FROM THE ARCHIVES
Nord, California, 1978
An old man lives in the grain bin across the road. The owner of the property there ignores him. The bin is always surrounded by pigeons. I wonder if the old man feeds them? What does he eat? He gets up early in the morning and emerges from the bin with a gunny sack and spends the entire day walking for miles down one side of the railroad track and back up the other, gathering flotsam for his sack. He probably doesn't smell good. How does he live in the dark like that, in the bin? He walks and his back is straight and his stride determined and of course he's a little crazy. I asked Gary Corea, my neighbor, about him. Gary told me that the old man is well educated and says some surprising things. Gary said, "That ol' man don't do no one no harm. Stays the summer there every year. He's got the gentlest, kindest voice you ever heard, and he says the damnedest things."
8.17.2012
Smokechoked. Nose & lungs filling. How to cool the baked house overnight with windows shut? Sometimes a moment when a feral gust kicks a hole in it and the sky may be seen and a deep unencumbered breath inhaled. Two weeks at least of this misery but imagine how it is in the valleys around. We sit on a plateau. Imagine living in a bowl. New line of thunderstorms - shall we call them lightningstorms? - said to approach in days to come. Extra firefighters arrive at the campgrounds.
Out window: catGreta hunts in the barren yellow field, a graceful black form slinking around dead weeds to groundsquirrel burrows. In here dogApple growls under her breath watching the deer step across the field's far end. How she longs to escort them! Everything out the window colored in feeble sepia or washed in diluted pisslight.
Out window: catGreta hunts in the barren yellow field, a graceful black form slinking around dead weeds to groundsquirrel burrows. In here dogApple growls under her breath watching the deer step across the field's far end. How she longs to escort them! Everything out the window colored in feeble sepia or washed in diluted pisslight.
8.15.2012
And so we move on. Continuing in Tom Clark's biography of Charles Olson, I find all kinds of resonances:
His life, foreshortened as it was by the alcoholism that seems the inevitable refuge of every male (artist or not) who is so obviously high on the autism spectrum, seemed destined for greater things even than he managed in his confusion to accomplish. No one understood these neurologies back then. With their (our) retarded emotions, inability to function as adults at the ages society expects them to, confusion as to purpose, and yet an unquenchable thirst for learning (the child's inbuilt seeking that in our case does not switch off in the adult), and curious inability to interact effectively with humans in the human world, the high-spectrum character doses himself more and more heavily with anesthetic until - JUST AT THE MOMENT WHEN HIS MATURITY WOULD CLICK IN AND HIS GIFTS BECOME OBVIOUS - he succumbs to its physiological effects.
That's my theory, anyway. I read this same sequence of events over and over again in the alcoholic male artist. Kerouac, Pollock, Olson. They never knew then that this was nature's weird painful way of holding them back until they might blossom in old age.
Females, whose hormonal makeup enables them better to mimic the neurotypical world and blend in at least a little, seem less likely to succumb to substances, but if they have made families, they seem equally inevitably to end up stranded in some remote place, completely estranged from the love their youth brought them so abundantly. I do not refer to myself only but to my female forebears who each in turn have ended up this way, and also to every stranded mother I have befriended out here in the wilderness. Bewildered, they are, to a one. What did I do? Where did they go? We can reach out no better now than we could then. We are wounded animals at our core, and the best we can do is crawl off to be alone.
But I've figured it out, kind of. The closeness with offspring seems to persist until the child is in his or her 30s. Then he stands solid on his feet and no longer needs to reach out to Mom. In neurotypical families, this is when Mom takes over the reaching, calling and visiting and sending little gifts, doing the chitchat required to keep the extended relation strong and vital, earning her contributing role of grandmother. But us folks who score 25 and above on the diagnostic spectrum (Husband is a 28; I am a 34) have no clue how to do that. Our efforts are awkward, sporadic, and after the first failure or two makes for sufficient embarrassment, we retreat, confused, and wonder why everyone around us gets those visits and calls and gifts while we get only silence and dark misunderstanding.
I fear nothing can be done about this. It's a matter of hard wiring. Certain areas of our brains simply don't connect properly. We contain vestiges of wild animal behavior. Terrors and solitarinesses. I don't want to be tranquilized into a false sociability. So perhaps I will fade away.
