Saturday

The mistaken Garvee chair happens to work quite well.  Rick Evans called yesterday afternoon; good to talk with him and I think we will go with him to his new set-up.  Apparently lots of former tiaa people who want a leaner operation and return to the personal approach they were trained in years ago.  Very happy he seems to want to continue with us as clients (friends!).  Over the last year or two he has been assigned between 400-700 families to look after!  Co says they have trouble finding qualified people especially in this upper NE location.  Wonder if he will say any more about that.  He is a little guarded in what he says because of the regulations in the industry about moving around and client and company security restrictions.  Hope it will work for us to join him and this new venture.  And that it will be safe!  As safe as tiaa has always been?  How can they guarantee that??  

Short video chat with PT yesterday evening.  Had forgotten they came up to be with us when Bela had her first valve procedure seven years ago.  She added that Chris has moved back into the house with Astrid and her mother, Danni, for financial reasons.  Too much to pay for two households, even on Chris's tech income.  He works from home; she works at the beauty salon.  Astrid in school.  

Message from Dave, he wants a face visit today.  Anxious to hear how it is all going for him.  What the family is doing.  

Those book booster nerds on X never hinted, that I recall, that Moresco's first volume features a seminarian as our hero-observer-narrator.  I enjoy that much because the details every now and then do remind me powerfully of the three brotherly years I spent--away from the world.  In fact our roller skating narrator is much more free, able to come and go it seems between seminary and home villa.  

Cool day again but gloriously sunny.  Black flies in the house going crazy.  One approach I just ordered from amazon places sticky panels in the corners of windows so I look forward to seeing if that will work since the flies do stay on the big windows, most of them.  Just pulled the big drape to keep them there.  

Pausing to see if my cortisol levels are good.  Have to look up the chat about the vargas nerve.  Not the right spelling.  

ok sympathetic is fight or flight system (heard about that in college psych); parasympathetic is rest and digest!  

Bela said earlier she was planning lots of things.  Mind racing ahead just as mine has been--all week?  David will come here and live with us; kids will go to college here and Dave will teach here!  Ha!  well, about as realistic as my racings are too.  

Vagus nerver not vargas, but close.  Vagus and sciatic, two largest nerve stems in us.  

Biggest question facing me now is whether on Tuesday I should go up to Owl's Nest for lunch and scope out the set up for the massage scheduled there in three weeks for Bela.  Why not?  Other options are pretty usual and not pressing.  At the moment.  You never know.  Still have not found the fly swatter!

Next pressing item is to put the new green plastic table cloth on this table!  Found the flyswatter; under the pile of papers on the table!

We have two Aho catalogs, or rather, books.  Rizzoli.  Peak of his career.  Certified and collected.  Looks like he has had about ten serious collectors buying his works.  Pretty darn good.  Aho moved to Hudson, NH in 1974.  He was born in 1966 in Melrose, MA.  His father worked for the Boston and Maine RR; first generation in US, he parents moved to MA from Finland.  Must have moved here in 1940ish.  So Aho himself is first generation son of immigrants.  Same generation as Catherine Taylor??  "Catherine Taylor (born 1964) received a BA from the College Scholar Program at Cornell University, studied Classics at Somerville College at the University of Oxford, and earned a PhD in English from Duke University. The author of You, Me, and the Violence, Apart, and Giving Birth, she is also a founding editor of Essay Press, and associate professor in writing and co-director of the Image Text MFA at Ithaca College and of ITI Press."

So Aho is two years younger than Catherine!!

The new table cloth is a wee short but looks so fresh and lovely.  Now to smooth out the folds and wrinkles over the next two years.  Will we eventually sell Casa Alegre?  Will we even go there this winter?  When will the valve procedure take place?  Can we get it done at Hanover?  

Dave called and talked for a good forty minutes.  While he was walking home I kept noticing beautiful details on the buildings behind him and the bright sunny sky.  His birthday is coming up.  He and C have not told the kids yet about the separation.  He sleeps in the living room sofa "because of his snoring."  They are negotiating point by point how to do the next steps.  He realized she had been looking through his phone the other night while he was asleep.  C thought it could be moved along quickly by having him start to live at some other location.  He wants to do things more slowly.  So, he is a musician and one note after the other would make sense.  Realize how different we are and how little I really know him.  He sees C as overly emotional about everything.  She has been talking with a counselor for years, not a professional therapist, it seems.  When C's mother died this counselor said, Oh, grief, I do not do grief.  Big help there! C's problems with her mother go way back, don't know the details.  Is Dave an alcoholic?  On our side of the discussions, no one has raised that question, that I know of.  Is he the Golden Boy?  According to his song he is.  He surveyed his past year's behavior and asked ChatgPT how long he had been away from the house on late night gigs and job duties (rock u etc) and Chat said pretty much average, not excessive at all.  

We chatted with the kids too.  They already look three months older more than one month older.  Both liking school and teachers.  Eliot the only one in his Spanish class to give correct answers and earned some green points for it.  Emma very keen on her roles in drama class, both this year and projected into next year.  

