2) After dusk, across the Inlet, the same Pacific Ranges obscured by clouds like bruises, heavy with northern darkness flowing down Vancouverwards in the wake of the weak, southern-tilted sun, a daystar, only, in the winter. This roil of bruising, fog, and blackness was pinned back against the mountains’ feet by many freighters’ bridges, lit towers of molten gold. The suburbs on the slopes were a gridwork of carnelian. No: a gridwork of sodium, neon, and argon–no: marine ash, new air, rare, and ab-active influence on filaments encoiled, fiery, and fine. In the language of Vancouver City, street lighting poles are nodes; conduits, ducts. Abandoned conduits and boxes for the junctions moulder in tusks of ivy tangled, rain-slimed, and shot through with parabolae of thorny blackberry canes.

3) Robinson Jeffers died today, in 1962. His poetry is grotesque and sublime, it is vivid and viscid in detail, sometimes grandiloquescent, sometimes sheer and understated. Apparently he died alone; it must have been hard. Una, his wife, died before him. I have winced at some of his sentimental and condescending letters to her, but here is a poem about her, or at least for her, that I like. I like it because although it is likewise sentimental, it expresses very well the tension between love of life and love for death that becomes complicated when you love someone and live with them for years and years, knowing all the while that it ends, and is always ending.

For Una

I

I built her a tower when I was young—

Sometime she will die—

I built it with my hands, I hung

Stones in the sky.

Old but still strong I climb the stone—

Sometime she will die—

Climb the steep rough steps alone,

And weep in the sky.

Never weep, never weep.

II

Never be astonished, dear.

Expect change,

Nothing is strange.

We have seen the human race

Capture all its dreams,

All except peace.

We have watched mankind like Christ

Toil up and up,

To be hanged at the top.

No longer envying the birds,

That ancient prayer for

Wings granted: therefore

The heavy sky over London

Stallion-hoofed

Falls on the roofs.

These are the falling years,

They will go deep,

Never weep, never weep.

With clear eyes explore the pit.

Watch the great fall

With religious awe.

III

It is not Europe alone that is falling

Into blood and fire.

Decline and fall have been dancing in all men’s souls

For a long while.

Sometime at the last gasp comes peace

To every soul.

Never to mine until I find out and speak

The things that I know.

IV

To-morrow I will take up that heavy poem again

About Ferguson, deceived and jealous man

Who bawled for the truth, the truth, and failed to endure

Its first least gleam. That poem bores me, and I hope will bore

Any sweet soul that reads it, being some ways

My very self but mostly my antipodes;

But having waved the heavy artillery to fire

I must hammer on to an end.

To-night, dear,

Let’s forget all that, that and the war,

And enisle ourselves a little beyond time,

You with this Irish whiskey, I with red wine

While the stars go over the sleepless ocean,

And sometime after midnight I’ll pluck you a wreath

Of chosen ones; we’ll talk about love and death,

Rock-solid themes, old and deep as the sea,

Admit nothing more timely, nothing less real

While the stars go over the timeless ocean,

And when they vanish we’ll have spent the night well.

2) Pine mushrooms/Ponderosa mushrooms/matsutake with udon. The mushrooms are available at Whole Foods, but we have really got to learn to hunt them for ourselves. I’d never realized, before we began to make this recipe, how intensely good pine mushrooms are. We’ve made this food twice in the last two weeks and are on the verge of buying out the store’s stock.

Chop pine mushrooms into two handfuls of 1″x1″ pieces

Heat butter in a wok or large frying pan till brown

Inhale the cinnamon aroma of the pine mushrooms and then throw them into the pan

Deglaze with good saké, not too sweet

Throw fresh udon into the sauce created by the mushrooms, butter, and sake

Squeeze wedges of lemon over everything; eat slowly

3) The MOA, Museum of Anthropology. There is, among other things, a South Seas collection made by the former owner of the house I live in now. He was the son of a whaler; he became something of an entrepreneur, moved around Canada, settled in Vancouver, and then sailed all around the South Pacific in a schooner–collecting shrunken heads, wooden swords, beads, shells, carven figures, shields, and so on. He had these on display all through the house. He somehow also accumulated a collection of things belonging to Inuit in the Coppermine River region.

