The Desk

Should I ever visit a psychiatrist and it won’t be voluntary…I will take along my desk as the co-conspirator of my life, my attitude, my ego and my crimes. My wife doesn’t clean my desk; I don’t clean my desk. At this very moment I can see two Asian Lady Beetles, they live here somewhere, on warm days they are antic, still we can co-exist, as happens to be the motto of my desk. Not necessarily of me since I’m on a learning curve, but it is the motto of my desk. Sometimes I put Lady Asians in matchboxes, revealing that I smoke a pipe. I have this business down to once a day because I’d rather not die too easily, on the other hand I’d rather not die too hard either. One can dilly-dally at the business rendering it quite unpleasant, as is my observation on most bad habits. That it is perfectly in keeping with good health to maintain a margin of bad habits so healthy persons die in some kind of good order. As a baby boomer I realize this more acutely than did previous generations, the next best thing we can do for our country will be to die off with a degree of forward velocity, lest we bankrupt the innocent bystanders.

I have my son’s christening cup on my desk; it holds paper clips with a baseball on top. Has his initials on it and birth date. The problem with things like a sterling silver christening cup is what possible use they are afterward.

There are two shelves of books, books I never want to be too far away from. Gary Snyder’s Axe Handles, Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat; Malcolm Rosholt’s Our County Our Story; the Nick Adams Stories, Laughing Boy, Sketches and Eccentricities by Col. David Crockett, yes that Crockett. The Book of Common Prayer, Norton Anthology of English Lit, two volumes, The Worm Forgives the Plough, John Steward Collis, a King James Version, Rascal by Sterling North, along with my grandfather’s polar bear ashtray, my wife’s student ID card from MIT, and then the dictionaries: Oxford, Webster’s 7th, Chamber’s Scot’s dialect, Father Baraga’s Ojibwa, (he spelled it Ochicheewa), French, Latin, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, Gaelic, Dakota, Menominee, Martin’s Physical Geography of Wisconsin, Asimov’s Guide to the Bible; he also did one on Shakespeare and several on the origin of the universe, my kind of spiritualist.

On my desk is a photograph of my wife amid summer daisies and not much else. It was a warm Sunday afternoon, the kids were playing in the garden. An ant mound as I remember, mesmerized they were by the kind that build those foot-high temple mounds. As a kid I loved to drop flower petals and lumps of sugar into the midst of those mounds to watch the resulting frenzy. A friend from school dropped in a firecracker; he was never invited back to the farm for a weekend. Like most theologians I too feel there are things that need no explanation.

The actual work area of my desk is badly eroded by the miscellany of notes, a rock, a sea shell via Lora Hagen in turn from France, another rock inscribed with the opening lines of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” I’ll tell you why later. Beethoven used the words of a poet nobody remembers, writing is like that, sooner or later the participant makes peace with that, the author doesn’t matter, words are meant to be absorbed, taken up by the body public, digested, disintegrated, sieved through a thousand minds or a million. Writing is akin to particle physics, dependent on chance collision to reveal anything.

Next to the pencil box is a list of people I owe letters, Alan Bell turned 90 years, Lowell for having me over to the New Hope Woodland Owners meeting, good people, good cause if it does remind me of the College of Natural Resources in absentia. I would be disappointed if the professors of that college retired to someplace other than the near woods and fields of Amherst, Nelsonville and Iola.

Surrounding me are breadcrumbs since I take breakfast at my desk, hence the source of the tea stains. Also eraser crumbs as I write in #2 pencil on yellow, lined paper. I never did learn to type, one of my earnest regrets, next to not taking Latin in high school. Perhaps I might still write by hand for I do like its motion compared to that of the keyboard. Beyond is the different mental horizon, of the hand writer versus the typist. I cannot express sentences without hesitation and some back tracking, add to this instant revision. Typing strikes me to be like those quick setting glues that demand outright precision. Hand script is more potting clay, moldable, typewriters and keyboards are for journalists. With a pencil you can dawdle if you want, exploit the margins, stack words, cross out, cross out, cross out. Somehow not the same as the delete key. The pencil allows you to paint as much as write, to be loose and frothy or chisel-pointed, either avant-garde or draftsman. Besides, the pencil leaves an archeological record, a contrail, what my wife calls a heap.

My desk is a heap, all good desks are. Occasionally in a fit of short-term splendor I clean it off utterly. Beneath is a picturesque desk of good oak veneer, and I felt suddenly marooned on a very deserted isle. As to writing, the addiction, sometimes in the morning what it takes is a little nearby junk to get going. I feel the same way when the farm shop is cleaned too well, like it isn’t the right place to work.