20th December 2013

"Today nobody will stop with faith; they all go further. It would perhaps be rash to inquire where to, but surely a mark of urbanity and good breeding on my part to assume that everyone does indeed have faith, otherwise it would be odd to talk of going further. In those old days it was different. For then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, not a skill thought to be acquired in either days or weeks. When the old campaigner approached the end, had fought the good fight, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten the fear and trembling that disciplined his youth and which, although the grown man mastered it, no man altogether outgrows..." --Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.

This is a comfort. My ignorance and my searching may not categorically be marks of deficiency; they may be marks simply of a difference in starting-point. Not having faith from the first; having to strive ever to earn it; having to battle continually with my assumptions; having to brave perpetual fear and trembling; having to labor through the void, so unknowing, so blind, and so vulnerable; in all this I am not necessarily just a frail and faithless lost soul, but I am, perhaps, as those old campaigners. This is a comfort. This gives me courage. The old campaigners were surely heroic; their lives were surely meaningful even if their task was never fully accomplished. I feel as if I have suddenly been granted a thousand mighty mentors, and I am, for the hour, not alone.

7th December 2013

"I darkened my eyes

with the dust of sadness

until each of them was a sea full of pearls."

-Rumi-

How many of my days are lived for tomorrows? What silliness! Take care of today and tomorrow shall take care of itself. Hmm. Shall I start living for today, then? I shall. Yes, I shall. Tomorrow.

Yet what of today? What of today? First, I built a tracted ziggurat on the counterpanes: a vade mecum villarette; an opuscular edifice. I had slept little and dared not commit myself to the rituals of rising lest I should, a half-hour following, have to undo the work with the rituals of rebedding. I have yet to master the chamber-maid's trick of quick trimming the bedclothes, you see, and, what with the three separate blankets, to say naught of the sheets, it takes a moiety of my morning to set my cot to rights, yet I must set it to rights, and first thing, for I cannot concentrate on anything elsewise. Thus, to avoid the labor of bed-making, I had to bring the shelves to myself, as opposed to bringing myself to the shelves (although, truth be told, the shelves are presently boxes, for this room hasn't any shelves, only a desk and dresser, and though I have filled every nook of those with what volumes they'll hold, and am thus framed, in my reflections, by the wisdom of ages, most of my books reside in neatly stacked cardboard). And so I built my mansion thus:

Thomas Traherne: Centuries and The Poetical Works

MacDonald: Diary of an Old Soul

Ruskin: Sesames and Lilies and Queen of the Air

Rudolf Rocker: The London Years

Gerald Manley Hopkins: The Major Works

T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land and Other Poems

Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet

Rumi: The Pocket Rumi Reader

And I read thus from Rilke:

                                       
"With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which while ours passes away, endures."

                                                                         
And, as the lines stuck out to me, and seemed the sort of thing I might have need of on some future occasion, I copied them into my commonplace book, in the same glacial, careful hand that I copy everything into my commonplace book, using always the exact same pen, and the exact same precision.

It occurs to me now that perhaps the reason I accomplish so very little of what I ever set out to accomplish is precisely because the simplest tasks (from transcription to bed-making) take me quite inordinate amounts of time. Who can say how much more I'd get done if I could only be content to have the bedspread a tad more uneven on right and left; or if I would just be a little more lenient about legibility?  Ah, but then I would not be as I am, and it is not so bad to be as I am. The perfectionisms (and they are not nearly so extreme as all that) are as Rumi's dust in the eyes: they are the necessary grit for such pearls as I may render.

Having copied those lines, I came across these:

                                                                          
"I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your hushed hour can perhaps answer."

             
These also went down in the commonplace book, but these lines sparked a revelation about my solipsistic-propensities that seemed in immediate need of utteration, and so I wrote thus underneath it:                                                                                                                                                        
"I have shied away from the doctrine of self-reliance as a danger, for I have perceived my connection to my fellow man to be too fragile as it is to risk the complete breaking of that connection that purposeful independence of thought might entail. And I have feared isolation above all; I am haunted by the ever-present, peripheral specter of solipsism, and am terrified of it encroaching. And the solipsism has rendered the doctrine of self-reliance dark, for solipsism is the most damagingly reductive philosophy there is: solipsism says "nothing but" until there is nothing but nothing at all. The trees, so solid at my window, are divested of their solidity and reduced to waves of energy, and these are in turn reduced to sense impressions, and these are reduced to mental impressions, and these can no longer be called "mental impressions" for there is nothing non-mental to render the distinction "mental" as meaningful. Solipsism mutes everything; it denies all objectivity and in so doing prevents all wonder, for it denies even emotions a fixed reality, a substantiality.

     The doctrine of self-reliance seems only fit for those who inhabit their bones already. The solipsist is two steps behind and must learn to believe in reality before letting his "inmost feeling" be his compass. One must have faith there is something solidly and assuredly "other" than one's inmost feeling to realize the value of the inmost feeling, which gains its own solidity and assuredness from the solidity and assuredness of the world beyond it. Or so I have thought.

