August 7
The rain all day, dinner crumbling into prolonged conversation with Roy about the Kennicott murders of 1982 & the finer points of drive-ins in Odessa, TX. & me looking out the screen-door at the rivulets skirting the porch, the willow-leaves dappled & sprung with the falling rain. The way you can carry in you a gravid feeling that doesn’t come to bear any change, & how it flees from you, vanishing, a wisp of breath expired. How you can wait for some nameless joy in promenade, watch out the window for some passing sign of life, even when you know full well that it will not come. It is how we navigate loneliness, I suppose. By believing in fictions we know to be fictions.
I have come a long way in my acquaintance with solitude. It does not thunder around me how it did initially, crushingly, deafeningly, almost. Nor does it spur in me a subdued panic, a feeling of restlessness without remedy. I greet it now like an old friend one is stuck with, a charge more than an enduring affection. It would be foolish to bar it entry, to lock the door against it, to feign that I do not hear it knocking; it is always knocking, & always with my own knuckles against my own door, the same slow rapping. Like my ghost in me calling my own name. Odysseus lashed to the mast, beeswax huddled against his eardrums, his heart writhing against its skin.
It rings of complaint, & I, too, weary of it, even as it spills from me. But at times one can catch one’s feeling as a curiosity rather than an event. One can pin it to a felt like a butterfly for examination, draw the glass over & adumbrate its erstwhile reason for being, run one’s fingers over its contours, feel its shuddering cold. & then one knows the world the better for it, just as the entymologist knows the world better for his study. Perhaps one is inured to sadness this way. Perhaps it loses its strange thrill when it is swallowed in daily silence, when there is no telos to which its cure can clutch. But it is just life, after all. Just some fugitive wonder. Some firefly sparking into starless dusk.
I have come a long way in my acquaintance with solitude. It does not thunder around me how it did initially, crushingly, deafeningly, almost. Nor does it spur in me a subdued panic, a feeling of restlessness without remedy. I greet it now like an old friend one is stuck with, a charge more than an enduring affection. It would be foolish to bar it entry, to lock the door against it, to feign that I do not hear it knocking; it is always knocking, & always with my own knuckles against my own door, the same slow rapping. Like my ghost in me calling my own name. Odysseus lashed to the mast, beeswax huddled against his eardrums, his heart writhing against its skin.
It rings of complaint, & I, too, weary of it, even as it spills from me. But at times one can catch one’s feeling as a curiosity rather than an event. One can pin it to a felt like a butterfly for examination, draw the glass over & adumbrate its erstwhile reason for being, run one’s fingers over its contours, feel its shuddering cold. & then one knows the world the better for it, just as the entymologist knows the world better for his study. Perhaps one is inured to sadness this way. Perhaps it loses its strange thrill when it is swallowed in daily silence, when there is no telos to which its cure can clutch. But it is just life, after all. Just some fugitive wonder. Some firefly sparking into starless dusk.
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