David did consult some free legal clinic help and I think that did help him think about things in that regard.  They want to avoid going before a judge at all cost, so they have to try to agree and work things out.  

I can't see how he will manage to stay in the apartment for much longer, really.  But perhaps money will insist that they do, that and the concern about avoiding legal process.  They have their marriage therapist and D his private therapist.  I was tempted to text him and suggest he find a way to insist that C get a real therapist to replace her long-time confidante counselor.  But I think I should stay out.  

Unsuccessful at finding a fly bait trap at walmart.  That section emptied out completely so looks like everyone is having pest troubles.  Chat says close all window shades and open one bright window and the flies will go outside, they are drawn to light.  I've opened the front and back doors!!

cortisol

 cortisol became a thing around 2023-2025 through social media hype

Opt for a small piece of dark chocolate

Colin caught up with us, had lunch, and then they played the piano.  He gave us his variant on cortisol obsession, talking about his stress patterns, the vagus nerve, some other terms.  Made me recall all my readings in diet and health over the years---Ayervedic food theory, etc.  

Advisor from TIAA in Hanover called to tell us Rick Evans has left and joined a "boutique" financial service called TenuredAdvisors.  Looked them up.  One guy is from Bates, Rick is UVa, other advisors from TIAA.  Their whole world shifting because higher ed not what it once was even among the elites but with office in Portsmouth and Essex, VT you can see they are poised to help the tenured private elite, oh, and physicians.  I liked him and now I realize what his phone call was about a few weeks ago---he was bidding us hail and farewell as much as he could, legally, without saying so directly.  He said tiaa could not find enough staff and he was loaded down with way too many clients.  Suspect AI doing things to all these worlds too.  Fill out the questionnaire, we run the numbers and manage with AI your account as does now some huge percentage of the market.  With all of our other changes it feels like all the tectonic plates are shifting at once.  Everywhere in our western world.  

Managed long "fast" night and morning.  Bela got a short walk in at Walmart in spite of my hovering.  Doug and Patsy are getting married!  They guess they've been together now about 17-18 years.   His wife died in 2006 or 2007 

Phillips sent great letter about cruise and valve dangers.  Filed a claim with Allianz.  See what we get back.   The new Garvee rolling chair is much better than I'd expected, fits into the bathroom, sturdier and better quality.  Whew.  

Cortisol is a stress hormone.  Discovered in 1937. Tadeus Reichstein, Polish-Swiss.  Nobel prize for it in 1950 with two other scientists.  

Aho's catalog arrived.  Not opened yet.  Novel by Priestly, guess Nicholas mentioned it, favorite novel of Jung's!!  Not intrigued enough, at the moment.  But it is here.  Waiting more for the Disappearers.  Jamaican-American writer.  Black and queer, teaching now in Minneapolis.  When did that city become a hot magnet for excitement?  Should I subscribe to the Washington Sun?  Founder of Politico started it.  Journos who got fired from the Post.  Shift just "like" advisors leaving TIAA.  

Friday morning 

onward through Moresco 

Rick would work out of the Queechee office.  I sent in a query to see what response I might get.  

bonfire birth

In Moresco they light the huge bonfire, cats drag flaming bits of entrail away into the woods, Turquoise goes into labor beside the fire, they take her into the villa

Doug McLane outside about an hour ago taking photos of a new crop of mushrooms sprouted on the front lawn, opposite the driveway across the way and I wonder if they arrived in the hood amidst the logs that Ian has in front of his house every year where I cuts and splits them into firewood.  

Bela having a good time on the piano.  A pt session with Joel today; four more booked over the next two weeks.  He's suggesting she get a hemi-walker for use in the house for more stability on her feet. She wants to walk with the cart at walmart.  

Carry away mind-imagination tries to picture the valve procedure taking place once again at cmc or at dhmc.  Pros and cons with each place; why should I care.  Judith gave her testimonial about going nowhere but dhmc.  Think she survived breast cancer under their care.  She and Jim explained that they both get full coverage for all medical there under the public assistance program of the hospital.  I had no idea such existed and very glad for them that it does.  They have to show all of their financial records.  Oh, it operates through state medicare coverage.  

one ranking includes dhmc in 100 great hospitals in the country   cmc ranked 2 in NH but not ranked nationally  

bought the baby bean stannah on the back stairs

chatted with Seamus; they go to Hawaii for two months on Oct 7 

our seminarian rides a bike with rollerskates strapped to his feet 

turning on one's axis, turning on their axes, rooms turn on axes--spinning, rolling, turning  

5 pm

 5:16 exactly.  Bela dozing again.  New episodes of Sommerdahl not gripping us.  Today's early medical visit upset us in lots of ways.  Our lives are so quiet we are more fragile to changes and disconcerting disruptions.  All of which seem to go along with, be exacerbated by, events at the upper, larger scale of things.  Mid-term elections, family divorce rumblings.  And now this valve procedure seven years after the first one.  Grateful we are as we should be for the seven years after the first.  Why not as grateful for the prospect of having to do it once more with the hope of another good seven years?  The lifelong sense that doctors know what they are doing and know what to do becomes shakier.  They clearly are under great stress as well.  Big signs in every Speare location now about how anger and disruptive behavior will not be tolerated.  Do they use that phrase?  Not exactly, have to look again.  But it seems misguided to have such a big mini-billboard.  Perhaps it constitutes legal covering of issues.  Psychologically, though, does it do the good meant to do?  Does it help?  How to know.  

