July 11 - Friday still. A willing, creative girl with a sense of humor, and three potential jobs, I am now, though. Thumbing desperately through Want Ads, I've considered becoming a painter of parchment lamp shades, a file clerk, a typist: Anything to give me that intangible-self-respect. Somehow I feel a great need for having a Job, no matter what, no matter how unremunerative. So I answered an add in the Townsman for "a highschool girl who likes to write" and ended up with Mrs. Williams, an aggressive and humerous widowed real-estate agent. (Never will I forget that amazing Wednesday with her which I started unsuspectingly enough with an interview at 10:30 and ended, somewhat exhausted, at 4:30, after having met and talked with her other interviewees - the Court's (Janet and the unforgettable fat, wheezy brown-eyed doughy intellectual Mrs.), the professors wife; and met Crazy Grace, the scatterbrained housekeeper who talked to herself all the time and thought she could sell houses because she sold germicides once and "It takes a lot of personality, selling germicides." - there were the trips down town, the going through two houses - one with a busy mother and her babies, to sell for $18,900, and one with a clover-grown lawn that the fat, lethargic TV listening Raymond would never get around to mowing ... for $20,500. There were the trips to new houses, the talking with builders and watching Mrs. Williams' aggressive, admirably unscrupulous methods of playing on every possible angle, no matter how shifty. All this, and a black-and-white float in Hopkins to cool our perspiring and sticky psyches. So I could be a Girl Friday for her all summer, maybe not earning anything, unless there should be a sale: seeing houses, wheedling builders, writing add copy, and even showing people houses if I got advanced enough. Veddy fascinating, if financially nebulous. Second is the possibility that Mrs. Williams herself will get me another job as waitress during the summer at the place where her daughter is working. That, however, is an off chance, in spite of the fact that she is best friends with the head of the Inn. The third and most promising job is one I read in the classified section of the Christian Science Monitor - a mother in Chatham (of all the strategic places - near Dick, Art, etc.!) wants a "neat, intelligent college-age girl of pleasing personality" to help with her two children. Sounds great. That's me. So I call, make an appointment for an interview this weekend, and it all sounds veddy promising - a quiet house evenings to study in, out of doors with the children, slower living, and just about as much pay as I'd make at the Belmont - we shall however, not yet count our chickens!

  July 25 - Chickens being duly counted, hatched, and I at the Cantors'." Life: full, rich, long, part of the family, growing to know them and their quietnesses, their laughters, their convictions, and always subtly probing, questioning, the core - Christian Science. (And thinking how Catholics are indoctrinated, and how hard to argue with are these then also.) Not argue, but discuss. They start with one major premise - an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God consisting of: Abstract qualities; perfect realities: Love, Life, Mind, Truth, Soul, Spirit, Principle. God is perfect and made man in his image, i.e.: perfect. God is not anthropomorphic - i.e. not like man, corporeal. If god made man perfect, where did sickness, disease and death come from? From "mortal mind," from error, the figment of matter being myth, rising like "mist" (see Genesis) to cloud the truth, which is God. So Jesus came to heal man of sickness and sin & return him to Godliness, perfection, wholeness. If God is all and real and spirit, there can be no logical admission of error as real, as that would imply god is not omnipotent and everywhere, but had a rival, thus error is unreal. God is the only reality. Mind over matter, real over unreal, truth over error - and so on.

  I would argue, or discuss, on their premise. More stimulating that way. A skeptic, I would ask for consistency first of all. If matter is unreal, if we are imprisoned in these clay carcasses, if disease is imaginary and unreal (Billy cries: "I hurt my elbow." She says: "Know the truth. You are God's child. Could God's child be hurt? Of course not. God has no elbows, no body. Know the truth and the truth will make you free.") if this is all so, then why pamper your "illness". Some devout Christian Scientists don't, and have let their wives or husbands die of cancer, for example. But these say "Error is trying to talk ... " and let their children stay in bed if they "don't feel well." Also have their teeth filled. Now that, to me, seems illogical. It is all very well to say they don't have "enough understanding of the truth," and that Christian Science (C.S.) also stands for "common sense," but isn't that a tacit admission that matter, even if an illusion, is a pretty potent one? And that they are victims of it's tyranny? According to Mrs. C., any one, no matter how simple, can practice Christian Science by thinking about God first, and his divine unchanging spiritual qualities. And God gave man dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air. Hence man can vanquish the serpent of fear, turning it into a rod again, casting out fear, sickness, disease.

  Now that I ponder over it, I do see a sudden neat edifice of logic, and I do agree with some of their generalizations in spite of the fact that I am philosophically at the other end of the pole, - a "matter worshiper."

  First, I do believe that "thinking makes it so" and that "attitude is everything." This the Christian Scientists seem to use to illustrate the power of real mind (divine) over unreal mind (mortal). I believe that there is a realm (abstractly, hypothetically, of course) of absolute fact. Something IS. And that, in our poor human lingo, would be the "truth." (But as far as I am concerned, that truth is matter, not spirit.) However, to each individual man, viewing facets, slivers, fragments of this whole truth (which must be) through his own particular grotesque glass of distortion, the truth will be, for him, a mere magnification and personal fallible interpretation of the special facet, sliver or fragment he sees. No man can ever grasp the whole impersonal neutrality of a universe. That is hidden under the mists of subjectivity. We are merely variously constructed sounding boards for the noise of the pine tree falling (proverbially) in the forest. The sound is potential, even if no one is there to hear it. Just as radio programs are all around us, clogging the air, needing only a certain sensitive mechanism to make them a reality, a fact. So what is reality? The definition is so arbitrary. It could be the basic truth, the fact of matter, impersonal, neutral. Or it could be, for each individual, what that individual chooses to make of his corner of the world. Looking at the world through the distorted colored lens of the individual, one might see only a few objects clearly - a math problem, a clock, a jet plane. Even the neutral things seen would be colored by personal attitudes toward them. Reasoning deductively you would come to think, after picking up, squinting through, and putting down a number of these human lenses, that reality is relative, depending on what lens you look through. Each person, banging into the facts, neutral, impersonal in themselves (like the Death of someone) - interprets, alters, becomes obsessed with personal biases or attitutes, transmuting the objective reality into something quite personal (like the death of My Father = tears, sorrow, weeping, dolorous tints, numbing of certain areas of sensation and perception about the stream of life moving about one ... ) Hence, "Thinking makes it so." We all live in own dream-worlds and make and re-make our own personal realities with tender and loving care. And my dream-world - how much more valid, how much nearer to the truth is it than that of these people? Valid for me, perhaps - even though it is not metaphysical. Even if I do consider mucous and sinus real - and medical schools have been instituted to cure through medication such machinations of "error and mortal mind." If they believe in life-after-death in a heavenly spiritual realm, what a pleasant solace it is for them - and what individual strength it can give. Why quibble: "It is absurd. It isn't so." For me, it isn't so, and I turn to hide irreverent laughter when Susan, constipated, gets a lesson instead of a laxative. But for them, it is so, absolutely so. And thus individuals construct absolutely real dream Kingdoms - paradoxically all "true" although mutually exclusive at the same time. My dream-bubble of reality exists side by side with theirs, without breaking fragmentarily asunder. We live and move together in the realm of concrete experience, harmoniously, motivated and propelled by our own dream-realities. And even that idea of mine is no doubt itself an artificial dream-reality.

  Man labors in laboratories to discover the truth, the unchanging fact. Yet what the head knows, the senses contradict. And who is to malign the senses, calling them false? Pick your winners, your own sides - concept (mind) says railroad tracks are parallel and never meet. Percept (sense: here, eyes) say railroad tracks meet at the distant point where one can plainly see that they converge. Which is true? Both concept and percept. Yes. And man can integrate the two as best he can, or choose one in preference of the other. He is "lord of the counter positions." He has been given dominion.

  And as for myself, I perceive all through the senses - mind among them. I must read up on the neural theories, the complexities. Someday, they will be understood. I have that confidence in the mind and intellectual curiosity of man. "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" So paltry, and so colossal. So puny and so potential.

  I wonder now, on August 6, lying here on my white bed, listening to the rain: slant long and hard on the roof outside my windows coming down liquidly, drippingly plural and generous from the low gray skies, fluently saying what I choose to make it say. Slanting down the screen in milky, translucent streams, prolific, uncaringly beneficent, it heals or annoys, (as we humans choose to translate it.) And I love it because of the sound, and the gray pluvial walls of it dropping down, closing in. Not knowing why. Not dissecting my liking or feeling, not being materialistic or matter-of-fact, but mystic - will use vague elusive words like "rapport," "affinity," for the calm pleasure I feel welling up in me.

  We perceive things through the concrete object and illustration. We see, we smell, we taste, we touch, we hear - and the abstract words are synthesized from the realms of concrete experience - from all the men kissing all the girls and all the mothers suckling all their babies, we get "love" - the abstract concept, and in turn apply it to the concrete individual percept: a particular individual man kisses a particular individual girl and says "I love you." They are "in love": in the abstract realm where their concrete acts harmonize with the atmosphere, synthetic-and man-made though it be. -

  "Everything is the same but different."

  Paradox again. Two mutually exclusive and contradictory adjectives are applied at the same time to the universe. And this phrase is again a unique insight into the repetitious and varied universe man has woken up in and begun to work at transforming into something he can call his own. We are all men, but as different as we are similar - as opposite as we are alike. We know a thing by its opposite corollary: hot by having experienced cold; good, by having decided what is bad; love by hate.

