Saturday Night and I . . .
… am still not in the groove. Is it eavesdropping when you listen to the TV in another room where another member of the household is watching? I guess not. In any case I ‘caught a whiff’ of Mozart’s ‘Requiem’. Such a beautiful piece and even now, when I am bone tired from this cold, I want to lean into the music, to lean into it it and climb the measures into the ether where all great music seems to go.
The table, the evidence of reality, is clutered. An empty Tylenol bottle is paired with the pepper shaker. A half empty bottle of water, my empty tea cup, and a can of Pledge are sentinels keep guard over the growing list of undone chores. Mozart is calling. It is a Mary or Martha moment. Will I surrender to the mundane or embrace the ascending score?
I don’t know. I am too tired for either, I suppose. Good night.
Coo-l
So here’s the deal. I don’t feel creative. I am not thinking creatively. I am just pressing keys in hopes that my muse will club me on the head as I ramble along. To my right, against the wall in her cage, is Bell our Diamond Dove. When my beloved brought her home I thought, “Great, one of the most annoying sounding birds on the planet after Finches, Cockatiels ,and Parrots.”
“Not so fast”, says Belle, “I am not a Mourning Dove, thank you very much.” Of course she didn’t ‘say’ this to me but when I heard her song I knew something was different. She has, to be frank, an amazingly pleasant song. It’s a simple little ditty consisting of bird sounds stretched out into a coo but not that maudling, whinny, complaint that never stops that I associated with all doves. Nope, not Belle. She and her breed are classy musicians and I am the better for it.
So…. on this afternoon when I am feeling anything but creative I defer to Belle to fill the void of this dark, dreary, damp, November day with her coo-l sounds.
What I know
Not much. I was interested that when my grandson, aka my buddy, asked a clerk if it were possible for someone to open the mouth of a mounted moose head she replied, negatively, and then added, “I can tell he is going to be a scientist.”
Later I heard someone refer to a particular science as the purveyor of questions and answers.
Whence did theology become the pervue of the ‘already asked and answered question?”
Keene, NH
By the time I am in the middle of the day the writing light is dimmed, the leaves of imagination have lost their color, and I am wearied of the notion. Why write at all, I ask? Because there is texture in the world even when there is no color.
The black and white (and tones of gray) to which the world seems reduced is not without interest. It is the observer who has lost interest. I am not ‘extinguished’ but my thirst to create prose has been quenched. I need to kick dust into the air. I must abandon the tiresome business of explaining and reclaim the role of challenger. I will advocate for the unresolved.
The world is awash in disarray, the clutter of leaves at the curb are the hastily abandoned trace of summer’s affair.
Getting started…
A few years ago, in a writer’s workshop, the facilitator described my work as, whimsical. Does this mean my work is capricious or that it expresses ‘odd notions’? You be the judge. I can say that very few of my compositions are the result of fleshing out a carefully reasoned thesis.
My nemesis, in high school, was the outline. Somehow I never could outline and then write. Ask me to express something in writing and I will start writing. Eventually something, chaotic, incoherent, irrational, and (in most cases) whimsical will emerge.
It is out of this that the muse speaks to me. Some spark, not of my own, will ignite a word or phrase, a candle to my own moth like compulsion.
Occasionally I will compose something for you (me?) to consider and record it here. Once I aspired to write for a living. It was a short lived aspiration. I found that I abhorred what I wrote. It was pedantic. My lust for unexpected expressions and fresh phrases could hardly be satisfied by the pedestrian quality of my writing. So, I fired myself and moved on.
Still, I love to write. To my joy, and your probable dismay, I love to borrow words and combine them. I promise nothing other than to make an occasional offering. Maybe you will react and even go so far as to encourage me? Who can say?
On a whim... 