Late

Perplexed by a noise in the night, I get up and flip on the porch light. It's leaf-rain on the metal roof. I make a cup of coffee, sit in the dark, and enjoy the oddness of the sound. A slight scratchiness. With dawn comes the realization that I can glimpse the other side of the hollow for the first time in many months. Sunlight is actually penetrating to the forest floor. The leaf-fall has become almost constant. No birds, no squirrels, too much wind. The leaves of the Royal Pawlonia are so large they become kites. The blackberry canes, stripped leafless, look like lethal weapons. Reading Benjamin, "In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows." The Arcades Project is such an immense system of interconnecting caves and tunnels I don't think it can ever be fully explored. It leads you OUT, as Olson said, into all this other stuff. A synergistic thinker who could juggle twelve balls at once. Where I write, I have a window in front of me, with flanking windows on each side, a sudden and powerful gust of wind hits, flexes the house, and within the field of my vision, hundreds of leaves swirl about, all at once; the airspace is thick with them, maybe thousands, and their flat light nature has them floating for several seconds. I can juggle one ball; on a good day, two; and by the standards of my generation I'm considered a synergistic person, however self-taught and misguided. I can't read ancient Greek, for god's sake, don't speak any other language, and my math skills, on a simple level, are impressive, but when it comes to unknowns, I'm lost in the dark. I'd better save you, the wind is blowing really hard. I do hate loosing paragraphs. It goes against my essential nature. Right, you were disconnected, right then, so you couldn't hear. Listen, I've heard all these arguments before, I would choose my tree-tip pit over any habitation, I don't want to bear any responsibility for something someone does. That the dog ate your homework doesn't carry water, maybe, if you spilled bacon grease on a piece of vellum; Shackleton's men ate less, and all survived. Lost phone. Read, finally sleep to the whistling wind. Phone back, but I'll just keep writing on yesterday, it seems to want continued. Beautiful day, I take my coffee out back, sit on the porch. Benjamin again. "Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show. I shall appropriate no ingenious formulation, purloin no valuables. But the rags, the refuse --- these I will not describe but put on display." A Strasbourg piano manufacturer, Schmidt, made the first guillotine. Like that. Germane on several fronts, not the guillotine, but the quote. D and his thesis work, hovering around the question of what is a book. Reading Benjamin, The Archades Project, then the hundreds of pages of drafts and first sketches at the back, you realize this never was a book, but rather something that was put into book form years after the fact. A great job too, in my opinion. Also, that the idea of montage works for me on the Emily Project. Fortunately I had the day free, to think about those things. I do have a 3:00 call (!) to set up my medicare. Other than that, and the fact that I crave an open-face roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes on the side, I didn't have much planned. The call went well. I start receiving checks (electronically) in February, but I'm covered by Medicare as of the first of the year in Plan B. Curtis recommended that I look into coverage for the last 20%, through AARP. I just have hunker down and live a few months. I can do this, I can hunker down in a tree-root pit. I'm flexible that way. You could argue some specious bullshit, but what I notice are things that are actually happening, a certain creep of shadow, the way a highlight appears and disappears in a second.