4) The house I’m living in is 99 years old. I’m in the attic, which is good for the light and for seeing the mountains and the cedar trees, the skyscrapers and the ski hills lit up at dusk. It’s been renovated nicely, which is helpful for avoiding the bedbugs that seem to inhabit even the library books in this city. It is at the top of three landings and three flights of stairs.

One begins by climbing slippery, frost-coated exterior stairs of unpainted wood to the second floor entrance. The second floor itself is at the top of a second set of interior stairs that are carpeted, dusty, steep, and dark. Then one has to walk through the second floor, which is a weird communal boarding room arrangement between hippies who work for MEC. Mostly this just means photos of Bob Marley in clouds of sorcerous-looking pot smoke and sentimental quotations on little banners on the wall. Sadly, it also means incense; I’m working on putting seals on my door, because I’m a grinch. The common area belonging to the second floor is full of shelves of ski boots and camping gear, and it’s always very dark, with heavy, dark wooden trim on all the windows and doors and wainscotting. The area is lit only by a large, dingy wall of stained glass on one side and a paper lantern painted with Zen characters on the other.

There is a tiny rainbow sticker on the door to my apartment (which is at the top of the steepest stairs of all), because for the thirty years before I moved in, it was inhabited by Brenda and Lucy, who used to live in separate apartments in the house, and fell in love, and one of them moved up into the attic with the other one.

5) Frost. The combination of mountain and sea air in Vancouver is quite unusual. It’s very fresh, and produces heavy, sharp, shining hoarfrost on all the leaves and the pavement and even the sand along the ocean. And on the stairs.

Also 6) There is a baby grey squirrel that lives in a pile of yard trimmings on one edge of the forest. It watches us pass by and we watch how it roams its little home–every branch in the heap and every little cavern of leaves–with intimate familiarity.

1)

2) Damned folk (even if it is folk rock):

3) Sunset on Mars:

4) Fairly infrequently one can follow a stream from its origin to end–depending how you define origins and ends:

From the beach below Spanish Bank. At low tide the stream welled up out of the sand and ran straight into the ocean. Why does this blow my mind? Because the big city is SO not epic. And this little stream was epic.

5) A new blog is out, from a good friend and someone I miss, and it really is in a state of near-perfection: http://aaronkreuter.com/blog.

2) Vestmannaeyjar.

3) Out for a walk the other night along Spanish Bank, the tide was out. I walked out on sand settled and rippled into unending edges by the ocean, and watched the sunset turn the waterlogged sand orange and pink and gold and blue–no: mandarin and peony and lemon and indigo; no: long-wavelength hues and non-spectral purples. Blue herons and gulls fished in fingers of water. The mountains in the cleft beyond the end of the Strait were high-lofted by the atmosphere and white and orange with snow and light. The freighters in the Inlet–and there are always so many of them–were Tonka-bright, monolithic stripes of red and black and blue on smooth, dark water. Standing in rippling, tide-soaked sand and looking up at the rippling sky proved such a good illusory sense of elevation that two other strangers came out to join me even though our shoes slowly soaked through with brine.

2) Movie: Eyes Wide Shut, uncut. All the non-LED Christmas lights glowing on all the breasts one could ever want in a schmaltzy, psychoanalytical sex cult movie. Must be watched late at night, while slightly depressed. Enchanting.

3) Drink: Forget eggnog (even the vegan kind), forget champagne. Scotch and soda.

4) Gift: Next in the collection of crystals (the Vancouver years) is sulphur. There is a very old store with a rather old rock man in it who is dusting off some large sulphur crystals for me to look at. The best thing about sulphur crystals, besides the theory that they’re formed through a combination of chemical and bacterial action, is that they smell faintly of, yes, sulphur.

5) Venue: The cold, wet, crashy beach. Where else?

Here is a photo of Tom Cruise looking paranoid, which he does quite well:

But all this is an exaggeration, and boring. The real question is, where can I find red crystals? Yes, the pattern: all the colours of the rainbow. Much more exciting, yes? Do you have time for anything else?

Constraint! Wendy Lewis’s deadpan vocals at the start with Reid Anderson’s spare bass. Wait for the last two minutes, when Ethan Iverson’s piano takes itself apart up into the sky, only to float on down at the end into total quiet, wonderful depression.

Also: