Creating a Tuscan Garden Path & Outdoor Dining Area in the Great Basin: Part I--Winter Dreaming

Although it is technically still winter, our unusually warm weather has sent me into garden dreams.  Still suffering from an infection, I can't actually get outside to work.  But I can shop for ideas and scheme.  Here is my plan for creating a little bit of Tuscany in my own backyard in spite of the obvious climate differences.

 

Existing Pond, Path & Grill Pad

1.  The Site

There is a narrow gravel path that runs from the driveway, past a small pond, to a series of three outdoor rooms partially enclosed and separated by three structures--a hanging bucket garden, a grill pad (above) and a pergola.  The three outdoor rooms are well defined and work well together as three interlocking spaces.  The pond also ties in nicely and reflects the grill pad.  But, between the driveway and the pond, planting seems unrelated and once the spring grass dies back, the pathway lacks definition.

2.  Tuscan Inspiration

Besides being my favorite garden style, a Tuscan style garden is perfect for Dry Creek because we only receive 12 to 15 inches of rain annually.  Although we can't grow many types of Mediterranean plants here because of our cold winters, I believe I can find enough substitute plants to make it work.  In particular, the natural rabbit brush can provide the soft grays of rosemary.

3. Existing Tuscan-Like Features

On top of that, I already have a few old-west features, such as my hanging bucket garden and pergola that give a nod towards traditional Tuscan garden structures.  I don't want to so much recreate a Tuscan garden as use a Tuscan garden as a familiar reference point and transform it with references to the American west.  I believe there are enough similarities between Tuscany and the West that I can blend the two into an effective hybrid garden.

Existing hanging bucket garden.  After this picture was taken,
my grape vine took off and softened the structure.

 

Pergola with grape vine beginning its way up nearest post. 
Vegetable garden wraps around two sides.

 

4.  Lessons Learned from an English Cottage Garden Pathway

4a.  Use of Pots

Although the above video models creating a traditional English cottage garden, I found inspiration in the even spacing of ceramic pots along the path to provide pattern and structure to what is otherwise an informal, winding path.  I will place ceramic pots along the south edge of my path, alternating plantings of skyrocket juniper and red geranium in them.  On the north border of the path, I will place lamp posts with lights over the pathway and hanging baskets both sides.  This will continue the verticality of the garden structures out towards the driveway.

4b.  Shrubbery in Patterns

Although you can't grow Italian Cypress here, skyrocket juniper are a good substitute.  Not only will they enhance the verticality of the garden structures and lamp posts, they will provide a common Tuscan reference point to build the rest of the garden around.

 

5.  Stay True to Your Site while Playing with the Exotic

 

Although I have never been to Tuscany, and most likely never will be able to afford such a trip, I don't think it will be hard to create a little nod towards that distant land in my own backyard while still honestly acknowledging the western structures, plants and landscape that exist here.

 

To me, that is what gardening is all about:  work with the topography and history of your site while playing with it until you create something that both respects the past and nods towards the exotic or new.

 

 

 

 

Lessons in Sustainable Living from the Grapes of Wrath: A Reading and Writing Journal (Entry 2: On Transport Trucks, Patsy Cline, Turtles, Weeds, Permaculture, Sepp Holzer, the Dalai Lama and Worms)

It's only been a day since the last storm and the haze is back.  It use to take at least a week, and then a few days.  Even with the oak and maple along the canyon slope, the cottonwood rising from the stony creek bed, and the wall of loose stone and ceder on the ridge beyond, it's hard to be here fully in the moment. Quite simply, winter moments here are no longer the same.  For now, spring and fall are still crisp, but pollution is eroding away our days, our weeks, our months, our seasons.  Maybe some don't notice.  Maybe some don't care. But to me the sky is everything: my connection to light, and through that light, my connection to the world around me.  It's not just about global warming; it's not just about public health.  It's about being in a world that sheds light on the sacred.  Pollution dims our connection with creation.

