Doughton State Park, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina 1.11.1996: Luminous Hills, Rested Souls

At Doughton State Park, Blue Ridge Parkway. We’ve not been here quite this late in the fall. I quite like it now. The soft muted colors after the leaves have fallen are restful and healing. They seem to reach right into my soul, in an immediate way.

I don’t know quite how to put the point. It’s as if my soul’s alive in a new way to what previously it could receive only in a mediated way, through thought, reading, reflection, mental processing.

That feels good.

If only one could get beyond oneself, to the soul beneath, or to things as they are, and not as one wishes them to be or thinks they are.

To wit: the scenes before me—I wish I could describe them as they are, as I see (and feel) them now. The sky’s slate gray with heavy low clouds of even darker gray. The slate’s everywhere relieved by bands of lighter gray shading to blue and white.

The hills underneath have that luminous blue quality that earned them their name—luminous from within, as if the soft light they exude comes from deep inside their earthen hearts. Stubble of bare trees—dark and light, intricate chiaroscuro—crowns them.

Closer up, one sees fields, undulant green or spiky red sedge grass. Rock outcroppings mirror the sky both in their color, with its striations like the sky’s, and literally, since they have pools of water reflecting the skies.

Three white-tailed deer we startled in the grass as we walked bounded off, one against the sky on a hilltop, the very embodiment of lithe, graceful abandon.

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Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life: “The genius [of a place] lies deep within, and as Richard Onians suggests in his extraordinary book on Roman ideas about the soul, it can’t be uncovered by conscious thought or explained by literal fact. It requires from us trust in our less rational ways of knowing and in whatever practices of magic we feel comfortable with and capable of performing” (p. 81).

Charlotte, North Carolina 29.3.1996: Much Ado about Nudity and Self-Conscious Sophistication

A day of inverted syntax, after a late night at “Angels in America.” Ludicrous, the way the Charlotte crowd sat through the play in reverent silence (at the wrong points) and self-conscious twitters (at the wrong lines). The brief nude scene, which has been the ostensible reason for fierce controversy here, was like the consecration at Mass: we held our breath—see how nonplussed we Charlotteans are! This is art, for godsake, and we durned well know how to appreciate it . . . .

Salt Lake City 12.12.1997: Phallic Power and Meretricious Buttresses

The new Salt Lake visitors’ center: go, modernity! It’s glass and steel, all angles and useless corners, with totally meretricious buttresses and a phallic tower. Interesting, is it not, that the most patriarchal religions now champion modernity precisely as the postmodern turn occurs? It’s because modernity invests so much in male control and power . . . . That’s what the sleight-of-hand buttresses are all about.

Salt Lake City 8.4.01: Blithe Cheerfulness and Aggrieved Messianism

Salt Lake City: that blithe cheerfulness, inhabited at its depths by that scary mix of puritanism, aggrieved messianism, and patriarchy.

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I have no idea, this go-round, what I expect to find at the LDS library. I suppose I should look to 1) new finds I’ve made since last visit and how to explore them more; 2) what moves my soul What do I expect to find?

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Head o’ hair, he kept saying. And I didn’t know if I’d heard right, or if so, what it could mean. The girls left their heads o’ hair the night before they went off to Amerikay. There’s a trunk full of them upstairs. We’ve plenty of them, year by year. Toothless, thick Northern brogue: perhaps he meant something altogether different.

And then he showed me: old plaits, snaked like silk one around another, red, blond, and brown, the final scrap of blood and bone an Irish mother claimed, her daughters sailed forever gone over seas.

San Francisco 28.5.01: Old Haciendas and Exotic Flowers

Another story told to me by Mike F., partner of Steve’s cousin Chuck B. Mike taught first grade, and says he loved it. Says the students called him Mommy.

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More plants, plants everywhere: did I mention the very handsome bottlebrush? I think I did. I’ve seen it only in New Orleans, where the yard at Galvez and Esplanade had a specimen in a summer corner. There, it grew as a shrub, perhaps because of the humidity? Whereas in Oakland, it’s a tree. I remember Stanislaw C. telling me either that it’s a native of Australia or that it grows well there. This made me think it prefers a dry climate. I seem to recall Stan saying there’s a yellow variety.