Reminder to self.  Chill.  Ignore your desire to have a say in what will happen next.  Can you help by seeking advice from others about where to go for this procedure?  Are you sure you want, or "want", DHMC?  Thought that place gave you the creeps?  More or less than CMC?  If the medical teams have set things up this way, who are you to demur or second-guess, or assume a so-called consumer reports stance from which to make a "more informed" judgment?  TV news spots like "Cost of Denial" does not help either.  Sarah says Dr K would favor DHMC over Concord, but would he also do so against CMC?  Should I call him and ask?  Would it be ethical for him to give me his opinion?  And why would I take his opinion over the doctors we work with now?  I might as well get involved in advising D and C's therapists over in Paris.  

I have this wonderful, huge Italian novel to bury my cares deep within.  Focus on those words, those clouds and wisps of meaning and non-meaning.  Clouds rolling over the landscape.  The gentle roll of the dryer tumbling the sheets and towels.  

back from Avery place

 Early morning visit to cardio office of Speare on Avery Street.  The doctor saw us two years ago.  The office was in total chaos because their wifi and computers were not functioning properly.  He asked if Va was ok and she said yes and he said ok great.  We had to point out to him that there was a recent cardiogram that he had not seen.  

now all a fluxmoxed about where to go and what to do --- 

The Type of Valve Disease: If you need a mitral valve repair and are looking for a robotic, minimally invasive option that avoids opening the breastbone, DHMC is currently the primary provider of this specific technology north of Boston. If you are a candidate for a catheter-based aortic replacement (TAVR), CMC's New England Heart & Vascular Institute is one of the busiest and most experienced programs in the region. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Second Opinions: Because your surgical eligibility depends entirely on your unique anatomy and overall health, getting a consultation at both clinics is highly recommended. You can coordinate a consultation through the CSofNE Valve Procedures Team or schedule an appointment with the DHMC Heart and Vascular Center. [1, 2, 3, 4]   

now all a fluxmoxed about where to go and what to do --- can see how it comes down to hunches about "cultural behaviors" as much as anything---

grasping for quotations

 Labor Day

"The land seeks deep inside each person so as to gather together all their dreams.  Yes, we could say that life is the seamstress of dreams."  190 in Sleepwalking Land

a link there, the land, the earth, back to Handke's geologies and walking.  

miraginations   mirages  

Darlene stopped, bringing a small pot of yellow mums to cheer us up over the vanishing of our cruise dreams.  She also told of Joan Berstrom's terrible fall on her steps in the blueberry hill apartments a few days or weeks ago.  Broken bones; now in a rehab center in Milford.  Her son looking in, perhaps will care for her further.  

"Giddified, existentially retarded, she went on turning and twirling, moaning  all the while."  201

the notebooks  "Blown by a wind born not from the air but from the ground itself, the sheets scatter along the road.  Then, one by one, the letters turn into grains of sand, and little by little, all my writings are transformed into pages of earth."   

last passage, the end, beautiful image, incredible sadness  12:35 pm  

653 "it's strangely relaxing, isn't it?"   Max Lawton discussing The Beginnings  on page 653 of the book

back to it   out of Africa Mozambique   

Catholic vs Protestant schools of Translation!!  who knew??? 

booking the cruise expanded mind and imagination across the map, at the same time our daily lives contracted more and more over the past few weeks and months, even while the kids were here, working through their routines and dramas,  Ours were contracting and now with diagnosis hinted and about to arrive tomorrow morning we can even wonder of the contricted aorta, its valve, has brought the constriction, if our daily routines respond to it as to weather movements.  The air outside this evening, right now and all day, has been that splendid dry forest mountain cold air from the north, early September tasting already of early October.  

Going back to Moresco from Couto feels a similar expansion after contraction.  Couto packed enormous desperation into a slim line of anecdotes, tales, short scenes, compressed allusions, symbols, mythic echos.  The wars he was surviving so horrendous as to be beyond words of any kind.  Moresco has all the time in the world, all the space, vast canvas upon which to slowly trace figures and letters.  strangely relaxing is indeed correct, strangely so.  Trauma tightens, Couto, binds; ecstasy releases in preparation for song, endless song.  

holiday ritual weekend

 Yesterday straight out of previous templates.  Visit to Tracy at Refresh and then drove over to Gusto's. Labor Day weekend traffic everywhere; holiday clusters of end-of-summer people everywhere.  We got a table at once, in front of the pastry case.  Same as last year.  Same as how many years before.  Paninis and salad.  We had phoned ahead to reserve a fruit tart.  The blonde woman with accent---British? New Zealand?--said they never listen to phone messages.  We got one of the few remaining strawberry bengnes. Back home for naps.  Bela finished the Mexican soap after GH.  In the evening we watched a German thriller filmed, beautifully, in Mallorca; terrible acting but beautiful young people.  About a land selling scam.  

