June 20, 2007...12:50 pm
viral persistance
[all the greens in the world could not keep it away this time. I realize I have no idea how to handle sickness when it is my own.]
gray.
this is the day that is necessary sometimes - as a reminder: that the body is real, that you can’t outrun it, that it can, and will, stop you in your tracks.
brief and repetitive surges of memory: upwellings of guilt for small things long ago. stolen pens, lost confidences. on these days I feel the urge to write to people I have not contacted in years. where are you? I want you to know how much I respected you, how much you meant. I have a feeling I did something wrong, and do not know what it was. Can you help me? How is work?
the doors are rattling slightly. I could put an end to it in two ways: turning the antique key in the closet door, and either closing or opening the main door. Closing the window is not an option, though I can see the fog coming in through the vent, against the ceiling, moving like a living thing.
last night the sky was strangely bright and the air was without temperature. there was the long beach road with nearly no one on it. outcroppings of grasses cowering and animate, making their own shadows. The sky so strangely bright, lit from some source near the the earth: crystalline blue. orange haze. tan. hues that don’t have names. There was the ferris wheel, taller than usual at 1:30 am, and even at the far end of the walk there were the bright dabs marking its hanging benches, their slight movement in the no-wind.
coming back, rounding the elbow of land at the river, the fox: streaking out of the links and across the road ahead of me, into the rushes at my right hand. I waited to see if it - he? she? - would emerge but there was nothing and I crossed the bridge. I’ll have to make peace with it somehow. I’ll have to prove something.
this feels like a cusp of some kind: a change in air current into a different chapter. I am learning slowly not to be eager on cusps, knowing that eagerness is disruptive, and tends to demonstrate one’s unreadiness to pass out of a given stage and into the next. like the sight of one’s shadow in spring. six more years of learning not to anticipate, learning to be humble, learning to work diligently with what is at hand and push on, without vanity, to the most one can do. To build, to labour at a good work, without confusing creation with accomplishment. Without losing sight of the possibility of creating something great in the drapery of being great. To turn off the self long enough to see what is there, to turn off one’s own thoughts long enough to hear and speak something like the truth, knowing that embarrassment and hesitation are resistant threads of vanity, as is the inability to begin a task, insofar as the associated fear is the fear of difficulty, of shame, of failure. To sense the proximity of a change, or a task, and holding back from defining it. when giving something a name would be like stopping in the doorway of one’s home and turning back inside.
A vanishing point, but workable at least, practicable in small ways, in the harnessing of one’s sight into attention, into sincerity.
Sincerity being the moment in which the inner prattle quiets and gives itself over to another, something or someone.
There have been moments - long moments, lasting for months at a time - in which I’ve not been here, in which I’ve not been quiet enough to see what needed doing, or to see what things meant, to listen when they were speaking. Strange: even now, the level of fearlessness required, the level of trust. But perhaps even the need for trust is too demanding - one cannot wait until the world is declawed and the night has no teeth, and the people are good - to step into earnestness.
Writing, I run up against small facts: the difficulty of reading while speaking; the difficulty of hearing while speaking; the difficulty of understanding while attempting to do both. All of this is important. Someday maybe I’ll learn what it means.
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