Evening Twilight: a Woman’S Village Journal, 2007-2011: A Woman’S Village Journal, 2007-2011

By Mary Kelly Black

This book is the third volume of journal selections (2007-2011). Volume I included an Introduction and some biographical memories. As with the previous two volumes, the major events of life claim little diaristic attention, the overlooked or insignificant habitually capturing the authors attention. Most journals or notebooks of eminent writers conclude with their relative youth, when they pick up the pen to create an imaginative retrospective journey, so there is little available of aging journal-keepers describing the downward journey. Those who maintained journals intime, or other forms of introspective writing, were rarely long lived, so there is little available of the aging journal-keeper describing the downward journey. Added to this is the paucity of proximal contemporaries who share or admit to the narrowing path, seeking instead the rejuvenations of youth. I unavoidably focus on the early twilight of this narrowing journey, lead me where it shall. Those interested in a more event-filled diary will find scant reportage in these pages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469172064

Mary Kelly Black

Mary Kelly Black was born Mary Kelly into a large Irish-Catholic family in Brooklyn, 1938, attended Brooklyn schools, migrated to Manhattan in 1957. She married briefly and moved to Illinois in the mid-1960s, then to the Village of Seneca Falls, New York, in the mid-1970s. Writing was primarily avocational, earning her living generally as management support staff in private, federal, and academic sectors, until retirement in 2003. Presently, she is President, Seneca Humane Society, and American Federation of Government Employees union officer for New York and New Jersey National Parks.

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EVENING

TWILIGHT

A WOMAN’S VILLAGE JOURNAL, 2007-2011

Mary Kelly Black

Copyright © 2012 by Mary Kelly Black

Library of Congress Control Number:      2012903522

ISBN:      Hardcover:                  978-1-4691-7205-7

Softcover:                   978-1-4691-7204-0

Ebook:                        978-1-4691-7206-4

Credits: Photographs by John Carman Stapleton

Acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote from previously published copyright material, all rights reserved:

Willis Barnstone, The Eleventh Commandment, Southwest Review, Vol. 85, No. 4, 2000.

Charles Bowden, from Contested Ground, reprinted in The Wisdom of Rats, Orion, November/December, 2009.

Andre Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. New York: Penguin Group (USA), Inc., translated by Nancy Huston, 2006.

What if Our World is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick, edited by Gwen Lee and Doris Elaine Sauter. Copyright © 2000 by Gwen Lee and Doris Elaine Sauter. Published in 2000 by The Overlook Press, New York, NY. All rights reserved. www.overlookpress.com.

Reprinted by Permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Vers de Societe, and The Old Fools, from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Excerpt from Baby Talk, from Collected Poems by C. K. Williams. Copyright 2006 by C. K. Williams.

Harpers Magazine, selections from April, 2002, January,2008, and January, 2011 issues, New York, NY. All rights reserved. Reproduced by special permission.

Tom Hayden, Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America

London and New York: American Verso, 2001.

Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson

New York, New Directions Publishing Corp., 2007.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1, Swann’s Way, revised by D. J. Enright, translated by Montcrieff and Kilmartin, translation copyright 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc. Revisions to the translation copyright © 1992 by D. J. Enright. Used by permission of Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 2, Within a Budding Grove, revised by D. J. Enright, translated by Montcrieff and Kilmartin, translation copyright 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc. Revisions to the translation copyright © 1992 by D. J. Enright. Used by permission of Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc.

Marcel Proust, Pleasures and Days, The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust

New York, Cooper Square Press, 2001.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote from previously unpublished material:

Ann Lorraine Kieffer and Felicia Phil Moss

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 05/05/2015

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INSIDE

Preface To Volume III

List Of Photographs

Selected Journal Entries

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DEDICATION

To John Carman Stapleton, Ulrike Cornelia Pohlig

and

Ann Lorraine Kieffer, for continuous, generous support

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Yet we have gone on living,

Living and partly living.