Bela on the piano now; about noon.  Note on twitter about long awaited new book by Donald Antrim.  Totally missed his career; over fifty electroshock treatments for long struggle with suicide.  Brown, tons of accolades including genius grant.  DFW, bud, assured him electroshock ok, helpful.  DFW did the job two years later.  Antrim has survived, written about it lots.  Brilliantly many have said, but I'm not going to look up his books.  Reviewer in the London tablet? said the medicalization of suicide still does not satisfy more than what art, philosophy and spirituality have said about it over the centuries.  Another too easy take?  Or what we are left with, no matter what we try to say.   Case in point:  continuing to read Cuoto's Sleepwalking Land.  Crazed, grim, astonishing journey of tales and people; after devastation, unspeakable violence, how to people go on?  

Meanwhile Matt K. Parker loves Stig Dagerman's Island of the Doomed.  Also loved Max Blecher's Adventures in Immediate Reality.  

Earlier Bela had Siri play David's song If You Break My Heart.  A sad song now; when composed I guess it was playful, joking, loving ironic musical indulgence, but in the current state of dissolution it feels prophetic about inevitable fissures under the surface.

So much energy invested in imagining every details of the cruise, worrying about it, anticipating it, wondering how it would have gone, now a sense of deep grief, the air popped out of the balloon, the shrinking of possibilities, expansiveness contracted, erased, ceased, like a death.  

Looking forward now only to more tests and talks with medical personnel.  And daily bread and cacao.  

No word from Doug and I'm shy about calling him to ask how Patsy is doing; probably holding steady and finding out how blank holiday weekends at rehab places can be.  No car in the driveway, I guess Doug is staying down there for a few days.  

12:30  trying to rain; heavy, dark clouds over the house.   I ordered the 12" wide Garvee aisle chair; surely it will be too narrow!!  Should I order the 16" one and hope to return the first when it arrives---without opening it; or open it and see and then try to send it back.  

decision day

Thursday 3 September

On the way home from walmart to buy miniature toiletries for the trip, took a call from MidState, Danielle saying since Dr Philips is away this week, my message asking about our trip went to Dr Fagan and he advises we not take the trip.  I had Danielle call us back twenty minutes later so Bela could hear the whole report and advice for herself.  We had lunch and talked it over a bit and decided to cancel the trip.  

Feeling now a few hours, and GH, later, a strange mix of relief and sadness and new worry about the report that her aortic valve has a new, severe restriction.  Dr Fagan indicated that was the primary concern in the decision to recommend travel.  Now some fear about whether a second heart valve procedure will take place and how well Bela will recover from it.  

DNMC just called to cancel the MRI scheduled for Saturday.  They want to dig into the history of the shunt before proceeding.  

Volvo Lebanon called earlier to explain the tech found a glitch in the software update involving the module for the brake, the emergency brake, so they have to order new parts and it will be a while until they get the fix for that.  

Who else called today?  Seems like someone else.  I canceled  the delta tickets and the full refund there will pay for the new HVAC in ABQ.   Yes, Juan had called early in the morning to say they were heading off to install all of that at 3601.  

Cool and rainy day, overcast.  Drizzle a bit when I was out to the store.  

6:51 pm  Juan just called.  Installation complete.  Gave him card number over the phone.  

No message from Lisa, don't know if they drove over or not.  

Well, with the trip off, am I now able to relax a bit more and not stress about it, which I have been doing these past few months whether I admitted it or realized it fully or not.  Didn't I keep brushing off the worries, trying to ignore them, face them down, chill them out with meditation.  And Aswaganda, etc.  Cacao.  

Relief too to have the MRI canceled at DHMC for Saturday.  Though they will reschedule.  

Main worry, then, is the meeting with Dr Flynn on Tuesday and his recommendations.  Also Dave and his future weeks, months, and years.  Bela's health.  Winter.  Air Travel at all??  going to Abq out?? 

Will we have a whole winter here after all?  Plant-based cuisine will save us.  

Mexican serial about love now on.  

George had a large article on the Dems in the Concord Monitor.  He sees his new career as "AI Prompter."

Dick Mertens wrote back that it is a great article!   Phil thinks it applies to all parties these days.  

so now we have all these cute little things to use up;  Rachel can use them at the pool 

watched the youtube about the vegan twin study; found out it was a hit on netflix in a longer form 

I wondered to myself if Dr Fagan when pondering our request and reviewing info about Va considered also my request for an MRI to investigate my persistent headache problem.  Most likely a little bit.  But I have no idea how doctors think about things.  