     But I am not a solipsist. I must never forget that. For the same lack of faith that plants solipsism on my perpetual periphery is the lack of faith that must prevent me from actual, absolute solipsism. The same skepticism that leads me to doubt the reality of the trees must lead me to doubt also the non-reality of the trees. I always forget this when I despair. In despair I lose sight of the half of my skepticism that allows it to be considered skepticism in the first place. I become an irrational half-skeptic and thereby no skeptic at all, for I fail to be skeptical of my skepticism. The saturant skeptic, the skeptic whose skepticism is absolute and ideal, admitting no flaws, knowing no deviations, is perhaps more appropriately called a possibilist. This is what I am at my rational best. Socrates says that all he knows is that he knows nothing; the possibilist says: "I do not know if I do not know." This statement is perfect as the possibilist's motto, for it is at once a contradiction and a tautology. The possibilist, the ideal possibilist, denies and affirms everything and nothing, and is endlessly curious, and endlessly humble."

                                                                        
 All this I wrote in my painstakingly precise penmanship. And it was not at all the revelation I had meant to write, but it seemed well enough. We sand the oysters aiming for spheres, but sometimes we get drops, and sometimes baroques, and they're all of them pearls at day's end.

     

Yet it had taken so much time to hand-write all of this, and had thus progressed so far along in the morning, that it seemed I should get up after all. And, having done so, and having disassembled the ziggurat and reassembled in a neat spire on the dresser, and having gone through the ritual of making my bed, it occurred to me that, much as I was now free to read as I pleased (my semester's work being at an end), I was likewise free to walk as I pleased, and, though the forecasted high was no more than 20F, the skies were azure and open, and I determined to take to the park. Yet, before that, being in a rather merry and inspired frame of mind, and wishing, as one does in such states, to share my merriment with another, I elected on one of my classmates, S______, as the candidate for this sharing. I had never written to S______ before, yet I had spoken to her on frequent occasions before and after classes, and I had been meaning to send her a note of encouragement, as I knew she had been having a very rough go of it the last week of the semester. Yet, having never written to her before, and knowing that my email would come rather out of the blue, I didn't know quite what to say in it, so I quoted the aforementioned Rilke lines on criticism, and mentioned the book-building, and expressed my very positive opinion of her. And then I sent the email off. And I did not dwell upon my letter to S_____, as I would have been wont to do in bygone years. I would have sent the letter in the past, just as I sent it today, but in the past I would have spent hours thereafter turning-over in my head every potential misinterpretation, fretting over every instance of polysemy and cursing myself for not phrasing this-or-that more definitely. I did none of that today, and this means I am coming to trust people; I am coming to trust in people's goodness and their willingness to see the best in others; and this makes me happy. This means I am improving. It is a gradual process, but I am improving; I am, at long and arduous last, showing some signs of becoming a better person.

And, after the letter, I did indeed take to the park, the serenely solitary and frostbitten park. And though I did intermittently lament the thinness of my socks, and the cheapness of my gloves, and the non-existence of my hat, it was immensely pleasant to walk around the frozen lake, with no obligations awaiting me on any side, and only myself to please in all directions. And, as the cold had left the paths to myself, I was free to skip and dance and heartily recite my handful of memorized verses, and read from my pocket Rumi. And I was free, too, as much as the cold would allow me, to stand very still, and listen to the hushed winter-noises of squirrel-feet in rime-brittle leaves, and chickadees dee-dee-ing, and the hoar wind through bald branches. And, if I ever drooped for a moment, and grew however fleetingly dull to the stripped shrubs and the pocked-and-sandy earth, I tried to remember the morning lesson on ideal possibilists, and this helped somewhat, although it wasn't half so efficacious as the unexpected sight of juncos cavorting in a tangled alcove, or squirrels families darting in and out of hollow trees.

And in the evening, I went to the bookstore, and bought a second hand copy of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for $6, and Daniel Barenboim's Music Quickens Time for $2, and I sat in the cafe reading the latter. And I read thus:

                                                     
"After careful observation, we notice that the relationship between sound and silence is the equivalent of the relationship between a physical object and the force of gravity. An object that is lifted from the ground demands a certain amount of energy to keep it at the height to which it has been raised. Unless one provides additional energy, the object will fall to the ground, obeying the laws of gravity. In much the same way, unless sound is sustained, it is driven to silence."

                                                                                                          
 And I copied this with my scrupulous scrivenery in my commonplace book, and wrote underneath it:

                                                                                           
"Silence is the underlying "sound" of the universe. Silence. I think of Lanier's marshes. Silence. I think of Stoddart's defense of death and monuments. Silence. Sound all around me. Cafe music and machine hums and murmurs and laughter. And one would say of this place, were one asked, that it is quiet, for one could hold a conversation in whispers and not miss a syllable. Yet it is so far from Silence. I am glad Silence is the base-note. I am glad it is the "sound" to which all things return. I have never "heard" it, yet still I am glad of it. Silence."

And now, I must to silence, or my best approximation of it. I must to those rituals of rebedding. For it is tomorrow already; tomorrow has encroached on today. And I must take care of today, and the care of today, for the present, is sleep.

Goodnight good world.

 "I [darken] my eyes

with the dust of sadness

until each of them [is] a sea full of pearls."

7-26-2013

What have I gleaned from the day? What of it shall adhere? What of it shall fall away? Who was I for this fistful of hours?

