Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Universe In A Black Wool Hat

A thick flat layer of cloud over the Olympic peaks to the west, but with such an even space between the peaks of the mountains and the bottom layer of cloud it looked like a curtain that hadn’t been pulled all the way down. Three band-aids on R’s arm. Athena got provoked, either by a sense of play or a sense of fear at not understanding what was transpiring, when R was doing her exercises on the floor. Athena pounced on her arm and dug her claws in. It’s enlightening when one considers the fear people have when they encounter anything they don’t understand. Towels feel wonderful when they come out of the dryer, and they’re easy to fold. I like that about towels. Socks and underwear, on the other hand, are a drag. Visions de l’Amen, by Olivier Messiaen. It’s like listening to somebody build a house of sound with twinkly nails and wavelengths of string. Medallions of pork roast on a bed of Greek spaghetti for our anniversary dinner. Delicious. There were so many crows today, well over a hundred. It’s getting ridiculous. We’re now feeding about a pound of unsalted peanuts to crows per day. This has to come to a stop. But how? Where can we run where the crows won’t find us? I mainly just want to feed Louise, the crippled crow, and her immediate family. Is ambiguity a good antidote for timidity? What would Lulu say? She’s still shouting at age 72. Ambiguity stumbles on a treasure of frogskins and ducats and buys a ticket to the aluminum in your eyes. But remember: good love is hard to find. Salvation is anywhere the divine shows its pullulations and sniffs at your beautiful remarks. The sublime might be subtle in some ways, but it is not innocent. Innocence is ruptured by the pain of existence. And then it becomes fibrous and fiduciary. Have you ever felt the lightning in your head shoot out of your eyes and mouth at a wedding? Or a funeral? Have you ever sat in the back of a Greyhound drinking whiskey with a cowboy from Laramie listening to Wipeout and other hits from the early 60s? I’m so full of questions I could be a fidget. What’s a fidget? It’s like a heat wave. Bach on the back of my tongue. The big groan of the organ at the Church of John the Baptist in Lüneberg, Germany is a luxury of sound on the divine palette of music. Light, physicists say, comes in discrete packages called photons. So the light emanating from a computer screen: packages hitting my eyes. The light from my lamp: packages. Open a photon, and what do you see? Energy oscillating in waves. Click of the plastic Ocean Spray Cran-Cherry bottle after I stomped on it, reducing its volume before tossing it into the recycling bag. The bottle returns to its original shape. Or tries to. Reminds me of an afternoon in a hotel cocktail lounge with my father and him gazing at a swizzle stick and bending it and telling me plastic has a memory as the stick resumed its original shape. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, say the Buddhists. It’s like, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, seeing the sunlight and rain and even the logging industry in a sheet of paper: everything that went into the making of the paper, trees, dirt, labor, air. It contains everything in the universe. Black wool hat stuck on a wooden stake plunged in the grassy street divider at West Prospect and West Kinnear Place. Details at six.

 

 

 

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