pulled in just alongside, sleek and nondescript. Minutes before: Javed, on his bicycle, careening out of the parking lot, head down Solano, cloudy expression. After working all night. But he looks up, waves good morning, "Hello, boss...how are YOU...?"

Analect 2.126x

28 June 2007. A Wednesday. Sunny morning. Mr. Copes' curious voice from the doorway--"How are you, my friend?" His 5-gallon pail with window-washing things, up and down the Avenue--a short man, of middle years. Gold tooth or two. Head always covered, until it's warm, and he needs to mop his brow...

Pina Bausch. Das Tanztheater. A man embraces a woman, or rather encircles her in his arms. To give comfort. His formal attire, white gloves--Spiegel der Gesellschaft--tender and clinical at one go. She a model of refinement, hair carefully gathered, tailored dress with tasteful floral print--a strand of pearls. Her ring--left hand--catches the stage lighting, and a narrow leather strap, above, over her wrist...

Rilke to Marina Tsvetaeva--"signal givers, noting more..."

"Each relinquishing fall plunges into the origin and is healed."

Analect 2.125x

27 June 2007. Brown United Parcel truck pulls in, glowing morning sun, Worldwide Services, golden letters on a darkened field. Yesterday: Jason Fox, his Aunt Jackie--the letter N on a dark blue cap, sidewalk show, under movie house marquee somewhere in New York... Figure in stocking cap, then another, lights of the city just behind. Double-long bus pulls in--long white shape, lumbers off, but the dance continue. Home video with very smooth cuts, golf gestures raised to the waist, the shoulders, baseball maybe--Yankee Stadium in its final season, 161st Street, the Bronx, turns and returns. Quick steps, a jump or two, arms out for the swing...

Sound off, just for the movement--always alive...

Analect 2.123x

22 June 2007. Morning sun. Animal hospital girl in white smock, brisk stride across north end of 7-eleven lot. White van with light-colored box askew on roof, aligned with bungee cords. Close at hand: shadow pattern of leaves on jumbly gray sidewalk, gentle motion. Floating flag form--the copy store logo--meandering on a darkened screen... Al-Andalus, this time via Paris. Bazille's studio, decor on the walls: rugs, daggers, brocade... She reaches into a purse just above her waist--everlasting gesture. Very foreign--and very French...

Analect 2.122x

21 June 2007. Longest day, shortest night. Sunny and clear. Yesterday evening: cold wind off the bay, raking the length of San Pablo. A few late diners at the Little Hong Kong, headlights zipping by, gold and white. Stories to Emio, the camera running. To take something with so little apparent value--a small square of cardboard--and to redeem it with meaning... As told to Nathaniel and Stephanie, a week before: the flood of divine light, breaking of the vessels, shards fall to earth, amidst which the sparks--to discover them, return them to their maker. No language for this, just a wash of muted color, then another--eddies and striations, everything the world would want to be. A kind of theater, perhaps, the quality of one tone against another, slight roughness of an edge. "Not too perfect," that was Lars' phrase, years ago, as he worked on a drawing, taking up a small eraser and easing back on a line--blurring it a little, an accident or two... The way of the world...

Analect 2.121x

20 June 2007. Skies gray on gray. Two-tone 7 tucked away behind magnolia leaves. Marlboro's double chevron just below, $3.99. Wszystko na Sprzedaz--Wajda's film from 1969. Everything for Sale.

Tradesman in green t-shirt. The glazier's truck has arrived. He pulls the OSB, tapping a secondary sheet into place. Long length of aluminium molding...

Streets of Granada--Moorish Spain. Los Chulos, Los Gorrones, La Gente del "Hampa." Los Guapos tambien. Islami al-Andalus. Los Moriscos que no se fueron...

Analect 2.120x

19 June 2007. Gray skies, chill wind off the bay. Window across the street boarded up, incongruous sheets of OSB. Evening before a car went half-way through, right into the foyer of the cleaners. On opposite side of door, still plugged in: Same Day Service, and, in flowing dark orange script, Alterations...

Al-Andalus, In the Shadow of Pomegranates. Small village in Moorish Spain, on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Mulhacén, the highest peak, snow-covered even into the spring. Legend has it that Muley Abul Hassan, second to last of the kings of Granada, was buried there. He refused to pay tribute to Castile. A life of peace--recetas and silk--but the Church would have none of it. Moriscos, conversos, la vita nueva...fierce tenacity of belief...