And now it's time for my own old age to kick in. I feeled somewhat healed and certainly more mature than I was for most of my life. Wait, though ... No I don't. I feel exactly as I felt at 6 and 10 and 14 - those childhood years when I was regarded as a litte adult with wisdom beyond her years - and I stuck there into adulthood - when I was regarded as an incompetent infant.
I think you have to be here to get it.
Anyway, back to work.
[Olson's] inability to control his addictive 'whoring after culture,' his involuntary adherence to the role of hopeful artist as past generations had defined it, brought him nothing but shame. ...And once he finally stumbled into his vocation - teacher - some delightful description of his initial classrom forays:
Now, faced with money problems that were obviously temporary but very real, he stubbornly dodged the whole annoying work issue, squandering what little cash he had in compulsive book-buying sprees, sometimes spending whole afternoons prowling dealers' shops in search of the one line, lost in an obscure volume, which might spur him forward to new writing discoveries. ...
Drawing unexpected connections with breathtaking speed, he leaped across space and time, linking Troilus and new astronomy, Frazer and Freud, field physics and Frobenius, projective geometry's 'gains of space' and epic poetry's timeless mythic archetypes, creating an open-ended architecture of knowledge that placed twentieth-century man in vivid relation to cosmic patterns of eternity. ...Confused though his students might have been by such utterances in 1948, said one, "We got his big message: stick to where your passions take you."
"We are a perpendicular axis of planes," he declared, "constantly being intersected by planes of experience coming in from the past - coming up from the ground, the underground tide - going out to the future."
His life, foreshortened as it was by the alcoholism that seems the inevitable refuge of every male (artist or not) who is so obviously high on the autism spectrum, seemed destined for greater things even than he managed in his confusion to accomplish. No one understood these neurologies back then. With their (our) retarded emotions, inability to function as adults at the ages society expects them to, confusion as to purpose, and yet an unquenchable thirst for learning (the child's inbuilt seeking that in our case does not switch off in the adult), and curious inability to interact effectively with humans in the human world, the high-spectrum character doses himself more and more heavily with anesthetic until - JUST AT THE MOMENT WHEN HIS MATURITY WOULD CLICK IN AND HIS GIFTS BECOME OBVIOUS - he succumbs to its physiological effects.
That's my theory, anyway. I read this same sequence of events over and over again in the alcoholic male artist. Kerouac, Pollock, Olson. They never knew then that this was nature's weird painful way of holding them back until they might blossom in old age.
Females, whose hormonal makeup enables them better to mimic the neurotypical world and blend in at least a little, seem less likely to succumb to substances, but if they have made families, they seem equally inevitably to end up stranded in some remote place, completely estranged from the love their youth brought them so abundantly. I do not refer to myself only but to my female forebears who each in turn have ended up this way, and also to every stranded mother I have befriended out here in the wilderness. Bewildered, they are, to a one. What did I do? Where did they go? We can reach out no better now than we could then. We are wounded animals at our core, and the best we can do is crawl off to be alone.
But I've figured it out, kind of. The closeness with offspring seems to persist until the child is in his or her 30s. Then he stands solid on his feet and no longer needs to reach out to Mom. In neurotypical families, this is when Mom takes over the reaching, calling and visiting and sending little gifts, doing the chitchat required to keep the extended relation strong and vital, earning her contributing role of grandmother. But us folks who score 25 and above on the diagnostic spectrum (Husband is a 28; I am a 34) have no clue how to do that. Our efforts are awkward, sporadic, and after the first failure or two makes for sufficient embarrassment, we retreat, confused, and wonder why everyone around us gets those visits and calls and gifts while we get only silence and dark misunderstanding.
I fear nothing can be done about this. It's a matter of hard wiring. Certain areas of our brains simply don't connect properly. We contain vestiges of wild animal behavior. Terrors and solitarinesses. I don't want to be tranquilized into a false sociability. So perhaps I will fade away.