Read a little bit in Sleepwalking when the pianists were playing.  A shocking scene where the boy is raped by some dancing old women.  Tuahir later explained it as some ritual that had been interrupted and so made up for; he comforted the boy.  

different take

post on bluesky this morning:  66 Fairy Tales written by 40 different authors in three different languages, on three different continents, over approximately 1600 years.  The Bible.  Well, ok, if you put it that way . . . . .   in a class with the tag I saw in The Guardian a few years back "monastic religion headed by a prince in vatican city, Italy

talked with Doug, nothing specific yet; speare would send her on to a rehab hospital/center; she hopes she can do it here at speare rehab here

Monday 31 August  

Spoke with Richard Dannenbaum earlier today.  505-697-9471  Juan and team will do the hvac work on Thursday of this week.  They will also file with PNM for electric board upgrade; that has to be approved.  

Victoria texted to say hello.  I texted Lisa but no reply yet from her.  

Good walk for Bela at Walmart today; up to prescriptions and back with stops at customer service.  Swim tomorrow.  Philips' office called this morning to have us get a "rush" appointment with cardiology at Speare next week.  

   

Tuahir

the old man in Sleepwalking Land.  He says to Muidinga on p 65:  "Never trust a man who doesn't know how to lie."  A hyena then lies down next to them, most uncharacteristic behavior.

Moresco, I thought earlier, noticing my painting in the bedroom, of course, he is the Giorgio Morandi of post-Post Modernist Italian literature.  Is there a new slogan for his work?  wiki gives him this line "Defined as one of the founding fathers of a new line of Italian literature that moves beyond post-modernity, and then mentions DeLillo and Pynchon but no clear slogan.  

I listened to theta waves sleeping chimes with my earphones about 3 am this morning and enjoyed that, went back to sleep, up and down, through at least two selections.  

Bela ready to order a custom house at the Fairgrounds road colony called Mountain View, for down the line in the future perhaps.  Earlier morning coffee thoughts.  

Muidinga is 11, lost his memory.  The notebooks they found in the burned bus were written by Kindzu, who died in the wars.  Survival in devastation, words, names, on pages, carved into the bark of trees.  Divorce is a kind of micro civil war, the slow dying out of earlier passionate "mutual enthusiasm" ( Handke's phrase).  

Having the cruise on the horizon is a great distracting project; anticipation, preparation, packing, imagining.  Something to shift the mind onto away from the new sadness, the news we were most likely the last to have been apprised of, even as we could sense the tectonic under rumblings much longer ago than we wanted to feel.  

"that miraculous hairclip of hers . . .was the cat's paw."  154 Beginnings

Friday the 28th of August

Wonderful movie last night, Jeanne duBarry.  Great rendition of life at Versaille under Louis XV, touching love story, study of class and wealth, rigidity and play.  The age.  

Chapter 8 featured the wrapping, unwrapping, care of, and rewrapping the circumcised penis of our narrator.  Some fish were smacked against the floor and then gutted and a poor cat similarly killed to get a souvenir cat's paw talisman.  The other characters ambled about the villa and park; the wedding dress being readied for the coming wedding.

Bela deep into another novel by the Spanish writer, Duenas. 

Crazy mind continues to speculate wildly about the separation-divorce; theories abound; ignored emotions come up with yarns and scenarios and flashbacks and entwined narrative arcs and threads.  The spaghetti of drama heard from a long tunnel or viewed through a periscope, a telescope.  Can understand Versaille better than our own family.  Thank you history and art.  Life itself that tsunami river wave crashing down from the mountains in Nepal wiping out everyone and everything.  

Sky did a terrific job repairing the toilet and then sat and talked with us for a while.  Wonderful guy.  His parents live out in Bridgewater, they came here as hippies (boomers).  Blakeley D grew up in DC, St Albans prep (National Cathedral), UPenn and Harvard architecture.  Sky's oldest, Wyeth, has gotten big into sailing this summer, day camp at Lake Winnepesaukee. 

End of summer week, everything happens.  Kim sent a market analysis of homes comparable to ours; prices have flattened and some dropped slightly.  

Would I want David to come back in a year or two and join Sky in his plumbing business?  

Got a proposal from TLC to work on Casa Alegre.  Will call them on Monday to talk with the sale person, Richard Dannenbaum.  Had never seen a document come on pandadoc and thought at first it was spam!!

Might be best to go back to one book at a time.  Finish Sleepwalking Land first?  Or go back and forth?

They move at such different paces.   

mid week

watched Bela's PT session with Joel.  Set up three more appointments with him.  Beautiful day now.  Time for after lunch nap.  FIP has been playing lots of Dolly Parton in honor of her, she died yesterday of cancer at 80 in Nashville.  

Apple Maps just drove down our street.  Dick sent a piece about translating the Odyssey.  C&K have invited us to meet them for dinner this weekend.  

Our narrator has just clipped off his pubic hairs with scissors, standing in the moonlight at his window.  Next chapter titled "Circumcision."  Time to nap.  