T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, 1935

Walk into the alone regardless, as life comes in minutes, not a stretch of years that might appear imaginatively bereft. As you walk and part the darkness, and it closes behind you, the misgivings dissolve, as the forward impetus is everything. Not into the future if older, but into the fearful dread so ignorantly described, where the demons of selfhood evaporate as well, and you may greet the diminished reality of aloneness, the inescapable you. Journal, 12/26/07

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PREFACE TO VOLUME III

Volumes I (1973-1982) and II (1983-2003) were published simultaneously by Xlibris in 2007. Volume I included introductory materials not reproduced in Volumes II or III: Preface From Where I Now Sit, and Memories of a Forgotten Life, fragments of recall from childhood and youth.

As with previous volumes, the major events of life claim little diaristic attention here, barely make the page, the overlooked or insignificant habitually capturing my attention. The historic Village of Seneca Falls was dissolved into the past on 12/31/11, so we jointly enter a shared twilight and inevitable decline.

Most published journals or notebooks of eminent writers conclude with their relative youth, when they pick up the pen to create an imaginative retrospective journey. Notable among these are Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson, and Romain Rolland. Those who maintained journals intime, or other forms of introspective writing, were rarely long lived, so there is little available of the aging journal-keeper describing the downward journey.

Added to this is the paucity of proximal contemporaries who share or admit to the narrowing path, seeking instead the rejuvenations of youth. I march in step with those coeval, and yet we are not, as I share little of their hope and illusion of becoming. Perhaps having no offspring to bridge the generations leaves me more sharply aware of my own. As well, I never sustained much interest in youthful aspirations, except my own insistent ones in their hour, so cannot claim any honest curiosity at this late stage. Thus, I unavoidably discover the early twilight of the narrowing journey, lead me where it shall.

Seneca Falls, NY

2011

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LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

Writing Corner

Elvis at Rest

Entry Garden, Winter

Entry Garden, Summer

Dancing Alone

Longtime, Loving Neighbor, Mary Marrapese

Entry Garden and Toby

American Beauty Rose, Winter

American Beauty Rose, Summer

A Garden for All Seasons, Winter

A Garden for All Seasons, Summer

Telescopic Trees, Previous Home

John Stapleton in Winter Garden

Summer Version

Roses Old Blush, Penelope, John Cabot

Roses Apple Blossom and New Dawn

Author and Ann Lorraine Kieffer, July 1988

Street-side Garden with Cats

Driveway Roses, Winter

Driveway Roses, Summer

Donna Mae and James Lombard, DVM, 2009

Early Spring Garden

Spring Irises

Heidi in Garden

Roses De Meaux, Ghislaine de Feligonde, Penelope

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SELECTED JOURNAL ENTRIES

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Vers de Société

My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps

To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps

You’d care to join us? In a pig’s arse, friend.

Day comes to an end.

The gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed.

And so Dear Warlock-Williams: I’m afraid—

Funny how hard it is to be alone.

I could spend half my evenings, if I wanted,

Holding a glass of washing sherry, canted

Over to catch the drivel of some bitch

Who’s read nothing but Which;

Just think of all the spare time that has flown

Straight into nothingness by being filled

With forks and faces, rather than repaid

Under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind,

And looking out to see the moon thinned

To an air-sharpened blade.

A life, and yet how sternly it’s instilled

All solitude is selfish. No one now

Believes the hermit with his gown and dish

Talking to God (who’s gone too); the big wish

Is to have people nice to you, which means

Doing it back somehow.

Virtue is social. Are, then, these routines

Playing at goodness, like going to church?

Something that bores us, something we don’t do well

(Asking that ass about his fool research)

But try to feel, because, however crudely,

It shows us what should be?

Too subtle, that. Too decent, too. Oh hell,

Only the young can be alone freely.

The time is shorter now for company,

And sitting by a lamp more often brings

Not peace, but other things.

Beyond the light stand failure and remorse

Whispering Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course—

Philip Larkin, High Windows (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), pp. 35-36. Printed by permission of Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, LLC.

