The Great Perhaps of Silence: A Woman’S Village Journal, 2012–2017

By Mary Kelly Black

This book is the fourth volume of journal selections (2012-2017). Volume I, Lovely, Lonely Life: A Womans Village Journal, 1973-1982, includes an Introduction (From Where I Now Sit) and some biographical memories (Memories of a Forgotten Life). Volume II, Lovely, Lonely Life: A Womans Village Journal, 1983-2003), and Volume III, Evening Twilight: A Womans Village Journal, 2007-2011.
As throughout the previous journals, the major events of life claim little diaristic attention, but more the introspective focus of a journal, intime (French for intimate or cozy). Any coziness or warmth is more evident in "cozy's" Scandinavian origin, as the bulk of these journals were written in winter. Readers more interested in an event-filled diary will find scant reportage in these volumes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543472592

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.

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 by Mary Kelly Black.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2017919116

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5434-7257-8

             Softcover     978-1-5434-7258-5

             eBook          978-1-5434-7259-2

Credits: Cover photo by Felicia Phil Moss; author’s photo by John Carman Stapleton

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

Willis Barnstone, Translator, To Touch the Sky: Poems of Mystical & Metaphysical Light (New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1999).

Dan Chiasson, The Grand Poem, Notes toward an understanding of Wallace Stevens, Harper’s Magazine, June 2016.

John Crowley, Madame and the Masters, Blavatsky’s Cosmic Soap Opera, Harper’s Magazine, February 2013.

Ann Leverson Kieffer, Three Trees, Seeing the Trees (Atlanta, GA: Atlanta Book Printing, 2012).

Adrian C. Louis, Under the White Sun, Random Exorcisms (Warrensburg, MO.: Pleiades Press, 2016).

Mark McMorris, The Drums of Marrakesh, c2015, in Ben Lerner, "The Drums of Marrakesh, Harper’s Magazine, March 2016.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Interview, The Lucky Strike (Oakland, CA.: PM Press, 2009).

Sam Sacks, Life Choices, Paul Auster’s Multitudes, Harper’s Magazine, February 2017.

Acknowledgment is made for brief quotes or references to published materials not affected by copyright:

Samuel Beckett, from An Abandoned Work, A mediation for radio, 12/14/57.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Catsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925).

John Galsworthy, A Modern Comedy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928).

John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga, The Man of Property (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1906, 1918).

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Faust, 1828-29.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (New York: Modern Library edition, 2012).

Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Ode (1844-81)

John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture (New York: W. W.Norton & Co., Inc. 1929).

Sir Walter Scott, Journal

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair [1848] (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1991).

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

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: 01/25/2018

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Inside

Preface to Volume IV

List of Photographs

Selected Journal Entries

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DEDICATION

With boundless gratitude to John Carman Stapleton for decades of

generous support and encouragement

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For each age is in a dream that is dying

or one that is coming to birth.

Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Ode (1844-81)

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 decline, 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.

Final Journal entry, 2/4/17

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Preface to Volume IV

This book is the fourth volume of journal selections (2012-2017). Volume I, Lovely, Lonely Life: A Woman’s Village Journal, 1973-1982, includes an Introduction (From Where I now Sit) and some biographical memories (Memories of a Forgotten Life, fragments of recall from childhood and youth). Volume II, Lovely, Lonely Life: A Woman’s Village Journal, 1983-2003, and Volume III, Evening Twilight: A Woman’s Village Journal, 2007-2011.

As throughout the previous volumes, the major events of life claim little diaristic attention, but more the introspective focus of a journal intime (French for intimate or cozy). Any coziness or warmth evident in this avocational output is primarily in the word’s Scandinavian origin, as the bulk of these four decades of journals were written in well-protected winter.

Although the historic Village of Seneca Falls was absorbed into the Town on 12/31/11, the Village’s embracing ambience was never lost in my reflections. Thus, it remains faithfully in heart and mind throughout these final pages, despite its legal erasure and my own imminent departure.

Seneca Falls, NY

2017

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List Of Photographs

Author, 27, 1965

Christmas Day Pond

Summer Pond, 6/23/13

Julio and Paula, Winter 2015

Winter Pond, 2/15/15

Blue winter twilight

Mary Marrapese, granddaughter Lisa’s wedding, 1989

Rene Marie Pichany-Keenly, Wedding 5/21/1993

Spring Garden, 5/1/17

GLYPH%20ONE.jpg

Selected Journal Entries

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February 10, 2012, 40 degrees

I am not the man that I was. The plough is coming

to the end of the furrow.

Sir Walter Scott, Journal

A return to these pages after more than a year, months of headache and ceaseless work, the headaches vanished after proper glasses prescribed, the work my self-imposed cat rescue and household maintenance. Other health problems arose, which I have forgotten in their satisfactory resolution. In my rebound hardiness, I no longer live quite in the weighty shadow of age and demise, their presence more endued than external, less threat than incorporate.

