Pulling Marble From PenteliconThere are evenings when ships move in the night, sliding slowly on that line between the dark sky and the darker water, engines growling and inconsiderate of the winds so needed by elder relatives, long since lost to history or perhaps playful ports to bring those who can afford them to destinations of whim and vigor. We do not have wide waters here, but we have them, and in the summer months they teem with craft. In the winters such things are scarcer, but I can still sometimes spy them far below the curve of the hill, trudging through the pool with gentle diaphony.
(It is unclear to me now that diaphony is even a word, and the very big dictionary is a flight away while I am comfortable under a throw. Let is pass.)
There are things I used to do, skills and crafts that I one held but have since put down, for a reason or another (only sometimes known to me). I used to knit. I originally started with the idea of eventually making socks, but I only got so far as scarves and hats. It was a restful thing, good for the wrists, chasing away demons that would otherwise haunt them from spending so much time poised over lettered keys (I have many such tricks, no fear). It was restful, too, to pass time with topologies of yarn while paying half attention to the television or, better, the stereo.
I have again nearly entirely ejected the television from the sphere of living here. The one small specimen sits squat in a cold room, untouched for weeks at a time. Stereos, however, continue to blossom about the house, each room having something in it what with to make a merry noise. I am on track to tie all of this together into something of a playground of audio, streams of noises culled from selected sources speeding along wire or stepping lightly across the air. There will be, in time, crows. I am pleased that the world in here is turning audial.
This fits well with the notion of knitting. A friend of mine is ill, and in a place best for the ill to be. We are collecting things to send over, and it is my understanding that they could use a hat. Well, I used to make hats: I have now the materials of a hat on the coffee table. Five needles each of two gentle points, an artful twist of a skein, quiet blue.
I will need to relearn it, I think. Rather: I will need to learn to get out of the way and trust my fingers, for I expect they will remember better than I.
They usually do.
As For The Hat CollectionIn the library (well, one of the libraries), some distance from the bizarre chair shaped by an antiquated notion of the future, a special piece of furniture sits. The chair is made for naps; the other made for maps. It is a massive, open case, built for holding massive, broad volumes of topologies, shadings, and obscure squiggles made plain in the corners. The stacks are somewhat unordered, but this is only the happy evidence that the things are used, pulled from the slats and cracked open on the tables, then stuffed back in again after fingers have been drawn across the pages. There is time in those piles, too: pull the maps of a place today and pull the maps of the same in years past to make mark of the changes. The chair sits empty, cradling only a spray bottle of antiseptic solution - I've not used it.
This evening's jaunt took me up the other hill and over to the natural rampart that offers a good view of the river valley, spread out below. There has been something of a change down there, too, in recent hours. The Brady Street Bridge has apparently slipped, dropping a deck eight inches sometime in the night. This is only eight inches, sure, but the massive thing touches both banks, and sometimes a small shift can belie bigger things. For now, the span at night is eerily quiet of lights, save only for the multicolored strobes at either end, and the punishing bright light of the work site, blooming into the night. It is true we have many bridges, but it is true, too, that losing one can cause cramp.
It is Friday, a night for small pleasures. For myself, I've coffee in my cup from the Moka Pot, made calm with generous hot milk, made gentle with sugar. The porch calls.
This Air Is That AirThere are plans afoot to begin taking tool to the rooms where the speakers reside, so as to better accommodate them. The hope, eventually, is to tidy up all the slouching piles of media into a small, slim box, and have that instead be the main driver of music in this place. I will miss the media, I think. Well, somewhat.
At present, the reproduction equipment is making good the work of Guillaume di Machaut, penned some seven hundred years ago and brought carefully back. Outside, the world is spinning down into dark skies and frosted breezes, light shards of ice carried in air. In here, it is close and warm, with occasional rattlings from the storm glazing when the playful wind wants in.
It is music papery and ancient, drawn thin from a place that is both joyous and sad but exults in both, bouncing down through the years as an echo, easily lost in the corners, best found with a candle held in shaking hand. The light is low, and the music pours down from the paper cones, dripping and tumbling over books and other leaves, splashing and churning at the kickboards to move smoothly out along the long lines of the floor, small eddies set behind the plain legs of the table.
I may need to dig an onion tomorrow. We shall see.
Travel AdvisoryYesterday morning, standing on the porch with a cup of coffee, I made an executive decision. "Look here," said the season, "I have now woken, an covered all you see with soft snow an hard ice. I have laid vast waste to your walking route, and I sneer at your boots and your silly walking stick." Steam tumbled furious from the cup, and I opted then to take the bus. On the way out the door, with plenty of time, I grabbed the walking stick anyway. I likely should not have done that: on the way down the hill (slowly, slowly) I rounded the bend just in time to see the bus zip by.
Well, damn.
If the weather wanted a fight, so be it. The first chunk of the jaunt is a bridge, which is always amusing for the wind (howling up the valley) and the ice (bridge freezes before, etc.). That was somewhat poor. Past the bridge is a long curve of pavement, notable on mornings like that for it's poor, sad status as one of the last bits of city sidewalk to be cleared on any given day. Well, fine: I had my walking stick. And somewhere in there, ten minutes later, the actual bus I had been trying to catch went zooming by.
Well, damn.