Thursday

Echocardiogram went well.  Bad news from ABQ last evening.  TLC, Juan, says our HVAC is shot; ordering a whole new system, will have it put next to the house not on the roof.  Next few weeks.  Juan says just after covid, (we bought in 2021, May, or '22) many installations were "frankenmonsters," pieces they could find and cobble together but which did not fit the job's needs or each other.  

day off news

 started with a headache and drove west to Lebanon.  The Magic burrito place was not yet open and after looking in through the window I decided I didn't want to eat there after all.  Walked back around the square to see what the Big News painted on the gas station cafe window was about.  They had moved early in the summer to 1 Court Street.  I walked along and looked up that address to find that I had walked right past that number but had seen nothing new there then realized it must be one of those doorways on the other side of the big set of brick buildings, the side facing the back parking lot.  Just then over in the common I saw Sarah and Don getting out of their car.  They headed across the street and on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse where the big busses stop we chatted for twenty minutes.  Sarah was going in to the town clerk to pay bills on their new house in Lebanon.  The washer and dryer were full of gunk of some mysterious sorts so they were waiting for delivery of new ones.  They still think of the Ashland road house as the real house, primary home, and this Lebanon one as another place to use as needed or wanted.  Ginger, Don's daughter, is going through a divorce.  My ears took note of that but luckily I blurted out nothing.  You first agree on which house will be the base for raising the kids in a secure location; they you divide up duties involved in organizing the house and getting the kids to all their activities including school.  Wonder if this is what will soon be happening in Paris, some for of it.  

Had a sandwich at the Coop and drove home.  Fage yogurt at Walmart here is $3 cheaper than at the Coop, so there goes the myth that the coop is cheaper.  Bought those Norwegian crackers---our resident mice got into two packs that I had foolishly left out on the stove last night.  

Into the two books.  Moresco's opening title and line I love so much:  From Sleep to Silence, From Silence to Sleep I, on the other hand, found myself at ease in that silence.  In medias res, bam!  love that "on the other hand."  How far we are from "stately, plump Buck Mulligan."  Couto's opens with "War had killed the road thereabouts."  mmm sounds a note, with "thereabouts" the touch.  

If you drink a lot of water in a short period, you may move from mild overhydration to what's known as water toxicity, intoxication, or water poisoning. This happens when there's too much water in the cells (including brain cells), causing them to swell. When the cells in the brain swell, they cause pressure in the brain. You may start experiencing things such as confusion, drowsiness, and headaches.

Brain Pressure: Brain cells swell and grow larger. This extra pressure pushes against the hard bone of your skull, causing a throbbing headache

If you’re properly hydrated, your pee will be light yellow, like the color of light straw or lemonade. You may be drinking too much water if your pee is colorless or clear.

Bela had a good day of swimming.  She mentioned early that she's worried about David and Cécile and I agreed we both are.  She wonders if they had not been getting along for much longer than we realized.  I do think that is the case. 

We saw two videos on YouTube showing the tenders at L'Spezia; looks easy enough to use.  Also videos of the staterooms on Legend of the Seas.  None of course of the accessible cabins.  

Phone call from the TLC hvac tech in Abq.  Power outage notice canceled his visit to the house.  Esteban will go tomorrow or Friday to check on things.  Fingers crossed nothing serious. 

Return to Walmart

 how long has it been since we have not walked at walmart?  Went today at Bela's insistence.  She was fine, walked to the customer service.  I circumambulated the store, first in weeks as well.  Why a headache all day?  all day!  stronger now than earlier, frontal lobe.  cookies aggravate it, or was it the slices of cheese I took about an hour ago?  Just took third advil of the day.  Had a big salad with asian noodles for lunch.  Too much Skippy peanut butter on bread in the last three days?  Palm oil, corn sweetners?  Ora protein powder drinks over past two days?  Cacao?  Chocolate?  feel like I've drunk lots of water today.  

Eating a bowl of blueberries now.  Relieved Bela walked so well at walmart.  Not interested in walking around the house on her cane, however.  Not sure why.  Long sleeps in the afternoon after lunch and before GH for both of us.  She swims tomorrow.  Might ask Rachel to take her to pt again on Weds so I can drive the loaner car back over.  

starting into Sleepwalking the Land by Mia Couto   title could be one of Handke's  

Sebald on Handke

such magnificent essays   in Silent Catastrophes  

And in allowing the particular light

which filters through the leaves of the canopy

or the canvas of a tent to shine through from time to time

between the words placed with often astonishing care and precision,

Handke, in Die Wiederholung,  succeeds in making the text itself a place of refuge

among the arid zones which, even in the culture industry, are encroaching further by the day.

The book of a journey on foot through the Karst landscape . . . islands of calm . . . in whose depths

. . .  the beasts of the Karst could assemble . . . . 

Inscribed into this image of a peaceable kingdom, reminiscent of the Ark, is the hope that,

despite the unfavourable circumstances, some small part of our natural Heimat may yet be saved after all.

In Handke's work, teaching and learning are ways of preserving the world. 

I can think of no more beautiful image . . . than this page of Repetition dedicated to the road mender and sign painter.  

