Motoring

This is the time of year I motor to the East.  Usually with a dog, and a lot of books on tape.  20 hours, more or less, Missouri to Rhode Island, through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut.  Sometimes New Jersey if I take the southern route and sometimes Massachusetts if the northern.  Every summer, every one for years.

These are highways that I have driven dozens of times, starting in my Mom's Impala in the '60's, through my bachelor cars, the Mustang and the Thunderbird, through a raft of family wagons, minivans, SUV's.  Occasionally passengers, friends, hitchikers, girlfriends, spouses, children - and usually a dog or two.  This time, for the third time, Isabel.  She's a fan.  Her and me, we talk some, listen to stuff, and try at least once or twice to find a place where she can get serious about sniffing up the local fauna and flora.

The idea is to bring a car to where the family stays, then fly back home to the practice, then fly back for ten days or so, sometimes more, then drive back.  It's too focussed and compact to be an odyssey, but there is some of the road's mixture of romance and boredom and looking around, back, forward, inward, out to the horizon, up to the hills, and at the end of the trip out, the sea.

More jazz

But this time all in one tracking shot, a long breathless phrase, trying to capture the end of the day, a hot day, when you hate coming inside to the artificial but hate going outside to the steam and the heat, only just keeping the pace, three men at lunch all agreeing that we live our lives only keeping the pace, not really turning out the fine and magic results we dream about, back to work, back home, looking ahead to bed and dreams, more dreams.

Be bop

But if this is about writing, does it have to make sense?  The poet's dilemma.  We think it is the sound of the words - the sound in your head, the sound in your ears - and the way they fit against each other, or don't.  Not meaning.  The meaning comes from the sound and the fit, not the other way round.  With ancient Chinese writing there was no punctuation, just blocks filled with characters, line after line, beautifully drawn.  The idea was art and transcendence, not a point of view or a plot.  But the other idea is to forestall the weakhearted, the ones who look at a fat gray block of words and think I do not have to climb up and into that.  Just bop bop bop, letting it wash, letting the words pour over.  Not thinking.  Breathlessness.  Courage.  An incendiary clause, a devastating proposition.  Go away.  Come here.  Touch foreheads.  Blink.  Blink.

Weeks clipping by

Yet another Friday.  It's a good day, offering a reprieve from whatever oppressed the week, a close of a paragraph in the chapter in the book.  But as so many of us have found, they just rocket by.  Not that they come quickly - few things come more slowly than Friday - but when they're here it seems so soon, the time is so compressed.  Maybe because Friday is a day with hope, and those hopes are what are flying past.

Back in St. Louis

It's hot, July, no rain lately and none coming.  The river is back down and barge traffic seems about equal, going upstream and coming down.  Two bridges across are in my window, a third is just to the south, and a fourth is soon to be completed, but this river is still a real border as it has long been.  An old slave state on one side, an old free one on the other.  Slaves were sold on the steps of the courthouse right below me; Lincoln lived on the other side.  There was a lot of back and forth, though.  Dred Scott's trial, which was also in the courthouse below, was about his going back and forth; Sherman lived here; Grant settled here; Robert E. Lee lived here and built a dam that saved the city from losing its landing on the river.

NYC 4am Monday

The city is hot now, so it's going to be a killer day.  The people up are car-movers like me, serious partiers, early shop owners, and the poor souls we used to call bums and now call homeless.  It's quiet, for the city, but you feel the thunder of a city day rolling in.

Not with a bang but a whimper

I think Eliot is mostly right.  Many do not - evidently even he revoked the idea - because they see an explosion ending the world.

Worlds, societies, networks, friendships, love affairs.  Their endings may start with a bomb, but there is always some measure of life in the rubble, and it isn't until that life dies, until there's nothing, no talk, no love, no life, that it's over.  And that sounds to me like a whimper.