Moonless

Seven thirty.

Another cloudy day so far, although yesterday evening the sunlight illuminated my family room floor. I’ve been to the market already for groceries, and a little later, Gloria is coming to work… Some people believe that some future day the Bible and science will be consistent and compatible with each other. I’m not so optimistic about that. But the effect of atheism that I’ve seen is a sort of moral decline, like reading the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Religion is especially good for providing a structure of rational restraint, like a conscience or the Freudian superego. I may never see a miracle or anything magical, but life without a God can be quite unstable. And I’m reminded of the morning when I came out of the store and a great rainbow arched over the building. It was when Michelle used to be a clerk there. Lately I haven’t even seen the moon in the sky. I don’t remember the last time it was visible.

The rainbows followed Michelle to Wyoming… and the moon followed suit.

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The Zoo

Quarter after nine.

A few times this morning I played the vigilante with the birds on my back porch. The sparrows have nested in several spots around the patio cover, but sometimes the starlings come and try to eat their chicks. So I get up and bang on the door or open it and stick my head out. The birds all scatter and fly away at first, then they go back to what they’d been doing. Should I interfere in their business or let nature happen its own way? I doubt that I make very much difference anyway. I wonder a little about social Darwinism versus egalitarianism, and what ideology goes with which one. Historically, socialism and Christianity have been tied to each other, when I think of Victor Hugo and Carl Sandburg. I find myself in a position of absurdity, being very poor and yet believing in Darwin and evolution, perhaps to my detriment. At this moment a starling lights upon a cord outside my door, scolded by a sparrow. It’s an avian zoo in my backyard, while clouds and sun look on blindly, impassively. Is there any justice in nature, and where does it come from? It is the same to ask if there is a god.

Moods

Seven thirty five.

The sun through the window is right in my face, a strident blast of golden star-shine. It was very cold for my travel to the store; I finally got wise and wore a pair of gloves against the 20 degree snap. At least it was dry and not slippery. My business at the market was routine except for the Snapple for Gloria, since she is coming this morning. My mind has been all over the map lately, quite scattered and perhaps incoherent, but hopefully it’ll coalesce into something like organic sense and system. Then again, usually life itself resists organization. But my dog definitely knows it’s breakfast time when eight o’clock comes around. He has a sense of structure probably better than mine, which keeps us both on track. Funny but I used to operate like a clock at work, a total creature of habit and ritual. How quickly a routine becomes a treadmill that can destroy you.

Quarter after eight.

I have no idea what the day might bring me today. It’s kind of an exciting prospect. The sun meanwhile is indomitable and cheering to see. Sometimes I think I have total recall of the events of my life: blessing or curse? And every new day is different from the last one. Sometimes it seems like anything can happen, like some quark of the constellations, or a scene from a Thomas Hardy novel. A real artist of fate is at work in our daily lives, and we’d be none the wiser to it. To us spontaneous, to the gods it’s a fait accompli… Outside, the sparrows make jerky movements like little automatons wound up at the beginning of time. All this time, an old tune like a circus ditty plays crazily in my head. But for this, the design would be perfect.

“God doesn’t make junk.” A sign on the wall of Harmony House long ago. My mood suddenly swings down as I pity myself a little. The sun and the birds are indifferent, even the mourning dove that coos for no one in particular.

Clouds; Outdoor School

Quarter after nine.

Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I opened up Mallarme to read some, but the vocabulary was far beyond me and it would take a lot more work to interpret a single poem. Also I lamented the fact that my French writing skills have atrophied. I should take a class and brush it up. I might feel younger if I practice the language again and access that bucket in my brain… It’s Saturday and yet the market was doing a good business before nine o’clock. Mostly guys as usual; I saw one woman. I felt kind of glad to get out of there with such a crowd. Then I looked around me at the clouds, walking along the storefront, which appeared almost blue with cold. They dwarfed human cities and human affairs, having about them an inscrutable quality, alien and other. The only thing stranger than clouds by day is clouds at night. Or maybe, to me, the French language itself.

Quarter of eleven.

Gloria and I had breakfast at Carl’s Jr, passing the new high school that now looks quite finished on the exterior. The dark gray brick walls give it an ominous vibe, and the whole place is enormous and intimidating. It’s like Mordor as opposed to the Shire, a wicked thing of mass production and industry, a factory for producing citizens. It’s nothing like the Outdoor School of Tagore a long time ago in India. It isn’t even like my own college where we had poetry classes on the lawn. The personal touch is missing, and nothing much of nature still remains.

Song

Three o’clock AM.

We’re in the middle of a storm of wind and rain. I’ve been sleeping poorly tonight, I don’t know why. Monday was such a nothing kind of day, everyone exhausted from all the holiday hype, now finally over with. We go through this bs every year but no one can explain why. Probably we’ll keep doing the same thing for years hence. But nature doesn’t care about our rituals, therefore the windstorm howling in the night. As if to echo the storm, you can hear a train horn moaning long and mournfully like a whale in the deep sea. The air catches the sound and carries it, buffeting and smudging it as it does. The medium of air is like that of the sea for sound waves, only the sea takes them farther. The song of a humpback can be heard for miles away. There was a break in the weather, but now the rain renews itself, and I know that my writing is as solitary as the whale and his faraway song.