Here's pennies for the ledger:

I drove too fast on the highway on the way to work. Not in utter oblivion did the construction cones pass me by, but the orange maidens fringed the road at such a remove, weltered so wallflowerish at the outermost edges, that their significance went unregistered. I did wonder at the unwonted leisure of my co-riders, for typically my bumper exerts magnetic appeal over my fellow wheelpersons and it is a lonely day when I cannot glance in my rear mirror and count the freckles on the motorist behind, but I rather attributed the irregularity to it being Friday. Yes. Friday. That was my conclusion. Fridays must attract a different kind of driver, I told myself, assuming, with reflex assurity, that all those vehicular titans, all those palatial perogatives of the American car industry that are as so many Ungoliants to my itsy-bitsy spider, all those pick-up trucks and SUVs, were being manned by Savannah gents in white linen, panamas, and loafers, with Louisiana jazz on the radio and long-island teas in their cup-holders. I honestly believed that everyone was going at an amble due to a universal end-of-the-week insouciance, and it didn't so much as once occur to me, until I sped past the "end of roadwork" sign, that the traffic cones could have anything to do with their repose. 

     What sort of imagination is this? What quaint and treacherous folly? I try so hard to be sensible, I try so hard to align my thoughts with actualities, but ever-and-anon I am brought into blinding realization of my default, daunting disconnectedness. What world do I live in, what bubble, that I can convince myself all Friday drivers are endearingly unhurried Gatsbys?

      I feel I have to try ten times harder than the average lass to approach even the layman's share of sense. Time, and the shortness of free-time, gnaw at me so strongly, primarily because I feel such a dire need of the stuff to process all the information my days throw at me, else-wise I am as one running miles without moving an inch, experiencing multitudes and not improving a jot; I am as one given the world without gaining a thing. And yet I am complimented for intelligence? Is it any wonder I feel such compliments misplaced, and believe them more a product of the bestowers' wishful projecting than of my own inherent merits? Is it any wonder I have no faith in the solidity of others' opinion of my intellect, and suppose that such folks as do acknowledge me for my mind have glimpsed it askance and mistaken it for something better, much as one might glimpse a sliver of glass askance and, due to a lucky refraction of light, mistake it for a diamond? I do not feel this way about other aspects of my being. I do not fret about people discovering one day that I am not as cheerful, or kind, or honest as they thought, yet I am ever persuaded that they shall discover I am not as sensible or sound-logicked as they had imagined. Yet I am hesitant to write this fretting off as a localized lack of self-confidence, nor to suppose that a dose of medicinal arrogance would be a suitable cure. If I feel the nip, nay, the brutal, bodkin-toothed bite, the keen, necrotic chomp of inadequacy where Reason is concerned, it is rather indicative of the heights of which I reckon Reason is capable. Good cheer, kindness, and honesty are comparatively much more finite than Reason. This is by no means to say their value is less, only that their mastery is a less complex, less expansive, and, at least in this respect, an easier affair than the mastery of Reason. The mastery of good cheer, kindness, and honesty relies almost wholly upon what is inside of a man, and not at all upon what is outside of him. With correct attitudinal coaching, one can be of good cheer no matter what befalls one, much as Democritus was of good cheer, protesting that he had all his valuables still with him, when Silbo (the city-sacker) asked him why he wept not for his razed-home and dead family. With correct attitudinal coaching, one can be kind though one lives in a world utterly bereft of kindnesses. With correct attitudinal coaching, one can be honest, though the return for one's honesty is naught but hardship. One need only resolutely believe in the overarching merits of cheer, kindness, and honesty, to become a paragon of all three (I do not say that I am such a paragon, mind you, but I say I am far more certain of these three within myself than I am of my intellect). Reason, however, cannot be attained through simple reverence. Reason does not rely upon man alone, but dwells in symbiotic relationship with reality. Good cheer, provided it is firm enough, will remain good cheer whatever environment it is transplanted into (the Nirvanic monk will maintain his serenity whether in a blossomed paradise or set aflame in roadside protest), but good Reason in one set of circumstances can prove absolutely atrocious Reason in another (it may be very good Reason to water one's flowers if they have thirsted all week, but very bad Reason to water them if they've been subject to monsoons since Monday). 

Yet it is late. Late. And I have to work again tomorrow. How long can my luck can hold out against my knavery? I wonder, but it doesn't seem advisable to take too many more chances. Sleep, then, dear Reason; sweet, deluded darling, sleep, taste the tender nourishment of a night's rest, and aim to make it off the highway four-limbed and fine-free again tomorrow. 

5-6-13

Who am I, sir? Who am I, and which way is home, and what is this loneliness that springs perpetual? No more crowds, just for a little while, pray sir, just for a little while. So many faces. "There will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." Shall there be time to remove the paint and plaster though? Where am I, sir? Beneath the pasteboard, where am I? Where do I begin to look?

Have I a soul, sir? Can it be lifted? Can I be made good? Can you show me how to break? Can you teach me how to break? Oh, break me. Make me a better thing.

