3. "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." (Philo of Alexandria)

I drove for weeks, it seemed, and the rain never let up. British Columbia, Oregon, Northern California, driving rain, the soothing swish of windscreen wipers. Rental cars are good, insofar as they are new. Which is to say they are waterproof, and don't steam up. Driving through the downpour, through spruce or pine or redwood, the sense is of being in a bubble of oxygen on a benign but exotic planet, or of drifting through vast underwater forests.

During the trip I was wading, sometimes rapt, sometimes merely determined, through Berryman's Collected Poems 1937-1971, which is pretty much everything except for the sublime Dream Songs. A difficult pleasure, like Weil. He fought great battles, but left great gifts. When I read too fast, they pass me by; it is easy to do, for the density and difficulty invite skimming. The impenetrability can be daunting. It is like a rippled stream: but you have to traverse the rippled section to be there when the water suddenly opens out, when deep transparency becomes available.

"Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams;
achieve in me patience till the thing be done ..."
(from "Eleven Addresses to the Lord")

"You must perhaps both pray for & abandon
your peculiar strength of patience,
daring daily more or all."
(from "To a Woman")

The desire to achieve patience, the desire to abandon it. Haunting contradictions, given the way his battles came to an end. Though there is something enticing in that notion of a daily escalation - from "more" to "all" - of daring. As if it can be developed by practice. I suppose it can.

That reminds me, obliquely, of something I read in Harper's Magazine recently: "Einstein's gravity is not so much a force as a circumstance: the very material of the cosmos has crumpled steeply around you until, almost conspiratorially, all of your possible paths have been narrowed to one." (John Mooallem, "A Curious Attraction - On the Quest for Antigravity")

But I was speaking of rain. I had begun to think that it never rains in Southern California, where I have been lately, on and off. That, as far as weather goes, this place might as well be "The Truman Show". So it has been good to wake up to a steady downpour today.


The hills outside where I have been living were ravaged by fire in April. It's been a kind of moonscape - pretty, but in an apocalyptic way - since I moved here. Then a month or so ago (before I went north, to the rain) there was a period where Griffith Park was closed to the public, and all day, every day, helicopters came in low and dropped a kind of green mulch over the barren ground. It looked like a strange art installation developing, Christo at work perhaps. The photo shows a fresh strip; within days of the drops the greens would become less lurid. It's "organic", or so they say. In Southern California one would expect so. It's a mulch that both reseeds the soil (with what?) and binds it, to prevent mudslides in the upcoming rainy season. I read this in the local paper and was pleased to learn there is, indeed, a rainy season.

Of which perhaps today is the first day?

I would have liked to have seen a mudslide, though.

In the meantime, in terms of visceral entertainment in the local neighbourhood, I will content myself with the frenzied yelping and bloodcurdling screeching of the packs of coyotes that come in from the hills to the edge of the suburb some evenings. (It is always in the first hour or two after dusk.) They are dispatching suburban cats, I've been told. Something's getting hurt, that's for sure, and the hairs raise on the back of the neck, a primal response.

One day I watched from my desk a coyote, immobile in the shade of a spindly tree in a gulch, not three hundred metres away, the occasional languid flicker of its ears the only hint it was not a statue. And yet if I turn my head 90 degrees, there are eleven million people spread out there. At night sometimes it is the distant baritone honking of the freight trains running through Glendale, and not the coyote attack, that reaches you.

When I got back from the rain trip it was Thanksgiving, my first ever first-hand experience of the ritual. It's been fertile ground in films about dysfunctional families coming together to collectively sprinkle salt in wounds, but I was fortunate to be invited to a mellow lovefest, complete with Louisiana cooking. Berryman seems to have a quote for every event:

"For that free Grace bringing us past great risks
& thro' great griefs surviving to this feast
sober and still, with the children unborn and born,
among brave friends, Lord, we stand again in debt
and find ourselves in the glad position: Gratitude."
(from "Minnesota Thanksgiving")

It got me to thinking how if one can live with relatively high levels of gratitude, then one is relatively lucky. Through whatever thick and thin. Through the worst disaster. For the simple surprising fact of having been here at all, and the knowledge that one day that will not be the case, that all things, without exception, will pass. But there is another level. When, through conscious contemplation, one becomes aware that one is experiencing a high level of gratitude: the gratitude increases yet again. A positively reinforcing loop. This is an accessible state. But it must be developed by practice too. Because complacency can act as a grand counterweight; what's more, there's a lot of white noise out there.

