Today I need to send off for supplies which involves calling which involves using a calling card which involves following instructions which involves confronting my phobia regarding logical progressions....sigh. Must be done, so I will do it.
Got the screens, will order the squeegee, ink, photo emulsion, and so forth. Just DOOD it, Dickie boy.
Snow last night. MikeBell and I sat in JavaDive, he with his back to the windows, me looking out, watching the flurry being driven here and there by the wind. He was talking about the drive he is even now probably doing. All the way to Kentucky. I asked, got chains?
That set him off on a ten minute dissertation on every thought in his head connected with snow chains, when he first encountered them, each time he's put them on, what they do to tires, close calls he's survived and all that. There are times I feel so feminine in that sense of keeping the guy talking about himself. It's sooooo easy, eh, girls? Makes me smile.
Nancy's basement now has sheetrock up (mostly) and I'm to finish it off with scraps. Not looking forward to it, that powder drying the hands and crying out for lotion. And the mudding to come. Mud, MikeBell sez, covereth a multitude of sins.
Well, yes.
Thou still unravished bride of time.
Each time I read that poem I see the vase, I see the scene forever frozen in time. I think of my brother-in-law, Patrick, who in 1968, June 16th, was walking across this dam. The water was up, and he was having a grand old time until the water quite suddenly swept him over into the turbulence where he began to drown.
He cried out for help and the neighbor boy jumped in to save him. They both drowned. Ken, the brother, watched helplessly from the river bank.
Patrick will forever be 16 years old for me, never aging, filled with that adolescent beauty and joyousness. He was my favorite, and I think of him each time June rolls around. Ah, Patrick, Patrick. Your smile is forever in my heart, dear boy.
For me, the poem is all about glimpsing into eternity, of the moment being eternal, fixed, static, forever unchanging. As if a moment, a simple moment, any moment, could be looked at, gazed upon, and stretched out forever and ever, never ending. This is beauty, the beauty of relating the static frozen figures to one another and to time itself. Of having the time, in that frozen moment, to see how all the parts relate to one another, of how each is a voice, a part of some celestial harmony which, caught up as we are in our daily lives where nothing is really frozen, we move by blindly, unhearing.
I think, too, of Auden's poem about Icarus falling from the sky. "...something amazing/a boy falling from the sky...." And isn't that the way it is? I move through my life and my thoughts whirl, collide, like some kind of molecular storm within, while all the time eternity is dancing, willing to be frozen for me, should I but open myself to it.
But I, of course, have somewhere to get to, a shirt to design, an order to place, letters to write, and so it all moves down that incredibly flowing stream of time and I miss it all.
The poem is about beauty, about the beauty that is here and there and, yes, over there, too. I love what Pirsig said about the motorcycle, that surely the Buddha resided within the engine of the motorcycle just as completely as within the petals of the lotus flower.
I think too it is about the negating of time, a sort of poetic time machine, and how something from the illusory past is really just as much a part of this moment as the movement of my fingers upon this keyboard.
And I have to pee, so I will send this while I do so....heh.
Back. I forget where I was.
The movement of fingers which in turn reminds me of the poem where it speaks of fingers moving on "this clavier." Is that right? "Peter Quince at the Clavier"?
I loved Sierra's letter, as I love all of her writing. She was the first person I met this time around in Poetry Cafe. I thought she was a genuine airhead. That first conversation she wrote me in IM, "Wanna run away and get married?"
Heh. Babeeee, do Ah evah!!
I thought, well, this one is into romance novels.
And of course I was all wrong about that. Turns out she's vibrant, alive, crazy, incredibly lovely, and a true and dear friend. Melly Christmas, Dear Heart.
This is the first time in ages I've had the luxury of sitting here in the Computer Center with time to spare, no restrictions currently applying, thinking about poetry and friends.
Dalila...big hug to my very special friend from Portugal.
Barbara...having a wunnerful wish-you-could-be-here.
Rebecca...I think of our history and all we've meant to each other.
