The Quail Diaries, Notebook Series 3

If I were without attachment I might not be so afraid. Is that true? and if it is will you tell me please?

I could feel the ocean today, as it reached up over me and the little fish came to nibble.

But, I am not at the ocean, I am in a house, with the coming cold front beating the windows. Snow is coming. Quail do ok in limited snow, but not a lot, at least, that is how it sometimes appears. But perhaps, it is just the amount of frost during breeding season—what is your thought?

I am reporting on the notebook. I am not inclined today to think about sanity and insanity. All the old Hollywood pablum, spoonfed to us, about the liberation of insanity—see the Vagabond before you long for the freedom of indigency.

My friend has lost her mind.

When, thickly covered in darkness,
it imagines that wrong is right
and sees the world upside down

Nature will compel you

Nature will

compel you

to act

And today’s tidbit (or if you prefer, titbit):
The top of the page is ripped—RP refers to those parts that are lost. All spelling in all the entries are as by the author.

I remember [RP]
Linda saying t[RP]
going to kill his father.[RP]
Way to the airport[RP]
was he still mad about[RP]
Beating him up? Shoudnt he
have Warnd him? His Best
friend Was [illegible] Chuk. They were
sneaking around on our one neighbor Dad frend.
Marty [superimposed above] he [which is crossed out] always had that tape recorder
on him.

At the bottom is a drawing of a rectangle with a centered horizontal and vertical line stretching across side to side and top to bottom, forming a cross. At each bottom corner is a circle with curved lines. The right circle seems to have the curved lines in the form of one arm a body and two legs. Inside the circle are two dots and a curved line, like eyes and a smiling mouth.

Italics are from the Bhagavad Gita.

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The Quail Diaries, Notebook Series,2

I am the Self

Seated in the heart of all being

I do not know whether the author of the notebook is a woman or a man (and does it matter?). A part of me seems to have always assumed it was a man–I seem to have superimposed the author of the notebook onto the man they suspected of setting the brush alight. He was, if you recall, indigent, and was camping on the hill. One fire set the hill alight–the Fire Investigator believes it to be the result of a hot pan, set down to smolder.

I am the beginning and the life span

of beings and their end as well

He returned, and continued to set cooking and campfires. I saw him. I found his campsite and Devlin saw a plume of smoke once. He continued to light fires until the police told him to move on.

demons…I am time

I want to talk about the notebook…I do not really want to revisit this man. Do you think he might be a bit crazy? What does that mean and isn’t it such an easy label? I have spent time with people diagnosed with our Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)–schizophrenic, psychotic. Some of us are lucid some of us will never be lucid. Is this man that allegedly set the first blaze accidentally insane? (Here is why I think he might be–a high proportion of indigent people are diagnosed with a mental illness, he set the fire and then returned and set a few more–all apparently for the purpose of cooking, the man I saw had some of the markings)

devourer

The man I saw had the markings. Is that fair of me? Am I stereotyping? I am tired of invasions, of being open and being frightened

I am time

A few pages later

[] er when []m’s triping out mom boght Pop []000 DimaD ring <1971>[crossed out] 72

She has sins put the Dimod in a ring for her.  She wears it all the time.

—

quotes not from the notebook are from the Bhagavad Gita, Trans. Stephen Mitchell.

The Quail Diaries–Notebook Series, 1

[My computer has been sick–and so on and so on–but now I will perhaps be back]

My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun

I am taking time with the notebook

In Corners

I am finally able to peel pages apart. I think it is because the paper is a lot drier after being inside for a couple of months–or maybe moister, from being in Seattle? I am a bit anxious because I am not an archivist.

This is peering down the top of the notebook. Can you see the water damage? And the staining? I wonder whether the stains are from ink, soil, something else or all of these? Probably all, don’t you think? The lines are all gone, or faded.

Can you see the bit of writing at the top right, it looks like a brown squiggle to me, with blue lines nearby. How much writing has been lost by weathering I wonder?

I have finally realized that this was not an active journal. It is a collection of memories. Many pages start, “I remember.” What sort of memories? The ones that roughly point to actual events or the ones that we create when we solidify our forms as adults. Sane memories or not so sane?

But memories are all the interstices between sanity and insanity, are they not? Perhaps not a bridge but the firings of neurons, the synaptic connections, the bridge between sensation and conceptualization. Story making.

The pages of the journal are like skin. They look like skin to me at least, like something of the body, something of biology.

Traveling into the center of the notebook seems to be the meeting of two legs, as though I could travel up from here to the heart and head, and journey right through the body back up to the stars.

I will, for the next week or so, transcribe pages from the journal.

Page one:

1972

We move to Yuma [drawing of CA, baja CA, AZ, Mexico, with Yuma shown as a dot]

Just in case mom pop got couth or thing [illegible]

they could run into Mexico.

Next page with visible writing (page two for my purposes–all further legible pages will be coded with numbers in order of their appearance):

1978

The year statues of limitations ran Out. Free to spend the rest of the money

Pop got a new Harly Davison [sketch of Motorcycle] Mom got 77 Oldsmobile

Sherry got a vette/house

frinitha [sic]

—

Quotes not from the notebook are from Emily Dickinson, poem 764 (Franklin’s numbering)