Friday, November 22, 2013

Be Wet with a Decent Happiness





Thursday Night Pints consisted of neither Thursday night or pints, but in Thursday Afternoon Emails L challenged me to post a particular poem of mine she likes as header last night. It'd been posted before. There is new product, I'm just not posting it. L thinks I should, encourages me to post at the other place, dared me to post the poem I posted last night as header hoping to kick-start something. Do you want me to tell you - this isn't Thursday Night Pints dialogue, I'm talking to you - do you want me to tell you my theories on why I'm not posting new product? No, I didn't think you did. Besides thinking of you, I'm thinking of me: I'd have to post the poems I don't want to post to explain why I don't want to post the poems. I posted a link to a friend's meditation on silence, another friend tweeted about a nice, small, quiet novel. I think of myself as nice, but small and quiet are adjectives that have never been used to describe me by me, by anyone. Sorry, here's a theory: I'm working on smaller and quieter, wildly unsuccessful here in this format, by refusing to post here the work that matters to me most (except when I do).







Today is Britten's centenary. I mentioned it first three weeks ago. I wasn't planning to post a piece a day in countdown to his birthday but I expected to have posted far more than I have. It's not work yet, an oh-fuck yet listening to Britten, but I find myself resisting the music when once it was drop the needle, flow. I picked up the nice, small, quiet novel my friend recommended, from admittedly light skimming it seems a Point A to B plot. I deal with Point A to B plots in real life, many of them more enforced because ridiculously contrived than the ridiculously contrived Point A to B plots in novels I no longer force myself to read. I have no patience for (all novels but especially) novels with Point A to B plots. The two, my new reaction to Britten's music and my now apparently calcified reaction to Point A to B plots in novels, are of course related symptoms. I have a theory, but.






I wrote this paragraph Thursday night. I am seeing Bonnie Prince Billy Friday night with Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Xtina. I'm going to get up at 7:00 Friday morning (if I'm lucky: I'll be wide awake at 5:30, cats chirping in ears, head-butting my forehead, for breakfast, I might be able to fall back asleep, though doubtful), drink coffee, finish this post, then go to an oral surgeon for the consultation appointment for removing this fucking wisdom tooth which waited 54 years to spurt, after which I will drive to work and find an email box full of fuck. I'll deal with it, I'll deal with this, I'll deal with that. I'll leave work at four and squelch the urge to stop for reward-sushi in Glen Echo and drive home and meet Hamster. If Earthgirl and I feel like quickly picking up we'll let Hamster in the house, most probably we'll meet him on the steps in front of our house, hopefully kept company by Napoleon, MomCat, and Frankie. The three of us will drive to the library - I'll park my car in Lot 9 as always - and meet Mr Alarum and Xtina on the library's loading dock. I will immediately insist that even though we are standing on the loading dock of the building I and Mr Alarum work in and the concert is in a building of my and Mr Alarum's employer WE CAN NOT AND WILL NOT DISCUSS WORK! This won't be a problem. We will walk down Prospect, possibly stopping to eat at a better than decent Thai restaurant, maybe walking down to M until we find a restaurant we all agree upon. Food, beer, wine, laughs. We'll trudge uphill back to Hilltop. We'll see an opening act or not and see Bonnie Prince Billy either solo or with a band, we don't know. It will be marvelous, charming, funny, if past Bonnie Prince Billy shows I've seen are predictors of tomorrow's show. We'll leave the theater, it will be colder than we expect though everyone thinks they're prepared for cold, but. Earthgirl and Hamster and I will say good night to Mr Alarum and Xtina, we'll walk to my car. I'll take Prospect to 35th to M to Canal to Clara Barton Parkway to Glen Echo Parkway to the Beltway to 355 to Beach to home. Napoleon and MomCat and Frankie will hear the sound of my car and see the angles of my headlights as I park the car and run out to greet us. A most enjoyable Point A to Point B plot. I will or won't write about it Saturday morning and post field recordings.







Yes, I've posted the Creeley poem below before, more than once, I love it, titled other posts with the same line I used for this post. I wasn't going to say more about writing (and I wasn't going link-farming today either), but flowerville's most recent post in which he posts a photo of his Decomposition Book prompts me to note that in a startling (for me) development I've stopped, after thirty-five years, maybe temporarily, I'll find out, working in Moleskins, a decision both impromptu and significant, I have theories why,  I'll spare you. I'm now working in:






THE RAIN

Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.
What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.
Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out
of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.



2 comments:

  1. a) i hope your day goes as predicted here and that any surprises will be pleasant ones, if kismet allows

    b)speaking of unexpected developments, not necessarily to our advantage, on this fiftieth anniversary i hereby renounce forever all conspiracy theories of the murder of jfk - it was just one guy with a mail order rifle, he did it by himself for idiosyncratic reasons - lee harvey oswald was the mark david chapman of 1963

    the recent NOVA show Cold Case JFK about the shooting seems convincing to me

    as does David Macaray's reasoning in

    http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/20/oswald-did-it-and-he-acted-alone/

    i no longer agree with the suspicions i expressed earlier this fall at http://tinyurl.com/kd4znuo



    ReplyDelete
  2. 99 cent notebooks Made In Brazil. Easy to rip for three-point practice.

    Word verification: vinterese, a desolate Schubertiad with a fine chardonnay I suppose.

    ReplyDelete