Sad day of sorts. Ford is gone and there will not be snow to await his body's return to Michigan, probably. Perhaps we will see some kind of spontaneous majesty from the skies, but the middling weather feels like it's here for a while.
When the ground is frozen much more is required to inter a body in the earth. One must warm the ground before digging, or else use special equipment, or else blast its frozen heart away with explosive charges and then dig, the last of these being problematic in cemeteries for obvious possible zombie reasons, for all-too-clear indian burial ground reasons, and certainly that would not be acceptable in the quiet heart of the city in very early January, upon a solemn occasion such as this.
I will be there in attendance, at the public viewing for Ford. I hope for snow. I turn my eyes up to the clouds and think of the physical remains of the former president, the only president never elected to the post of either Vice President or the Presidency itself. I hope it snows for you, Ford. I hope it covers the world again in white.
12.22.2006
Well met, then, Willard
I am here, have been here in waiting. Waiting for weather—as you (probably) know, there is not a spot of it on the ground anymore. Has not been for weeks it seems. And close now to the holidays, just in sight of them, still the ground is bare, if wet and watched over by consistent wind. I wish for it, for winter, if this is what it is, what we can call it. We have passed the solstice just yesterday which means the days begin their game of lengthening again.
It is dark out in the world. There is no poetry in the darkness. There is no language in the heart of it, the occasional flick of light, the loneliness, the quietude. I could map your face onto it but where would that leave me—here, still, the sound of typewriter keys striking the faceplate as I write my way into it, whether the weather sees fit to grant legitimacy, a brief white blast, a taste of it at least, or if it does not.
It is dark out in the world. There is no poetry in the darkness. There is no language in the heart of it, the occasional flick of light, the loneliness, the quietude. I could map your face onto it but where would that leave me—here, still, the sound of typewriter keys striking the faceplate as I write my way into it, whether the weather sees fit to grant legitimacy, a brief white blast, a taste of it at least, or if it does not.
12.16.2006
Trapped under snow or rain or fog
Or wind: there goes a roof, a cow, any semblance of thought. My body landing miles no months away. But I'm back, Bentley, I'm back.
12.12.2006
What was underneath this space
a year ago—a hundred years ago—a thousand years ago—
and what does having a tomorrow mean? Does it mean that I will be returned to this, over and over, until I find another way out? Does it mean that there is such a thing as history? Have my actions, few though they may have been, had repercussions? Did they percuss down through action and equal and opposite reaction, slowly murmuring in the background behind my heart?
Air sound from below. Air sound from outside. Rain sound melting all the snow to ground.
There will be almost
nothing when I wake—
and what does having a tomorrow mean? Does it mean that I will be returned to this, over and over, until I find another way out? Does it mean that there is such a thing as history? Have my actions, few though they may have been, had repercussions? Did they percuss down through action and equal and opposite reaction, slowly murmuring in the background behind my heart?
Air sound from below. Air sound from outside. Rain sound melting all the snow to ground.
There will be almost
nothing when I wake—
12.09.2006
Wind is hard against the panes
and there is not much outside, friend, tonight. The gases of the atmosphere are lined up as if to buffet the glass and force a kind of entry. I know it's not personal (such solipsism here, the world aligned for you) but it's hard not to think of world in terms of self, how external and internal weathers relate. To what extent they correspond. Think Poe. Think whiteness, pallor of flesh, the slow creep of death, shadows spectral along the snowfield.
Weird day for weather: everything gusty, but nothing via precipitation. No prestidigitation from the up above. No trickeration via lightning and snowcloud oncoming, none of that illumination. The plus about words ending in -ation is that they rhyme inherently. That they imply a state of action, a snapshot of the act diminished in our naming and cordoning off of it. The body's movement, the magic of storm, becomes manageable through the mind's decision to just think about it. Which is something.
My whiteness. My whiteheads that dot my back like mushrooms awaiting rain. My wiving of the weather. My avatar of W, that wingspread and impression of sudden motion. Everything in winter is associated with the letter, the worst in some ways of the seasons. But the weather has its reasons. I love it—love to be underneath it, under its spell, its thumb, its cool control. I would be great as a kept man, a toy, cared for, collared, leashed, within.
Weird day for weather: everything gusty, but nothing via precipitation. No prestidigitation from the up above. No trickeration via lightning and snowcloud oncoming, none of that illumination. The plus about words ending in -ation is that they rhyme inherently. That they imply a state of action, a snapshot of the act diminished in our naming and cordoning off of it. The body's movement, the magic of storm, becomes manageable through the mind's decision to just think about it. Which is something.
