Landscape With Traveler (10 page)

 

44

It

Seems

Appropriate

to

Find

Myself

Alone

It seems appropriate for me to find myself alone at this point in my life. The weekend was taken up in great part by my interceding in a lovers' quarrel—tiresome business! And a delicate one. Mostly, of course, it involves a great deal of listening and the finest kind of lying. But it's good, too—for me. Reminds me how nicely my life goes along! Of course, if one waits for the right person, that sort of thing is less likely, and I like to think that's really what I'm doing. But am I destined to meet him in a nursing home?

I've actually been doing a lot of nothing lately. Picky reading of this and that, but with not much interest. I am going through one of my “wandering” periods, in which I sit and stare or sleep and just enjoy “it.” I bought a plant at the dime store! Two plants, actually. Must be the springtime. Not that it's springtime yet—it was twenty-three degrees this morning, and the forecast is for snow.

A new possession is a Dohachi wine cup, which I couldn't resist. After all, as I drink a lot of plum wine, I should have an authentic cup to drink it from. I bought it yesterday and went straight home, washed it and filled it, settled down to leaf through
Genji,
and found myself musing on whose lips had touched the cup last. Some nice Japanese gentleman, maybe, who was unaware, in
1825
(actually it's Dohachi III), that there were such people as Chopin and Bellini, much less Malibran and Pasta? How nice it must have been to be a Japanese gentleman in
1825
!

 

45

What

A

Lovely

Snowstorm

What a lovely snowstorm we had last night! Just like twenty years ago, though that was fifteen inches instead of three and a half (but we always did things better in the good old days).

Well, it's fine to have a big snow just before the real spring comes. One has given up all thought of it, and it comes as a wonderful surprise. Though when it becomes slush, a March slush is much more tiresome than a January slush. So today I sat at home and read
Genji,
sipping plum wine from my new cup, and looking up from time to time to see the snow flurrying against my windows. There was sufficient heat in the apartment, thank goodness, to make that occupation quite cozy. Dohachi III, it appears, was not a period, as I had originally supposed, but a potter in the late
1700
s to the mid-
1800
s. Whether he was considered a fine one I know not. But it's a sweet little cup!

I love Japanese and Chinese landscapes, like those reproduced in Awakawa's
Zen Painting
—especially those with tiny solitary travelers barely discernible scaling a mountain path or crossing a fragile footbridge. Looking at them, I become the traveler, far from the “real” world, hiking along a winding stream or sitting in a hidden eyrie. Jim's lovely poem,
Reading in the Study in the Bamboo Grove
(after that painting), is a perfect commentary on my vision:

 

Lonely for conversation,

the scholar in the mountain hut

goes on reading.

 

46

I

Wish

I

Could

Get

On

Better

with

My

Father

I wish I could get on better with my father (my mother being dead now for some twenty years), but I have no great hopes for it. Men are too stubborn—both he and I—about things like that. Though I have tried several times to get into the subject of us, he just won't talk about it, and it makes him so uncomfortable that I stopped trying. My “complaints” about him don't bother me as much as his about me, whatever they are. I'd really just like to
know
exactly what they are (there are several possibilities), but I guess I never will.

It's always strange to get a glimpse of the you that other people see, at any age. It so rarely tallies with your own you (if ever) and is usually fascinating. I always try to find out what people think of me, but to avoid their accusations of egotism, which I don't really think it is at all, one has to be at one's most subtle and so usually has to settle for just a fragment of the picture.

The most curious of all, of course, is to come into contact again with friends one hasn't seen in many years, particularly childhood friends. It's very hard for people to recognize each other and know that they are the same, and that they're still part of that same wave headed for the shore—or the rocks, as in this present generation! Of course that comes from the usual human shortsightedness and self-centeredness, from which we all suffer to some degree.

But there are times on the other hand that I seem to see so far that I actually do wonder whether I exist at all. Trouble is, too, that people just don't think—but that's another (and endless) subject.

Just last Christmas a girl I'd gone to high school with and haven't seen or had any contact with since then was in town and called me, and I was amazed by what she said. She quoted long passages of my conversations with her at that age (sixteen or seventeen)! Crazy things, like “Well, after all, we're the two most beautiful people in the world and we just have to learn to live with it.”

I'm happy to say I'd long since forgotten having uttered such nonsense, but still I was touched by it, saddened in a way that so much of me has died already, and by the image of what her own life must be for her to keep on remembering stupid things said by some idiotic kid a quarter of a century ago. Also by what she told me of many of my boyhood friends, like the star athlete everyone worshiped and had great hopes for who now pumps gas in a filling station. All too typical, I suppose. Old mortality, and all that.

 

47

Looking

Back

Through

All

of

This

Looking back through all of this I can see how one might find it a rather sad history. Aside from the sadness inherent in all humans, I'm really the happiest fellow I know—a happiness dearly paid for, perhaps, but happiness nonetheless. Well, no—not so dearly bought at that, but I never was a bargain hunter! It's ever so much more pleasant to buy a shirt, or whatever, quietly and courteously at Knize's than to haggle and fight for a salesgirl's surly “help” at Macy's, even though you pay five or ten times more and have to skimp till payday. I guess that anyone with even slight intelligence who lives through forty or fifty years of as varied a pile of experiences as I've had (which I don't consider so very unique), happy and sad, couldn't help coming to a realization of sorts rather closely resembling the Eastern notion of maya as opposed to truth, the truth being that, with even the smallest of overviews, nothing merits the distinction of sadness or joy. It's certainly a deep question to which I can pretend to have no answer. But I just about believe that there are no questions, either.

I got interested in Eastern thinking some years back from reading Isherwood's biography of Rama-krishna, but the more I learned about the Eastern philosophies, the less different they seemed from the Western ones, and the more I decided I'd really figured all that out in my own way anyway (or was born Socratically knowing it). I'm interested in languages and in the different terminologies people put to the same things, and it seems to me to be only that—a difference in terminology, another way of saying something basic to all people.

The great value of the current vogue for Eastern ways being that one can, through them, contemplate basic truths in fresh jargon that is free from any buildup of emotional associations. One can't really say even “Amen” without it calling up all sorts of ballooning memories of childhood and its lessons, which lead to one's early teachers, etc. But I can't help laughing at myself in a way, making all these pronouncements as if I knew what I was talking about!

 

48

Maybe

I'll

Never

Be

Able

to

Relax

Maybe I'll never be able to relax into the real acceptance of someone else's love. I know myself too well to be able to believe (except coolly and rationally) that I deserve it, or perhaps even have it. Yes, well . . .

There
is
a sadness inherent in any sort of maturity, after all. The other night a couple of boys came into a stationery shop where I was buying a few things, both about nineteen or twenty, I guess, one excessively handsome and the other just this side of being ugly, but both so beautiful I had to make an effort not to stare at them. And not just because they were both boys—the same thing happens to me with girls, too.

It's late indeed that we come to realize the accuracy of flower metaphors. There's such an incredible beauty in simply being young. There's beauty in being old, too, but a different kind. Beauty, beauty everywhere! But I'm not like Yeats in his horror of growing old. Most of my friends of my own age think me rather perverse in my enjoyment of my age and hate my revealing it, but I'm quite wonderstruck at the realization that I once had that same beauty that all young people have.

Nobody realizes it at the time, of course, which simply doubles the beauty of it. Of course there are many young people who use their beauty quite consciously, but even that's beautiful in a sense, since no matter how beautiful they think they are, they couldn't possibly realize it all.

 

49

Just

in

from

Shopping

Just in from doing a bit of shopping Friday night after a long week and had a funny scene in the supermarket.

“Are these any good?” said the cute young (female) cashier, holding up a package of frozen tortillas I'd bought to go with my frozen enchilada dinner.

“Sure,” says I, “unless you're used to the real ones.”

“How do you get used to the real ones?”

“To grow up in Texas is one way.”

“Did you grow up in Texas?”

“Yep.”

“How come you live in New York?”

“No more work for us cowboys.”

“Oh, that's too bad.”

“Yep.”

“Do you like it here?”

“Yep.”

“You know, you don't look like a cowboy.”

“How's a cowboy supposed to look?”

(At this point an old lady in line behind me is starting to get angry, as I'm all checked out.)

“Well . . . are you sure you're not kidding me?”

“Would I kid a nice girl like you?” I say over my shoulder going out.

 

50

A

Desert

Island

Library

A
desert island library: If, as is usual, only one book is allowed, then it would be a blank book like the one I'm writing in—the biggest one I could find. To choose a given small number of books already written would likely give one more regrets than pleasure. I would like to have:

The Blue Estuaries.

All of Austen, Forster, Kerouac, and Nabokov.

The Last of the Wine.

Genji.

The Lord of the Rings.

The Silmarillion.

We Think the World of You.

Cavafy.

Byron's letters.

Makriyannis's memoires (but only in Greek).

Balzac.

Proust.

Plato.

Homer.

Nocturnes for the King of Naples.

The Jerusalem Bible.

 

51

A

Young

Friend

Came

Over

to

Talk

Today a young friend (both in age and in the length of time I've known him) came over to talk and listen to music and go out to lunch. We never made it to lunch, much to my surprise (and greatly—well . . . nicely—to my pleasure). It's ever so much nicer when things turn out differently than you've planned (so long as it
is
pleasurable).

Now a trying evening ahead with another old friend with whom I've been out of touch for a few years, ever since he went to a psychiatrist and decided he was really straight so didn't want to see me (even though, as I found out, he's been sleeping with his old tricks with fair regularity). Now it seems he wants to be friends again, but I'm not really interested. Neurotic folks, even though one sympathizes with them, are ultimately a bore. At least they are to me.

 

52

I

Feel

Curiously

Peaceful

I feel curiously peaceful despite the depressing things I've been seeing lately, or hearing about. Like that little boy getting killed by a truck going out of control and coming right up onto the sidewalk on Sixth Avenue, which bothered me all night long thinking was he with his mother, how awful his parents must have felt getting home from work and finding out about it, how awful the truck driver must have felt to see that little squashed body (I was told they had to gather him up with shovels). It was during the afternoon rush hour, everybody hurrying to get home. The truck driver, too, I guess, and the little boy having had a fine afternoon in Washington Square and hungry and hot, hurrying home, too. The fantasy could be endless.

And like the woman who went up to a man in the park by my house last Friday with two German shepherd dogs and asked him if he'd like to have them. He said no thanks, so she just turned them loose and went and got on the bus and left. So he took one of them, but the other one was so scared he wouldn't let anybody near him and ran off. I saw him on Riverside Drive and he just ran across in the traffic and of course a car hit him, but didn't kill him, panicking him even more. Later I spotted him doing the same thing on West End, and no one could make him stop and come to them.

Then on Monday morning when I went down to see Sylvia Fowler at her shop, there was a little mutt tied in the vacant lot next door, trembling and looking as mournful as a dog can look, an I found out he'd been tied there since Friday night, without food or water (the lot was locked and nobody could get in to him), in the rain-storms and heat and cold. As soon as the baker came and unlocked the gate, a fellow in the building where the shop is boiled him up some liver and gave it to him and I took him some water and he was very happy with it and we called the ASPCA (not the greatest fate, I know, but better than dying all starved in the rain). But in the meantime a man came by and when he heard the story he took the dog away with him. Ah, me. But then he brought it back because his father wouldn't let him keep it because it didn't get along with the dog they had already. And then a lady came and said it was her dog, and that she was on welfare and didn't have a place to live, so she'd left it there while she was out looking for someplace to stay. And she took it away with her. It seemed happy enough.

After all, what's to be done, really, about
anything?
I plan to spend the coming weekend painting the bedroom, doing laundry, lying on the roof in the sun, and studying
Rheingold,
since I'm hoping one of these summers to get to Bayreuth.