Analecty 2.118x

18 June 2007. Bright Monday, cool bay wind. Colombo bread van pulled in at an angle, 7-eleven lot. Odd green and lemon-yellow strip on white field, image of loaf and roll. Kurt Schwitters on the dunes at Scheveningen...the Ursonate--a poem made up only of sound...

dll rrrrr beeee bo,
dll rrrrr beeee bo fumms bo,
rrrrr beeeee bo fumms bo wo taa

and so on and so forth, as Uncle Jimmy used to say. The coast of Holland, yes, and points east...a wedding, perhaps. Two rustic figures appear, arrived from the country-side--bast shoes, heavy coats. A peasant dress with light-colored apron, fleur-de-lys on the Russian front--weave of tiny violets... Carrying a basket of fruit, lemon, fig, olive--just the beginnings, just the beginnings...

Analect 2.117x

15 June 2007. Warm again...even in the morning. Leigh's face just outside the window, pushing back a strand of graying hair. Her shopping cart--the neighborhood's excess, gathered, like a miner, working a vein...vegetable and mineral, bottles and cans, piles of newsprint, rags, god knows what, an inverted world, wheeled slowly up the street.

Set free a bird. Searching last night--Peterson's Guide to the Western States. Which one? The oriole--too bright. Spotted Towhee--Freya's guess--but no white front. Black-headed Grosbeak--also Freya--but needs the collar. The right creature on Plate 48--same page as the robin... A Varied Thrush...?

Oregon forests late in the fall, mushrooms everywhere, pushing up through the damp ground. Each one distinct, never quite matching the examples in the book. As if planned that way--to fall in between. Always their own...

Analect 2.116x

14 June 2007. Warm morning, dusty blue sky, cool shadows along edges of the street. "Das ist Werner," the early voice, as if from some secret service operation on the Eastern Front, low, gravelly--understated but firm. The kind of voice that gets you in trouble--or already has...eternity and a day.

Under the Sallyport, middle of old dorm block. Darting in and out along dark brick walls, perched for a moment on the even darker molding above. A dusky orange with blackish hood, sash dropping just below the eye, another over the shoulder, as if to hold in place the taut black wings. Alert, none too pleased--he disdains the attention. But it can't be helped--we notice everything. Gnarly bark of old sycamore, wide-branching ash and elm...the expanse of lawn, Portland green, two hazy tracks disappearing into the gloom, and a tiny white garden chair, seen from afar, something dark blue draped over its back...

No telling here, the guests have gone, scattered home, all far flung...

Analect 2.115x

15 June 2007. Figures outside the window--morning bus. Michael, narrow-limbed, with a full rucksack of books, quick smile as he turns to board the G. Portland again, standing under the Commons eve with John. Remove of forty years. Last time was the Doyle stairwell, fall of 1964, sometime late at night. Hume paper due the next morning--was it Blake? Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience. But how does one know? His holding forth--on Leadbelly--the only true music. An adamant view... But again, how little we knew. A bridge in Caddo county, oil derricks and duress, the prison songs were just a fragment. He'd as well have been doing Gene Autry...

All the same, finally, all from the same spirit...

Analect 2.114x

12 June 2007. Golden light raking the south wall of the pool, ripples and shimmers. Two dark flip flops, askew, on wet tile. Racing turns in the deep end. Portland, Sunday morning...the wide lawn at Reed. Mike Russo's stories--Candy's brought him over--his tours with Lightning Hopkins, up and down the West Coast, Brownie McGhee, too. Got his start in Gresham, a few miles to the east. Last played in 1980, he tells me, with Brownie McGhee. More recently--hard times. "But I still have my thumb and finger picks in my pocket." And he did, too--taking up my guitar, launching into an inimitable version of "The Fireman," bass runs right out of the blues, figures up the neck, too, solid, emphatic--the kind of playing where detail never outweighs the song itself.

You wonder how he got there--so strong, simple, direct. Like the old guys, even with some missed notes. "It's all country...," he tells me. "But you know, I learned even more from them during the times in between the songs..."

Analect 2.113x

11 June 2007. Alison in the pool, leaning back, looks up smiling. Her black suit and blue green water. Birds in flight, Portland, dipping down over the Columbia. Rough freighter filled with rust, downstream, working tugs with flat pram prows--river boats--moored nearby. Ukrainian cab driver--Odessa. Old Russian songs, now with a Uniate twist--softened, rounded-off--but still that same longing... He swings over to Woodstock--way out at 82nd, same as four decades back, ramshackle structures, overgrown, the edges rounded off as well. Winter rains, green--a burgeoning, by way of melancholy...

Carved in stone, a single bird, emerging from a ledge. No lengthy wings, just a hint of flight, staring, forever...

Analect 2.112x

8 June 2008. Gray sky, touch of sun now from just over the hills. Blustery man in blue-black vest, tossled hair--Scottish highlands--making his way across Solano on the diagonal, worn leather knife case at his side. Last week: morning sun, two figures with guitars, in front of the old Commons. Felt hats and Yamahas--mountain retreat. Songs fifty years old? Right out the window--it's all rock and roll. Hank Williams, maybe--something lyrical? Takes encouraging--to get through the strum-o-phile veneer. A culture of consumption--re-purveyed. That's where we're at. But the songs themselves--where do they come from?