My whiteness. My whiteheads that dot my back like mushrooms awaiting rain. My wiving of the weather. My avatar of W, that wingspread and impression of sudden motion. Everything in winter is associated with the letter, the worst in some ways of the seasons. But the weather has its reasons. I love it—love to be underneath it, under its spell, its thumb, its cool control. I would be great as a kept man, a toy, cared for, collared, leashed, within.
12.08.2006
Between falls
Cold world tonight outside the glass. As usual, nothing appears to be alive. No world transformed. Nothing trudging through it. Silence is one indication of my control over this world. This desire to be up after others have passed through into their slumber. No curse, this; no swear words necessary. Pleasing—though not without a dryness around the eyes, weary sensation one, and total darkness in the tower, weary sensation two, and a sense of slowly shuffling off towards sleep. If I had more to me I could stay up until three or four, or five, when the old begin to stir and fill their mugs with something dark and steaming. I admire them for this singular pleasure. My parents were this way, awake and away to their days for hours before I would stir. Now on occasion I am up before the light, before the night subsides and the factories along the water turn down their smokestack output to avoid being found out for what they in fact are. And if I am aware of anything at that hour, I am grateful for it, this glimpse of early motion that I do not normally get.
I wish I could get by with three or four hours of sleep, that I could work late and awake with no effect on the body's defenses. Imagine what I could be privy to—the motions of the trash trucks on their circuits through the grid. Different sorts of snow. Traffic patterns that don't occur in daylight or late-night hours. They might look from above like halos, or precipitation (more than traffic does already, that steady or sometimes clotted stream), like the video game Frogger, or diamonds chugging through a tube. It could look like anything, and I would be there to witness it, somehow. This would be a kind of power, secret revelation. Vivisection, maybe. Pattern recognition. Precognition even.
This is desire for knowledge. Desire for bragging rights. Desire for the ability to shovel out the walk before anyone else in the time zone does. Desire—a cloud, an ampersand of thrills hovering closely together, on the edge of my mind, outside of reason. It's there and silent mostly in this life, punching chemical signals through pneumatic tubes to the brain. But it wants things. It is active often enough to pull me one way or another one, towards one body in rest or motion.
I wish I could get by with three or four hours of sleep, that I could work late and awake with no effect on the body's defenses. Imagine what I could be privy to—the motions of the trash trucks on their circuits through the grid. Different sorts of snow. Traffic patterns that don't occur in daylight or late-night hours. They might look from above like halos, or precipitation (more than traffic does already, that steady or sometimes clotted stream), like the video game Frogger, or diamonds chugging through a tube. It could look like anything, and I would be there to witness it, somehow. This would be a kind of power, secret revelation. Vivisection, maybe. Pattern recognition. Precognition even.
This is desire for knowledge. Desire for bragging rights. Desire for the ability to shovel out the walk before anyone else in the time zone does. Desire—a cloud, an ampersand of thrills hovering closely together, on the edge of my mind, outside of reason. It's there and silent mostly in this life, punching chemical signals through pneumatic tubes to the brain. But it wants things. It is active often enough to pull me one way or another one, towards one body in rest or motion.
12.05.2006
Beneath
When I was younger it would snow like this—layer on top of layer—and you could buoy yourself up on it with snowshoes, or cross-country skis (that wax, those boots, those locks). I am thrilled to be alive today in all of this (6 inches plus, everyone in the world complaining about it but me with four-wheel drive and sliding through the everything). Shoveling is even a recurrent pleasure: I was cold in the morning when I got up, every step a gasping against the hardwood floors, but when I went outside after coffee to huff it off of my driveway I came in flush and hot and ready for the day. It is my routine.
Others in the house make sport of watching cars try to make it up the hill (30 degree grade in my estimation), as they skid and their tires whine and all they can do is make it happen laterally, nothing in their dream of forward motion. The more interesting thing is when they don't give up: their minds are set, they have this goal of driving up this street. This is their world. Their wildly skidding, snowdrifted world. So we watch their taillights disappear back down the street, sliding into the banks or the cars parked at the bottom of the street in the danger zone, where descending cars cannot make the stop and turn and in turn hammer them, more often then not driving away without a note or admission of their guilt.
The engines rev all night. Some few do make it up when the road is plowed, or those that came in weighted four by fours. We see lights: plowlight, policelight usually without sirens, towtrucklight, brakelight, headlight, the light that descends on us from stars, from windows, from the few streetlights that illuminate the night. NintendoWiilight cascading from the top floor studio where the college kids clearly room together. You can see them manipulating the controller in front of their televisions. Ambulancelight when our neighbor has his weekly health scare and the authorities are called to try again to haul him off, even though they should know by now that he will not go with them.
I will not go with you. I will not go with anyone if lights come to vanish me back into darkness.
We even witness airlinelight blinking fast across the sky, far too close to qualify as actual astronomical occurrence. Rare thunderlight against the snow: you can't see it like you do in rainstorms, but it occurs. Lightninglight technically I suppose, not the result of thunder but concurrent with it.
Snow and light are everything in the world on nights like this, on days like this.
Others in the house make sport of watching cars try to make it up the hill (30 degree grade in my estimation), as they skid and their tires whine and all they can do is make it happen laterally, nothing in their dream of forward motion. The more interesting thing is when they don't give up: their minds are set, they have this goal of driving up this street. This is their world. Their wildly skidding, snowdrifted world. So we watch their taillights disappear back down the street, sliding into the banks or the cars parked at the bottom of the street in the danger zone, where descending cars cannot make the stop and turn and in turn hammer them, more often then not driving away without a note or admission of their guilt.
The engines rev all night. Some few do make it up when the road is plowed, or those that came in weighted four by fours. We see lights: plowlight, policelight usually without sirens, towtrucklight, brakelight, headlight, the light that descends on us from stars, from windows, from the few streetlights that illuminate the night. NintendoWiilight cascading from the top floor studio where the college kids clearly room together. You can see them manipulating the controller in front of their televisions. Ambulancelight when our neighbor has his weekly health scare and the authorities are called to try again to haul him off, even though they should know by now that he will not go with them.
I will not go with you. I will not go with anyone if lights come to vanish me back into darkness.
We even witness airlinelight blinking fast across the sky, far too close to qualify as actual astronomical occurrence. Rare thunderlight against the snow: you can't see it like you do in rainstorms, but it occurs. Lightninglight technically I suppose, not the result of thunder but concurrent with it.
Snow and light are everything in the world on nights like this, on days like this.
12.03.2006
I predict some photographic evidence tomorrow
—some video perhaps
—some beginnings of a story
—some more precipitation to cover us all in wreaths of it
—some beginnings of a story
—some more precipitation to cover us all in wreaths of it
There is light but not a lot of it
The sun has long set. The snow has set in around us. I expect this may be it for a while. I love the world when it is bright with snow like it was today. Everything ashine, reflective, beaming even. Good snow day with sun is good indeed. And now it's been dark—it's past midnight and as usual I am up in contrast to the sleeping thousands within (maybe) earshot. I have my tower. I have gotten used to it. When I ascend I gain perspective on the world. The weather quiets even against the windowpanes and I am ensconced here for a while to watch. I might be watching you if you are moving still.
A lot of light is still reflecting. The night comes packaged with its own unearthly glow. Is it moon or light trapped under clouds? Is it starlight from billions of miles away finally cascading all around us? Is it the front porch lights or back porch lights, motion detector lights, or Xmas lights just coming up all throughout the neighborhood? Tonight has far more definition, Willard. Most recent nights I could make out one, two houses perhaps. But this evening I am clearly in the world, surrounded by other bodies all in their own four-square shrouds. Dozens are visible. The light is kind of amber, kind of sepia, almost. Are you there this night, dear reader presupposed?
There is only so much to deduce from observation. The telephone cables, or electric cables, or cable cables, or whatever bisect the world as I see it into two parts, roughly of the same total area (thinking two dimensionally). With this little light peering out the world could in fact be simulation, simulacrum, total fake. It could be a well-rendered scene: all quiet, a canvas lit exactly right, placed outside the house by those who may control what we see and survey. It could easily be two dimensions masquerading as three. Without motion it's difficult to tell. There are trees, sure, and this is a street intersecting with the alley behind it. The alley has its own weird rough grade, the slope crosshatched with tiny pits, probably to allow for water to runoff in this cold climate to help with traction. Or something. It does not work to a very good effect. The streets are a grid, a kind of Midwestern map of the hearts that dot this city. We are on the northeast side of the plane, in positive relation to the X and Y axis. Lights strobe slowly off and on in the distance. Motion lights perhaps. A trick of the weather filtering out stimuli, perhaps.
Is it strange enough just to have this window to look out and porthole up the world? Or should I be glad of this, that these panes are something, a frame, boundaries to my sight. Should I be pleased with this chair and this tower and this view, these cables bisecting all that is in my sight, the blowing warmth from the duct below, the few lit windows I can just about see into. These two windows prove a kind of life. I could go all floating-eye like Emerson and hover just outside and watch their lives work. I could upload video of it to the network and trap it there, saved and safe and watchable. What would that be evidence of. Who would it draw to it? What worth is any individual life in aesthetic terms? I will leave it there for now.
A lot of light is still reflecting. The night comes packaged with its own unearthly glow. Is it moon or light trapped under clouds? Is it starlight from billions of miles away finally cascading all around us? Is it the front porch lights or back porch lights, motion detector lights, or Xmas lights just coming up all throughout the neighborhood? Tonight has far more definition, Willard. Most recent nights I could make out one, two houses perhaps. But this evening I am clearly in the world, surrounded by other bodies all in their own four-square shrouds. Dozens are visible. The light is kind of amber, kind of sepia, almost. Are you there this night, dear reader presupposed?
There is only so much to deduce from observation. The telephone cables, or electric cables, or cable cables, or whatever bisect the world as I see it into two parts, roughly of the same total area (thinking two dimensionally). With this little light peering out the world could in fact be simulation, simulacrum, total fake. It could be a well-rendered scene: all quiet, a canvas lit exactly right, placed outside the house by those who may control what we see and survey. It could easily be two dimensions masquerading as three. Without motion it's difficult to tell. There are trees, sure, and this is a street intersecting with the alley behind it. The alley has its own weird rough grade, the slope crosshatched with tiny pits, probably to allow for water to runoff in this cold climate to help with traction. Or something. It does not work to a very good effect. The streets are a grid, a kind of Midwestern map of the hearts that dot this city. We are on the northeast side of the plane, in positive relation to the X and Y axis. Lights strobe slowly off and on in the distance. Motion lights perhaps. A trick of the weather filtering out stimuli, perhaps.
Is it strange enough just to have this window to look out and porthole up the world? Or should I be glad of this, that these panes are something, a frame, boundaries to my sight. Should I be pleased with this chair and this tower and this view, these cables bisecting all that is in my sight, the blowing warmth from the duct below, the few lit windows I can just about see into. These two windows prove a kind of life. I could go all floating-eye like Emerson and hover just outside and watch their lives work. I could upload video of it to the network and trap it there, saved and safe and watchable. What would that be evidence of. Who would it draw to it? What worth is any individual life in aesthetic terms? I will leave it there for now.
12.01.2006
And it came, and it sounds quite crappy against the windowpanes
Seriously. A foot is on the forecast, which is good. An X arrived at last by mail, by a hundred thousand gusts of wind by night. It is white and granular and all over the place. But it is blustery and it has kept me up. It sounds like a sandstorm. Flecks, not flakes, sandblasting the house. Snowblasting the house. Does that count? Can it strip paint from wood? It sounds like it could. So it is cold and weather's here around us like a blanket. It is all along the ground like a rind, like a round sung by schoolchildren a hundred years ago that has finally settled down across our brows and hands.
It sounds like it would sting. This wind. This combination of it over everything. The old house's windows are not completely snug. You can tell in these kinds of situations especially. Rattling. The thundering of gust against glass. Luckily we are on the inside half of that equation. Else we would be cold. We would be beautiful and silent, over and still.
Snow day is what the local news claims. I am a stickler for them, and this seems in no way like a day for snow and staying home to me. I am from another country, one that "very rarely" cancels classes. We consider our education, our work, our continued productivity important. We are stoic and we are cold and we are covered in this most of the year. We will snowshoe, snowblow, cross-country ski to work if necessary. Snowmobile, dogsled, trudge. We have methods of counteracting weather, or working within its bounds, against its tyranies. But here, in the South, it is a different story. The weather balls that glow against the night (they are setup by all the local weather stations, and they write songs to pair with the interactions of the weather balls with the world—they are warnings, blinking, colored, beacons in the cold) suggest the mood. How should we take this? As a slap? As a warning blast? As a punishment for the things we've done, come at last and long overdue?
It sounds like it would sting. This wind. This combination of it over everything. The old house's windows are not completely snug. You can tell in these kinds of situations especially. Rattling. The thundering of gust against glass. Luckily we are on the inside half of that equation. Else we would be cold. We would be beautiful and silent, over and still.
Snow day is what the local news claims. I am a stickler for them, and this seems in no way like a day for snow and staying home to me. I am from another country, one that "very rarely" cancels classes. We consider our education, our work, our continued productivity important. We are stoic and we are cold and we are covered in this most of the year. We will snowshoe, snowblow, cross-country ski to work if necessary. Snowmobile, dogsled, trudge. We have methods of counteracting weather, or working within its bounds, against its tyranies. But here, in the South, it is a different story. The weather balls that glow against the night (they are setup by all the local weather stations, and they write songs to pair with the interactions of the weather balls with the world—they are warnings, blinking, colored, beacons in the cold) suggest the mood. How should we take this? As a slap? As a warning blast? As a punishment for the things we've done, come at last and long overdue?
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