Skinny Dipping

[#SD2024 / 24.ix.24.b] Back home this morning … for the past six weeks ,, some of my travels have been at this desk, but we have (Alice & I) been on the road. Time to collect ,, recollect … a swirl of images (writing puts thoughts into neat, straight lines) … back to Rosendale. This time we took our bikes. Saturday morning, I rode from Rosendale to New Paltz. Alice met me at a little café where I was sitting on the terrace drinking a peach saison (Yellow Owl). “I’ve found my thing,” I said to her. Another piece in the jigsaw puzzle of … putting all the things that have ever been meaningful to me back into … shaping a wholeness. Sunday, we hiked around Joppenbergh Mountain. Our previous trips to the Hudson Valley and the Catskills have revolved around hiking, breweries, and bookstores. Now, we spend our sunny afternoons at wineries and we fly down the trails on our bikes … life changes.

An observation about riding … even though I’m not going very fast, keeping a leisurely pace, when riding, my attention focuses forward and takes in distance. When hiking (walking) I look around (360 or maybe 270 since looking back isn’t so frequent) and down. I study the ground, the stones, the roots, the pitch of the slope ,, where I’m going to put my feet. Riding: one glances at the ground (a quick check), but the trail becomes a tunnel through which one slips.

[24.ix.24.c] Three weeks ago, when we were staying in Stonington, I bought Virginia Woolf: A Biography by Quentin Bell. Also, Three Guineas. On the way back home yesterday, at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, I bought The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, edited and with notes by Merve Emre : it’s a beautiful book. I’d planned to read Mrs. Dalloway again since she’s writing it now one hundred years ago … look at me live-blogging Dalloway !! … these few acquisitions, additions to my growing Virginia Woolf library, reminded me of that moment when I was at the New York Public Library, at the Virgina Woolf exhibit and I thought “maybe writing Skinny Dipping is my thing : !”

On the Wallkill Valley Trail at New Paltz is one of those little library boxes on a post. There’s another at the exit of the municipal parking lot in Rhinebeck … if only I had a collection of Nova Letters, I thought, I could disseminate … put my plan into action. A simple idea, write novelettes, print them as booklets, make them readable and downloadable on write.as and send them out into the world to do their work.        this time I must follow through      I’m like V.W. running her literary press, putting words into the world. Mine is a different scale. My aim is Enduring Contentment. I read about Tao Yuanming, the Gentleman of the Five Willow Trees : I too wish to be placid and calm, not in a hurry to speak. What do I care about fame and fortune? Such bothers! I’m fond of reading, but maybe I puzzle over difficult passages too much. Better to let the words flow through and work silently. I enjoy eating, but if I’m reading or writing, food can wait. I like beer and I never drink without emptying my cup. While I enjoy feeling a little tipsy, I exercise moderation (not so much out of concern for the future) but because I know I will want to wake up early the next morning and sit here at this desk and write and write and write … my brain lets me milk it to the tune of 20,000 words in a fortnight ( booklets!! ) ,, not that I’m endowed with some central essential vigor … I write poems for my own amusement, and in them can be seen something of my innermost thoughts and if I share them, it’s not out of concern for worldly success, I hope that these words will do some good

when traveling, my writing and reading time is squeezed. I brew my morning coffee, give praise to the goddess, sit down and get to work ,, focus, no distractions, write as much as I can before Alice wakes up … and then we’re off !! / my focus (primary project) has been on Von Neumann’s Elephant, a novelette I didn’t know I was going to write, completely unplanned : that’s what I like about this process, the material shapes itself … obviously, I’m doing the shaping, using my sensibility, intuition, experience, but the field of the material … I work like a painter. In the documentary on Philip Guston I watched last month, there was a sequence that showed Guston at work, actually making a painting : That’s how I work, I thought. I make a few strokes, collect some words, it’s a little like grocery shopping or no! rather more like gathering wild mushrooms. I wander through the forest looking for colorful round toadstools to pluck … crinkly yellow spongy things … , clean and sautée up with garlic and pepper in butter. What I find when foraging in the word forest suggests recipes, possible dishes. The words are then placed on the canvas where I study them from several angles. My decisions are rational ones. I’m listening to those strange (often mysterious) promptings that I don’t understand, but whatever ! I do what they suggest to see what will happen. The process involves both layering and erasure. The Daily Catch is half-cooked. The Kitchen (the Galley) is where the paint goes on the canvas … my process is something close to music.