March 26 2011

An elegant algorithm should unfold like an origami plant in the halls of the crisis, a delicate web membrane whose veins you can see. A delicate artifact whose purpose no longer appears above the earth in the enlightened present. Pack in those vowels, those gluten-rich modifiers.

At the camp, I changed my regimen instantly. You could be fast, but that wouldn’t pay. Mammals are not sui generis communal when in families. Had the reptiles advanced instead, imagine the coldness of their reflections, upon their sons and daughters, upon their siblings. Imagine the beetling of their brow in the deep thought required to ice their competitors, the mammals. No Harvard behaviorist highbrow could compare to them in the purely cold courage of their arguments and calculations—sink or swim.

Calculi were small stones, also beads of the abacus. How could they calculate without Arabic numerals? I was driving over the bridge to White River as I thought of this. The sign said SPEED LIMIT 55. We drivers ignored the sign.

In the cleanest most immaculate houses, worthy of the photographic features in Home and Gardens, there is an unlit corner relegated to chaos and abandonment—loose brick, empty paint cans viscera of water-hose and wire. It’s a room full of matter out of place, unlocked only when the residents know that guests would never venture near it, never cross it. But when the house expands, a neighbor’s land bought, the room’s cleaned up, remodeled, and another corner takes its place, but already a dumpster is moored nearby to accept its junk, its records, and its embarrassments. What local weekly, what student newspaper doesn’t print a verse or two about the reliquaries of attics, about faded photograph albums, grandmother’s old photographs, about the continuity of the past from which we were unduly severed? There’s some sincerity to these expressions. But that is not the true subject here, those albums are a digression. Does the visible neglect of these corners come from negligence and exhaustion or from willful forgetfulness? Or is the photogenic order of the household grounded in this disorder? Without it, a quiet and staid inertia, the household a mausoleum, indifferent to fashion.

Surely the last episode of the series must be about aquatic mammals, about the adaptation of mammals to water, whether porpoise, whale or manatee. Meerkats who mount the shoulder of a host, as if a tree from which to peer. Hit the supplicant with that birch switch, while the steam expands in the cabin. In Arkansas, truckers sleep inside their rigs, and the rugs in apartments double as prayer-mats. A fjord holds more than fish roe. Salmon-enriched rivers, the spawn of fingerlings, bifurcates the valleys.
Her mother suffers from allergies, as she does every Christmas. She has a mildly disapproving demeanor. Her taste in art is more advanced than that of her daughter. Her daughter takes no interest, for example, in David Hockney, whom her mother just loves. She loves the pastels, the pinks and aqua-blues, their serene and depopulated blankness. But that’s OK, because the daughter inherited the business, and works long hours managing it. They evaluate distressed property, which means when property goes down, they really make out like bandits, but when it goes up, they make out like bandits too. So they do well. I’m there for the ride. But there’s a daughter out in Los Angeles, and her eyes go strange. I’m no one for scenes.

The oldest daughter takes my mother aside in the kitchen one day, asking her whether she’d ever noticed my pupils dilating or contracting from the influence of drugs. She suspects her sister’s habit, but she doesn’t want to divulge as much.

And another thing: the mother drives her older daughter’s husband to drink or to illness every year.


“Should’ve salted over some money before you were out of work” said Pilgrim when driving Manuel home.

The phrase “to salt over” connotes little interest is earned in the savings, as if the money were being put in a change jar instead of a bank.

Of those untidy corners one always persists.

As if neglect were purposeful, to remind us of the huts in which we lived, or the river side settlements, the houses on stilts falling into floodwaters. Bring your incisors, the means by which to part the meat from the bone. Bring those fabulous triangular back teeth to excavate the marrow. It’s the dentist who excavates the tooth to fill, but where’s the plunger cusp? Loser, you ground the amalgam off. It’s you, said the dentist, who ruined my plunger cusp, the flying buttress I deployed in your mouth. You ground the amalgam into saliva, and I must slave again to put it back.
Thank God there are no spell checks on paper, no red and wavy lines beneath the malapropism or misspelling, no green wavy lines beneath the grammatical error, beneath the lack of agreement especially when the agreement has not been decided upon, the new sentence frankly unfinished. And to be frank is to be free to be incomplete. The condition of writing in the journal is a kind of freedom that is finally unsatisfactory when the faculties are not required to commit themselves to a final work. But laziness is a healthy suspension of the faculties, a necessary indirection. The sun falls outside, but how chilly it will be when I go into the work shed, try to unlock the bikes, untangle the water hoses. The shed needs new florescent lights.

The floor bows when I walk upon it. Nocturnal mice eat the bags of birdfeed or the grass seedling. The floor-boards of plywood are oily. In the recycling center free sand can be had for anyone who wants it to shovel onto their icy driveways. But spring is winning, the winter embodied in snow banks is retreating, but persists in the fields—its officers encourage fortitude against the enemy, saying “if we can only last through the summer our forces can prevail. October is a safe zone. With December’s reinforcements, we can accomplish the mission, return the world to ice. We’ve failed before, but we’ve only learned lessons that make us stronger. Don’t fail us now. Stifle the growth of the grass; Resist the blandishments of the sun to join the plants, the succulents that imprison you. No more water-fairy stories.

Stroke the back of the couch for the dust that entraps you. I’ll tackle and maybe unpack Marvell’s Horatian Ode on Cromwell.