Perpetual alertness, mindfulness: life lives in you, it moves in you, it speaks itself.

If I could do this more often (blog, I mean, not be perpetually alert), it might not ramble so much. Though maybe that goes for the alertness too.

Final Berryman:

"... a fair wind and the honey lights of home
being all I beg this wind-torn foreign evening ..."
(from "Overseas Prayer")

2. "There exists a 'deifugal' force. Otherwise all would be God." (Simone Weil)

I saw this image about a year ago, driving somewhere out beyond Mudgee and Orange in central western New South Wales, looking for locations for a short film I plan to make called "Air". I can't remember any more exactly where this place was; it was on a day of random driving through back-roads, and while I noted down locations of relevance to the film, this was just a "stop-the-car, did-I-just-see-that?" moment. And how lovely, and odd, it is. I'd love to know more about it, but figure I may never.

It's all pretty flat out there, but this was an area where I was winding up and down hills. This image was a long way from anywhere, on a rock face, close to the road, on a bend. What is it doing here? It's the kind of image you'd find stencilled around the inner city - close to an art school, perhaps, an obsessive little motif scattered in back alleys. But not all alone, a hundred kilometres outside of Mudgee. And what is the flying man doing exactly? Or thinking, on his lonely central western vigil? And are those wings? And is he wearing a suit? The shoes make me think so. And is that a signature? A "D"? And a kiss?

Right now I'm in Paris, and that road trip seems a long time ago. I've been reading "Gravity and Grace" by Simone Weil; this appears to have been just the right July, just the right hemisphere (Freudian pun), just the right Paris in which to read something really challenging - I have to concentrate, hard - that opens out, now and again, into these flashes of recognition. But it comes to you quite calmly. Reading Weil, it's like you are picnicking with astonishment. I mean, you spread the blanket, you open the picnic basket, and look - astonishing bread, astonishing knives that glint as you cut.

"To strip ourselves," she says, "of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world."

Later: "We have to go down to the root of our desires in order to tear the energy from its object. That is where the desires are true in so far as they are energy. It is the object which is unreal. But there is an unspeakable wrench in the soul at the separation of a desire from its object."

This morning I had breakfast with my friend Maria and her fiancé J-F the fireman, at his apartment above the fire station at St Sulpice. Then Maria and I rode bicycles across Paris to her apartment in the 18th, and then down to her dress shop, elegantly minimalist, in the 3rd. which she had to open around midday.

Eleven years ago I had ridden pillion on the back of Laurent E's moped, as we careened through this city that was everything he knew and loved. This was a bright time for him. But he never quite made it through, and died last year, far too young, and troubled. The last I saw him, eighteen months ago, he had run out of the café, crying with shame at where his life had gotten to. Perhaps my unexpected arrival had brought back for him memories of what once was. This week I will visit his grave, at the cemetery out near the Porte de Pantin. The first time, perhaps, I've understood the concrete necessity to say goodbye.

And yet today, whirling through Paris, trailing Maria the navigator, just as eleven years ago, watching the city unfold over Laurent's shoulder, what I experienced was a kind of flow. Which is nice, because for various reasons, these are stop-start times, and flow is not a given.

Weil: "In general we must not wish for the disappearance of any of our troubles, but grace to transform them."

1. Thou art that

Hardly daily. Barely weekly. Possibly not monthly. But could be handy.

My friend Lee called from New York the other day. She was at the zoo - I forgot to ask why - and couldn't find the exit; the call was interrupted at one point by her asking a staff member for directions.

A couple of minutes later she said to me: "I keep circling the baboon reserve and saying where the hell are the peacocks."

Later again: "I passed the lions they were roaring like crazy."

I wrote the lines down because they tickled me pink. They will most likely make it into my next book, "The Interferon Psalms". I don't often write that way but how could I resist this? Is that what's called "found poetry"? Not any more.

Lee said if she could just find the peacocks she could find the subway entrance. She had worked at the zoo briefly once but had been in Madagascar more recently and perhaps memory played tricks.

Then I heard a commotion on the line. "That's a lovely sound," I said.

"That's a bunch of peacocks squawking," she said. (I had thought it was a group of schoolchildren running past her, screeching with joy. It was an odd experience, transferring the visual image when she said "peacocks".)

In the interests of brevity, I will finish with something from Eduardo Galeano, "Walking Words":

"The Church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta."