Category: diaries and journals

A magnificent fire

“Last night the English Opera House was burnt down — a magnificent fire.” 

Charles Greville

All the gentility of London was there
from Princess Esterhazy’s ball and all
the clubs; gentlemen in their fur cloaks, pumps,
and velvet waistcoats mixed with objects like

the sans-culottes in the French Revolution —
men and women half-dressed, covered with rags
and dirt, some with nightcaps or handkerchief
round their heads — then the soldiers, the firemen,

and the engines, and the new police running
and bustling, clearing the way, clattering
along, with that intense interest and restless
curiosity, which received fresh stimulus

at every renewed burst of the flames as
they rose in a shower of sparks like gold dust.

(From The Greville Memoirs, January 1830)

The empty room

I dreamt of you again last night. 
And when I woke up it was as if 
you had died afresh. I read 
all your letters this afternoon.

I feel as if we had collected all 
our wheat into a barn to make bread 
and beer for the rest of our lives 
and now our barn has been burnt down 

and we stand on a cold winter morning 
looking at the charred ruins. For this 
little room was the gleanings of our life. 
All our happiness was over this fire 

and with these books. Voltaire blessing us 
with up-raised hand on the wall. No one 
to talk to about my pleasures. I write in 
an empty book. I cry in an empty room.

(Dora Carrington’s diary, February 1932)

Stopping

Two feet of snow fell last evening.  
It lies in largest masses on the flat 

fronded branches of firs and the mounded 
close foliage of the live-oaks, and it 

bends and welds together the tassels 
of the pines. The ouzel heeds not the roar 

of avalanches, the heavy masses 
of snow from banks and trees, and the constant 

upspringing of pines. He would not cease 
singing or feeding for an earthquake. 

(From John Muir’s journal, February 1873)

Burn him!

If ya have to ask, you don’t belong there.

The lake bed is a Euclidean plane 
with zillions of dry fractal cracks. 
The parched Nevada mountains of the Black
Rock Desert rise on three sides. Point the front 
of the vehicle into emptiness and launch. 
Gaseous tails of flying white dust spurt up 
like jet exhaust. Cars and trucks leave huge wakes 
on the horizon, like white prairie fires. 
The place feels like the afterlife. When you 
walk across it, you just drift over 
endless cracked whiteness, lifting your feet 
maybe a quarter inch from the surface. 
The alkali dust is like a fine and 
bitter talcum. Just throw off your clothes. 

Colored strings of chemglow out in the desert, 
woven through the spokes of bicycles and 
mysteriously revolving. Huge dramatic
bowl of desert stars overhead. Fireworks 
and flying flares casting a lurid trench-
warfare glow above the massive camp.
Pagan hierophants in tall headdresses 
and silver lamé march in slow step,
toting flaming standards of arcane device.
Swarms of nude dancers caper up in
bizarre sword-and-sorcery bondage gear. 
The soundtrack switches to repeated, insane,
bestial screaming. An awe-inspiring insect 
goddess – a hunchbacked bug on red stilts – comes 
towering and toppling into the firelight. 
Amy is an imaginative child. This 
is awful! It’s like a living nightmare! 
They go at it hot and heavy, booming-
banging-boogying.

A guy got killed last night.
He rear-ended a truck while zooming 
along the darkened playa on a blacked-
out motorcycle. At night somebody
constructs a fake constellation. Faking
the stars, cutting-and-pasting the desert
sky. Flat on his back, he looks like a giant 
abandoned packing crate, but when he’s 
catapulted into standing position, 
he becomes a striking neon symbol 
of pretty much everything that matters.
It’s time to finally burn the Man. 
They fire up the guy, and he explodes 
in sheets of colored fireworks and giant 
livid gouts of flames. Burn him!
Amy is screaming, wriggling like an eel.

(From Greetings from Burning Man! August 1996)

Dead brown mice

At sundown the western sky turned a deep
and almost brilliant red, changing
and softening in colour in its upward
spread until the verge from south to north
was like an immense but yellowing rainbow.
Then frost came lightly; there was the merest
sound of a crinkle in walking over the grass
away from the oak wood. This morning the air
was softer. On the broad marl and flint track
there were dead brown mice; they had crept
from among the withered leaves under
the bramble bushes; it is one of the signs
that winter is sharpening.

(From 100 years ago: Rooks set about the acorns in an orderly way)

A visit

Every place on earth should be like this; unexpected.
On a good day, you can see forever.

Restful sleep for a windy place.
Tranquility is a marvelous experience
sound of meadowlarks in the morning, music
for the body.
Breath and love are everything.

This is sort of my home town.
Where my father went to school,
took piano lessons.

I had stitches on my hand in this place –

Nice to be back home,
to see the old schoolroom and
place where I was born

Different than I remember it as

Hope we weren’t too much trouble.
Thanks for the beer.

(You will remember me by the broken chair)

(Guestbook entries at the Convent Inn in Val Marie, Saskatchewan, noted in 2006. Submitted by Shannon Bruyneel)

And We Provided Frances Crammer Greenman with a Model

The telephone rang in the Newspaper Room. It was
Francis Crammer Greenman. A friend had just called
from the Library to tell her
that a type she had been looking for for a picture
was sitting in the Newspaper Room.
It was an old man with a beard.

Would the assistant hold him until she got there —
she was six blocks away?
The man had left.
But they thought he had gone to the Magazine Room.
The call was transferred: the man was found
by Reference in our room.
He stayed. She came.
They left together.

(From the Daily Happenings log of the New York Public Library Reference Room, June 1952. Submitted by John FitzGerald)

A Life’s Parallels

Never on this side of the grave again.
Christina Rossetti

Synthetic coconut shies.
Whiskers absurdly long.

Give the show away.
Everything tawdry and shoddy.

Was it always so?
Were they as cheap looking
in one’s youth when one loved it all?

Does one get fastidious as one grows
older and the fair
always was rowdy
and dirty
and unappealing?

As we came away,
all Himself said was:
“Our poor park,
how untidy it is.”

Diary of a Sheffield housewife, August 1942. Diarist 5447 in the Mass Observation Project. Submitted by B.T. Joy.