Bono this morning, on the radio, G8 Summit--his quest for African aid... Articulate, straight-talking. Almost guileless. "I'm just a vain pop star from Ireland..."

Analect 2.111x

7 June 2007. Bright Thursday, already warming. Stephan's gestures, seen through doorway of pool. The swim coach--bevy of women looking up at him as they lounge for a moment in the shallow end. Gray-green waters--now in the north. Portland canyon, alders and willows, tangle of unnamed grasses, all around the edge. Proliferation of green--impossibly green--verde que te quiero verde--the endless rains giving way to a hot summer afternoon. River valley--the sandy Willamette. Old smells of pulp mills and wood smoke--a working town. The Yamhill Market, horsemeat and mutton--Ginny Gilmore's "continual" stew--we finally had to toss the entire icebox... Quiet now, the summer's visitors yet to appear. Amphitheater on a hillside--rickety wooden benches, set into the slope. Not yet refurbished--no need to, apparently--memories too strong. Like the faces--intelligent, intense--all re-seen...

Analect 2.110x

6 June 2007. Pale blue sky, one small white cloud far to the south. The man with smokes, standing next to his polished black Porsche, unfolding a newspaper on the roof. Morning rituals. Evening, too. The four of us, walking alongside Reed Commons. Two penny whistles, a concertina, and Diana's voice. Earlier: her twirling motions, unending--singing along with everything. "I can make up words..." Chesty voice, belting them out, but understated, too. Not so much tentative as in her own world. The holy fool? But why her alone? Why not the friend alongside, holding the mandolin--or, later, an Irish flute, at the side of her narrow mouth. We reconvene--it's just past dark, making our way across the lawn to a long rolling hillside where everyone is gathered. Small figures down below, hidden in the distance--red lamps attached to their arms. Then, all of a sudden, a first narrow trail rockets into the sky, bursting into a streaming canopy of yellow-gold. "Ahhhhhhhhh...," the response from the crowd--primal, even--as if around some ancient fire...

Irish songs, played in the night...

Analect 2.109x

5 June 2007. Cool Berkeley morning, late spring. Whispy layered clouds, bus route sign shifting in the breeze. Changes. "Effective June 24 line 18 will begin stopping here & line 43 will no longer stop here," the dates and numbers entered by hand. History of the world at the end of a signpost--or a flagpole. The stars and stripes--unexpected--high above the wide Reed College lawn. A very warm day, humid, even. Everyone has left again...Eliot Circle, shaded once more in trees. A bicyclist or two, neighborhood folks, and one tall, pensive young man, stooped slightly, striding slowly in the direction of the library. Sound of piano from inside--second floor perhaps. Scales at first--soft and tentative, then something more complex, but still indistinct. Two women sitting on the steps, one with here skirt pulled up onto her knees, having a talk.

The letters of Father Catich--remembering when they were written. A guest of Lloyd Reynolds, from St. Ambrose College in Iowa, he held the brush--long and narrow--at a full arm's length, facing the stone. Writing each character by hand in slow, careful sweeping strokes--later incised and painted blue. Eliot Hall. Roman capitals from the Trajan Column. Not perfect--that was the aim. Human creation--an entire past contained in each of the forms...remade each time as best we can...

Analect 2.108x

31 May 2007. Tossing gray skies--light clouds moving across. The cleaning man in rose-gray short-sleeved uniform shirt, walking his old brown lab. Scruffy Mustang in 7-eleven lot--graffiti all over the hood. Zampano e' arrivato. The scenes from La Strada--Nino Rota's theme--cymbals and drums, Gelsomina with her trumpet. Anthony Quinn--chains across his chest, pulled wide to the max--they break, and he is free... Must all end in tragedy? Machine guns and sea walls--our best knowledge and hope. Tsvetaeva on the Kama--no end. "I do not know."

"For water clarifies the spirit, no less than a perfect friend." And music is all...

Analect 2.107x

30 May 2007. Gray skies, summer dawn. Puffs of whitish smoke drift up from roof of the 7-eleven, just over the cleaners. One fine blue line circumnavigating a darkened window...the words, spelled out in neon, turquoise green--Clean Living. Oh that it were so. Tsvetaeva last night, her response to a query from the new Bolshevik state, forwarded to her in Paris by Boris Pasternak, asking as to her origins as a writer. Many of her answers indelible. Social origins: peasant, worker, employee, cleric... "Of noble birth." "I know no literary influences, only human influences." "Things I hold most dear: music, nature, poetry, solitude." "Life is a railroad station; soon I will set out--for where? I will not say..."