I grow lost amid the crowds and the crowds are lost on me. I can't see them. I am insulated. How can I love if I cannot see? I must learn to walk unbuffered. Oh, but how, how, how? Ever since childhood, this fixation on masks. World! How can I see you? World! Take me! On the side of the angels, but not one of them. World! Show me virtue. Teach me goodness. Teach me sympathy. Begone stoicism. World..........

I am so lost.

05-02-13

And have you walked, my friend, and have you walked?

And have you stooped, stopped short by brackish air?

And have you crouched, my friend, and couching stalked

The mud besludged and stagnant lakish lair? 

And what, my friend, yes what did you find there?

A water baby, was it? Some fallen fay,

Slime-skinned, or furred, as one hirsute with bile,

A rigor-mortised toad-child mid-decay

With claws for feet beneath the phlegmy pile.

And did you squirm, my friend, and did you smile?

Oh worry not, I shan't look on you ill

For letting wonder outpace your disgust;

The curious will get their ghastly fill,

And naught's so rank as awe can't overcrust.

And awe is love, my friend, and love we must.

April 10th 2013

I am enslugged, and sapped, and shorn 

Of all the haring thoughts of dawn.

I'd Samson's strength of mind at eight;

By eight again, mere empty pate.

Oh dread Delilah Nine-to-Five,

Don't take my life to keep me 'live!

2-1-2013

Occasionally one must say to heck with Chesterton. Chesterton is a grand philosopher for pulling the fair-to-middling life up into the angelic ether; there is none better for taking a hobbit and fashioning a hero; but, for those who deem ho-hummity as an unattainable paradise, Chestertonian precepts are unavailing. It is no use telling the man in the gutter to make a game of his goose-flesh. Sometimes it is better to imagine oneself away from one's present circumstances; sometimes it is better to live in groundless fantasies than in the world as it is; sometimes a studious disregard for the moment is necessary to keep one remotely functional. I am tired to excess. I shall sleep and awake elsewhere than Michigan in February. 

1-31-2013

One aught not despair. One aught to regard all inconveniences as adventures. One aught be merry and confident and ecstatically grateful for what was and what is and what has yet to be. I know life is a grand and gratuitous blessing. I know it. And yet, forgive me world, today I despair of you. Today I break and beg things to be all other than they are. Too much pain.

The car radiator has gone into hibernation and looks to require $700 to be coaxed back into life. If I pay the price of warmth, I lose the Santiago. If I pay the price of the Santiago, I lose my fingers to frostbite. Twice daily. The pain of cold in the fingers is almost beyond bearing. It is the pain of cells turning to scimitars, cutting nerves open from the inside. My face suffuses with involuntary salt-waters and I cry out imprecations at the winter and the tortures of the cold. The pain prevents me from properly gripping the wheel. It prevents me, likewise, from properly concentrating on the road. I risk so many mishaps on its account, and yet I am so reluctant to surrender the Santiago. The Santiago has been my North Star for almost a year now; it has been the lone fixed point by which I have navigated my ramshackle raft over circumstance's rollicking waters.

Flying the North Star

Oh life! Where is port? Where is a safe place to anchor? Where is a home? Where is anything other than the hingeless oscillations of the tide and eternally landless horizons? I know I am in a thankless frame of mind right now; I know that to be given experience of any sort is worthy of praise unending; I know that even torment is a marvel. Yet it is hard to confront, at last, one's homelessness, one's solitariness, one's directionlessness. One can be homeless, and alone, and without direction for a lifetime without ever confronting these maladies, and one can get along pretty decently in one's oblivion. I was oblivious, after a fashion, for oh so lamentably many seasons. Yet the pasteboard mask has ruptured, the white whale has been punctured and I am forced to face truths once hid. It is for the best, ultimately, I know it is. I shall learn to captain the waters that presently leave me seasick, and, as I learn, the ship shall become my home, and the sea my companion, and the trajectory of billowing Fate my direction. Only until such a time I grasp the gunnel in fits of self-pity and shake bitter fists at the winter.

1-30-2013

Rain. A winter tonic, a respite from the ice. I sit in the coffee shop and watch the glossed black night beyond the window. It's pleasant. Exceedingly. Swingy jazz issues from overhead speakers; a lady with horse-wild hair and debonair knits sits with her beau in the corner; everything emanates easy-come ambiance. At any moment I half expect a P.I.--sandstone trench; East Coast accent--to idle in and start interrogating the barristas. I want to protract this fiction longer than the open-hours will allow. I want to stop the clock and rummage around in make-believe corners. Slow down, glassed sands, slow down! Pause long enough for a lass to build some castles on you!

The rain grants refuge from the winter, but has rendered me an exile from my four walls. It has seeped in under the door and soddened the carpet, which the in-laws have since wrested from the floorboards and wontoned over upon itself, an obstreperous watchguard of fans stationed all about lest the fibers think about returning to their supine state. The place smells of damp and has no seating provisions, the chairs all being displaced to accommodate the newly yogic floor-mattings. I wish I didn't have to leave this table, this trumpet drawling, this cup of tartly steaming tea. I wish gadfly time was not so persistently biting at my ankles. Where's the veil as would protect from that gnat? Where's the break in the glass? 

1-29-2013

Swiftly now! Write like the arboreal bellows on a wild Northern sea! Write like the gallop of blood through lovers' veins! Write like the feet of Gene Kelly! Fly fingers! Fly! Outpace the night!

