online: 12 july 2009 modified: 10, 11 july 2009 4 july 2009 beyond independence
a summer evening
...a quiet valley on a summer evening... no longer too hot or too humid... a valley filled with young trees and long grasses... people pass... a wood pigeon calls again and again... a woman is pushing a tandem buggy from which the rearward infant waves good bye... sounds of other children's voices in the distance... a couple passes: he smiles and nods a greeting... then a solitary man walks quickly by with eyes straight ahead as if on a march... and now a young man in Hasidic dress and holding the hands of two young girls in formal dresses of white and gold... one of whom looks back as if to see what I am doing... a wasp begins to examine the finger that is writing this and goes away... i pause to drink some fruit juice...
later
...now resting under a spreading beech after walking beneath low willows that meet overhead to make an enclosed path with long grasses on either side...
...nettles and tall white wildflowers that were cut down here in the spring are already as numerous and as tall as they were before the cutting-down... loud sirens as emergency vehicles drive by... behind the surrounding trees... the astounding fuchsia of some other wildflowers that are already as tall as people...
...a poem said Gertrude Stein* is primarily a list of nouns (with few verbs or adjectives) and i wonder if a poetic list differs in her mind from a utilitarian or prosaic one?... grasses, pigeon, beech, shadows, sunlight, parts of summer... is it that each noun seems poetic in the presence of the others (without the verbs and adjectives etc that can make a list into a sentence)...
further on
...sitting on a bank of dry grass that has been mown to the root in places ...perhaps there is a nest of ants here as one is already crawling over my trousers...
...sitting on the highest seat... on which someone else is also sitting... soon he stops reading a newspaper to draw my attention to a baby rabbit that is eating grass two or three metres from our feet... it doesn't run away when we talk...
...then he tells me of a fox he saw walking here in daylight (as close as the rabbit is now)... and of another fox that frequents his street and which will come to sit by him when he gives it food... and once he saw a fox holding a supermarket bag by its handles as if it had been shopping...
...the man has gone and i remember that today is the anniversary of my resignation from employment (on U S independence day 4th July 1974)
...unwilling to compromise with employers i was hoping to earn a living by writing books (encouraged by Design Methods)... but my writing became poetic and of interest to fewer people... so i lived largely by giving occasional short courses and lectures... then, after writing the internet and everyone i started this online diary and ceased writing for print... what next?
...as i wrote that a man asked me if one can walk through the Vale of Health village or is it private?... yes one can... he wanted to see the houses where D H Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Leigh Hunt and other writers who lived, or visited each other... which reminds me that some of them managed to live by writing despite refusing compromise...
...hmmmm!
*Gertrude Stein, 'Poetry and Grammar' in Look at me now and here I am, writings and lectures 1911-1945, edited by Patricia Meyerowitz, introduction by Elizabeth Sprigge, Peter Owen, London 1967 (republished by Penguin Books)...
...i can't find the word 'list' in 'Poetry and Grammar' but in it she frequently mentions nouns as being the essential of poetry ('think of Homer, Chaucer and the Bible' (page 137) and also Whitman (mentioned on page 139))... perhaps i am remembering another of her writings?
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