Her photograph, 1925 or so, with daughter Ariadna. A life of rivers: Tarussa, the Oka, Koktebel, Chernomorye, the Kama...the Yenisei...

Analect 2.106x

29 May 2007. Gray and cool, clouds along the coast. Single line of metal flashing along roof of the 7-eleven, same color and value as the sky. Figure on bicycle, ragged longish beard, dark beret, buttoned wool sweater and nubbly jacket--comes in to make color copies. He's smiling as he explains the order. "That's four fifty seven..."

JMW Turner, sturm und drang--had himself tied to the mast of a ship so that he could fully experience a storm at sea. All the sailors below deck, just the painter and the waves. Back and forth about Keifer, Wagner--a certain human need for drama, perhaps? But what about "the poetry of blandness"--François Julien, who mastered Chinese, both the literary and the artistic traditions--in a lifelong examination of quiet. "To better understand the origins of our own classical civilization..."

The poverty of theory; experience is all. It doesn't have to be a storm...

Analect 2.105x

24 May 2007. Thursday morning, cool air, sunshine. Portland soon...the north country once more. Sawmills and paper, woodsmoke on the Willamette. Burnside Bridge, open to the river below, metal towers against an Oregon sky. What's forty years? Last time Midgette was working on his room-scale portraits--students, friends, Sally, himself--an American Courbet, without the cap. Bonjour, Monsieur... Wide expanse of lawn, hard to recall now just how wide--birds early in the dawn, grackles, maybe...and once or twice a year, snow. The temperature could drop to zero, everyone holed up. Walks in the forest--hunting for mushrooms. Boletus edulus, aminita muscaria (the fly agaric)--in Poland, as well. Red cap with touches of white--a children's toy. Everything returns... states of mind, incantations...

Roll on, Columbia roll on...

Analect 2.104x

23 May 2007. Warm already, just stepping outside the door. Light layer of clouds clustered to the south. Tiny figures of workmen lined up along one edge of the Bank of America roof, dark against the sky. Long ladder braced against the wall. One white t-shirt. Last night: St. Petersburg--looking for the Moika, the Fontanka, the Griboyedov Canal...not to be found. It's all stories of grupovniki and transit fuel rackets, godfathers in old hotel ballrooms--Vladimir Sergeyevich--and a waitress who blushes when asked to describe the flavors of the ice cream... The exotic returns to the everyday. A thousand Russian school girls still in love with Sergei Yesenin--that same hotel. He wrote his last poems there, in blood, very near the end. No place in a world of crankshafts and bullet-proof vests. Or was that it? Maybe just the song... A life lived to the fullest, ongoing, forever...

"And I hope that someday she come to love me too..."

Analect 2.103x

22 May 2007. May sun, ripples of gold-silver across turquoise pool... "I thank you for my grandchildren," from a speech, yesterday, at the commencement ceremony. What does it all mean? Nabakov's word: poshlust'--from Gogol, Myortviye Dushy. A Russian peasant on the road. Yurodivy--the holy fool. Speaking in riddles--his clothes in tatters. "You look like a homeless man." That was last year, when the pants still had paint on them. What should one be. I put my arm around his shoulder--the first gesture. But the words are misunderstood--"a deeper reading." All of us, joined by the lines, not divided. "Goin' home to...live with Moses..."

Analect 2.102x

21 May 2007. Light clear blue sky, morning already warm. First sun over the hills, raking the north side of the house. Yesterday: Stephanie's father--in a stylish white shirt, engaging face, young. His own grandfather--"a democrat"--disappeared in Taiwan when Chiang Kai-shek came in. Never heard from again. He'd studied philosophy at Columbia, "the first person to get a doctorate in America." Steph's parents returned there to marry--in New York, a small chapel in the same church where his grandfather had calligraphed the inscription--in Chinese--for a stained glass window. What did he write, I ask. "God is love."

Later, with Carol. Photos of Leonard, also young, strong, thoughtful. Their years in Modesto, just starting out...a milk-carton castle... Leonard taught at the local college, Carol edited a labor newspaper for the Valley. The Teamsters crossed a picket line once, but her paper couldn't run the story--so Carol resigned. Another certain kind of strength...

"...to see the older couples, dancing..."

Analect 2.101x

18 May 2007. Dark beach on a dark coast, Sakhalin, the Russian far east--dal'ny vostok. Worn siding of an abandoned fishing fleet--boats pulled up on shore, rockfish and cod. Hexigrammidae--greenlings--herring, too, massive schools, a churning swirl in blackened waters. The Kuriles, Hokkaido north. And the Ainu--their homeland marked in dull orange on the map's run of gray. "An isolate language group"--like the Basque, the Greeks, even--hills and islands...a view to the sea. "Salmon so fat and pink, we haven't seen anything like it since the fifties..." Oil, too--a massive platform balanced on sand... "like a bar of soap," in 60 foot waves, melting ice, endless Pacific tides...

Analect 2.100x

17 May 2007. Wispy sun, cool breeze off the bay. Single helicopter, tiny, traversing shelf of gray-white cloud, at an angle above worn mansard shingles of the 7-eleven. Someone's good idea, ages back--make the place appealing. And then, banks of insistent fluorescents, big brew sign in red-orange and green--the attention-getters, a universe of commerce, evenly applied, spread over every available surface. As opposed to the Ainu, on Sakhalin. A robe of fish skin--delicate-seaming, color of winter sand, the round hearth, tundra twigs for a fire. They worshipped the bear. Spirits of land and water--fish, whale, seal. Island itself in the shape of a spirit--long and narrow, running hundreds of miles into the north. Prigodne, Yuzhnaya Okha, Polovinka...Muz'ma, Pomyt, Rybnovsk...

The Sea of Okhotsk...

Analect2.99x

16 May 2007. Misty sun, roofer's noise next door--sound of compressor--on-again off-again, breathing, but without the fun. Or who knows, perhaps machines do have fun. That may be it. The dictated edge...all points defined, lining ourselves up as well. Our selves. Freud's word: seele, soul. Translated into English as "mental activity." The problem already in place, reified. Made clinical. Die Freudlose Gasse--Pabst saw it coming. Geheimnisse einer Seele. Secrets--dark and lost. That which cannot be known. Keep a corner free of light, hidden. Burrow and grotto. The open plain...

Analect 2.98x

15 My 2007. Denver, too, 1955, tender morning sun, Arapahoe Street, Lula and all. A single bird flying high above the Sappa, fish in the shallows, a meadow...

Sea of Okhotsk, the Russian Far East, beyond Sibir'... Sakhalin, fir trees and otters, rutted road to the far north, as in Chekhov's time. The Port of Okha, one rusted freight car with reddish roof, lurching into a sand bank, wooden catwalk along the top... A few wispy blades of grass, poking up through the sand, for a month or two at this time of year. Then ice and snow--where the whale fish blow, and the daylight's seldom seen, my boys...and the daylight's seldom seen...

Analect 2.97x

10 May 2007. Beautiful Berkeley gray, that kind of morning. Fog last night, pouring in over the Marin hills, then across the bay. Last night: a dream story of seagulls and frigate birds, small boat on the open sea, somewhere off the Nushagak. The far north--an expanse, vast distances, weather to match. The plains of Moav, dry and windy, heat seeps into every crevice, you shade your eyes, look to the east, towards where it all began...

A spoon player, with the pair from Reed. From the dining commons, maybe 1966. Round, finely made. What was the name? Michaelson--that's it--the young political science professor, who'd lived in Dublin, learned how to play them at the source. It's all in the roll--fingers fanned, just the right amount of bow... A dance, time and time only...

Analect 2.96x

7 May 2007. All sevens, sun-filled morning, warm wind from the east, from over the hills. Pool at dawn, turquoise, cool. "Like Chico when we were children." Last night: story of Tsvetaeva's daughter, Alya. Ariadna, by fate--except that her thread of red fleece lead to Krasnoyarsk--and up Yenisei, hundreds of miles, to Turukhansk. Vechnoe poselenie--eternal settlement. That's what they termed it--after one had already lost all else. Sixteen years in the far north--"rehabilitated" in 1955, she made one return trip, a decade later. Up that same river, on the steamer Matrosov. "As soon as Alya had climbed to the village plateau and again beheld the Yenisei--'the view imprinted in my heart forever'--she felt her soul lighten. 'I felt this physical lightness, this vast relief,' she wrote in a memoir of the pilgrimage. 'Why? I do not know and never will know. I did not understand where this sense of peace and clarity came from...'"

(From Andrew Meier, Black Earth)

Analect 2.95x

May 2007. Wind through the Chinese elm, gray skies. Rain last night--a fine mist everywhere equal. Campus lot, after midnight, empty, forlorn. At home: Natasha outside, a bundle of wet--I open the back door and she dashes in. Dashing in. Budyonny and the Konarmiya. Makhno there in the helmet--Central Asia meets the steppe--a figure from dreams--or nightmares. Under the banner of plunder, wave after wave, traversing black earth. Astrakhan, the Urals, Saratov. Up the Volga to Kazan--where an ancient people man the walls, arrows in defense, siege...

Da zdrastvuye...

Analect 2.93x

3 May 2007. Sun against matte gray sky. Swerving open-bodied truck plows up Solano. Man in pony-tail, rough face, smiling, leans against late-model Porsche, cigarette and coffee in hand--Leigh K. right alongside, holding forth. Last night: near Chechnya--the mountain kairns. Carefully assembled out of piles of slate, in the shape of large gray hives. Ancestors within, visible, their long straight bones. "Preserved by that particular combination of sunlight, coolness and dry mountain air." Then, summer of 1944, Operation Bagration. The savior of Moscow--with Kutuzov--but the city is burned to the ground. A quarter of a million men, many many lost, fought to no conclusion. "A pyrric victory for Napoleon," who was "curiously detached," distracted apparently by a fever...

Eliminate the personal, they say--may vows of objectivity prevail. Cut to the bone. AK-47, Kalishnikov, the M-1...

Analect2.92x

2 May 2007. Filtered sun, pushing through. "More sunlight than shade." The empirical judgment--in conjunction with theory (but only if cloudy). Shabbos ending at the appearance of three stars...such a reliable test, enjoyable even, peering up into the heavens, awaiting their arrival. That's three middle-sized stars--not just Venus, hogging the whole sky, or the moon, certainly--the major players. Rather Arcturus, Boëtes or Casseopeia...a twinkling Vega, Orion... They show in moments, not all at one go, twinkling here and there. "Teased out," the current phrase, implying subtlety, but already over-stated. The things we can't say. Chuang Tzu would know. Each one lost, inevitable. Victor Pelevin, sitting cross-legged in a Korean monastery, his face to a bare wall. Hours so...

But also the American workman in heavy canvas dun-colored vest, with a 12-pack of Schlitz on the counter in the 7-eleven, facing a dark and smiling clerk, from Pakistan...

Tovarishch...

Analect 2.91x

1 May 2007. Mayday. Bird on the edge of a wire, a circle--may it be unbroken. Warsaw 1969, this time of year. Morning rain, pools of water along streets and squares, country people gathering, costumes--a Polish folk dance reworked in polyester, muscular farm girls, their thick blond braids, high cheekbones, wide Slavic faces. A red and white image, in pieces--each one a meter square--beginnings of a face--also wide and flat--assembled one by one, huge wall, aggregate of his visage--whom no one--absolutely no one--takes seriously. Let alone the cap, Smolny, the sealed train across the top of Germany, or even the speech, at the Finland Station, standing on top of an armored car... Leonard's poem--focusing instead on Kerensky--the man of hope, outwitted, left in the shadows... The locomotive of history moves on...

Analect 2.90x

30 April 2007. Much sunshine, and two left shoes, for Inke. Or perhaps no shoes at all. Worn as a kind of defense--a shoring up--as on that morning, testing the waters, when all seemed safe enough. But then, out came the long knives, stealthily, one at a time. First, the women in black--demanding a plan, a strategy, a one-word summation. "Tell us, in one sentence, the meaning of your life." Then: "How does it contribute to the x or the y or the z?" Always coordinates, as if science--the planned experiment, the dream of repeatability, would alleviate anxiety, doubt. Another tack: historical precedent. "Here are twenty examples of things people have done before you..." Or a summation via the history of the mind: "If you read Giordano Bruno..." But Bruno may be the right case, after all. His desire to be a churchman, running afoul of those in power--the gun-emplacements of Rome--so he wanders: Toulouse, Paris, Wittenburg, Prague. England, even, until they catch up with him at the end. All is unique--that was his vision. The monad--an ideal unit of experience--a manifestation of the divine. How else to measure except in the daily step--one after another, the gestures and touches that can be known, exchanged even--an accumulation of primitive capital--love...

Analect 2.89x

26 April 2007. Open sky, and an almost warm morning. First days of May, quiet camphor street, filtered sunlight through branches and leaves. Many years back, having left town before dawn, heading for a cabin in the Sierras... past Sutter's Mill, en route, about this time of day...live oaks, meandering stream. That particular kind of light, before the day's begun. Just now: tiny spider on cool-white wall, dashing along. He stops every few inches for surveillance, then onward again, onward...

Analect 2.88x

25 April 2007, Wednesday. Rolling sky, chilly winds off the bay. Open stretches of blue. Jill. A day for sailing. Last night: B's return, from New York. Small round roll of mazoinos--challah bread made with apple juice for the simpler blessing. Plane of ethics, plane of social relations--experience, that is. The navigators--a compass and a pirate sword. Or a painter's brush. In the afternoon, Chavela Vargas, again, with Antonio Bribiesca. México puro. At once classical and yet so local. Told story of the gaucho shirt--pink and gray--with two ties in front. Image of the islands--the Caribbean--someone else's freedom--maybe our own...