This morning I read Chapter 2 and 3 of The Grapes of Wrath.  Chapter 2 doesn't necessarily provide any lessons in sustainable living, but the writing is spot-on and made me long for simpler times.  Obviously, not better times.  I've tried not to be pulled into ubi sunt, or the unnatural glow of the past, where we long for a rose-colored yesteryear.  I'm not Ronald Reagan.  I'm aware the good ol' days included lynching and constant insinuation that your wife and daughters were inferior.  But, there was a directness to living that has vanished even since I was a child, and that had already faded compared to my parents' generation. Steinbeck captures so well that period when people were fewer and even strangers were more connected:

A huge transport truck stood in front of the little roadside restaurant.  The vertical exhaust pipe muttering softly, and an almost invisible haze of steel blue smoke hovered over its end...  Inside the screened restaurant a radio played, quiet dance music turned low the way it is when no one is listening.  A small outlet fan turned silently in its circular hole over the entrance, and flies buzzed excitedly about the doors and windows, butting the screens.  Inside, one man, the truck driver, sat on a stool and rested his elbows on the counter and looked over his coffee at the lean and lonely waitress...

When I lived in Dallas, I longed for such scenes.  As a student at a nearby university, I'd drive home each weekend on the back road, the old highway, instead of the interstate, because it was lined with barely surviving cafes from better days--left overs from the forties and fifties.  I longed for that slower life, the one I'd grown up with.  I'd take great road trips in search of an America lost, an America I was almost too young to know, but not quite.

Once I found it in Terlinqua, Texas with a girlfriend from Germany.  We sat in a small cafe and stared out at the white stone desert listening to Patsy Cline over a small radio while drinking Blue Sky soda and I thought I was in heaven.  I could almost see a bright red truck pull up with OKLAHOMA CITY TRANSPORT COMPANY in twelve-inch letters on the side.

True, the time periods did't line up--Grapes of Wrath predating Patsy Cline--but for me, it was close enough.  Ceiling fans whirled overhead.  Patsy sang "I Fall to Pieces" and my beautiful biologist friend went on about symbiotic relationships, while I looked out the window into a distant time.

Chapter 3, my favorite one of the book, does provide a couple of lessons in Sustainable living.  It's the turtle chapter that serves as a metaphor for the struggle the Joad family will endure.  As Steinbeck was good friends with marine biologist Ed Ricketts, he had a deep understanding of nature, which bubbles up in his writing:

THE CONCRETE HIGHWAY was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog’s coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse’s fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep’s wool; sleeping life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance of dispersal, twisting darts and parachutes for the wind, little spears and balls of tiny thorns, and all waiting for animals and for the wind, for a man’s trouser cuff or the hem of a woman’s skirt, all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement.

The first sustainable living lesson from this chapter is that nature is designed to take care of itself.  In many ways, industrial farming treats nature as the enemy of agriculture.  Weeds are wicked.  They are plowed up. Bare soil is the birth of life.  But it isn't.  Steinbeck seemed to sense this.  Foxtails, unpleasant, weedy and thorny shit, are the pioneers of life.  After the turtle finally crosses the road, he inadvertently plants the seeds to repair the soil disturbed by the drought and wind:

The wild oat head fell out and three of the spearhead seeds stuck in the ground. And as the turtle crawled on down the embankment, its shell dragged dirt over the seeds. The turtle entered a dust road and jerked itself along, drawing a wavy shallow trench in the dust with its shell. The old humorous eyes looked ahead, and the horny beak opened a little. His yellow toe nails slipped a fraction in the dust.

Permaculture, like Steinbeck, recognizes the weed as the first cultivator of life. Rather than being the devil, the weed is the heart and soul of Eden.  One starts ones garden the way nature does--with weeds--and then, by studying the natural processes, works with nature rather than against to achieve a desired outcome.  

The second lesson we learn from Chapter 3 is a Buddhist principle, which is the practice of loving kindness.  It's slightly different than the Christian principle of brotherhood, in that it recognizes that every living thing has its own purpose, its own journey to complete.  Instead of being thy brother's keeper, one steps lightly, so as not to cause undo harm to life around you, which is demonstrated by the two drivers in the chapter:

Now the going was easy, and all the legs worked, and the shell boosted along, waggling from side to side. A sedan driven by a forty-year-old woman approached. She saw the turtle and swung to the right, off the highway, the wheels screamed and a cloud of dust boiled up. Two wheels lifted for a moment and then settled. The car skidded back onto the road, and went on, but more slowly. The turtle had jerked into its shell, but now it hurried on, for the highway was burning hot.

And now a light truck approached, and as it came near, the driver saw the turtle and swerved to hit it. His front wheel struck the edge of the shell, flipped the turtle like a tiddly-wink, spun it like a coin, and rolled it off the highway. The truck went back to its course along the right side. Lying on its back, the turtle was tight in its shell for a long time.


I believe that both Christ and the Buddha had it right.  With people, there are times, we are our brother's keepers, and must offer others the grace offered us when we lose our way.  With nature, we must at least practice loving kindness--harming no life unnecessarily, to allow each creature to fulfill the measure of its creation.

