Earthrise Diary 609

© text Don Diespecker 2009


The Earthrise Diary

Don Diespecker

June 27 2009. Last weekend there were further prolonged showers and rain periods; the river got up dangerously high again and there was almost a fourth flood. Fortunately, the flood did not eventuate and the bridge remained passable.
At last I’ve completed a respectable draft (in my opinion) of my much too long piece describing my view(s) while sitting sunnily on my Belvedere. Now I have a fat folder of bits and pieces and am free to move on. The ‘essay’ has been cut from around 10-k words to little more than 7-k words and a print has been sent to a journal with my hopes that it may be carefully read and seriously considered. There were many difficulties in writing “About my View,” not the least of which were the floods that totally demanded attention; other difficulties (entirely of my own making) were those of taking responsibility for some of my ‘views’ on writing and literature. For example choosing to use or to not use an introductory epigraph or quotation by a famous writer (or even by an un-famous one like me) became a headache. I considered lines by Lao Tzu, Ernest Hemingway, William James, Martha Gellhorn and Julian Jaynes, and even some lines by yours truly. Finally I began the piece with a snappy one-liner by Michel de Montaigne, the formulator or ‘inventor’ of the essay (many thanks for the book, Bruno; I now run into M de M here there and everywhere!). The Earthrise view(s) couldn’t quite speak for their selves and I did so for them and was otherwise writing almost entirely about the stream of consciousness as I was experiencing it. Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (as an English translation!) contains beautifully written lines. I was influenced by Hemingway’s first novel, ‘Fiesta’ The Sun Also Rises and that book has been my inspiration for more than 60 years. William James explained and named the stream of consciousness, thereby encouraging and motivating many fine writers. Julian Jaynes’s explanations of imagery marvellously explain us to ourselves, in particular, our ability to image our past experiences.
If you’ve followed this Diary recently you’ll be aware of the most recent floods here (The Three Floods). Last month’s Diary began with a short verse, since changed (yet again), because everything changes constantly and also because I managed an inspired burst of word herding and completed the memoir/essay that almost began with this:

In the riverside garden
March light’s softer
than summer’s glare
the river runs greenly
autumn thinking starts (and has become, instead, this):

In my riverside gardens
Autumn light’s softer
than summer’s glare
the river runs greenly
seasonal thinking begins

A while ago at lunchtime, half listening to the Science Show, I heard the presenter discussing planets and there also was included part of Holst’s ‘Saturn’ music (Saturn, the planet of growing old/approaching death, was how it was referred to, I think. We’re all doing it, so the notion wasn’t alarming in any way). Today is grey and almost entirely overcast except when there are sunny breaks and I can see patches of blue. It’s not all that cold today, but the air is heavy and damp and where I sit now is made warmer by the hearty breath of an electric blower/heater. The heater seems almost necessary so perhaps heating today may be related to aging. Had it been sunnier (as yesterday was) I’d have tottered outside to sit on the Belvedere reading in the sun, as I was able to do yesterday. I’m at last dipping carefully into Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night, despite the beckoning attractions of The Literary Review (several issues) and even Quadrant, plus umpteen recent books, untouched. Floods have a bad reputation for upending and disrupting; clean-up chores and plumbing demands make reading of any kind seem a luxury. Yesterday, too and just before I went outside I watched a cormorant come in for a landing, downstream on the high river which was white-capped in waves. Do cormorants do this for fun, I wondered, or is that type of landing only expeditious? If humans can enjoy water sports like board riding and surfing, why not cormorants, also? All this by way of indicating something about the greyness of dull days being nullified by the colours of the river and also by the clean near-white look of river stones and gravel newly spread on the banks opposite. The river is presently showing her greenness: dark bottled greens that remind me of the worn glass pieces I used to pick up on the stone beach near the ocean-end of Cook Street in Victoria, BC in the 1930s and of paler greens that look almost as if diluted with something white (like milk, perhaps, or white sediments like those seen in some New Zealand rivers). The contrast between these beautiful greens and the ugly dark browns of the recent floods is considerable and, psychologically, I know how easy it is to enjoy greenness and how unpleasant are flooding browns. Colouring like those mentioned may set a mood or nudge motivations of one kind or another. And, yes, going outside in search of sufficiently dry flotsam for fire-starting (and there have again been showers) produces only mild enthusiasm; my psyche prefers other pursuits: reading and writing indoors rather than muddied chores on the ruined banks outside. Curling up by the fire with a book is something I did when very young; nowadays it’s a rare pastime.
For those of you who write daily diaries and who necessarily make short entries in small books, the first draft is the considered draft because revisiting the manuscript to make endless changes, corrections and further altered versions seldom seems appropriate. Writing via a keyboard is another matter: we may cheerfully uproot text and place it holus bolus in a different location, alter or improve syntax and grammar and even change tense. Drafting a ‘memoir’ that also has the form of a long essay seems best suited to the computer keyboard and no reader need ever know the number or kinds of changes the writer has made. (Now I’m reminded of a reproduced page I downloaded from the Web: a manuscript page by Grace Paley from the story “Friends” in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. The page, typed in 2-space, was reproduced in The Paris Review and can be seen on the Internet. The text had been much altered in barely legible scribbles—which, hopefully, the author was later able to read. There’s also a reproduced page proof from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake that includes some hackles-raising corrections and challenging corrections scrawled by the author to be seen in William Wiser’s book, The Twilight Years; Paris in the 1930s). –And there are pristinely attractive manuscript pages by famous British authors that are displayed beneath glass in the British Museum in London.
Monday June 29 2009. I was up early in winter darkness and drove to Bellingen, Coffs and Park Beach. The sun came up as I drove and I’ve not seen cloud all day. The light is magnificent. These last days of June mark the 25th anniversary of Jannelle and I coming to Earthrise in 1984. After a quarter century here (the longest I’ve lived anywhere) I feel almost a Local. To celebrate I sat in the sunlight and read for more than an hour (after typing and printing a page for my neighbour, unpacking my groceries and hastily eating the briefest of lunches). Then I chopped wood, cleaned out the heater and here I am in front of the computer again at a little after 15:00 hours. I hear there was a siege yesterday in Bellingen and that, earlier, in the Valley a certain motor vehicle was attacked and damaged (the two events unconnected). Here the sun still shines. Now it’s time to set a fire. Sunset is less than two hours away and there being no cloud cover the night will be cold.
The stone (ocean) beach (Victoria, BC) reminded me of Canadian summer evenings when our little family sometimes enjoyed a meal on that beach: my mother prepared a large saucepan of plain boiled rice and another of mutton stew, with the saucepan lids tied on tightly so that when they were opened the contents were still hot (we lived only a few minutes away by car: an old Paige sedan {?} I think it was). Those evenings were in the early 1930s when I was four or five and I well remember those suppertime tastes. There was perhaps some memory of those days when, yesterday, shopping in the supermarket, I searched for ox tail (a tasty staple of the Depression) and found instead, lamb neck chops for a stew (a well-remembered substitute).
I’ve leafed through rare copies of the June 1988 Diary that opened with this:

