Never Nothing

If you're attuned to sound at all, any change is enough to wake you from what had seemed a solid sleep. With the windows open, I'd fallen into the insect drone of pre-dawn, when an isolated whip-poor-will got very close and it was like a bugle in my ear. I shut the window and turned on the radio. The dew was dripping from the upper roof onto the lower, and that provided a staccato rhythm. Drown out whatever. Sometimes the natural world is just too much. When was it, the other day, I was walking over to Kroger to get cream for our coffee, and the blackbirds were everywhere, singing the second part of the common wolf-whistle. I had to laugh, but I didn't want to appear an idiot, so I almost choked to death. I can count without conscious thought, 117 repetitions before that fucking bird flies away. Time divided by iteration. I could go crazy, but it's easier to crank up The Allman Brothers and lose track of whatever it was I was thinking about, the way a particular painter portrayed light. I'm thinking Rembrandt here, you can imagine whoever you please, Vermeer, even Van Gogh. Receptionist was a no-show and I had some things I wanted to look up in the library, so I sat at the desk. Rereading Michael Gruber's "The Forgery Of Venus", which is a great book, and I wanted to read about and look at pictures by Velazquez, ditto with Canaletto (who had a lovely written hand) because he painted so many bridges in his pictures. I love bridges. In Venice, of course, but also when he spent time in England. Finally got a little book about Teosinte, the wild grass that became corn. So my reading is rampant and eclectic, which is how I like it. One of Canaletto's bridges is held together with a hog-chain system very much like what was used on steamboats. Steamboats had a lot of rigging, damping the vibration. Canaletto is not much for capriccio, which in painting circles is 'made up stuff', he pretty much painted what he saw; the views are still, in some cases, essentially the same, and he is the consummate draftsman of architecture. You could recreate buildings from his paintings, down to the ornamental detail. Velazquez is often miraculous. The "Rokeby Venus" blows my mind. Spain was so deeply Catholic, that you didn't do nudes. But he'd spent some time in Italy, and there were all those nude statues, and there were models willing to pose.