There is no time! The clock has got me shackled to a deadline, manacled to a midnight minute from which I cannot be unloosed. Life is so diffuse and the days so compressed. How may a mere time-dweller reconcile the two? I know not. I know not! I rack my brain, the seat of man's moments, but the seconds remain unstretched. 12.29. Tick tock. Tick tock. The sandman's hand infiltrates the hourglass and collects the last grain. I must pay the debt of that handful of dust and turn myself over to sleep. 

1-28-2013

The Clote (Water-Lily)

"O zummer clote! when the brook's a-gliden

So slow an' smooth down his zedgy bed,

Upon they broad leaves so seafe a-riden

The water's top wi' thy yollow head,

By alder sheades, O, 

An' bulrush beds, O,

Thou then dost float, goolden zummer clote!

The grey-bough'd withy's a leanen lowly

Above the water thy leaves to hide;

The benden bulrush, a-swayen slowly,

Do skirt in zummer thy river's zide;

An' perch in shoals, O,

Do vill the holes, O,

Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote!

Oh! when they brook-drinken flow'r's a-blowen,

The burnen zummer's a-zetten in;

The time o' greenness, the time o' mowen,

When in the hay-vield, wi' zunburnt skin,

The vo'k do drink, O,

Upon the brink, O,

Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote!

Wi' earms a-spreaden, an cheaks a-blowen,

How proud wer I when I vu'st could swim

Athirt the deep pleace where thou bist growen,

Wi thy long more vrom the bottom dim;

While cows, knee-high, O,

In brook, wer nigh, O, 

Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote!

Ov all the brooks drough the meads a-winden,

Ov all the meads by a river's brim,

There's nwone fo feair o' my own heart's vinden 

As where the maidens do zee thee zwim,

An' stan to teake, O,

Wi' long-stemm'd reake, O,

Thy flow'r afloat, goolden zummer clote!"

-William Barnes--

Do not seek me in the arm-chair, with the keys upon my lap, and the Dandelion tea untasted on the table. I am not here. Oh no, I am not here. I am on the other side of sleep, tumbling in the warm undertow, gone, gone, gone, going, gone. I am amidst the clover, and the scent of hyacinths, and the drowsy emeralds of midsummer in the meadow, of midsummer in the glade. If you wish to find me, to meet me, to join me--oh how I hope you will join me!--you must come to the place where the June birds sing; you must settle yourself down in the dappled dusklight and presss your belly to the blades on the bank, and skim your fingers just-so through the clover. Turn you face this way, my friend, for I am right by your side. You have found me! Ah, I am so glad you have found me! Let us watch the clotes till our lids slide shut, and sleep, and rise elsewhere tomorrow. 

1-27-2013

The reconnaissance hours. Sunday at the coffee shop; sun-sloshed, my shadow alternating between blur and pitch against an opposing wall; peduluming seed bag at the window, junco excavating breakfast; flickersome freckles on crystalline snow. I consider the tree dead ahead and its legion of shadows. In the initial estimate I write off the optics as inscrutably complex; I think of landscape artists and suppose their chiaroscuro to be a guessing game. Yet the mind craves exactitude, it craves a cause to every effect, an action for every reaction, and so I focus, and concentrate, and try to read the light like one reads a pool table, graphing angles, calculating geometry. And just like that, the shadows unravel, simplify; the black and the gold partner up as waltzers, each color holding the hand of its contrary; poles of shade and light hinge at definite, discernible points, and all is rendered orderly. Methodical thought tidies the mess of sensation. It feels good.

I do not debut the jumper, the Salvation Army foolery with Christmas pom poms caught in the straggled green collar and tartan present toppers stapled down the front. Everyone else is wearing perfectly inoffensive woolen numbers, albeit erratically patterned, and my desire is to blend into the spirit of things, not to stand on sartorial ceremony. I hide the indiscreet glue-gun work beneath the sheath of tailored wool, coat belt cinched to squash the highland bows, and consider the eminent good sense of making a first birthday party an "ugly sweater" one. Baby Ruby samples the cake frosting with her feet and knees and fingers before reapportioning the ecru paste to all and sundry, sugared war paint banded thickly on her cheeks. I crouch in a corner, admiring the child at a distance. She's beautiful: face that pulses with expression, eyes of layered blue, every feature denoting both sweetness and curiosity and utter unconcern for her doting onlookers. The frosting finds her iris, stinging the lovely orb, and she is taken to a corner to be cleaned and to cry. The crowd fluxes and unfurls, its centralizing agent gone, and I find myself on the sofa talking to a chap with a ten-month old. The first-time father is working towards his PHD in cellular genetics, or something of that nature, experimenting with cyclins in fruit flies, trying to determine if a new-found member of these proteins, one that apparently has all of the looks but none of the personality of the others, does indeed belong to the family it mimics. I am enchanted by his enthusiasm. He requests I hold his son, Gabriel, for a moment while he collects his things as his wife has suggested they should be heading home soon. I have no instinct for babies and sink into cold sweats at the prospect of handling them, but I am caught fast by social graces; I have no time to object, and Gabriel is delivered into my arms. I feel his weight; I scan his swollen cheeks; I cock my head to better hear his sleepy clucking. It does not feel half so wrong as I feared, this ball of being, breathing, breathing, breathing, ribs to my ribs, feet at my elbow, head in the crook of my arm. It feels humbling, sacred even; it anchors me in the moment and the moment tastes of eternity. 