With this thought process, the grasshopper becomes as meaningful to the garden as the hummingbird or butterfly.  The workings of man develop habitat rather than destroy it.

I remember one beautiful afternoon I spent watching a wasp drag a dead tarantula from one end of my garden to the other.  I was amazed at how quick he was, how diligent, and the obstacles he overcame.  At the borders of my pond, he encountered what to him were enormous boulders.  I was sure his home was there in a crevice between two rocks, and was surprised when he toiled on.

It gave me strength to toil on with an infection I had experienced for months.  It brought peace.  It is in these small noticings, these small acts of loving kindness, these steps back with humility, observing rather than participating, that we find the true measure and purpose of our creation.  If you kill the little birds (or the wasp), you can't learn from the the little birds (or the wasp).  You're aligned with the wrong energy.    

My favorite scene in Seven Years of Tibet is where Heinrich is asked to save the worms when building a movie theater for the young Dalai Lama.  Whether that really happened or not isn't significant.  It's taking the time to do that sort of thing that would lead to a kinder, more sustainable civilization.

 

Lessons in Sustainable Living from the Grapes of Wrath: A Reading and Writing Journal (Entry 1: This Valley is Me)

This valley is me, and I am this valley.  Lately, it hasn't been doing so well and neither have I.  Skies have been gritty, a haze of humidity and grime smudging the horizon, rust-tinted snowy peaks rising out of the smoke.  Inversion, they call it.  They treat it as a natural phenomenon, but my history here goes back far too long to buy that.  Skies once were clear, and it was not unusual to be able to see peaks 75 miles away. Now the haze hangs around for days, even weeks, between storms.  It's like living along the Wasatch Front without the city.  Spill over--that's what it is--like the rust colored air that hangs over the Mojave because of Los Angeles.

Scripture describe such times:  

And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.  (Revelation 9:2)

Whether this is smoke of biblical proportions or not doesn't matter as much to me as that it hangs around and distorts views I once saw so clearly.  Regardless of whether or not it is a sign of the second coming, it is a sign of sickness--an environment crying out for redemption, much like the landscape recorded in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath:

A gentle wind followed the rain clouds, driving them on northward, a wind that softly clashed the drying corn. A day went by and the wind increased, steady, unbroken by gusts. The dust from the roads fluffed up and spread out and fell on the weeds beside the fields, and fell into the fields a little way. Now the wind grew strong and hard and it worked at the rain crust in the corn fields. Little by little the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind felt over the earth, loosened the dust, and carried it away. The wind grew stronger. The rain crust broke and the dust lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes into the air like sluggish smoke. The corn threshed the wind and made a dry, rushing sound. The finest dust did not settle back to earth now, but disappeared into the darkening sky.

Like Exodus, the Grapes of Wrath is an epic--of loss, of wandering, of survival,and of dignity.  I believe it is also a blueprint for sustainable living, and in this series of posts, I wish to explore the lessons it teaches in sustainability.  Not only is it a masterpiece of literature, it is a field guide for a better way of life.

Dry Creek: A Winter Meditation (“Back Home Again” by John Denver)

 Dry Creek Lane ©Steve Brown, 2014

A beautiful wet snow clumped on tree branches of wet dark wood.  Slush and stone gray puddles.  On the way home, I slowed to see the bald eagle in his outlook tree—a watch tower to guard the keep, his nest.  He was there, as he has been, day after day, for the past couple of months.

Sometimes I get the itch to go.  Now, even the movie theater in town has closed.  Not much left—a couple of hardware stores, a grocery, a convenient store, a drug store, a seasonal hamburger joint, a couple of flower shops, a video store and a handful of gas stations/fast-food combo joints out by the freeway.

A café to sit in and drink hot chocolate and look out on Main Street and watch the occasional car drive by slopping slush up on the walk would be nice.  But the café closed long ago.

Yet that land keeps me.  It always has—even when I lived in Dallas, in El Paso, on the Navajo Reservation.  I can’t leave.  Juniper, sage, rabbit brush—up top.   Oak, maple, cottonwood—along the two creek bottoms.   Deer, eagle, wild turkey—the very occasional sighting of a bobcat.  These things hold me.

Sometimes I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse.

But everything I am is in this place.

A song by John Denver comes to mind:  “Back Home Again”.  I don’t care what the critics say, I like it, and I think I know enough about words to know for myself what is good.  What is art, what isn’t—sometimes it seems so arbitrary.