At the old Perralta hacienda (the original large grantees of the region), I snipped a piece of what J. calls potato tree or shrub. It’s a shrubby tree or a tree that also grows as a shrub. One source I consulted at Barnes and Noble identified it as the potato vine, a Solanum. But another garden book indicates it has been removed from the Solanum category. It has inconsequential leaves a bit like Ligustrum vulgare, and purple flowers like flattened dark morning glories, with crinkly edges and a dark yellow throat. I fear it won’t do in our less-than-tropical climate.

J. also pulled up for me a bit of some curious shrub-like perennial with the square stems and opposite leaves of a mint. It is aromatic when crushed, and has a dark red small flower, tufted like a honeysuckle or shrimp plant.

San Francisco 25.5.01: Bowers of Jasmine, Syncretistic Brew

In San Francisco. And I dreamt last night of some plants in my garden. They were thistle-like and had gone to seed. They were disfigured, smutted over, by some black fungus.

Yet atop them were goldfinches, three of them. I got down at eye level to the birds, where I could see right into their eyes. One looked back uncuriously, unafraid.

I couldn’t even see if it were a goldfinch, since all I could see were its face and eyes. I had to back away and stand up to see its color. I was afraid to do that, for fear I’d scare it.

I did so. It—nor the other two birds—didn’t move at all. I see that it is a goldfinch.

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I didn’t even remember this dream until today, at Cody’s bookshop. I picked up a book of poetry and opened to a poem about goldfinches.

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The gardens. One I saw yesterday in front of the Franciscan friary at St. Elizabeth’s church, an old German—now Hispanic—church in Oakland, was absolutely stunning. The colors in the clear California air seem to leap right through the eyes to the brain. As that happened, a rush inside, warm in the chest, bringing tears of sheer joy.

The flowers were foxgloves of all hues of lavender, with a bell-shaped flower in front I should know, and can’t recall, blue, white, pink, purple.

So much else to note. Agave with its mottled serpentine-looking leaves and strange canopy of orange tubular flowers. Bougainvillea/mandevilla trained to tree shape. Bowers of nutmeg-scented Confederate jasmine. And roses roses roses, everywhere, especially in old gardens, growing so abundantly that they seem almost to outgrow themselves.

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The syncretistic brew, always fermenting, that is San Francisco and its environs: here in this old German neighborhood in Oakland, that was a ranch into this century, people are now black, Hispanic, Asian. And plop in the middle a Greek Assembly of God church. Where there are no Greeks at all, that I can see. A Hawaiian eat-in restaurant (as opposed to a take-out one; and what would Hawaiian take-out food be?). Taco Bell and KFC in the same fast-food outlet—are the people driving through seeking burritos or hot wings? Ads for sex therapy and tantric healing in the daily newspaper cheek by jowl with Pogo.

San Francisco 26.5.01: Tall Tales and Hedges of Lavender

Line overheard at Steve’s cousins’ party last night: his cousin Treecy S.—“We call him Japanese Frank, since there are so many Franks in the building. I asked him, ‘Are you the one who pastors the Korean Presbyterian church?’”

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Steve’s cousin today, stories: someone in his wife’s family from Tabasco locked his daughter, who had a child out of wedlock, into a bedroom with the child, until both starved to death.

Another story: J.’s (Steve’s cousin’s) brother-in-law, who practices voodoo and folk magic from Tabasco, had an argument with J.. J. sat down and wrote the brother-in-law a letter after the latter stormed out of the room.

J. thought better of the letter, tore it up, flushed it down the toilet. Brother-in-law returns, walks into the bathroom, makes the sign of the cross over the toilet, and proceeds to tell J. everything he had written in the letter.

J. also says he slept with Rock Hudson in the 1960s (’60 or ’61). Didn’t know it was Rock Hudson till afterwards. It was an orgy, and Rock Hudson was surrounded by a bevy of beautiful naked boys, to whom he paid attention while in flagrante delicto with J.

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The wonderful flowers here—hedges of lavender, rosemary four feet high and blooming profusely, a purple and red althea covered in blossoms. Beautiful beyond compare. What must be bottlebrush trees sculpted into ovals and covered in red blooms.