But: these things work out. Once I got into the woods, the snow underfoot was no longer the dirty salt crusted stuff that skulks near roadways, but rather white and crispy, handily packed by the brave and unseen joggers that braved the dawn. The slopes were gentle and navigable, and bewildered birds sang into the snow. At one point, a hawk in the distance found something tasty and fell from the sky (I do not know if it succeeded). I got passed by someone commuting on skis. It was tremendous.
Today the flinty sun shone down to dry pavement that had been cleaned. The drivers were less timid; the air less close.
It is time for toast and tea.
SacroThe week has been long, the night crisp. I took a long look at the car this evening, sitting quiescent under snow. It was with a sigh that I knocked all of that off and shoveled the driveway, chattering in the fresh wind.
Tonight I went to see The Suspicious Cheese Lords.
A dozen men in dark slacks and simple wine-hued shirts, entirely unassuming. And then they began to sing. They were singing in a local Cathedral, a vast space of stone and arch. I was a little bit late (I am good at that), and so spent the first few songs far in the back, out among the scattered, few or none to a pew. I am happy for this: it was good to hear their singing shaped by the far end of that space, less detail, more melding, distant in a way the songs they sung felt as their voices brought them back to us over centuries. Back there I also got to hear a breathless, bewondered "Oh, Wow" pulled from the lips of one of my neighbors as their recital of Miserere mei Deus by Senfl turned its corner into beauty.
During intermission, I got to move up. I found Mr. Bridged: we chatted of things relating to the place, told stories. I was hoping to see Mr. Woodwind, but I did not find him there. The Suspicious Cheese Lords returned for a second set.
Up close, the sound was brighter, lighter, less mixed by the heights of the hard walls. Tones blended, lifted and fell. With eyes closed, the air could be imagined to shimmer with it, the granite arches filled again with Latin sung in ways that the place was built for, even if perhaps the builders themselves did not know it at the time. The music rang smoothly, seeped gently, fell to cadence and shone like light. It was tremendous. It was difficult to clap; we were in a church, after all. It was difficult to clap, too: it seemed a poor offering to give after the last of the notes dies away, lost in the rafters, each and every time. We did it anyway.
They were not done. "Congratulations," they said, "on surviving the Latin portion of the program." They then spun hymns in English, rich with close and careful harmony. What came to mind to describe it, sitting there, was the Shenandoah Valley. Not the actual one, but the one of memory and dreams, the one the way it was half a century before now (for any value of now). There, on that rumpled land on a summer's day, in some field or farm, with clouds lazy in the sky, the chirps and hum of bird and bug, and the sun slinging down light, the warm sweet light, shining in that moment when all hangs still...
It was like that.
That was the gift of a dozen men in wine-hued shirts this evening, in a bright stone church on a flinty winter night. If you get a chance to see them, I would recommend it.
The ChompA serpent eats the Moon tonight. Because of where I am (and all that is happening above where I am, in between me and the moon) is it a little difficult to tell. If I were to spin a tale of it, I would claim that the shamans who served the tribes in this place many millennia ago were all careful, competent, and correct when those women and men pointed to the sky to fortell and demonstrate the latest wonder in the skies. I do not think any of their kin minded as they did this. Their kin had no doubts. It was just, with the sky that night as it is this one, no one really found it much to matter. I imagine the elders nodded sagely, clapped a rough hand on a back or two, and then they all went bowling.
I can't imagine how the astronomers around here take it.
And yet, sitting out on the porch (blankets are involved in this, this night), there are sometimes breaks in the smooth stream of cloud that rolls over us now. Occasional whispers of light sneak though, alien and dim, unrecognized as the moon. Some dour sister has taken station instead, beaming down not the bone blue of clear nights, but of other colors. There have been times tonight when holes in the clouds of slid past just right, and I've been able to look up, to see disc whole, but still covered with cloud, until I notice the cloud is not moving. Just when I recognize this, it all fades away into murk again.
In other places tonight, deserts perhaps, there are those who are lucky to see the whole thing unfurl from end to end, the smudge of colors slipping across the face up there like veils. Here: we only get glimpses of mystery, a coy glance, a wink, hard fought.
I'll take it.
A Liar Of MeMoon's out!
MulticulturalismTonight for supper I had a bit of Peruvian red beans, long simmering on the stove all day in the way of the Bayou, sitting atop a fluffy bed of Carolina rice. Next to that sat a fat pork chop, done up in a way that can only be described as Tuscan. There on the table, beading in the warm air of the kitchen, an open bottle of good English ale. As I made slow and good work of all of that, I listened to the Dutch world service on a German radio set. I think the salt was French. It is sometimes good to go all out with dinner.
(I do not speak Dutch. And I still don't have a dog.)
Mrs. Compass gave me some Chopin; it is stumbling comfortably through the rooms of the house, sticking out a small tongue at the deep, cold stillness outside the windows, finding good forms in the curves of the ceilings.
Think I'll go make a coffee.
All content under copyright by the author. Dancing is permitted. The strange deltic glyphs in the sand under tidal flow are a pleasure to watch in their deepening. Offer not valid in Kansas. We put it down and then we lost it. It all happens in the corner of the eye. Mail accepted for the bears in the basement. We have a dog, but we do not own it. Thank you.