In My Own Mind

9 a.m. Dearest, I am sitting on a porch overlooking the creek - the other side of the creek this time. I've come along with D on a job - I felt that I just couldn't bear to be by myself this Sunday morning - never alone on Sunday, as Lyle Lovett sings. It is lovely to sit perched here on the porch high on a hill looking down at the shimmering water. The water is audible, a constant backdrop of sound, like a waterfall. Maybe there is a waterfall. There is bird song, and the sound of the back door opening and slapping shut as the men go about the house in circles (or so it seems at the moment) going about their work. It's another one of those grey misty days reminding me of camping trips - another reason, I think, that I came along for the ride. The scenery is reminiscent of Mianus or Aspetuck or Webetuck or wherever it was we girl scouts used to go by VW bus to camp. (I look around - tangle of trees, bare branches like pincers. Chill mists cut through me and I see my breath, then the sun comes out and I'm warm.)

I just walked down the road to the water's edge - it's shallow rapids that I hear. I wonder if anyone ever swims here (in the quieter parts), how deep the water is. Maybe it's too treacherous for swimming. For rafting? I've never seen anyone on the water.

I feel like Cunegonde being here. Perhaps I should be making pastries to help, I said to the client (nice guy). I brought cookies yesterday - close! (Endless recursions - I am Echo and Cunegonde). Making lunch would be more realistic and practical, though. It would be nice to make them lunch, cook something up this morning. Spaghetti sauce, perhaps. Or perhaps just sandwiches. I ask myself - what would Ruth Reichl do?

***
1 p.m. As it happened the client wanted Subway for lunch and D & I went home for leftovers. It wasn't my Cunegonde day today, though I sent D back with more cookies. Am at the library now, will head back to sit on the Adirondack chair on the client's porch again. It is good to tear myself away from the computer and from KZE for a day. As a result I have made great progress with Jerome Charyn's Emily Dickinson novel. I'm very impressed with it, bracing language and voice. I glance at reviews on the dust jacket - someone compares Charyn to Nabokov, and I think that's about right - it's that startlingly direct, fresh and original.

Wondering about mysterious page hits from Belgium - so strange, this page hit business, and none, ever, from Hudson. Go figure. Anyway. Hope your Sunday is going well, darling. Thinking of you. Kisses.

Mona Lisas, Mad Hatters, and an Indigo Girl

Dearest, it's a very quiet day today. Am reading Maps & Legends. The universe granted me another chance so I checked it out of the library (g.s. eyeroll). Am reading that Arthur Conan Doyle's father was

an architect and painter who died, in a private sanatorium, of drink and of the bitter, self-aware madness that sees itself as damnation through an excess of sanity. His was the kind of madness that reads the random text of the natural world and finds messages and secret connections, the agency of elves and demons and other liminal beings. Charles Doyle burdened his son with a legacy of failure and a [rich and irrelevant] treasure... an eccentric way of looking at the world, of making it against all reason, cohere.

Not elves so much, but having lived through the last several months I relate to the foregoing. I find messages in the infrequent hits to my blog, and narratives that relate to you and me in many (maybe not all) of the songs on KZE. For example, I have constructed a mental picture of your marriage, in particular your wife, based on lyrics to an eponymously named song by Pink Martini. The fact that the song has your wife's name in it seems to me to go a bit beyond mere coincidence, but who knows. The story within the song also offers a snapshot of what I interpret to have been (note my tense - my conclusion based on the 12534's "Niagara Falls" post) your marriage - that she's so active and driven that she's always out the door - not there for you. (Another song, Nobody Knows Me, by Lyle Lovett - (you) hate to be alone on Sundays.) I also link it with a song KZE played just now - Conversation, by Joni Mitchell - basic needs for comfort and conversation unmet within a marriage. I wonder about a disturbingly dramatic Carolina Chocolate Drops song, Hit 'Em Up Style, the unleashed, destructive fury it describes - I am on the fence about whether this relates to the coherent narrative. But maybe it does.

I don't know what keeps me going in this. Every day is a struggle. My impetus for writing - heartfelt writing - is love, especially for you, or some other passion, such as, in the political sphere, being occasionally aroused strongly enough by an untruth or injustice that I feel sufficiently energized to articulate it. Sheer physical energy is a big issue with me - overcoming bodily fatigue and ache is often an effort of will - unless my passion or a particularly roused sense of duty - is aroused. Then I'm Superwoman!

Maybe you're not even reading this. But I don't really believe that. David Gray is on this very moment, singing Made Up My Mind. I believe him.

***

Near dawn this morning, lying by the stove listening to the radio, I felt a sense of validation when this song came on:

I am aglow with thoughts of you
Are the stories that you told me true?
It doesn’t matter if they are
They are to me
I am aglow

Some might say these thoughts are wrong
That you might see yourself in this song
I hope that you don’t mind if you do
I am aglow with thoughts of you

Does it matter that what I remember might be
Just my own imagination painting scenes more pretty
Is it obvious? Does it show?
With thoughts of you I am aglow

Some might say I’m thinking in sin
So I’ll just sit back and take you in
You’re a map of a place; maybe someday I’ll go
With thoughts of you I am aglow

Does it matter that what I remember is not true
Does it matter that all I can think of is you
Does it matter that what I remember might be
Just my own imagination painting scenes more pretty
Is it obvious? Does it show?
With thoughts of you I am aglow.

Sarah Harmer, I Am Aglow

glistening

Dearest, here I am
I'm feeling better
I was in a bad water place
a hell gate
but taps on the wall
and a morning shower
worked wonders

yodel-ah-ee-he-yos
hot water fell in long rows
sliding down my rosy roes
swiss chocolate drops
and figaros
inside along my wet allegros
slipping to my posy toes
I moaned it felt so good
I stood in the falls of loving you
and kept my eyes closed
I'm better off when I'm serene, above
awash in an alpine pool of your love
yodel-a-ee-he-he-o
give that fire another poke, darling
and please
if it's not too late
make it a cheeseburger.











images:
John Singer Sargent, Alpine Pool, 1907
mashup via figaro