Stranger in a Strange Land: Diary Entry (spring, 2005, North Carolina)

It’s after 2 a.m. and I am still up. I just watched a Bernardo Bertolucci movie Stealing Beauty. Today I drove around to Kannapolis where the huge textile mill just shut down two years ago, and on the way to Mooersville I saw a deer by the side of the road with a vulture standing on top. In Mooersville I risked a local barbecue joint where the shredded pork looked as if I might need anti-rejection drugs to eat, and the waitress laughed at me and said I talked like an alien and then brought me hush puppies to try and then came back and told me NOT to eat them with a fork — “They are finger food around here!” And I slapped her fingers away from my hush puppies and told her to get away from my table, and she laughed, and I gave her a 40% tip for making me feel like I still had some charm. And then I went to Statesville and had coffee and went into a store that specialized in hair products and wigs for black women.

I spent yesterday buried in Genesis. The patterning is obsessive and brilliant. I wish I’d realized all this when I was 20 rather than 56. And now I think I understand what Northrop Frye said about all plot structures being U-shaped — he meant the shape of a chiasm which seems to be one of the governing structures in Genesis, a-b-c-x-c-b-a or some variation. But then also there is a structure of threes coming in over and over and a plot/subplot (antithetical) structure e.g. Abraham plot and Lot plot. And more.

dg