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NOVEMBER 18, 2007, mid-40s, cloudy and windy

A return to these pages after nearly four years, the past three winters devoted to preparing for publication the original manuscript destroyed in the 2000 house fire. Not until retired in 2003, could I devote time to recapture the manuscript from an earlier version I had fortuitously given John in case of fire! Two volumes of the journal were published recently, so I resume these notebooks. The desire to have selections from 30 years of journals in print was to avoid such loss again. I have, however, scant motive for marketing these volumes, which shall remain as before of interest to a small group of readers.

The hands that hold the pen, or rests upon the page, are older, merely months from 70, and the legs more labored as I climb to this study bedroom. I was nearly half my present age when first I began. Much has passed and yet the sinews remain: the simpler shape and form of life, the introspective eye more retrospective than progressive, what Richard Ford describes as an end of perpetual becoming.

I am overly imbued with the retrospective, primarily from these past few years of readying past journals for publication, having read of myself to near satiety. It is impossible as writer to be a first reader, to comprehend what might interest and be fresh to others, and thus these volumes move away from me, and I from them. Jonathan Franzen believes readers are social isolates as children. More so the isolate who also writes, cocooned within the present, enjoying once more the hard-won interstices of hiatus necessary for this vocation.

The full retirement years speed as quickly as the half-year freedom of earlier years, as I knew they would. While still far busier in practical affairs than desirable, I move as well (with success) toward reducing these. Aging further compresses the hours, as that of a sleeping infant; far less is accomplished, and with less impetus and strength, though others still judge me a Sampson of energy.

The loss of a future is the strangest element, though the few I convey this to display umbrage at such blasphemy, as if they would not know or admit this. It is a timeless inanition, far different from the vast timelessness of younger years when I would enter, briefly, the suspended hours and silence of writing. Whenever I returned to these notebooks it was the same, often despite years of absence. That has changed; gone the initial unease with recaptured solitude, the familiar chamber of self that was simultaneously magnetic and repellant.

I am, at last, coeval with others, as so many women especially are alone or widowed at this age. I am less alien, merely having arrived decades earlier, describing in advance the reduced self. While many pride themselves on youthful thinking, curiosity, and activity, these occur in a circumscribed sphere without horizons or living egress.

The beauties of this shrunken world remain, with borders more formidable and unyielding, as if the village limits were precursors to further shrinkage, narrower and tighter, less illusory of personal events and growth. There is little of this reduction others wish willingly to hear, even if it be—as with me—an illness-free existence. It is the call to silence I receive, the appeal to a duplicitous illusion. If one is my age or older, such talk will only hasten their demise; if younger, it is inconceivable, as they protect themselves or proxy for the elderly.

A bad faith towards reduction drowns the silence—the noisy, incessant media in so many lives lending a false, frenetic pace and connection of aliveness. As I tired of such busyness in youth, before the advent of instant communication, I am stranger still to access and digital links, mourning decades of letter writing and these companionate journals. What is easiest to achieve is disengagement, a drifting divorce from impersonal technologies, as I remain linked to the external world with a few withering obligations. I do not free myself from one set of obligations to take on others, as sagely warned by Montaigne, but to still the pace, and examine, relish, and learn well the future-free shape of my existence.

So many more about me are near natural death, it is impossible to ignore their influence. I do not seek out youth to offset the imbalance, as I look on them simply as not yet on the inevitable path, and envy not a portion of their freshness. Who would ever wish to make this journey again, all joy and pain, whether the latter less, former more. Once is enough, regretting not ourselves departing from this earth, but solely the planet in dishabille, which remains the prime, impersonal sorrow. Reading of this virginal continent and its devolution, as well its further almost preordained losses, is the sole, indelible sadness that long life has brought. This is not, as has been described of Vergil, a commitment to sadness, but an inescapable assessment of legacy. I do not share this with youth, unless sought out, but primarily with rare intimates of similar conclusions.

