"It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty — it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping. ..."
— George Orwell, "Down and Out in Paris and London"
Awakened at 5:45 a.m. by cats fighting underneath my car. Not just the usual screeching & urgently creepy yowling — they were bumping up & down against the chassis & the oil pan, really locked into it. They broke loose & I heard their high-pitched wailing move off into the distance. That's what I get for parking in the parking lot of an apartment complex, but I have to keep moving around so as to stay invisible, so I often go to apartment complexes and park in the 'visitor' spaces. Have to keep my head down below the window-line so patrolling security cops don't see me, but they often make just cursory rounds at most places, go through the motions so they can write in their logs that they checked the grounds. I've seen those guys drive through parking lots at what must be 35 mph, so they can get back to their parking spaces & read their books or sit & collect pay while staring into the dark. Since I couldn't get back to sleep, I moved the car to a public lot & as it got toward daylight I consulted I Ching, throwing the coins six times just outside the door of the car onto the pavement. Dug my James Legge translation out of the trunk of the car & read the interpretation of the hexagram, as I've done every morning for the last 10 years. I left my Wilhelm translation in storage in Lexington Kentucky, so I have to use only Legge until I can get some other translations & interpretations at a local library, where I have a card now. After that, I pasted some printouts of e-mails into 2 or 3 of the collage-books I have going & put them in the rear window so they'd dry when the sun came out. Then hopped on a MAX train without a ticket & went downtown to get one of the lunch bags from St. Michael's & then go to the sit-down lunch at Blanchet House.
Drawing pencil sketches in the dark in my car, with a Maglite, using pencils lifted from the public library & little scraps of paper they put out for patrons to write down call numbers on. Then pasted some of the drawings into free staple-bound books the library has on shelves, pasting over the Russian, Spanish, Vietnamese texts about this, that & the other.
Reading at the library till I feel like I’ve got eyestrain. Going over various interpretations of I Ching that I can find. I wouldn’t call them ‘translations.’ What’s to translate? There aren’t any originals. But it speaks volumes that the basic ideas come through anyway, down through the aeons. Some people who publish these I Chings have little pieces of the idea, & this includes the great Confucius, who knew he only had pieces of the idea & said as much. And sometimes even the most insignificant interpretations contain a few new insights that touch the Big Idea. Wilhelm is considered so authoritative, but he too has only glimpses & sometimes gets things wrong. He's too Jungian. But he does seem to get his share of the idea illuminated. Legge too, Legge confesses to being perplexed in places, but he laid the groundwork for western understanding & acceptance of The Book Of Changes. We all have the whole idea & whole insight in us, but we can’t wrap our minds around it, or can’t keep our minds wrapped around it, anyway, even though we grasp it in its entirety in flashes & instants, which come after a lot of work otherwise & groping around in the dark trying.
Sunday is buffet day at Blanchet House, so you can get large helpings of whatever they have. The food is strictly utilitarian & often the fruit salad looks as if it's been dropped on the floor & scraped up, but how can one complain? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth & all that. The other night at Portland Rescue Mission they had what someone in line today at Blanchet House called “four star cuisine for Portland Rescue Mission,” a sardonic reference to whatever the gruel was, I can't even remember. But it was good enough that guys in line were remarking on it. I find it funny that there's this sense of humor about it all, and that I often hear homeless people rating the food at the various kitchens, just like people in an office discussing the food at Applebee’s vs. some other such place. But why would I think homeless people aren't the same as ordinary employed people with places to live? Are we homeless folks, after all, all supposed to be going around with our tails between our legs because we're homeless? In fact, there are nights when there is jolly good cheer in those food kitchens, especially while standing in the daily lines waiting to eat. Sometimes you stand there for a half hour, 45 minutes if you're really starved and want to get in in a hurry right when the doors open. Tonight, a man covered from head to foot in tar came walking along to get in line. He had tar in his hair, under his fingernails, all over his neck and face, his clothes & boots were covered. He spotted someone he knew standing in the line & said, “Hey, it's buffet night, so I dressed for dinner!”