Sir Walter Scott’s words are reminder against late-life hubris, as the several health issues arrived without warning, no slow accretion of ruin and decay, as if falling down a long flight of stairs, rising with suddenly acquired difficulty, aging in a free fall of compressed time. I am no longer who I was, but who is and shall be, the latter two states more coupled than the younger self, who preserves a remotely intense existence in earlier journals, otherwise an eclipsing stranger.

This winter has been restful, concluding and submitting for publication Volume III of these journals (Evening Twilight: A Woman’s Village Journal, 2007-2011), the previous two volumes (1973-1982; 1983-2003) published in 2007. The black and white photos, including those of the garden, reproduced surprisingly well in galley form. I included winter and summer garden photos juxtaposed, though the lack of color in a trade book may appear as if all were dormant.

After preparing Volume III for publication, I re-read Volumes I and II, preparing a list of overlooked errors, so future reprints will be more accurate. I revisited in those pages Ulli’s judgment that these journals would prove of interest primarily or solely to intimates, those who know or are curious about me. A character in one of T. S. Eliot’s plays (I believe The Family Reunion) mentions a friend who wrote adequate poetry. Another character responds, the poetry is of interest if you are interested in her. A disinterested audience is perhaps limited for the self-reflective (often judged self-absorbed) journal-keeper, while I consider the audience more limited by the effort required to read these volumes.

I, of course, retain some interest in that long-ago self, while unable to determine whether any who knew me not would have patience for a record of such habitual self-scrutiny. If, as Philip Larkin wrote, All solitude is selfish, these volumes are as well, avoiding which would have been extreme self-negation. As well, the Irish comedic frustration and bluster that likely would have substituted for this avocation inspire me to continue, aware my initial judgment is the result of revisiting those decades in a brief span as reader, editor, author and critic.

I was surprised nonetheless how much was fresh to me, while simultaneously alienated from the more-youthful aspirations, the necessitous long-ago intellectual and biological impetus, now foreign and remote. In this retrospective mood, I would never wish to be younger by a day, to relive even the best of younger years, or to live another life entirely, even if the better lessons of this one were mine from birth. Once is truly enough. If not evident in these words, this is not pessimism or defeat, but relief that the bulk of the journey is over, and I need not rise to such ardent challenges again. My less-Kafkaesque inner world has vanished, emptied by language and observation, desiccated by excavation.

I can barely glimpse evening twilight, writing in a room with a view narrower than usual, as I keep a tiny kitten company. Febra sits atop my head as did little Gypsy years before. This kitten, exuberantly reborn as I sit to write, battles with the pen’s movement and inscriptions, my rescue habit weaker but not yet at rest, despite proclamations and sincere desire.

Winter has been mild with scant snow, though earlier weeks brought ample rain for water table and garden. With book preparation and other projects, the winter disappears, October’s bedding of the garden mere yesterday, though Spring does not hover with its familiar burdens, as I continue to cast off physical responsibilities, the workload shared by John. A new 90-foot vinyl fence will be installed in April along the large back flowerbed, requiring no painting, reducing further the burden of maintaining lengths of wooden fencing. All that is required is to cut back the many plantings and vines along the fence, which by next year will flourish as before, this garden that has survived transplanting, flood and fire, improving every year, the transformative powers of nature assisting the grateful gardener, sempiternal until my final gesture in its service.

My preternatural precipitance envisions this large house empty, gifted to someone in need, the garden undoubtedly neglected or plowed under, as was John’s at the lake, and me in narrower, easier quarters, shaping myself more sepulchrally, drying as pressed flower and leaf, more brittle to the touch and enormously indifferent to the urgencies of youth, when all that mattered was essential, the insistent motive to confront now diminished, as I remain faithfully coeval with each stage of life. It is 6pm, darkness ascended as I wrote, the dulled window more onyx than reflective light.

FEBRUARY 13, 2012, 30, clear and windless

Colder weather has resumed, alternating all season with milder days, no extended period of cold thus far these months and not likely as calendric Spring approaches, the past few days’ snow melting in the bold February sun, which is bright and still above horizon at 4:30. I pledge myself to equally quieter days, those that remain before I am required out of doors, resuming garden cleanup begun last week when snowdrops first appeared through Fall’s decaying leaves, soon to prune clematis and mums, then an hiatus until warm enough to prune the myriad roses, some of which yet maintain bright leaves and frozen buds.

It has been too cold or wet to go often to the park, walking only Ruby and Lu Lu now, as Mabby-Doodles has lost most her back legs’ mobility, and Katie flounders as well, slipping and collapsing on the smooth floors, getting stuck in the pet door, so she requires close monitoring. I hope I have the resolve for no more dogs, especially older ones, who require care and nursing so soon after arrival, when both John and me have diminishing patience and fortitude for such responsibility. I can easily lift a cat, but a dog requires strong back muscles with greater risk of injury to both.

Although I envision an empty house, hopefully that may not occur for another decade, as each annual heavy cleaning involves disposal of the burden of belongings, especially John’s, as he clings more to personal baggage, while recognizing my dread of facing such dispossession alone. The basement