What is valuable about writing is to clarify the sensations, in this instance, of aging, so these are freed from the vaguer mental regions of busyness, moving beyond murkiness into assimilation if valid. It is unimaginable the assessments of those ill and diseased, who may be disallowed such candor, or affrighted of it. I also do not speak to them of such matters, except as they near death and are more anxious for their final truths, where little of the language of aging has prepared them for finality. So much are well-kept secrets—the pleasures of retirement and the less-beneficent avenues to death. Once recorded in this journal, I shall move on, with awareness of this stranger in my flesh, whom emerged from fruitful, more restful retirement with its terminal message: Not beware, but be-aware, ignoring all communities of illusion.

The strong impetus to write has flagged as well, a memory of that urgent need preserved primarily in previous journals. That, of course, is the value of recording, as so much seems remote in its now-faded hour. All that was forsaken is not regretted; all that was lost mere chimera than painful regrets, the lightness of self familiar and preferred. I would undoubtedly spring to full and youth-like life again if the accouterments of solitude and silence—embraced by a garden—were lost or threatened. The houses I have written in have changed, living in this sixth one for 21 years. The bulk of writing was in the old village house of 12 years, in quest of the elixir of solitude, a nostalgic recall with its tangible chill of dampness. It is difficult to resurrect that urgency, nor shall I pretend to, observing in generational sequence the familiar stranger.

Volume II of the published journal selections closes with a photograph of my present writing desk, at which I now sit, and on the walls are other pictures of the desk, so I can enter and re-enter its encouraging ambience, the declivities of thought imaged in the varying lights captured by camera. Such self-voyeurism is evocative, a reminder in non-writing months or years of this essential vocation, which is both foundation and arch of my narrow world, the temptress away from other solutions.

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Writing Corner

This house of many and large windows yet affords no clear view of the back garden; thus, the eye is drawn to upper reaches of neighboring deserted yards, the birds fleet strokes of dark animation. The view seems narrower, conforming to all other constrictions, as if I were bound in stricter quarters or garments, yet without any youthful impatience for release in this largest of homes. There is also less mystery or magic in these neighboring yards, as I am more familiar with them and their occupants. Not a stale familiarity, but I cannot lend to them qualities they do not, in imagination, hold. There is more a prosaic than poetic quality to the light and shadows, the at-homeness of prolonged station in one locale. Yet I know that calm or fierce, somber or sunny, even the tempered nature that surrounds this domicile shall display its patient triumphalism or threat, humbling a writer of equanimity.

I admit the loss of magical connection is one sided—the loss is what has diminished in myself. If it be possible to recapture this lost magic, it will come with faithful attendance to less-worldly thoughts and writing. There is even a pleasure in loss and diminishment, in its closeness to my present nature and reality, the exigencies with which I grapple in this conspiratorial November twilight.

NOVEMBER 27, 2007, 38, mostly cloudy and damp

Ray Bradbury in Martian Chronicles describes trees as architectures of food and pleasure. For us, perhaps, but far more for the earth they anchor and the creatures housed. The massive evergreens surviving in this old neighborhood are more forward in this naked season, feathery needles quickening to the faintest breeze, more accurate than a wet finger. In a filmed version of 1776, Thomas Jefferson—called on to relate the day’s weather for the Congressional Record—puts his head out of window, checks a gauge for temperature, looks at the sky, then determines wind direction with a wet finger. No complex backlit map and light stick, or regional forecast, but near and immediate. And they experienced quite dramatic weather, especially winters, with snowfalls not experienced here in decades.

In listening to David McCullough’s John Adams, the descriptions of weather in Adams’ diaries reveal weather often not different from the anomalies we attribute to global warming, reaffirming that a timeless item in diaries and journals is weather reports. Or, at least, these are a tangible link, not alien as customs or contemporary prejudices. Earlier chroniclers are not imbued with weather, as they were more intimately immersed or battered by it. The natural condition or setting had not yet become an externality to be observed as news in a disengaged, well-protected leisure.

The outer world was often harbinger of disease and pestilence from mosquitoes or poor public sanitation, so there was little impetus for urban odes to the balmy air that harbored such threats, or to admire its vagaries. Our two centuries find us more distanced observers, reduced and isolated from daily and prolonged contact with the outdoors, increasingly entranced and subsumed by the substitute virtual, where we learn little and lose much. We have fingertip control over perceived or fictional enemies, but remain heavy footed and ignorant of the skills and rudiments of biological sustenance.

