A Chiaroscuro Of The Mind

Ripples in my life, ripples in anyone’s life, little concentric rings across the pond of the mind, the cold still water of mind in repose, silt on the bottom, tree branches in stunning lucidity. It happens occasionally.

Or the little clanks and thuds of the woman upstairs.

Mexicans tossing chunks of concrete into the bed of a pickup truck.

This is life on earth in the year 2018.

It’s 6:14 a.m., Monday, January 1^st, 2018 in Australia. I’ve never been to Australia, but I find it interesting that it can be December 31^st here and January 1^st on two separate parts of the planet.

I hear the dryer going in the building laundry room. I did laundry two days ago and don’t need to do it today thank goodness because I don’t like doing laundry. I once did laundry for a living, throwing huge loads of hospital sheets and surgery gowns into a giant washing machine that looked like the instrumentation of a submarine. I worked with two other guys on wooden slats that were slippery all the time and one of the guys, Chico, who favored see-through tank tops and platform shoes (this was the 70s) and priding himself on being a pimp, why a pimp I have no idea, liked to play at boxing. We never actually hit one another, it was more like the Afro-Brazilian martial art known as capoeira, but without any of the grace or fancy maneuvers. Just slapping around at one another in a goofy kind of way.

We were also stoned. The other guy, Kurt, would bring in some killer weed. The washing machines were huge. You could get behind the machine and there’d be a joint lying on a ledge, lit and ready to go. You’d take a quick toke or two and go back around to load or unload the washer. Kurt brought in some especially strong Columbian weed one day and didn’t say anything. I took my usual two tokes and went back around and a few minutes later I barely had a sense of what I was doing. I was just standing there holding bits of laundry and staring off into space. Kurt and Chico were in stitches.

I’m also reminded of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh of a group of women doing laundry in a canal under the Pont de Langlois, a drawbridge constructed of stone and wood, near Arles in the south of France. A print of this painting hangs in our bedroom. The women are clustered together on the shore near a small boat as a covered wagon pulled by a single horse goes over the bridge. The water ripples gently outward in concentric circles from where the women are stooped to do their work. The colors are chiefly blue (blue sky, blue water) and lots of warm earth tones. It’s a highly balanced composition and emanates a feeling of serenity, despite the hard work being done by the women, who are huddled close together in almost a knot. The colors are strong, but not explosively so, insinuating a mood of calm immersion in the task at hand.

And today in France where it is 8:33 p.m. animated films are going to be projected onto the Arc de Triumph as millions gather in the Champs-Elysées to celebrate the coming of the new year.

I find it both silly and fascinating that people celebrate a new year, which, after all, is just a functioning of time. I can see celebrating time. Time is weird. The weird, the strange, the aberrant, the phenomenological, the eccentric and inexplicable should always be celebrated. 

Why does time always go forward? Why does it never go backward? Why does it move forward in such a manner that anyone’s life becomes a narrative beginning with infancy then childhood then adolescence then adulthood and its thousand miseries and then old age and its sad but mellowing resignations?

Why does it never go backward? Why does it move forward in such a manner that anyone’s life becomes a narrative beginning with infancy then childhood then adolescence then adulthood and its thousand miseries and then old age and its sad but mellowing resignations?

I’m in the twilight of my life. What’s on the other side of this life I don’t know. I’d like to think there may be some form of continuance but how that would occur without a body I have no idea. Do people become amorphous spheres of rapturous energy? What color are they? What would consciousness be like as a ball of energy without actual eyes to see anything with or ears to hear things or a mouth to say things and eat things? Without legs to walk? Is everything afloat? How to you get around? Why hasn’t a single dead person come back to tell all about it?

2:47 p.m. I’m hungry. R is making bratwurst. Hurrah for bratwurst. And mashed potatoes. Is there anything in the world better than mashed potatoes?

R informs me that the man who makes deliveries for the grocery store has also noticed a drop in the population of birds and insects. I find this deeply worrisome. It’s a sign of habitat loss. I worry about what we’ll do when food stops appearing on the shelves at the grocery store.

There is a great deal to be said for living in the present when the future looks so grim.

We watch The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel-Day Lewis, Wes Studi, Russell Means and Madeleine Stowe. This must be the eight or ninth time we’ve seen the movie. I really like the scene in which Hawkeye, Chingachgook and his son Uncas, Major Heywood and the two women, Cora and Alice, escape after the ambush by Magua and his Huron warriors and row a gigantic canoe down a raging river and get out just before the canoe goes over a thunderous falls with a 200-foot drop and hide under the falls. The roar of the water provides a backdrop for an impassioned speech Hawkeye delivers to Cora minutes before they’re inevitably discovered by Magua and the Huron warriors who are carrying torches, adding more luster to the drama, in which Hawkeye urges Cora to stay alive, no matter what, he will come and find her, and then falls back, takes a fast run and goes leaping into the thunderous mass of the waterfall. We see him drop through the water holding his long rifle, his long black hair streaming behind him. It’s quite spectacular.

I pop a cherry cordial in my mouth and go read “Reflections on African Art” by Leo Frobenius.

The first cherry bomb goes off. The cretins are out.

I watch an episode of La Grande Librairie from last November with guests Michel Serres, François Heritier, Eric Vuillard, Géraldine Schwartz, Colson Whitehead and Douglas Kennedy. It amazes me I can watch a television show on my lap, much less a French television show. And one about books. People still talking about books as if books mattered. It’s comforting, even though it’s another country.

I’m especially interested in Eric Vuillard’s L’Ordre du Jour (The Order of the Day) because it highlights the collusion between the economic and industrial world with the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. There are clear parallels between what happened in Nazi Germany and what is happening in the United States today. The corporations have completely taken over the government. Neither political party responds to the population; they respond to their corporate donors.

11:55 p.m. We went out to look at the fireworks on the Space Needle. I could see Mars. The Space Needle is under construction. They’re putting a glass floor into the restaurant. You can sit and eat dinner while looking down 500 feet to the ground.

The fireworks display was spectacular and went on for quite a while. We were joined by Z, our neighbor across the hall, holding a glass of brandy. He said he didn’t think there would be fireworks because of the construction. I said I was also surprised since there would be open cans of paint and thinner and whatnot up there and it seemed a bit risky. But maybe that’s why the fireworks are going on so long. It’s all the construction supplies going up.

Time goes so fast. Fifty years ago the five hit songs were “Hello Goodbye” by the Beatles, “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses) by John Fred and his Playboy Band, “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” by Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Woman, Woman” by The Union Gap featuring Gary Puckett, and “Daydream Believer” by the Monkees. I don’t have a clue as to what the pop songs are today. Or what they will be. Or what they mean anymore. Is there still such a thing as a pop song? Music is so fragmented now. There are so many mediums and channels by which it can be accessed.

“Time is an illusion,” said Albert Einstein. I agree. But the illusion has left me with a lot of wrinkles, thinning hair, and memories whose vividness and shadows have become a chiaroscuro of the mind.