These places & persons as things & spots are all inside any one of us. ... the whole world & all experience is, no matter how real, only a system of metaphor for the allegory (Keats called it) a man's life is.
- Charles Olson

Some chemical smell, oldfashioned shoe-polish or melting electrical, overpowering here but not a stroke (yes!) because I lose the scent when I walk through other rooms. I've checked the outlets and the cords, put the computer to sleep ... is it coming through this window? Someone burning plastic? Ech, nauseating.

I'd wanted to have the Thing finished, what I'm writing. I finished final edits on paper yesterday late morning, meant to keyboard them early afternoon, but as I was winding toward the work (lightening anxiety by organizing rooms, thereby organizing mental energy, as I do) Husband descended to start his own day. I told him what I was doing and that I had a deadline. He congratulated me and proceeded to talk virtually without stopping for breath until nearly suppertime, and me practically in tears. I still do not know how to express needs firmly. I had expected him to coffee and withdraw, which he does every day without fail. But not yesterday. And oddly enough not back on the day when this material all came to me in a rush I had to get down or lose it, and so I lost much of it, back in December.

Anyway I blurted finally that I had to get going, and he asked to remain in the room then reading quietly, and so I went outside to water plants and unconfuse myself. When I returned he had gone upstairs. I sat down then before the text column on the screen and soon realized I was so weary and overheated I would lose the music that sang to me so clearly just that morning. So I closed the file, showered, curled up for sad nap.

No one's fault, I decided. Something wants me to slow down. And it was true, after the morning's edit I was burned out. So why can't I begin work today? Husband has promised not to talk to me until evening. But I am groggy today - where's the jar of guarana? - and having doubts again, and since the deadline for online submissions where I wanted it to go is midnight tonight, I'm afraid I will rush now and damage it.

I'll get to it, in a bit. I'll take it easy. Other, later deadlines are out there.

Anyway, eventually I'll have a MacBook and can do computer work in trailerSylvia.

I received a bushel of cheap used books in yesterday's mail. Husband accepted the packages at the door, to my embarrassment. Why books ordered on this day and that over the course of a month must always arrive at once on a Monday I will never understand.

I finished reading Brother Souls all teary-eyed on Sunday afternoon, and so today I've started several other books hoping one or two will grab hold of me. Tom Clark's biography of Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg's Composed On the Tongue account of his acquaintance with Ezra Pound at Rapallo. Poor EP! All Ginsberg seems to do is sing him Hare Krishna. But I love the words he finally squeezes from the otherwise stubbornly silent 82-year-old Pound:

[Ginsberg]"Ah well, what I'm trying to tell you - what I came for all this time - was to give you my blessing then, because despite your disillusion - unless you want to be a messiah ... anyway, now, do you accept my blessing?"

He hesitated, opening his mouth, like an old turtle.

"I do," he said " - but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along, that spoiled everything - " This is almost exact.

... and I responded, "Ah, that's lovely to hear you say that ... " and later "as it says in I Ching, 'No harm.'" (pp.8-9)

Olson will be more difficult to crack. He seems so lacking humor or joy. But he shares my birth date of December 27 (though his is 1910), so I am curious.

Those are the two volumes near to hand as I type. There are others.

I was thinking yesterday how adult life is like a kind of exile in a foreign land and when you approach old age you want to go home again, live as you did as a child, where things are familiar. And so people who grow up in the countryside go off to cities and then return to the country late in life, and I, who formed my Self in central Los Angeles and have sought remoteness most of my adult years since then, now long to immerse myself again in urban energies.

I think maybe it's immoral, environmentally, for humans not to live in cities. Perhaps the only ones who should be allowed to live in the wilderness are holy persons - farmers, monks, and such. Then we would have to learn how to make cities healthy and livable because we could not flee them.

But who would want to live in such a restricted world?

[Midafternoon addendum: I sought Husband's brief company for coffee at lunchtime. When it seemed clear his (otherwise welcome) stories would continue again for a while I stood abruptly in his midsentence and said "I've got to go." And he said, laughing, "I'm so proud of you," and stood himself and kissed me. God sent him to me for many reasons, but surely one of them was this lesson.]

Image of Charles Olson from pavellasmusic.wordpress.com via Google