Tomorrow

I have to completely reinvent myself tomorrow, this incarnation has failed in more ways than one. But it's late and I'm tired and I agree to a draw. Not that I admit defeat, or even position, but I'm bored with the posing. I'd rather throw a game, than stay up any later. Rain, when I wake, a uniform greyness. I can just see my other ridge across a fog-filled hollow. The phone is out, but I have electricity, and the quiet, except for the staccato beat of light rain on the metal roof, especially after I flip the breaker on the fridge, is total; the sense of solitude is overwhelming. No crows, which would complete the picture, but a ragged looking Pileated woodpecker arrives, during a lull in the rain, and works a dying hickory tree. He makes a few pecks, then cocks his head to listen for bugs beneath the bark. A lovely bird, always alone, most majestic in a stark winter landscape, when everything is black or white, with that brilliant flash of red. Nothing for it but to read all day, so I spend an hour looking through my stacks and settle of MFK Fisher's translation of Brillat-Savarin's "The Physiology Of Taste". A very good matching of styles between author and translator. Fisher is a plain, lucid (and beautiful) writer, an important influence on my work, and I've read her, over and over, for thirty years, and she does a wonderful job of keeping Brillat-Savarin clear. After a couple of hours though, I turn to my favorite current food writer, John Thorne. He writes in such a clean, relaxed prose, not unlike john McPhee, that it's not until later that you realize how much information has been transferred. I write so slowly that I don't even keep two fingers busy. I started this paragraph four hours ago, but I keep walking around the house looking out the windows, thinking about various things. Glad I called Glenn and Linda last night, before the phone went out; Linda was up to her elbows in butter and couldn't talk, but I had a nice chat with Glenn, about the Emily Project and life in general. He's my oldest friend, Hypo Clearing Agent, and I can't remember ever having a falling out with him. We shared some strange times, living together on Cape Cod, first in a de-sanctified church in Yarmouth Port, then in a house on the dump road in Brewster. I had spent a couple of hours reading myself, trying to pull a manuscript together, and I enlisted his aid, in trying to find some things I'd written. The leaf-rain is mesmerizing. The wind picked up. As Emily might have said " Trees stripped bare by their master---" and there's a finality to the sound and feel of it. With Ted Enslin, once, in Maine, before he moved to the coast, we listened to all of the Mahler symphonies in one day. He actually possessed the manuscript copy of the unfinished tenth symphony, and hummed it, dragging his finger across the page. Those last Beethoven quartets are heart-rending, Opus 131. How that feeling of sublime is generated by a piece of music, or looking at a piece of art, or reading a poem of Emily's embedded in a letter, is a mystery, but real nonetheless: there's a visceral response with no mediation. Religion is all about mediation. I tend to worship things that are extremely local and seasonal: a fox, a particular bird, the way water runs downhill, the patter on the roof; it's taken decades, but I've cleared the ways, only pay attention to what interests me. It's an arrogant attitude, and tends to isolate me, because no one wants to spend time with someone who watches tadpoles for hours at a time. But I'm not unhappy, is the point I think I was starting to make. Looking at the bilaterally symmetrical leaves on a sumac bush, or befriending a fox is more important, to me, than tweeting a friend that I was leaving Kroger. I might grow a bread because shaving is become bothersome. All I'd have to do in the morning is brush my teeth, no chance I'd cut my throat by accident. Tom The phone is still out, so I can't send, and it's easiest to just keep writing in the same file, whatever I called it. Today, tomorrow? I have to get out, the wind is blowing, and that's a good sign. Dries the surface moisture, and I just want to get to town, so we can do Emily, the only thing I care about right now. Then I'm taking a week off, assuming 'The Corpse Pose' on the living room floor and not moving a muscle. Drinking just juice. Doctor John, "Money honey..." Junior Wells, "Everybody's getting them some..." Bonny singing back-up, then Jimmy gone wild. Shake everything you got. Did I mention Zach is a genius? And Linda is beyond anything you could imagine, she nails Emily, in all the contradictions. Twice she makes me cry, and I don't even remember how to cry, a strangled choking, an embarrassed cough, but at the very beginning and then again, at the beginning of the fourth movement, I just weep. This is what art should do. This will be out of sequence, but I didn't want to throw it away. Tom