Often, what captures me most, what binds me, is the simple, the real.

©Steve Brown, 2015

If Any of You Lack Wisdom, Let Him Ask of God: It Is Our Right to Be Secure in the Knowledge that God Lives

 

 

I am reluctant to write about my religion.  There are multiple reasons for this.  I’ve always wanted to be taken seriously as a writer and have succeeded in that to a minor extent among a few writers who have had more success than I have.  These days, other than Buddhism, religion isn’t taken seriously in literary circles.  I guess I’m guilty of desiring to be both of the world and in the service of Christ simultaneously.

But it’s more than that.  I also fear friends will be offended, that they’ll feel I’m trying to convert them, and truth be told, I am.  But it’s not that I feel they are deficient in some way.  It’s just that I want to share what is most important in my life—my religion.

So great is this fear, we had some friends visit a couple of summers ago, and we wanted to take them to Cove Fort, not to share our religion, but just because it’s an awesome old lava-stone fort built around a courtyard and restored beautifully.  In short, it’s something beautiful in our area to see.

However, it’s owned by the church.  When we were asked by the missionary tour-guides if we were all members, I quickly said yes, which was a lie.  The truth is I didn’t want our friends to receive a missionary discussion because I didn’t want them to feel we had taken them to the historic site with ulterior motives in mind.  I would have preferred the old fort to have been a hide-out for Butch Cassidy rather than a frequent stop for Brigham Young.

In The Outsider, Colin Wilson follows a significant portion of the literary development of the twentieth century, in which the narrators and/or protagonists (outsiders) of many literary works have this dreadful secret, which they want to suppress because it will do society no good to learn, but they can’t suppress it because there is a “distressing sense that truth must be told at all costs, otherwise there can be no restoration of order” (Wilson 15).

And what is this truth?:  that existence is meaningless, most succinctly captured in Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”:

It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant.  You do not want music.  Certainly you do not want music.  Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours.  What did he fear?  It was not fear or dread.  It was something that he knew too well.  It was all nothing and a man was nothing too.  It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.  Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada (Hemmingway 291).

I have felt that sterile night, and have sought the clear light of a clean, well-lit diner to hold off the impending chaos.  So, I’m not here to refute that reality, or to mock those who have stared the void in the eye.

But it is not the only reality I know.

I have another secret, one that is hope, goodness and light.  Oddly, I’m more reluctant to write about that than I am of memories of nothing and for nothing.

But I will be silent no more.

Last weekend I came home from church hurting.  I have an extreme case of epididymitis, an inflammation of the epididymis at the back of the testicle, usually caused by a bacterial infection.  It makes sitting very uncomfortable.

Anyway, I skipped Sunday school, and went back for priesthood.  I was late and just sat down and listened to the lesson.  It was a good lesson, taught by a good friend, and I listened intently but was not particularly moved emotionally.

At the end, I was asked to say the prayer, and I did so.  Part way through, I started to thank God for having the gospel in our lives, and I couldn’t, not because I’m not thankful—it has come to mean everything to me—but because I felt the Holy Ghost so strong I couldn’t speak.  It was as if my tongue had been bound.  I tried three times before I could get it out, and only succeeded on the fourth try.  By that time I was in tears.

When I was finished, before I even knew what I was doing, I rushed over to hug this guy I once knew from the town bar.  Anyone who knows me at all knows that’s just not the sort of thing I do.  I’m shy to the core and physical expression of emotions—even handshakes—just aren’t my sort of thing.

What had happened?  Well, I am thankful for the gospel.  And I haven’t been getting well despite numerous prayers and blessing on my behalf.  It even felt as if I’d been struggling with my testimony, having a few thoughts of “Our nada, who art in nada, nada be thy name” myself  (Hemmingway 291).  So, perhaps my Father in Heaven felt I needed some reassurance that He was there for me.

But, I don’t think so.  I think it was my old drinking buddy who needed to feel the spirit most, and I was the vehicle used to answer his prayers.  That just seems to be the way the priesthood works—not directly, but through others.  He too was crying when I’d finished my prayer.

I want to continue exploring the void explored in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider.  I think it does identify a real phenonemum, and I believe I have some insights into that reality.  But there is not time for that here.

