As Your Azure

As the sun rises, so does my consciousness emerge from the depths of sleep.

As I read Le phénomène érotique exige la venue du Jugement dernier by Jean-Luc Marion online, I hear the rustle of newspaper pages as Roberta reads today’s news on the couch behind me. The headline reads: A humble salute: 2 historic anniversaries noted this year along with Memorial Day: Next month marks the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, and July is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. World War II veterans are dwindling fast, and the U.S. has no living World War I vets.

As I sip the last of my coffee, I wonder what time I will go for a run.

As I am little persuaded to believe that a large yet largely invisible omniscient and omnipotent deity resides in the sky and whose image resembles that of a muscular, athletic man in late middle-age with shaggy long white hair and beard and a stern countenance, and who can be invoked during times of hardship, towns devastated by tornado, famine brought on by drought, cities blackened by cholera and other devastating epidemics, even though these occurrences have to be attributed to the same deity since said deity is omnipotent and responsible for creating all things in the universe, I am nevertheless inclined to believe that everything in the universe is imbued with divine energy.

As You Like It is one of my favorite plays by William Shakespeare.

As the unprecedented influx of people into Seattle continues unabated, it becomes exponentially harder to drive. One must frequently wait for a car to travel down a narrow residential street, factor in an extra hour for traveling during rush hour, as making a trip to the airport or dentist.

“As Time Goes By” is a song written by Herman Hupfeld for the 1931 Broadway musical Everybody’s Welcome. The song was re-introduced in 1942 in the film Casablanca. It was sung by Dooley Wilson and heard throughout the film as a leitmotif. Alto saxophonist Dexter Gordon recorded a version of it in 1985 for his album The Other Side of Round Midnight. Bob Dylan, then known as Bob Zimmerman, performed the song on January 9^th, 1959, at the Jacket Jamboree in Hibbing, Minnesota.

As the World Turns was an American television soap opera that aired on CBS from April 2^nd, 1956, to September 17^th, 2010.

As the world turns at approximately 18 miles per second, the day shifts from the long crisp shadows of morning to the stark energies of noon to the quieter lingering shadows of late afternoon, shadows which lengthen into night, and which reappear the next day as the cycle of the planet’s spin goes on and on, day and night shifting their scenes as humans shift from moment to moment of their lives creating a continuous, never-ending drama.

As I put on my running clothes, I hear someone in the laundry room shift their laundry to the dryer, followed by the hum of the dryer and the click of zippers and buttons against the metal surface of the drum, followed by the click of the door latch as the laundry room door is closed.

A sad size a size that is not sad is blue as every bit of blue is precocious, wrote Gertrude Stein one hundred years ago in Tender Buttons.

Breath, which was ever the original of ‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness, wrote William James in Essays in Radical Empiricism. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.

As dye molecules diffuse slowly into the region where they are less concentrated, regardless of the presence of other solutes, so does a perception diffuse into our nerves, stimulating a response or thought or provoking a higher level of awareness.

Awareness resembles awakening in its dilation, its expanding horizon of information, much of which can be overwhelming, as the waves at sea can be overwhelming for a small boat, or the progress of Arthur Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, immersed in delirium the same way the mind can be agitated to states of ecstasy by an hallucinogenic drug, suggesting that as a poem dilates the mind with its metaphors and analogies, creating a fresh perspective of the world, making the ordinary suddenly extraordinary, the mind is both made unsteady and enriched by the destabilizing forces of the poem, or drug.

As I put on my socks, I hear François Hollande address France during the 3:00 p.m. news on France 2: “ce vote est un defiance à l’égard de l’Europe, à l’égard du government, aussi bien de la majorité que de l’opposition,” he proclaims, with reference to the election results yesterday in which France’s National Front Party, their extreme right wing, triumphed over the other parties, garnering a whopping 26% of the vote, and indicating a clear movement toward fascistic policies. The sense of shock and dismay is in the tone of his voice. He sits at a desk. Behind him is the French flag and shelves of books. The shelving consists of a dark hardwood, oak or cherry, with modest decorations rendered in boiserie. All the books have shiny golden spines. Hollande’s hands rest on a golden mat and go into movement as he pleads for sanity.

I like the expression “as is.” As in, here, this is available now at a cheap price, as is, in its full reality, nothing altered, all of its imperfections in full view, the very embodiment of truth, reality, and the raw immediacy of the tuneless world. As is is as as as an as can be. As your azure. As your razor. As has an as in assonant jazz.