Seen in this light, the journey on foot becomes a kind of Pilgrim's Progress, and the stages along the way those of an imagined history of salvation.  The decisive factor . . . is the act of walking itself: 'Set out on the road to one goal or another, whether actually or merely in thought: between the goal and the intention there is something that contains both, namely the act, the progression.  This progression is as good as the goal:  for this will certainly be reached, if the decision is firm and the conditions adequate; and yet this progression can only ever be called intentional, because the walker can always just as easily be paralysed before the last step as before the first."   from Goethe's Color Theory 

This progression is what Handke calls the continuum, in his later books.  

They are the incidental results of the hope for redemption from the guilt-ridden conditions of life, a hope fleetingly realized in art, in the creation of images which allow author and reader to enter almost bodily into the nature of all things, which yet remains forever strange to us.  

----

I'm glad a read some of Stifter so I could enjoy the more the essay on Stifter and Handke.  I plan to read The Castle in our week on the cruise ship and when we get back I can then read Sebald's essay on that book.

gray sunday morning

Emmett Stinson, Perth, says his holy trinity of books is Gaddis's The Recognitions x3.  I could see re-reading that book, more than digging into the Tunnel.  I "read" Recognitions at some stressful time and barely got what it was but enough to have been impressed and fascinated.  In all the good ways.  Stinson, on X, says "I like pretentious bookslop."  He follows 1.3k has 2.5 followers.  

apple photo claims Feb 4, 2016 we stood in front of the Taj Mahal to have our picture taken. 

steady rain now falling.  Headache has won, I've capitulated and taken two small advils.  10:46 am 

on X a few moments ago a post from Nicholas dated 2014 showed up, this famous passage from Merton:   

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak [God’s] name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship [and daughtership]. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely . . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.  from Confessions of a Guilty Bystander

AI discovers  "Merton borrowed the exact phrase le point vierge from the renowned French Catholic scholar of Islam, Louis Massignon.   Massignon used the term to describe a concept found in Islamic mysticism (particularly from the Sufi mystic al-Hallaj)—the innermost, uncorrupted core of the human heart where the individual directly meets the divine truth.  

simmering onions, mushrooms and carrots to add

Sebald: 198: "Stifter rarely ever attempts . . . for the latent sense of panic beneath his quietist prose."

208  via Sontag  photography promotes forgetting; writing assumes a life in the future

216  "This is not so much a wish for death as a reversible simulation of dying."  

Sebald on Handke in Silent Catastrophes

Sebald's essay on Handke, Beneath the Surface, is so good trying to slice out a key quote feels like an unforgivable violation.  What the essay demands is being re-read and re-read, its brilliance sends you back to re-read the novel.  The last sentence will have to do:  "The pathography of the protagonist and the biography of the narrator thus converge in what, from the point of view of societal normality, appears as illegitimate nature of both illness and art, which, each in their different way, recall the destruction that is wrought in the lives of children."  151  Can imagine how beautiful the sentence must be in the German.  

The beginning of that final paragraph:  "The suggestion implicit in the above, that in depicting a pathological world view Handke was ultimately also concerned with a scrupulous examination of his own artistic 'guilty' conscience, and his own distance from 'normal' life, is confirmed by his story in another regard also."   "Bloch's story converges with that of the missing schoolboy" 

"the development of goalkeeper Bloch's pathological state goes back to pre-existing handicaps of a social nature, and that his own art only goes beyond the pathological inasmuch as it opens up, for both author and readers, [. . . . .readers . . . .] an understanding of the wretched and utter hopelessness of such circumstances."  150-151 

now if only Sebald had written such an essay on each of Handke's novels after this one !  

next essay on Light and Dark deals with Stifter and Handke  and later a big essay on Repetition  

much to look forward to    probably will not read the final tale in the Stifter volume  

heavy gray skies now    rain tonight, Saturday   

"he had chosen this apartment in particular

 because it appealed to his poetic powers--which expressed themselves less in creation than in reception."

108 Motley  "there was nothing he loved more in the world . . . to stand at his window on a rainy day and watch as . . . the moisture crept down the old walls."  

I like that notion that poetic powers could best express themselves in reception---there, my whole life understood, described.  When I consider the remainder of the passage and the context in which it is placed I wonder if I am using it, affirming it, adopting it as my motto, somewhat too hastily.  It may not be a sentiment one should take as an ideal, after all.  How can I know?  

Saturday   What if I place that comment about reading with Mia Cuoto's?  

"Books are never written. When we read them, we write them."   Mia Couto

his poetic powers expressed themselves less in creation than in reading--reception  

Sebald's essay on Stifter may help me out here.  Since he wrote and painted might he not be placing reception on the lower rung of estimation.  Could also wait to see how this vaguely creepy story turns out.  The narrator warned us it would be dark---Tourmaline  

today and tomorrow I am trying to do a 24 hour only thing eating only Ora So Lean & So Clean powder protein.  Why?  Who knows.  Some strange "cleansing" impulse, or "fasting" or experimentation to see what happens to the cycle of headaches?  