Instead, I also want to testify that life on this earth is not all nada y pues nada.  That God lives and has a plan and purpose for each of us, and that we do not have to know this on blind faith alone, that there are other ways of thinking than logic, and other means of communication than words—and that although we may never know all the pieces of the puzzle to life (to do so would abort free-will),  we are promised by God in James I: 5 that if we sincerely ask of God we can know enough about the meaning of life that we don’t have to make it on faith alone:

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

It is our right to be secure in the knowledge (not just belief) that God lives; it is just a matter of being humble and patient enough to receive his reply.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Hemmingway, Ernest. ""A Clean Well-Lighted Place"." Hemmingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Book of the Month Club (Scribner's/Macmillan Publishing), 1987. 291.

Wilson, Colin. The Outsider. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, Inc., 1982.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Master’s Scribe (Buddhism, Furious Fiction, Pugs, Zen)

Camilla, the fat pug, waddles across the blue-gray snow fields of Mount Fuji like a three-legged pig.  Jack, the Hokkaido fox, should be chasing her.  But how can he?  One leap and he’ll be well beyond the ugly little tanker.

The narrator won’t like Camilla being called an “ugly little tanker.”  I can hear him say, “Nothing ugly.  Only perception ugly. ” He doesn’t like much of what I type on his behalf.  He says I use too many words.  That’s because he’s a Zen Buddhist monk from Kamakura who sits on a straw mat all day playing Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.  He says enlightenment is found in the moment of action.  “No words; use thumbs only, fingers.” 

I’d quit if he didn’t pay well.  He says although words kill the moment, a monk without books to his name is no monk at all these days. 

“California read enlightenment too much!  Zen not self-help.  No problem.  No help.  Just be.”

“Okay,” I say, “but what about the fable?  Why not have the pug chase the fox?  She’s slow; he’s fast.  We have struggle, plot.”

He says Americans are too logical, that you can’t write a fable with logic.  You shouldn’t write a fable at all.  It should just be.

“How can it be, if we don’t write it?” I ask in exasperation.

He smiles, “Your journey, not mine.”

Moving from a Literature of Disbelief to a Literature Belief: An Open-Dialogue with The Outsider by Colin Wilson, Part I: I See Too Deeply (Henri Barbusse’s novel, L’Enfer)

There have been three times in my life when I did something irrational and brave:  I said, Screw it, I made a mistake, and I cut chords with the past and almost started down the path to the sort of life I wanted.  But the first couple of times, at the last moment, I faltered and clung to doubt and self-imposed limitations instead of walking out of the picture I was in and into the one I wanted.  Of course, it would not have been perfect, but if I’d had the courage to carry through, it would have been perfect compared to where I’d been.

Pure sunlight shines between two Austrian pines my brother and I planted back in ’96.  The snow, mostly in shadow, is cold, hard and blue.  It seems like the perfect day for reading, drinking hot chocolate and reflecting.  Marci even made Chili.

What I want to reflect on here is moving from a literature and life of isolation and disbelief to a literature and life of connection and belief.  I once thought I’d found my bible, The Outsider by Colin Wilson.  It described perfectly the void I was feeling and the literature I loved.  A window, even if accurate, is just one view of existence.  Having looked through other windows since then, I’d like to go back and look out that window again.

I think all of this will come to play in this dialogue, but I want to get right to the book, and when I found the book, and why it meant so much to me.

It was a cold winter, and during the week I lived alone in a dorm.  I’d dropped out of school and moved back to Dry Creek, this piece of family land that has never let me live fully anywhere else.  But there was nothing here for me.   The only jobs available were the type for college dropouts.  I ended up being a janitor at an indoor mushroom farm on the other side of town and decided a formal education might not be so bad after all, so I went back to school in a bigger town, two hours from Dry Creek.  However, I was twenty-six and really didn’t belong in an undergraduate program anymore.  I’d had some poems published, had been somewhat involved in a writing community in El Paso.  After returning to Utah, all I wanted to do was get my degree, so that I could get a teaching job in my hometown and live the rest of my days at Dry Creek, writing poems about stone, cold water, deer carcasses and drunken nights in the town’s two bars.  I had no belief beyond sight—to live and bear witness to a meaningless universe, which was at least bearable if I were there to witness a deer bounce down a gravel road covered in thin snow, the cottonwood along the creek a faint pink in the last day light.

Back at in college, I’d hear girls laughing outside my dorm room, but they sounded so young, so remote, like distant memories.  They weren’t even that.  I was incredibly shy and my romantic adventures were few and far in between.  Older, I still liked the giddy laughter outside my walls, but it was different.  It did not stir the restless hunger of a teenager.  No, it was more like the fondness of a father.  I had never had a real college experience, but I was mature enough to realize I’d missed that train.  If there was a world for me, this wasn’t it. 