Intimations Post

I realized something a minute ago. I don’t daydream very much anymore. That is, it’s nothing hypothetical, a pure fantasy that I weave out of nothing. I’ll have reveries from memories of the past or I’ll make guesses about the future, but I don’t dream up scenarios for the pleasure of it anymore. I suppose I don’t see the point or the relevance of this these days; my youth is used up, totally exhausted, and I’m left with my old age, a withered old fart.

I’d kind of like to get out of the house again today but there’s nothing I really need from the store. It’s quite beautiful out right now. I think it was yesterday morning when I saw the full moon 🌕 waning in the western sky on a backdrop of blue. In only a few minutes it dipped below the rim of the trees and rooftops, denying that it had ever been there: so you are left to doubt your own senses for having witnessed the spectacle. The moon was the only remarkable, otherworldly thing I saw that day. The rest was quite humdrum and drab and very ordinary, showing a poverty of imagination for beautiful things and possibilities because our minds are so fixed on grubbing for material satisfaction. All’s not gold that glitters; and precious gems as well could be so many worthless rocks that clot the streets like the ones in Voltaire’s El Dorado. But this little sermon will still fall upon senseless eyes and ears— at least until the next full moon comes around.

…while the marketplace keeps buzzing with business of people blind to the love that lies dormant someplace out of sight…

“Under My Thumb”

Seven thirty.

The streets are dark with wet but I didn’t get rained on for my little pilgrimage to buy groceries. When I was reading from Walt Whitman I began to think of my baptism five years ago on a rainy October Sunday. Specifically I wondered why I converted to religion; and probably I considered the benefit to me and not to others. Or more likely I didn’t think anything at all and my feet got in front of my head. Now I ask myself, If I could undo the baptism, would I do it? As it is, I’m just a lapsed Lutheran caught in a tug of war between the church and my independence. An old song by the Stones has been playing in my mind: “Under My Thumb,” the one with the little marimba melody. Whitman suggests that books (and traditions) are not men. I believe he’s saying that nature is logically prior to the fictions people create, including religion. But it’s easy to get this backwards and subordinate nature to the Bible.

I can’t tell if it’s raining right now. Aesop is patient about getting his breakfast. I feel better today than yesterday: maybe I should kick the gabapentin habit to avoid the crashes in my mood. Through it all runs the music in my brain. 

Doggie Logic

Wee hours.

The dead of night. No store is open until seven o’clock except the 24 hour places like 7 Eleven and WinCo, or Shari’s restaurant, all of which are too far to walk to. My dog seems happier now because I figured out the cause of his bitter mood. It’s funny to discuss him as if he had human feelings, but he’s very smart for a canine, and reason is the same no matter where it occurs in the universe. Aesop has no understanding of music, but his verbal comprehension is good, and he even has elementary math ability; he knows basic quantities, and more-than or less-than. I would beg to differ with something I read by Loren Eiseley about the uniqueness of human intellect, as though only people had a soul, and the world was kind of waiting for us to arrive on the scene. He wrote some nonsense about the “finger of God” in evolution. He seems to think that human beings hold a privileged place in the cosmos, which is true enough, but it doesn’t mean that we have a monopoly on reason. Even Plato believed that the universe is imbued with an essence of reason. It wouldn’t matter which species came to ascendency, so it was rather accidental that humanity was the one. As it is, dogs are capable of dreams.

City Life

Quarter after seven.

The city installed a cable on N Park to monitor the speed of drivers nearby Randy’s lot. They ought to do that on Maxwell Road, where the limit is 35mph and people actually go 50mph or faster. I didn’t see the moon this morning, though I did the last two days. “Wake up in the morning with a good face / Stare at the moon all day / Lonely as a whisper on a star chase / Does anyone care anyway?” An old Queen song by Brian May. The world needs more beauty instead of the industrial ugliness I see around me every day. To witness something pretty, I have to raise my eyes to the blue and wish upon the moon or the morning star. But this is the curse of the suburbs. The psalm goes that the Lord is my shepherd and I shall not want. I ought to be content with my daily bread. And yet so much is still desired. When the reality isn’t very attractive, this is the time to make poetry and pull humanity out of the gutter. “…Some of us are looking at the stars.” Remember that you shall not live by bread alone, but the gospel we need is beauty.

“Look in thy heart and write.”

Hummingbird

Quarter of ten.

Aesop didn’t like his fish dog food today so I won’t buy it again.

There’s something missing from my life

It cuts me open like a knife

It makes me vulnerable, I had this disease

I shake like an incurable, God help me please

Whoa, there’s a hole in my life

Does anyone remember that song? The Police were so much fun. I’ve had dreams that I was jamming with Andy and Stewart. I used to have King Crimson dreams as well: strange dreams where they did a gig in a church or a shopping mall.

I just saw the shadow of a hummingbird on the wall opposite my seat in the living room. I turned to look and he was gone. I saw him again, but only his shade, gray on the white wall. I’d like to see the real thing and in color, but I can settle for this illusion like we all do. It’s after ten and the neighborhood is fully awake by now, though maybe not illuminated.

Go on toward the crimson shore

Beyond this life of metaphors

Where doors of understand’s house

Decorates he them with clove

Acorns smack the roof and patio cover in my backyard. It’s destined to be a lonely day for me but odds are I’ll survive it.