I walk on infirm firmament, my garden grows from chaos, entropy, fission, disorder. It is disorienting to till such soil, but I am not discouraged, for I have seen the flowers that bloom in such landscapes: harmony, uniformity, fusion, order. Life is neither all Reason nor all Madness. It is both, each consistently creating and destroying the other. 

The sun and the coffee-shop are fled; the Juncos shiver and slumber; I sit with night and fresh, thick snow at my shoulder, and the music of Satie, and the peace of the evening. And it feels good.

1-26-2013

Three cheers for the simple joys of domesticity! Radio 4 plays a panel documentary about Romulus and Remus, the tea kettle gurgles to a boil, I fold my various jumpers and arrange my new-bought groceries in a pretty array over the chest and microwave. The dairy items I have had to put in the fridge, understandably, and the strawberries, but as for the rest, I think I shall leave it where it lies, a pleasing produce patchwork, a testament to ethical consumerism and a hint at yesterday's lesson learned. Everything we do is significant; everything matters to the severest degree. The tidy bags of seed and grain are organic, as are the biscuits and soups; the strawberries are American grown, as are the rolled oats; the honey is raw and fair-trade; every item, save the one concession of mandarin oranges, is carefully chosen to cause the least harm as best I can foresee it.

"Do I dare disturb the universe?" Oh, Eliot, we do not have any choice. In a minute there is not "time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse." Everything matters. You shall disturb the universe with every mouthful of peach. Pray, then, make the mouthful count. Sit in the aisle of the grocery store, on the tiles, crouched by buckwheat and hazelnut flours, sit and unfurl the story of the honey in both directions, both its history and its future. Ask yourself: what were the bees that made this comb? What were their dances? What their flowers? What was the ancestor that came before them? What was the need that gave them wings? What was the predator that couple-colored their backs? What were the blooms? What painted these blooms and numbered their petals? What was the soil from which the blooms grew? What were the micro-organisms that unapplauded nourished that soil? What was the sun that gave of itself to the leaves? What were the atoms that fused and fled and fed the chloroplasts on those filigreed flagstaffs? What hands dove for the honeycomb? What history had she who wore the netted mask? What parents and what progeny? What battles did her great-uncles fight? What poetry did her foremothers know? And ask yourself: what shall become of this honey, once the jar is in my basket? What shall the taste of it, dripped thick on coconut butter and rice cakes, do to me? What peace and comfort shall it foster? What satiation? What cells shall it vitalize? What energy produce? What shall be accomplished with that energy? What strength? What sorrow? What love? What shall become of my body with the honey in it? What shall become of the million dominoes the honey-eating sends toppling? What shall become of the honey-eaten world, and the universe, and of the future itself? How much depends upon a jaw of raw honey? So much. So much. Everything matters so very much.

1-25-2013

7-1-11

"...This afternoon M___, a gentleman in his early fifties, came in to buy his weekly yogurt. We have talked on many occasions before and I like him because he is passionate about the importance of good boots and gave up fishing because it upset his conscience. He loves walking and the solitariness of Bald Mountain. He told me he was sad I was leaving. I replied that there would always be wonderful people behind the counter at L____, but he shook his head saying I was the best there'd been. I was flattered. Then he told me that if he were younger and I were single he'd have "been all over me," but unfortunately that was "not how the world had turned out." Again I was flattered, and not knowing what else to say, said as much. I wanted to leave the store and spend the afternoon tramping with him, learning about his history, what brought him joy about nature, what his philosophies about life were."

Today I learned that M___ had passed away. His final minutes were spent on Bald Mountain. I should have taken the initiative. I should have suggested we hike there together. I should have replied to his last email. I try and comfort myself with the fact that it was summer, and I was working 77 hour weeks, but damn it! I didn't reply. "Dear Sarah, I desperately wanted to come up and see you this weekend, but fate had other plans for me." I didn't reply. "Please take good care of yourself until I can come up and see you again. M___." I didn't reply. I never did see him again and I ache with wishing things were otherwise. For they could have been otherwise; I know they could; I could have made them otherwise.

Everywhere we tread we leave a trace, nor can we breathe without disturbing the universe. To exist is to bear a responsibility beyond reckoning. How have I treated life so blithely? How have I failed to see the gravity of my most trivial actions? How have I misunderstood the importance of every "hello" I've ever uttered, every footfall I've ever in snow imprinted, every word, every gesture, every move? Listen! We are alive and everything we do is of uttermost importance in the grand scheme of things; every action has not just an equal and opposite reaction, but chains of actions and reactions stemming out into the horizon of the future until, at some point, the entire universe is altered by the way we put on our socks. Everything matters; everything matters to the severest degree. Everything! 