Analect 2.87x

24 April 2007, Tuesday. Billowy white clouds over tops of uphill elms. What kind of day? Gary's talk last night--his narrow face, now gray at the temples. Shades of Dan in the wryness. Davis, 1979, a point to begin. Sunlight and straw bales. California Aqueduct, huge pipelines over the Tehachapis, power from Mt. Shasta. Run of the land. Utilities diagram for Units 1 and 2 ("poetically named"), maze of gas and electric, underground. "New York infrastructure as deep as the Chrysler building." All giving one pause. Beautiful chapel in Houston; every shot a sense of repose, intended that way. Light reflecting from narrow channel of water running along inside of a high concrete wall. "This is in the morning." Ending with the tides, Land's End, Sutro Baths...

Analect 2.86x

23 April 2007, Monday. Bright, clear morning. With Alyosha again, slow walk up Tacoma, over the top at the Alameda. Two little boys, on the sidewalk, looking this way and that with great animation, awaiting someone's arrival. They run to him as he makes the turn around the corner, embracing his furry ruff and petting him wildly. But still waiting. Man's voice, baritone, welcoming, "Alyosha!" Seems we know everyone. Car pulls up in front: the cousins. Girl jumps out, a little older, lifts up one of the boys in round-the-waist embrace, his feet caught in mid-air. Bruno Ganz, from a movie-still in the New York Times, found in an yellowed folder. Grainy black and white, a seaside town, quay reaching into the distance. His head is down, the dog alert. All atmosphere...

Analect 2.85x

20 April 2007. Speckled sun to the east, dark wedge of cloud moving in from the west. Rain for later this afternoon. Last night: Dutch sailors' voices, "A Yankee ship comes down the river, Blow boys, blow. A Yankee ship with a Yankee skipper..." This one in English, though the album itself is Pays Bas, Chansons Oubliees... Songs Forgotten. Translated as Songs Adrift, which feels right--with so much of Holland reclaimed with from the sea... Then--images of the ocean itself. A Bering Sea fishing boat--motor churning, rain on cabin window, we're looking out onto blur of a tumbling horizon. Then, engine room of a merchant ship--super tanker, container monster--deep rumbling inside and out. Sailor with ratchet wrench, adjusting a valve. While on deck, heavy breaking ground swells, lots of ambient noise--equipment in the wind. Then, a passenger vessel, modern cruise ship form, lashing about in hurricane winds like some bathtub toy. Filmed from above, out of a Coast Guard chopper, engine roaring full blast over the storm, white caps and rolling seas from horizon to horizon. Nothing else quite brings us in like this--the scale of the open water.

Later, together:

The winter star doth now appear
So boys we'll anchor weigh
It's time to leave this cold country
And homeward bear away, brave boys
And homeward bear away...

Analect 2.84x

19 April 2007. Gray sky, rain impending. That kind of morning, everyone feels it. "We're due for a storm," neighbor's's pronouncement. Mallard talk on some ancient lake, collusion. He's holding a box with bottles in it--not really paying attention, but now they come to mind. Different sizes and colors--an in-between state. Green, brown... Girl with dark lab, a teen-ager, pained expression. "Is your dog friendly?" as Alyosha makes his way slowly up the sidewalk. Is the world friendly. Po Chü-i thought so, writing his words on the face of a cliff, or settling into a second small cup of afternoon wine... Pines to the east, bamboo to the west. Incense Brazier Peak. The world animated, shared. It all happens...

Analect 2.83x

April 18, 2007. Walk this morning, with Alyosha. Beautiful clear sky, one small cloud far to the west. Everything luminous. He takes his time up the hill, rolling on available plots of grass, rubbing his back under a rhododendron branch. Older man in light-colored clothing: "That's a handsome dog." Understanding every tongue, Alyosha gives him a nudge. Years before: spring in Tyumen'. Billboard mural on side of gray apartment block, bleak water-stained concrete. Young woman in red, holding an armful of golden roses. Petals? Pages? Tortilla chips? "Lyublu tebya moya Tyumen'." High-voltage power stanchion to her left, leaning a bit. Gray sky. Rainy street, mud-filled lot surrounding a single anonymous kafé. Reddish mansard roof, symmetrical windows, all horizontal, off-the-shelf, and a triangular sign with narrow white border just over the door. Single palm tree against orange-yellow sunset. In the rain. Girl in foreground, holding what look to be ice creams--one in either hand. Dark clothes, smiling. Her face from afar, somewhere along the Silk Road...

