Friday I have a lunch date with Sara Gordon. I'll try the bus that leaves at 6:55 .
I am amazed at how much words from "The Wasteland" fill up my own senses. I walked around Liverpool Street station and underground, indeed any place I see a crowd of people, and think, "I had not thought death had undone so many" over and over again. I often think to myself, "April is the cruellest month"; it's as if Eliot supplied a language for what I have been thinking; as if I learned Eliot (as in a language) at an early age and continue to speak it now.
My desk is more cluttered than at the office.
Yesterday we celebrated our 13th anniversary (Ed Buckley's birthday as well [1877]; today is Harry Johansing's [1883]). It seems to be a sleight to our marriage and family that I write so often about my childhood and adolescence. That does not mean something is missing from my present life. It's just that during those years there is so much growing and shaping of one's personality. One remembers most often the first time. The trick now is to figure out first time experiences later on in life.
My first efforts at a story (Jim Talbot goes home to mother, father's letter, etc.) is too ordinary, even if I spruce it up a bit. I want to continue, but I also want to do something different. Same thing with the Thanksgiving play: need to go back in time before I have everyone married, capture the essence of what it is I am trying to keep, savor.
Thinking of my goals as I prepared for this trip: 20 poems, play, stories, etc. Now really is the time to experiment, write this or that and see what becomes of it.
Wednesday 16 October. 12:15 p.m. I have started quite a few things now. Add today a new start about writing in the morning behind closed doors. This morning I asked myself, what am I trying to say? It's one thing to create a scene, set up the mood and lead to the brink, but where do I go from there, what's the idea I want to get across? Perhaps I hinted at it today, when I wrote about mindless activity, but is that all I want to say, that it is mindless? And how do I dare say it as I sit here comfortable behind my desk and the comforts of my well provided house? Where do I take this?
2:10. What I want to do is create a time and place that is gone.
We missed Robert's rugby game in the afternoon. We were late. I walked five miles back, to Shelford, before Cathy and the gang caught up with me.
Thursday 17 October. 9:56 a.m. Perhaps all I have to tell about my life is based on my own love of mystery. For some reason, probably my Catholic upbringing, I am perfectly content to accept that mysteries exist. One of the problems of our society, yet one of the reasons for its technological and material advances, is that it thinks it can know everything.
I have been thinking off and on over the years about the idea of "providence" and God's will. If God has somehow brought Cathy and I together, does God's will fit into other aspects of our lives? Did God, for example, lead us here to England
But it is not God who leads us to these things. We ourselves do. Indirectly it is the hand of God that leads us, for we are God's creatures: made in His image and likeness. This may best be explained by analogizing to the natural world. Take a flower, for example:
A flower is perfectly natural (as is a bird or an insect or any animal or plant). It grows into what it is intended to be and it behaves as it should, all by its identity, given to it in its very innermost being, its DNA or something like that.
A person, however, has free will. A person can grow as he or she was meant by nature to grow, or a person can choose to grow in a different manner. Indeed, choosing is in the nature of a person, hand in hand with physical characteristics.
The response of a non-human being, plant, dog, whatever, to its environment is basically natural, instinctual. A person responds to his or her environment by choosing, though there are environmental influences that are so strong that the human response is also completely natural, e.g., fear. At all levels above such a strong environmental influence, we make decisions. Decisions are influenced by the environment, but we still make decisions.
It is our job/mission in life to know and grow into our natural, God-given nature/being. God must have an image of each of us: what each of us might grow into if we were completely attuned to God's will. The trick is that we do not know what we're supposed to look like (be, act). All we have is what the gospels tell us and Jesus' own life. The rest we have to figure out on our own with the mysterious help of the Holy Spirit.
How? It seems to me that we have to learn to listen to ourselves. I do not think it is God talking to us, but it is the person made in the image and likeness of God that is talking to us, our real self.
As we go through our lives we are faced with countless opportunities for decisions. We must learn to try to see, feel, hear, be what God wants us to be. We can't know ahead of time. That's what makes us superior creatures, because we make ourselves, so to speak, into ourselves. Unfortunately, we are more likely to make ourselves into what we are not, for temptations and influences are very difficult to overcome; but if we listen and pray, we can inch forward a little at a time.
Somehow I married Cathy. Somehow we arrived in England. I listened to myself, armed with the only tools I have, my free will and my ability to discern the facts – and the Holy Spirit?
Perhaps God's creation is in total harmony, and there are places for us to be, times in which we fit. If we listen, perhaps we can understand this harmony and find where we belong. Somehow it is right that we are in England now. It is right that we have four beautiful children. I am not sure how all this came about, but perhaps there were ways that Cathy and I could sense the true way things should be. God created a beautiful world, a harmonious one, from all that we can see and determine, a world that is not only friendly to our form of life, but actually provides us with objects of beauty to consider, whether they be red ivy leaves or the movement of the stars and planets. It is not unreasonable to suggest that somehow all of these things fit together. Perhaps in Eden everything did fit together, and our goal since then, as humans, has been to make things harmonious once again.
Friday
18 October. I spend the day in London
by myself, taking the 6:55 bus into town from Saffron Walden, though we don't get in until close to 10 after terrible traffic around an accident. I buy two suits and have
lunch with Sara Gordon, who helped me get our visa. More importantly, I buy the Pissing Dogs lithograph. Sara and I walk around
Covent Garden after a nice lunch at Mes Ami's or something like
that. I return on the 7 pm train, my first
experience of a perfectly quiet train--many commuters, no talking!
Bus
to London. Eightish. Low (fog) lights on cars. America's images of success are too high,
leading to anger and frustration when you don't make it. England's are much lower; there is less
unrest because you "learn" that you will likely not crack through to
the top.
I
like my idea of a "Book of Places."
So much of what I write is based on places. When I write, I usually begin by describing
the surroundings. Most of everything I
have written in Self-Conscious can be redone into "Places." Is this new idea an improvement or is it just
a different look at what I have already done?
[1] 68 Royal Hospital Road, 1977-1998
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