January 30 1988, on time for once…& it’s another superbly sunny day here; there have been quite a few this month. It was 3.5 degrees outside early this a.m. and about 9 inside [12.5 degrees today, June 30 2009]. The coldest morning was 2 degrees. There are many bids around these days: king parrots and magpies in the eucalypts, black plum and myrtle; magpies and smaller birds in the white cedars (which are now almost leafless). Some black cockatoos also, intent on chewing into cheese trees for grubs.

Twenty years ago we were writing on an Osborne portable computer (which soon afterwards began to fail) and there was no Internet. In the same Diary: a 2-m python had emerged through part of the floor (the floor not then completely sealed); wild dogs were howling in the scrub and a near neighbour had reputedly shot two that had killed a calf (our dogs stayed on their leashes at night); Jannelle was making baskets from Lawyer vines and artificial butterflies from stained glass; I was building stone walls and we were also gardening—all these activities followed a morning’s work on the house. We worked hard every day.
The pipelines have been repaired and I now have two operating systems (one as back-up): the large electric Italian pump (fixed in place on the East deck) drives the larger system, as required; a small Honda fire-fighting petrol driven portable (just) pump drives the smaller system. Either can lift water from the river to the much higher storage tank next to the carport.

Thoughts about summer suppers in the 1930s now provoke some other old images. Now I remember our kitchen in the big old timber house at 1129 Oxford Street in the ‘30s. And now I’m visualizing an image of myself sitting at table with the family. A favourite meal was boiled beef and dumplings with vegetables, the dumplings looked like fluffy snowballs. Another favourite was steamed syrup pudding. Now I can see myself watching my mother in the pantry preserving vegetables. She used crockery jars about 120-mm in diameter, filled them with green beans and some salt, topped up the contents with water and sealed each container: fresh green beans for midwinter. Although these remembrances of times past have nothing to do with Earthrise in 2009, the 1930s can never be irrelevant to me simply because I was there. Yesterday I looked for quinces in the supermarket, but there were none (but I did find another old favourite: fresh rhubarb). There’s still an old quince tree growing here in Cedar Grove, but it no longer produces fruit. Sometimes, when I buy these hard-skinned fruits in the supermarket I’m asked at the checkout to identify them. They’re very familiar to me; not always recognised by others, perhaps because the quince may be regarded as ‘old-fashioned’ fruit. Try some. Quarter them carefully with a sharp knife and peel them even more carefully. Place the pieces in a saucepan; add some sugar and no more than 25-mm of water. Stew to taste. Delicious. I’ll assume that stewed rhubarb and custard is still popular).

June 30 2009. Suddenly mid afternoon arrives and the sky is all cloudy again.

This Diary is # 19 in the New Series (previously 1107, 108, 208, 308, 408, 508, 608, 708, 808, 908, 1008, 1108, 1208, 109, 209, 309, 409; this is 609). DDD June 30 2009.