Unless majestic or catastrophic, the outdoors is banal or unpleasant, disabled for competition with the incessant tempo and advances of the artificial. In its progressions, the substituted world becomes more perfected and beguiling, as the increase in artificial flowers is nearly indistinguishable from the genuine. The surprise is no longer with the unreal but the real, a flower with burrowing bee or other insects, untidy petals and imminent messy decay. The faux are scentless, but that will soon likely change, joining the plethora of preferred substitute aromas and tastes. As we remove ourselves from the natural world, we become less able to contend with its harsher manifestations, exacerbating these through ignorance and indifference, where we create crises of planetary scope.

It has ever been, and shall be, a good time to be old for the aged, as the present-day transgressions are not to be inherited or solved by us. I will not pay any piper, though I heed the sound of its distant tones. The dissonance, for me, is not that of the actual from the virtual, but is chronological, having lived for most and at times in sanctuaries free of such threats and forebodings. The virtual helps preserve the more natural, which would be trampled to extinction in scarce forests and meadows if overrun by millions safely contained by pixels than a search for the illusive pixie. Ecotourism is more threat than respect of the remains of planetary splendor, where roadside zoos and botanic creations replace the exotic and diverse.

Do I run the risk with all these obvious complaints of becoming a finger-wagging crank, where age lends slight wisdom and bountiful sorrow for vanishing Arcadias? I have witnessed the destruction since youth of even the simplest natural settings, slowed somewhat in this isolated village, itself being reshaped into non-distinction to fill the maw of short-sighted consumption and the paltry employment and goods this promises.

In this less-lit section of the village, there is more darkness than illumination, few street lamps discernible, myself mirrored in the gloam of darkening windows, a self transfigured by the years: phosphorescent, an eerie temporal glow, then gone, passing with the click of lamp within this room, and the turning of the years and planet.

DECEMBER 4, 2007, 30, heavy snowfall

A beautiful snowfall, at least a foot, where I plowed with Elvis through the untrampled yard and diamantive light, avoiding the nearby creek for fear of our sliding in. At nine years, and quite suddenly, Elvis is far more attentive to my whistle or words, stopping or returning swiftly if too close to road or other mishap. When younger, he would be a shrinking canine at the horizon pursuing his nasal visions. As I never seriously train my dogs to heed, his remarkable responsiveness permits relaxation of my constant vigilance for open doors or gates. As I have run him without a leash in open fields for years, he would until recently ignore my calls if he saw another animal or person, requiring me to be telescopic in anticipation of intrusion. I never presume another prefers to see this large dog heading full speed forward, especially as most dogs we encounter are smaller. Only one dog was on the attack in those fields, and that years ago against Artemis. I had to run to where the attack began—as Artemis too enjoyed the freedom of open fields—where I grabbed the rude Shar-Pei from Artemis’ throat, handing it on its rear legs to its breathlessly apologetic owner.

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Elvis at Rest

The domestic value of a large dog as Elvis is his plowing through dooryard snow, creating paths to the far birdfeeders, where I then follow his tracks, treading these down without the tedium and fatigue of shoveling. I shovel far less than when younger, granting myself the reprieve of aging, where I ask each winter Why bother? When John lived here several winters past to recuperate from an injury, I shoveled the seemingly football-field driveway for parking and his underfoot safety. Elvis, as did his littermate Priscilla who died in May, loves snow, swimming into its drifts, nose and face buried, or dustings of snow from trees on his back, snow rapidly melting in the kitchen as he enters through the pet door. He naps on the snow, thick furred and drowsy, or wakes to observe the minute movements in the neighborhood. He never exhibits overheating or discomfort indoors, but prefers a bed of snow, so neglect of snow removal in the large driveway is a treat for him, though soon enough his pressure and melting yield a driveway of treacherous ice, where none can safely walk until spring.

I recall Red and Pretty Kitty again,