Analect 2.82x

17 April 2007. Milky blue-green pool water, early, hint of sun through windows to the east. Last night: Alyosha impatient, pacing, laps from metal bowl in the dark, then finally to bed. Stories from the south: the taste of salt on her unwashed neck. "I am a good wife." Woman's form at a piano--graceful, bending to impossibly small set of keys. In gloves, even. Like Coco Chanel from 1964. Isabel Ettenauer--a career of toys. Photographed in violent red dress, against background whites and grays--a miniature ebony grand. Another shot, from above, again in place at her tiny black charge. Wires to various recording devices, then a space of polished maple, and a circle of listeners, also on the floor. The appeal of all this--a return to childhood? World free of cares? An island? Österreich--fun to write, so many syllables for a land-locked land. From the south--St. Poelten--also an odd number of syllables. Catholic diocese. Mountains? A lake? As opposed to Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Raw thumb pick runs on a white electric guitar. An off-the-shelf Gibson. Wealth of the world.

Analect 2.81x

16 April 2007. Sunlight through upstairs window, soft on camphors and plum. Wild spread of branches arching over what was once a garden path...squirrel or two dashing along fence top plank--autostrada to the back yard. Alisia's face, bending to open the blue van, her dark hair surrounding a smile... Last night: Edward P. Smith, black Virginia in the 1850s... Lives intertwined--each person's worth, a kind of absolute, measured against kindness, intelligence, good sense... To make the best of what's possible--and to dream of change. To make one's way down a road, perhaps, live under another sky. A kind of hunger. Elias and the young boy who brings him water. Blue tin cup with chipped edge, once then again. "He loved him as much as he had ever been able to love another human being." Redemption. Also: the memory of his mother, decades in the past. A large ship, dark brown, sunny sky, gone...

Analect 2.80x

13 April 2007. Morning.

"Street Sense is my horse. We're gonna run him tomorrow, let him stretch his legs..." John from the hole-in-the-wall take-out place just up the street. Gravel Camel-smoked voice, crew cut with touch of gray, weathered face. Paddock and field. Last night: the cowboy. Rottweiler video clip--why on earth did I show it--running without sound, powerful dog, low to the ground, lunging at the heifers to get them in line. Jumpy resistance of the cows themselves--amazingly agile, given their bulk, dodging his every move...but also acquiescent--slow-eyed gaze, impassive. Better without sound, just their liquid movements...

Hojin's Taoist interpretation of the Orpheus myth...all that we turn towards, yet must need leave behind...

Analect 2.79x

12 April 2007. Sunny Thursday morning, late start. Up reading Martin Cruz Smith--his first book, Gypsy in Amber. Not quite Arkady--the character in a way doesn't yet have a voice--but still very promising as to wholesale plot evaporations and attentiveness to detail. Lists of words in Romany, for example--and the set piece galore... An imperfect circle, man and bird. Ghirlandiao, no Giotto di Bondone. In a universe of chaos the form must be whole. But here, today, in a world of signs-- Prints From Your Digital Camera, High Volume Scanning, Enlarge the Small Ones to Poster Size... A note of imperfection, Pierre Bonnard in the '90s, how much more so his friend, Eduouard. Preserving the future--rough, wiggly, off-handed...

Wszystko na sprzedaz...

Analect 2.78x

11 April 2007. Beautiful rainy gray morning--luminescent slab of sky hovering over 7-eleven. Line of silver roof flashing above dark mansard shingles, marking one horizon.

Laurentie-lief, Laurentie mijn,
Dat ik bij mijne Laurentie was...

From an old Nederlands street song--straatliederen... Amsterdam cobblestones, winter canals--the Uilenberger, Nieuwe Prinsengracht... Cars rolling up Solano in gray light--whoosh of wheels on wet asphalt. A pair of red tail lights just across the way--maroon electric vehicle backing out. Rain mist over dark magnolia...

Analect 2.77x

10 April 2007. Tuesday morning, Moeser pool, Emory's gnarled hand through small window, how ARE you...since sometime in the winter a year back, cold mornings, before dawn, black sky with misty moon. Today, hint of sun over eastern hills. Visit with Jane, each year at this time. Dad's salad bowl, turned wood from top shelf. Peter's guacamole--just green onions and fresh jalapeño. Sense of smell, the most atavistic...carries us back, zeroing in on some until-then-unremembered moment--kitchen on Fowles Street, for instance, the same bowl at end of counter, my father the produce man, holding cucumber or radish in one hand, a paring knife in the other, adding them in, his particular patience--an enjoyment of the moment, the ongoingness, humming under his breath--I'd try to catch the tune--or did I try? Maybe it just became a part of me...

Analect 2.76x

9 April 2007. That's my baby, Nick Tosche, late at night. Brilliant, informative, unpleasant. His runs of adjectives, describing country-music players and their lives--puce suits, lizard eyes. A version of truth--one slice, adjusted to a falling-barometer... Whereas Wang Wei, above, on top shelf--Sung dynasty print on dark gray-green cover, running all the way across...a copy, from hundreds of years later--his record of attentiveness, everlasting. Shanshui--rivers and mountains. What we put into the world...