And Then It Was

The Poem

Not the sunset poem you make when you think
                         aloud,
with its linden tree in India ink
and the telegraph wires across its pink
                         cloud;

not the mirror in you and her delicate bare
shoulder still glimmering there;
not the lyrical click of a pocket rhyme—
the tiny music that tells the time;

and not the pennies and weights on those
evening papers piled up in the rain;
not the cacodemons of carnal pain;
not the things you can say so much better in plain prose—

but the poem that hurtles from heights unknown
—when you wait for the splash of the stone
deep below, and grope for your pen,
and then comes the shiver, and then—

in the tangle of sounds, the leopards of words,
the leaflike insects, the eye-spotted birds
fuse and form a silent, intense,
mimetic pattern of perfect sense.

-Vladimir Nabokov

I happen to believe that a lot of scientific and rational premises are irrational to begin with – that the work of much science and academic inquiry is, deep down, merely the elaborate justification of desire, bias, whim, and glory. I sense that to some extent the rational ‘thinking’ areas of our brains are superrationalization engines. They provide us with means and justifications for our more animal impulses. They allow us to justify them both to ourselves and then, when that has been accomplished, to others.

-David Byrne

Dreamscent

Woke up to the smell of burning toast, which slowly dissipated into the air.  There was no toast, and no burn, just a dream.  Do dreams have smells?  Rolled over in bed and remembered that phantom smells are a common symptom of brain tumors.  Don’t know the connection but this made me think of Bobby Kennedy.  Felt sorry for Ethel, in an oddly despairing kind of way that can only be accessed in the groove between waking and dreaming.  Remembered a quote I once read about the Bobby-Jackie affair - “mortals behaving like the Gods.”  Went back to sleep and dreamed of Jackie Kennedy and debutante balls.

Goodbye, Faust

Today:  brioche toast with ruby dots of plum jam, crispy rice with lime and mint and a fried egg.  Octagonal houses and concrete rivers and kumquat trees and tea.  A place where I could stand with a foot in the rain and another in the sun. Pine cones the size of coconuts, so big, they barely fit into my hand. 

Everything leaves an impression now, the way pregnant women say their sense of smell becomes more pronounced.  Beauty is no longer something that needs to be possessed, which it was when my hours were tied up with work, and it felt like the money I had existed for the purpose of buying beauty.  And I did - experiences, travel, expensive shoes and scarves and wonderful meals.  Art, concerts, mid century dining tables, Eames chairs, Japanese ceramic knives.  For years, I spun out and out further like an unguarded event horizon, things and events and people and places getting pulled in to the eye of that endless black hole.  

But I must have, even then, known better.  Now I can’t walk a block without being transfixed by something beautiful.  Especially if it’s fleeting, especially if I can’t possess it.  Maybe it’s a byproduct of getting older.  Or the truth of paring down.  Less money+more time might actually be a luxury, the left-hand truth that we somehow fail to learn when we’re so desperately invested in something else entirely.

Or maybe it’s finally yielding in a way that I refused to for so long.  After all, I’m not as obsessed with the Faustian bargain as I once was.  Sometimes I’m even arrogant enough to believe that I’ve made my peace with diligence and simplicity.  There was a time when those very things frightened me, and felt so lonesome, so austere.  But who knows, perhaps I’ll wake up one day, fully returned to my former self.

Was it the paring down that’s responsible for this?  The fact that I’m finally doing what I always wanted?  Or all the sacrifices that came with it, all the parts of me that were forced to adapt and mold to the changes that came from every direction?  The letting go, the discomfort, the pain?  Do we ever really change?