1-24-2013

Aesculus hippocastanum. The genus, Aesculus, hails from the Latin for "acorn." The species, hippocastanum, derives from the Greek for "horse" and "chestnut," possibly on the basis that Horse Chestnuts were used to treat respiratory ailments in equines, and possibly because the tree has markings reminiscent of horseshoes. A dutiful latter-day apothecary, I instate the bible of herbal healing upon my lectern workplace counter and try to determine what ails the customer in aisle two. She has requested Horse chestnut. Horse chestnut: an anti-inflammatory, known to strengthen the capilliaries, thereby aiding circulation. Perhaps she has arthritis, or gout, those needling crippledoms of weak blood flow; or perhaps she is as I am, a seasonal leper, whose veins protest any oxygenation of the extremities until Persephone returns back upstairs. Horse chestnut: an expectorant. Perhaps it's a wet cough she suffers; perhaps her lungs are as two lakesome reservoirs that must be drained dry as the haunt of the Light Princess, lest the lady succumb to pneumonia and pass away before March. Horse Chestnut: as a flower essence, "helps those who repeat their mistakes over and over, without learning from them, to see themselves more clearly." Perhaps she's held fast by cyclic errors, stepping, in defiance of Heraclitus, back into the same river not merely twice, but five, ten, or fifty times. Ah, I sympathize dear Miss Aisle 2, for I have been in that thrall all my life, a one-woman pine processionary following my footprints in a circle because familiar missteps are less daunting than the assay of untrod ground. No more, though, no, no more. If I am such a Dorothy that home is my desire of desires, then I must follow yellow brick roads unnavigated, not my own bald tracks in the snow. If I am an Innocent Smith, I must row oceans, climb mountains, and hold truck with Emperor Ho and the hermit of the Sierras to traverse the "round road" home. If I am a hobbit, I must go to the Cracks of Doom to get back to my hole in the Shire. 

     So I shall prise myself from off my beaten track, with the Horse Chestnut in mind as a reminder of past folly and a symbol of future fortitude, for the nut of that tree is, after all, the conker, which Bilbo Baggins (as played by the inimitable Martin Freeman), when posed the question "axe or sword, what's your weapon of choice?" proposes as his munitional preference. And, as the old wives' tale has it that conkers keep away spiders, who's to say that Bilbo wouldn't be just as well served by his humble Horse Chestnut than any Gondolin smithery? Would it not be apt for Ungoliant's spawn to be undone by the seed of a tree? Would it not be apt for the most horrific of monsters to be laid low by the humblest of weapons? Though this is not the tale of bound pages or glossy screens, perhaps it might yet be my tale. Let me go out onto roads past my ken, protected by nothing more than Earth's bounty, protected by nothing less than the world.

1-23-13

Here is the thing. It is night. Past midnight night. And the lass who writes these posts has a ten hour work day ahead of her, commencing in the early hours tomorrow morning. It does not do for her to be occupying these onyx seconds with text when sleep is calling. Yet regularity is key, it is pivotal, and if one cannot do one's job oneself, one should at least have the good sense to delegate to one more adept. This journal is a job to be done. It must be done. It must pound like a heartbeat if it is to live at all. And so, though I am duty-bound to brevity, I leave this page in the capable hands of my Moriarty, Mr T. S. Eliot:

"We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time."

Yes! Life as an intrepid journey to one's starting gate! We have been gone so many years, and shall be gone so many more, but know that, far-gone though we are, we're only seeking our front door.

1-22-2013

"A stranger here

Strange things doth meet, strange glories see;

Strange treasures lodg'd in this fair world appear,

Strange all and new to me;

But that they mine should be, who nothing was,

That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass"

-Thomas Traherne-

     Once I, too, was new born and saw all the world as strange. Since then I have lived, and I have acclimatized, and I have learned to predict the passage of the sun and the underbelly of the leaves, but I am mistaken if I think that, just because I have seen it daily, in and out of so many months and seasons, the world can no more be new to me. For the world was not new when I arrived in it. It was I, and my new-found perception that rendered it strange. The world holds no tyranny over perception, nor forces one to see it in one way and one way only. No, rather the world is as a Virgil, a guide. The world sets up certain parameters beyond which perception may not stray: objective reality does not function wholly at our behest, nor can we view things entirely according to our whims, but even within reality's unbreachable limits, perception exercises much wiggle room. Chesterton says "if you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe." Chesterton is right. Yet though we are not free to draw giraffes with short necks, we are eminently free to draw them with necks of many different altitudes, provided only they are all long ones. 

     The world does not demand to be viewed as old or commonplace. The world admits to being viewed as new and strange, as it is viewed by infants. I am not an infant, yet nor am I debarred from infantile perception, that perception in which, as my mind conceives it, there is so much joy and comfort. Let it all be strange to me again. Let me enter the world afresh with each breath.

1-21-2013

Supposedly it is 75 degrees Fahrenheit in this room. I refuse to believe it, huddled as I am in my three jumpers, doubled trousers, scarf and blanket, and still feeling the prick of a thousand thermostat-oblivious goose-pimples across my calves and biceps.

"Cold now,
unbearable. Clouds
bunch up and boil down
from the north of the white bear.
This tree-splitting morning 
I dream of his fat tracks,
the lifesaving suet.

I think of summer with its luminous fruit
blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,
handsful of grain.

Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we always had, secretly 
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe

that is what it means the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.

In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest, we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers."

-Mary Oliver-

Is this what the cold is to me? A love of my own bones? Ack, perhaps. Perhaps. Yet it is more than a love for my bones; it is a love for my muscles, and a desire they should be limber and swing loose and free, bidden rather by brain than by reflex. All winter my muscles are tense, wound taught about my skeleton, contracting, compacting me like a crocus sewn shut by night, and my mind grows effete from the gale. I read of beetles in tropical climates and count the hours till the thaw.

1-20-13

"But for repentance to emerge, a person must first despair with a vengeance, despair to the full, so that the life of spirit can break through from the ground up." --Soren Kierkegaard

Let one house contain all one's goods. There is room enough. Put everything under one roof, for that is life's method, and leave the editing for the evenings and the candle hours. Analysis is important, but experiment must come first. The wool precedes the knit and pearl; the ocean precedes the tide; and observation, wild and free, must precede conclusion, neat and orderly. So I shall put all my goods in one room, and all my words on one page, with nothing but dates as flag-posts. I shall write as I live.

The underbelly of pine fronds beyond the window are a-gloss with gold. I know they would feel frictionless to the touch, as plastic does, or waxed paper. I know this due to the distribution of light and shade, the clustering and clumping of gold and white along their spines. I deduce touch from sight, smoothness from coruscation. 

All my colors are muted; all my sounds are dimmed. It is as if there were a parasite within me, vitiating me, numbing me.  Yet no, not a parasite, not a living thing, but a non-malevolent band or shell of some sort, something that, being lifeless, cannot be killed, being without motive, cannot be indicted, and being without malice, cannot be fought. 

Love stories hurt. It was on account of love stories, I believe, that I fell to the floor, the lacquered floor between boots and fridge, and ached, and cried. Yesterday. I cried. Aye, cried. Was I a sorry specimen? Did I cut a commiserable figure? Do I flinch to admit these brined antics? Aye, I do. I do not want to be weak. I do not want to be the lass who cries in self-pity over love stories. I do not know why I am as I am these days; I do not know why I'm held as in amber, held by numbness and pain as in amber. Nor do I know how to overcome these blights. I only yearn for Spring and escape.

Here is honesty and a little practical description. This house is not good for me. Everything associated with him hurts terribly, and everything here is associated with him. The walls are paper thin and I cannot escape the sounds of my mother-in-law, my brother-in law, my nephew, and though the conversations permeating the wood and plaster are benign, nor even picked out with any clarity beneath shrouding madrigals and requiems, they go in like daggers all the same.

      The wood that he brought down remains unused beside the wood burner. He was going to show me how to properly construct a fire, how to arrange the logs and kindling to best effect. There was no instruction. The wood has become a symbol now. It cannot warm me. 
       The busts upon the mantle are of idolized authors, and have inscribed upon their bases love dedications from he to I. They are beautiful busts, ivory, exquisitely crafted. I am weak. The busts are apologies, pleas for forgiveness, bids for reconciliation. I would have said they were clay surrogates for animate love, but, if I am truthful, they are not even that. They are rather requests to delay, promissory notes for a love that could not be redeemed, that could never be redeemed. I am weak and would put them in paper, bury them in boxes. I do not, but I would, though they are beautiful and do not deserve to be hidden. For the present they sit on the mantle and ail me if I think upon them. 

      The guitar remains untouched in its casing. All the old songs were bound up with him, in one way or another; not written for him, but bound up with him. He slipped away from the wedding bonfire in Maine while I joined the six-string epithamalia. He slipped away to be with vodka and the stars, and when I finished playing, and, blushes obscured by night and flames, looked about the kindly ring, I realized my mistake. All gone. All gone. The hobbit hole, the friends, the independence. All gone. I went North as a hostage and I play my songs no more.

In 1848 revolution broke out, firstly in Paris, and subsequently throughout Europe. Country upon country, in quick, destructive bursts, toppled their governing regimes to achieve fleeting liberalism. There was much bloodshed, but little lasting political reform, and the Springtime Of The Peoples, as the events were dubbed, gave way to a renewed Winter Of The Parliaments. The fact that Winter returns is never so significant as the fact that it was once Spring. Yes, there was violence and death and horror, but there was also hope, real horizon-skimming hope that the drudgery of inequality was at an end, that a halcyon age awaited on the other side of the musket-smoke. Right now I would give my life to have something worth giving my life for. 

My despair is hesitant, lack-luster; the life of the spirit lies entombed in frozen ground that will not break. So much numbness. Entombed in amber. Yet in amber there is as much life as death, as much activity as inertia, if I would only view the thing aright. Amber, in its Greek rendering elektron was one of Helios's many monikers, meaning "formed by the sun," and is etiologically anchored to the tears of Phaeton's sisters, who, transformed into poplars, wept resin for their dead brother. Amber, as elektron, is the etymological spark behind "electricity," a term coined for the static charge generated by rubbing amber against other materials. Come Phaeton! Come Faraday! Melt me! Break me! Come vernal revolution! Dissolve Winter into Spring and let the life of the spirit tear through!

1-19-13

Life begins with a desire to break open. 

Let these words be the beak to the shell.