"It is a dietary supplement designed to boost protein intake, not a complete meal replacement. Each serving provides only around 120 calories and minimal fats and carbohydrates, meaning it lacks the total daily energy, essential fatty acids, and broad spectrum of vitamins and minerals required to sustain human life."  

so indeed this is a fairly stupid notion and where does it spring from?  

Anton Reiser, the German novel, written in 1785-1790    Christian Garlitz shows up in Garrett County, Maryland  1790-1873 Avilton, MD 

In the end we are unable to reconcile the facts, because they, to this date, simply have not been discovered. Therefore we can only reconcile the stories. Thus, for the present, the history presented on this website lists the first Garlitz in the area, the one who came from Prussia, as John Hendrey Garlitz. The Garlitz to whom all the family histories are traced is Hendrey Christian Garlitz or Christian I. The great hunter of folklore is Christian II. And the convert to the Catholic faith and the settler of Avilton, MD, is Christian III.

"same" German cultural mind-sets?  And the point is?  

putting an end to the Ora only thing, having some milk, yogurt and granola 

back to Tourmaline   a tale of the mother who fled, who disappeared, from the girl with the large head who lived in the basement of the abandoned house.  Sense of tales from Poe, slightly.  

so that's it!  the great actor, the professor, the man who fell to his death, the woman who birthed the young girl, the ancient house, everyone "disappears" and none of their lives are told with any meaning.  Very proto-modernist indeed.  Nothing coheres.  The tale is dark in the sense that it is a mystery with no revealing patterns.  Stones hold themselves together, we can carry them in our hands, but in themselves they yield nothing to us that we may want to hear from them.  We live in the landscape of mountains, nature, stones, but we are not of them.  At all.  

our son's dissolving marriage weighs on us in the silence of the house now and we wonder how it will all play out over seas in that other country that we understand and do not understand.  Could his wife not be a character in many types of stories, including one by Stifter?  One by Henry James, for sure.  I talked with him about Henry James in the only short conversation we had about the situation.  I wonder how to help him, what to do, what to say.  We are clarifying bequests in the portfolio that had erroneously been neglected and I am going to re-do the trust and will to clarify David as sole beneficiary.  Ten years ago we had named the grandchildren as well, trying to be caring, but now under these new circumstances it seems better to not try to engage legal structures we cannot comprehend.  So many tv dramas under our belts!  As much as we do not cotton to "Ted Lasso" as entertainment, it had some resonances that we could not help but notice, in this new situation, about the American abroad trying to navigate a different national and cultural reality.  

rules of thumb

years ago I learned from that beautiful magazine for doctors that Mamacita subscribed to that it takes three weeks before a doctor actually begins to feel the relaxing effects of a vacation.  Old rule of thumb.  Bet it would bring some scoffs these days.  However, the query today is: how many weeks does it take to relax after visitors have been staying with you for three weeks?  

hmmm

empty house, chill air this morning, picking up, laundering, rearranging; we did establish that the new toy aisle chair works perfectly to get Bela into the downstairs bathroom.  

letter from Dr Fagan says nothing in the mri would relate to persistent headaches.  Should I see anyone else, maybe neurology?  

hard time sleeping last night.  suspect mountain mermaid shake had some green tea or other such in it

Karl Philipp Moritz's Anton Reiser

Adalbert Stifter's Motley Stones

will I finish these ?  

picked up euros at the bank.  Very tall young teller.  Nolan Cross, graduated from Exeter high school six years ago; advanced placement English there with Ryan Hale.  

will talk with Fagan next week for short visit about mri and headaches---nothing to figure out, really 

MRI today August 19

 

Interesting experience; wanted DFW to write an essay about it.  After, in the parking lot short chat with John Sheineman.  He stopped himself short explaining why he took his buy out from the college a year short of turning 65 saying "because I was tired of fucking. . . ."   I was glad to hear that.  He described instead what a great trip he had with his family driving around the great lakes and taking in three or four of the world cup games.  

On the message from Mid-State it doesn't seem possible to copy and paste.  So here is the key line

so far as I can tell:  "IMPRESSION: Mild frontoparietal atrophy.  Pontine and supratentorial white matter disease, likely the sequelae of microangiopathy.  No acute hemmorhage, infarct, mass effect, or midline shift."  

Now, do I wait for Mid-State to contact me and offer explanation and what to do?  Or do I ask google to explain the lingo and advise procedures?  

Stopped into Westcott Law to find out if we are in the computer.  Email said no.  Should I contact Dorcas can't recall her last name, now!  Dorcas Murphy?  She is no longer with Westcott.  

Rick Evans called while we were watching General Hospital.  All is well but he is sending documents to update beneficiaries for two of our accounts.  Wrote him back and said maybe we should update all the accounts to be safe.  

So the word disease has shown up.  What to do about it?  How significant is it?  Normal part of aging?  Angiopathy?  Diet? medicine?  Cut back, kick up, smooth out?  

AI says it might be about blood pressure and to stay active.  Walk more?  What about nsaids on daily basis?  or live with whatever and try movement rather than any pills?