So, during the week, I walled myself in my little cinderblock room to write.   On weekends, I went home, got drunk with a band of single and divorced Paiute women and a drop-out actor, and when not at the bar, soaked in as much of Dry Creek as possible.  The next week I’d start the process all over again.

When at school, I seldom ventured outside my dorm except for class and to go to the library.  My writing professors admired my craft, but as I was writing at a master’s level and most of my classmates had barely opened a book, I had no connection with my peers.  I remember Jim Aton would have us rate each other’s papers and then would give us his rating.  According to my peers, my paper was almost incomprehensible.  According to him, I should get it published.  So, I doubled up on my studies to get out of there.

The campus had a beautiful, new library, with a three story glass atrium, but hardly any books.  On top of that, they had all-but-illiterate undergraduate students weed the small collection they had.  As a result, I’d pick up collectible books on the discard rack for 25 cents.

One of the books I picked up--not a collectable--was The Outsider by Colin Wilson.  As it so accurately named what I’d been feeling and capturing in my own writing, it quickly became my Bible.

I still have the book.  It’s the 1982 Tarcher edition from  Houghton Mifflin with a forward by Marilyn Ferguson.  The cover is simple: a black rectangle with a thin red border.  Centered near the top is the title and author, also red print.  It looks serious, revolutionary—and when first published in 1956, it was.  

Chapter One, “Country of the Blind,” begins as follows:

At first sight, the Outsider is a social problem.  He is the hole-in-corner man.

Damn, I thought, that’s me.

He then quotes from Henri Barbusse’s novel, L’Enfer:

In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting.  Her dress, lifted a little, blows out.  But a block in the traffic separates us.  The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare.

Moving in both directions, the street is full of dresses which sway, offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting; dresses that lift and yet do not lift.

In the tall and narrow shop mirror I see myself approaching, rather pale and heavy-eyed.  It is not the woman I want—it is all women, and I seek for them in those around me, one by one.

Defeated, I followed my impulse casually.  I followed a woman who had been watching me from her corner.  Then we walked side by side.  We said a few words; she took me home with her… Then I went through the banal scene.  It passed like a sudden hurtling-down.

Again, I am on the pavement, and I am not at peace as I had hoped.  An immense confusion bewilders me.  It is as if I could not see things as they were.  I see too deeply and too much.

I knew that feeling immediately.  It was my old friend.  I’d written poems about it:

The Question

I think normal people just go to sleep,
which isn’t a bad idea, and I use to.
Nine o’clock always as a kid, and looking forward to it,
that cold blue room in the lean-to add-on.
I plugged in the electric blanket and cuddled up
after a firm talk with God
about how if I did this, he’d do that,
and I’d grow up happy, successful and loyal,
with a wife, five kids,
an architectural firm and a house,
a great space of light and body
headed by me, Patriarch,
like God headed the Church,
the building, the body, the light.

But then, I don’t know, something happened.

Oh, I know it happens to all of us,
and few of us really sleep,
with houses balanced on loans,
beds suspended over arguments with elastic smiles,
marriages held together with kids as tape,
marriages not held together,
kids torn like tape, a piece on each flap,
flapping in the wind,
the guilt of having torn such a little body,
but how do you live in a house so small,
and with her?

And how does she stand you,

both of you growing,
swallowing space?

All healthy things get bigger,

more complex,
cells and histories of cells,
whole cities wiped out within
with new information and cable TV.
The cage can only make you rabid,
the things she says ticking off in your head.

Okay, so I don’t have it so bad.

I have none of this.
I have one single question
that keeps me up at night:

How do I make it mine?

At the time I wrote that poem, my mother thought the ending-line,“How do I make it mine?” referred to marriage.  And it does,  sort of, but not really, because prior to it “something happened,” which is the first fulcrum of the poem, a pivot between the secure fixed universe of youth and the open, uncertain universe of adulthood.  What I desired to make mine was life in all its complexity, but something had robbed me of that possibility.  What was that “something”?

When I opened The Outsider, I knew immediately my something was the same something  that makes the romantic encounter in L’enfer so banal.  Like Henri Barbusse’s protagonist, I also saw “too deeply and too much.”

Or so, I thought at the time.  In this series of essays, I will in fact argue that like so many of my predecessors,  even though I saw deeper than many, I actually didn’t see deeply enough.  But, I'll get to that later.