Lorelis...Mizzz poetry in prose--and Wiccan to boot? I will come see you this coming spring. You must each me geology. I am telling everyone about this December 22nd, when the moon will be the brightest in 133 years. Hoping for a clear sky.
LLT...are you reading this? Am incredibly curious about what you've been up to. Did you go to college? I asked EVERYONE about you. We were all concerned. I wanted to find yr number, call, see if all was well. Then someone said you were fine, just not hanging out in the cafe. Command Performance?????
Darcy...you continue to amaze me in very good ways.
UPDATES....
Nicoletta has quit JavaBreak. :( Her b/f Matt has shaved his beard and looks two years younger. Very handsome young man, likeable.
I called Liz this morning and told her to get her butt down to JavaBreak, so she came down bringing son Jack along. Jack is all of four years old, but has already begun lying about his age. He's, um, FIVE. Trying to impress the girlz, I reckon.
Liz gave me $20 worth of JavaBreak gift certificates, so I'll soon be starting a branch of Caffeine Anonymous. Liz is a dear friend who went to the Olympic Trials back when she was swimming for KU. I love her dearly.
Am still at Hearthstone, but now off restriction. Am paid up into early January, so there's hope. At least I've a warm place to sleep.
Dori, my artist friend, has gone back to Iowa and left me the keys to her house and instructions on the care and feeding of Maggie, her cat. I keep Maggie purring now and then. Dori also came up with some screens, so that part at least is done.
And here I am in...procrastination. I know I have all these things to do....
Looks to me like some serious downsizing is going on. Not one of you has sent me an address so I can send your Christmas Present, so...shame. I may end up doing a couple dozen shirts for friends, not making any $ at all. Ohwell. At least it will get me back into the field.
Last night I led the meeting at AA. By default, since no one else wanted to do it. So I talked about how the thought of drinking entered my head yesterday as I was drywalling, as MikeBell was going on and on about pieces of sheetrock he has known, as the day was moving along in some kind of lockstep toward quitting time. There it was, the idea of drinking. Whispering to me.
A could taste the vodka. I could *feel* how I would be feeling. Not upset about the shirt. Not stressed. Unable to do it, of course, but it'll get done...someday. With enough $ in my pocket to stay AWOL a week or more.
AA advises us to "play the tape all the way through." So I did that, as I hammered and screwed. I saw myself quite suddenly out on the street, saw myself sitting at this computer with a liter of some kind of citrus drink mixed with vodka in my jacket pocket, of drinking it, of going into Poetry Cafe and telling people what I *really* thought of their poetry. I saw my judgment eroding. I saw myself waking up of a morning and regretting hurtful words I'd said the night before. I saw myself running out of money and slinking back into the meetings there at 8th Street. I saw myself saying, "I'm Dickens and I'm an alcoholic. Day One."
I saw all that. It's a performance I've been through so many times.
And I just didn't want to do it again.
Sister Nancy says, Dickens, you must live a life of impeccable alertness and awareness. (Rebecca alone understands this.)
So I went to the meeting and talked about that. A fellow who spent six years in prison talked, then, and later a woman who's been isolating, and then a guy with 20 years clean and sober, and then a guy we call "the Weasel" and then a guy who drank one shot night before last, ending 3 years sober....
Kent always says, "When you get a desire to drink, TALK ABOUT IT IN A MEETING, dammit." So I did. I hardly ever do that. But I did it last night and when the meeting was over I realized that I had it pretty good, that there were lots of people who were worse off than I was.
Then, walking home through the falling snow, I suddenly realized, hey...
The desire to drink was gone.
This is how it is today, how it was yesterday. You are all yet unravished brides of time. I would that I could see you in the totality of your beauty, but that is beyond me just now. I catch glimpses of your loveliness and content myself with that. More will be revealed. As we share more of more of who we are, who we aren't, we will perhaps someday reach that place where time freezes, where the moment sings, where all is interconnected.
Call it poetry.
Call it...the Circle.
I love you all.
Dickens