And now it's time for my own old age to kick in. I feeled somewhat healed and certainly more mature than I was for most of my life. Wait, though ... No I don't. I feel exactly as I felt at 6 and 10 and 14 - those childhood years when I was regarded as a litte adult with wisdom beyond her years - and I stuck there into adulthood - when I was regarded as an incompetent infant.
I think you have to be here to get it.
Anyway, back to work.
Skipped study for a couple of days: I had gotten a response on Facebook from an old high school classmate - the only classmate I'd been able to find - and it turned out to be my old nemesis. The rich kid, the smart kid - the two-points-more-in-IQ guy who used to ridicule me mercilessly whenever I mispronounced (or he thought I mispronounced) a word, etc. He went on to become a doctor, a renowned blood expert, a professor at a decent university. I found the 60-year-old version to be kind and open, and we had such a flood of correspondence over the course of three days, the relief of it overwhelmed me, and not much beyond the wrapping and mailing away of my precious library, bit by bit, has happened.
But now, after the sharing and the healing, the inevitable silence resumes. Bye-bye now. His three grown children are off at good universities, his 26-year marriage is solid as a rock, and I am left to contemplate the difference financial security and parental support and guidance can make in the life of even someone from the same tiny farm village I went to school in.
I found myself weeping in gratitude that he was able to accomplish so much, and yet I did not envy him. My lessons too benefit the collective, at least in my soft conception of things. And I still have a little bit of time ... and even if I don't, maybe something will last, or that wild gene I carry will blossom elsewhere down the line.
But now, after the sharing and the healing, the inevitable silence resumes. Bye-bye now. His three grown children are off at good universities, his 26-year marriage is solid as a rock, and I am left to contemplate the difference financial security and parental support and guidance can make in the life of even someone from the same tiny farm village I went to school in.
I found myself weeping in gratitude that he was able to accomplish so much, and yet I did not envy him. My lessons too benefit the collective, at least in my soft conception of things. And I still have a little bit of time ... and even if I don't, maybe something will last, or that wild gene I carry will blossom elsewhere down the line.
8.12.2012
Still much study, very little writing going on here at the Old Same Place. Actually, for the past ten days I have been preoccupied digging up and posting for sale any valuable books and DVDs from my little collections. I have nearly 200 listed now, and not too surprisingly they have been selling briskly, one, two, and three per day. I say not surprisingly because that's as it always happens with fresh-posted books: the as-new and sought-after titles will fly out immediately. Eventually the dregs will settle and the sales doldrums set in. But we will not dwell on this. I am very grateful for the little injection of extra income that will keep the fridge filled while I pay people to paint and repair the house. The trim has been rescued, although not well. (Husband overheard one painter say to the other, "There's good enough and then there's perfect. Around here no one will pay for perfect." I was expecting Best Work. Sadly, once again I got Good Enough. If I'd known there was a choice I surely would have paid for it.) Next, I get the roof repaired. Plywood is showing through where shingles have blown away. I wanted to replace the whole shebang, just like I wanted to paint the whole house, but only piecework is affordable.
Still pushing through the Tom Clark bio of Charles Olson, and the reading peripheral to it (Yeats, Pound, and next up, Melville - repeats for all; refreshers, I guess I could call them). I have to return to my own work soon. When I get thrown off course/schedule I have to wait for my frustration and irritation to evaporate before sitting down to it again, lest I forget the wordrhythms (sensitive, elusive critters). This is I suppose another Aspergers/ADD deal. Lovely finally to have these pegs to hang excuses from.
Days continue witheringhot, near 100F, and fires all around make for constant twilight. Big meteor showers tonight and tomorrow night surely will be obscured.
Still pushing through the Tom Clark bio of Charles Olson, and the reading peripheral to it (Yeats, Pound, and next up, Melville - repeats for all; refreshers, I guess I could call them). I have to return to my own work soon. When I get thrown off course/schedule I have to wait for my frustration and irritation to evaporate before sitting down to it again, lest I forget the wordrhythms (sensitive, elusive critters). This is I suppose another Aspergers/ADD deal. Lovely finally to have these pegs to hang excuses from.
Days continue witheringhot, near 100F, and fires all around make for constant twilight. Big meteor showers tonight and tomorrow night surely will be obscured.
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