When, inevitably, our conversations repeat,
the questions return, idly re-packaged.
The theater of the moment dictates
how the questions are nuanced:
gently re-phrased? sarcastically flourished?
the questioner has the answers for years
but takes pride that he still knows to ask.
All have been answered,
definitively, with evidence,
but the questions persist.
Why?
For the sake of the question,
a nostalgia for mystery,
for the hope of stumping all times
with a question that
render all answers impotent.
….
Aha, sorry for the John Ashbery wannabe spew. That business of people asking questions without caring to hear the answer, it’s in my brain matter again.
Sitting at a pub, the music on the box is The Band, “Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Great song.
Today was placid. I am on a quest for placidity these weeks. I missed any trace of it last night, when an unfortunate seating arrangement found me trapped between an unbelievably loud drunk and his pedophiliac-ranting buddy. That kind of company can make one feel like utter dirt.
Today was a brush with placidity. Checking the computer screens once in a while I mostly played through Bach’s English Suites and some of the WTC. If you have never played the piano or another instrument then you can not know how fulfilling it is to feel that music passing through your hands and through your body. It becomes an addiction for me, it genuinely does, although like most addictions the satisfactions are ephemeral. As much as it feels like I am crafting something I am, when I stand up, left with nothing. The passages and the counterpoint vanish, consumed by that lately beguiling incinerator that is the present.
I would like to have a day like I had today, but in the sun. Outdoors. A back yard or desert tract with shade and a cooler full of ice, water, sammiches, and shitty beers. Mmmm, sammiches and Fosters in the hot, desert sun with a piano or two in the shade.
The song on the box now is that cheerful late Johnny Cash song about the empire of dirt. The E major fugue from Book II of the WTC reminds me of this song, the way it heaves and rises, then returns to balance without exploding into vomiting. The Johnny Cash song derives its quasi-“Day in the Life”-like crescendo from, I suspect, the production studios and not from Johnny Cash’s badass song-writing self. I don’t’ know where Bach got it. Buxtehude, I guess. Maybe he got it from my pants.
Tomorrow is going to be hot again. It rained Florida-style today. I liked it. Ironically it added to the placidity: growing up in Tampa I came to expect savage, nuclear-strength thunder and lightning storms once or twice a day. The minutes before the storm were peaceful and clear, then came sudden, catastrophic eruptions of lightning and soul-wrenched-asunder thunderblasts, then more peace and clear skies with puffy clouds here or there. It was like living inside a woman’s head.
I liked the rhythm of it. The routine of a daily terrorist attack from God during which any electrical devices could and often did explode from power surges. There was something comforting in the regularity of these reverse-volcanoes.
Damn, but the music here is good tonight.
