The Expansive Howl (Part IV)
...a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet...
Often I look at Therese in the pre-dawn hours. I’m a terrible sleeper, and the wholly unpatterned hours of my work-day don’t help. I mean my real work: the toil of my soul, not the editorial job which scarcely deserves mention. No, this work-day is the day that starts when I feel the tug in my sinews, when I close myself off in the furnace-room the size of a utility closet, and there, but gas-light, I compose the poor prose that’s the language of my life, that ties together the strands of my memory into knots I can point to, like prayer beads pilgrims are always fingering. Ready-at-hand for application to the situation at hand. The problem comes when this happens in the middle of the night, or during meal-time, or during work-hours, or on the train back from the granite cock-towers that dot the other bank of the river. This is when I sweat, when I offend, when I leave dishes clattering or conversations cut off. She has tried to understand through cultivating that long-suffering approach. But I can’t explain it to her. I still can’t tell her what has not formed itself in my head. How would she understand? Does it make any sense to tell her, or anyone, that sometimes I hear the voice of my grandmother, speaking in that tongue from the swamps of the Dniester, speaking in her fairy-tale voice? Does it make sense that when I hear that voice, I obey? I enter a small place, sacred only by virtue of being small and unobtrusive, to tell tales and draw together what was disparate, like grass into hay bales, like droplets from an eavestrough into a mighty stream. A stream that won’t stop until I’ve been emptied and can once again return to that world of car horns and steamwhistles and peddlers and niceties. And yes, back to the world of Therese, who is still sleeping. She does not know the thoughts I have of her during those times in the closet gas-light: my sentiments that disappear lest they be collapse like a frail origami puppy in front of a barrel-chested construction worker. How do I tell her that I speak to Baphomet night after night, pleading for more time? Time to make the gifts I promised, humble as they are, real. A time when we can have curtains, seasoning, clothes for more than one occasion, an apartment that does not rattle with the passage of trains? A world where we can have time to just lie and touch, not worrying about my next spasmodic episode, or about her pre-dawn lathe-turning shift, a world where I can practice my origami and smoke a pipe and she can dance like she used to—like I saw her once—in a room that doesn’t constrain every free arm movement. This goddamn room! Nowhere to turn without knocking over some jar containing an essential. In other words, no room for the playful, except the Sibelius records over the phonograph, which was never meant to be listened to while preparing yet another heap of cabbage soup, with potatoes as essentials. It is around these times that I get hung up on the inessential, insubstantial, airy, flighty, flowing world and retire to the furnace “room”. But in that loss of gravity, I lose her wholeness. Her corporeality. Her here-ness.
Consider: "All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been co-ordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason."
Often I look at Therese in the pre-dawn hours. I’m a terrible sleeper, and the wholly unpatterned hours of my work-day don’t help. I mean my real work: the toil of my soul, not the editorial job which scarcely deserves mention. No, this work-day is the day that starts when I feel the tug in my sinews, when I close myself off in the furnace-room the size of a utility closet, and there, but gas-light, I compose the poor prose that’s the language of my life, that ties together the strands of my memory into knots I can point to, like prayer beads pilgrims are always fingering. Ready-at-hand for application to the situation at hand. The problem comes when this happens in the middle of the night, or during meal-time, or during work-hours, or on the train back from the granite cock-towers that dot the other bank of the river. This is when I sweat, when I offend, when I leave dishes clattering or conversations cut off. She has tried to understand through cultivating that long-suffering approach. But I can’t explain it to her. I still can’t tell her what has not formed itself in my head. How would she understand? Does it make any sense to tell her, or anyone, that sometimes I hear the voice of my grandmother, speaking in that tongue from the swamps of the Dniester, speaking in her fairy-tale voice? Does it make sense that when I hear that voice, I obey? I enter a small place, sacred only by virtue of being small and unobtrusive, to tell tales and draw together what was disparate, like grass into hay bales, like droplets from an eavestrough into a mighty stream. A stream that won’t stop until I’ve been emptied and can once again return to that world of car horns and steamwhistles and peddlers and niceties. And yes, back to the world of Therese, who is still sleeping. She does not know the thoughts I have of her during those times in the closet gas-light: my sentiments that disappear lest they be collapse like a frail origami puppy in front of a barrel-chested construction worker. How do I tell her that I speak to Baphomet night after night, pleading for more time? Time to make the gifts I promised, humble as they are, real. A time when we can have curtains, seasoning, clothes for more than one occasion, an apartment that does not rattle with the passage of trains? A world where we can have time to just lie and touch, not worrying about my next spasmodic episode, or about her pre-dawn lathe-turning shift, a world where I can practice my origami and smoke a pipe and she can dance like she used to—like I saw her once—in a room that doesn’t constrain every free arm movement. This goddamn room! Nowhere to turn without knocking over some jar containing an essential. In other words, no room for the playful, except the Sibelius records over the phonograph, which was never meant to be listened to while preparing yet another heap of cabbage soup, with potatoes as essentials. It is around these times that I get hung up on the inessential, insubstantial, airy, flighty, flowing world and retire to the furnace “room”. But in that loss of gravity, I lose her wholeness. Her corporeality. Her here-ness.
Consider: "All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been co-ordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason."
posted by A. D. at 11:11 PM
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