  And yet Art says there are certain absolute moral standards in society approved of by all - that all is not relative as I would seem to imply. For instance, that nowhere is it "good" to do a friend dirt behind his back, kill him, for instance. All right - if a "friend" is defined as one with whom one has established a very close, personal attachment of love and understanding, it would be frowned on to injure him in anyway - but if he were going mad, this hypothetical friend, would you do what was requested by society and sent him to an asylum, or be true to his pitiful demented pleading and let him stay free as long as you could. Or, if he had defied the law, would your first loyalty be to him or to the welfare of the community? All questions being merely theoretical. And just for the record, consider all the potential "friends" we slaughter off in war, just because they are arbitrarily labeled "enemy."

  Is everything we do an attempt to choose between the lesser of two evils? Is man, in this sense, born in original sin? Or perhaps just born into a world of "sin," sin being the tragic dilemma of making wrong or less wrong choices, with nothing to approve or condone the choice - nothing but the fruits of the choice and attendant action to decree whether the choice was good or bad. And even, then, always, the doubt.

  August 8 - Friday - 9:45 p.m.

  In bed, bathed, and the good rain coming down again - liquidly slopping down the shingled roof outside my window. All today it has come down, in its enclosing wetness, and at last I am in bed, propped up comfortably by pillows - listening to it spurting and drenching - and all the different timbers of tone - and syncopation. The rapping on the resonant gutters - hard, metallic. The rush of a stream down the drain pipe splattering flat on the earth, wearing away a small gully - the musical falling of itself, tinkling faintly on the tin garbage pails in a high pitched tattoo. And it seems that always in August I am more aware of the rain. A year ago it came down on my porch and the lawn and the flat gray sea beyond at the Mayos - closing me in the great house in the day, talking to me alone in my room in the evening as I sat alone in bed writing; surveying my kingdom from my throne: the lone streetlight on the corner, hanging solitary in a nimbus of light, and beyond it the gray indistinguishable fog and the rain sound blending with the wash of the sea. It shut me in a rock cave with Dick on Marblehead beach, drenching, soaking, and we threw rocks at a rusted tin can until it stopped coming down viciously and churning the sea to a flayed whiteness.

  Two years ago August rain fell on me and Ilo, walking side by side, wordless, toward the barn. And it was raining when I came out from the loft, crying, my mouth bruised where he had kissed me. Rain closed about the windows of the car Emile and I rode home in, and fell outside the kitchen where we stood, in the dark, with the smell of linoleum, and the water always falling on the leaves outside the screen.

  Three years ago, the hot, sticky August rain fell big and wet as I sat listlessly on my porch at home, crying over the way summer would not come again - never the same. The first story in print" came from that "never again" refrain beat out by the rain. August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

  August 9. Today I was alone with Joan, Sue and Bill. Mrs. Cantor gone. Car mine, and planning of meals and time allotment, it was good. Flowers - zinnias gold and rust and umber - pink and white and lavendar - bought in rash armfuls at a flower stand for guests this weekend. Four dozen eggs, beige, oval, full of protein - farm produce, where there was hay sweetly damp in a loft, a cow, and chickens. Three children chanting loudly in singsong from the car window. Lunch then: good tunafish salad, tomatoes, crackers, cheese, and milk. So in the afternoon, late, with the rain still coming down, I left the children down with Joanie - and escaped in the Beachwagon to Chatham town. Inching the shiny green machine through the rainpuddled narrow streets to the town parking lot I felt an evil sense of victory and freedom. I was going to see Val Gendron" in the Bookmobile and I did.

  I walked in the backdoor of "Lorania's Bookmobile", and my red slicker shed rivulets of water on the floor as I bent my head, scanning titles, while Val was talking to people up front. I sat on the floor then, looking at poetry books and the brightly covered, good clear-printed Modern Library editions. She was alone then, and remembered me.

  So I asked her about a lot of things - how she got writing and where published, and where worked. She talked nicely to me --- cynical, hardbitten, with a sneer, and then a quick look, a smile, soft fleetingly, that said she understood about how I was critical of my story, didn't like it now as much, and how it was best writing actually, the process, not the product. So she told me about the four page (1000 words a day) deal. No time limit - there's the catch. You don't have a time limit, it's the produce that counts. 365,000 words in a year is a hell of a lot of words. I start this fall. Four pages a day.

  She is small, skinny, sallow, with black hair done up in back in a bun and braids under a visor khaki cap. A pointed face, glasses, and a dry, sarcastic drawl. Cats she has, in her shack, red-painted (she says) and no phone. Signs of loneliness? Of living too long with Val Gendron? Who to talk to? Who? I will find out. I will be no Val Gendron. But I will make a good part of Val Gendron part of me - someday. And the coffee grounds can be left out. For good. She has said I may visit her: a pilgrimage: — to my First Author.

  10 - Always washed and bathed with the rain coming down. Thunder tonight. ("Lord, lord, though ridest.") Whistling over the mulberry trees thou goest. Lord, thy children are jaded, and their ears go flat with sound. Marveling in the thunder rumbling of thy voice no longer - they hear not, and the omens of the white gull and the flayed oak are as naught to their purblind sight. The prophecy in the thunder, the foreshadowings of the leaves quivering white, the dismay of the grass bent in the merciless wind are naught, lord.