Wednesday
Poem.a.Day is here every morning, arrives about five o'clock, so if I've done an early rise and email scroll I miss it, because I generally don't go back for another scroll. This line just came, not in the poem but in the poet's words about it:
memory works this way, some incidental moment setting a buried memory—here, a scrap of remembered dialogue, but from whom, and where?—into motion, up toward the surface, into the light of remembering what had lain hidden
What a happiness that I didn't miss it, the poet saying lyrically what happens often at this age, something triggers a memory set long ago, and you get to live there again.
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What is superb writing? It varies from one to another, for me, superb writing moves me, stirs memories, makes me think "yep", maybe about something I once expected to do or wanted to be, or when and where I was for what I then thought would be always but now seems to have been but a moment in life. Superb writing isn't always in the great American novel, it's in poems too. And in short stories even if the author isn't anyone you ever heard of or ever read again. And in memoirs, over the years I've mentioned several here.
Yesterday a short story, the fiction in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Their fiction tends to try for sophistication never maudlin or with "a happy ending" like in Nancy Drew, or the cowboy rides off into the sunset, or lovers live happily ever after. More like life as it really is, or with details wrung out that were there all along but that it takes an observant person to notice, most likely not at the Time but in retrospect - - that word "idosin" again from Mark 9:1, Mark's NT Greek aorist where, in some future, the past will be completed by realizing that something has happened unnoticed while we were living life.
In this story, twenty years on, a recurring dream about a year of light - - in a place where one will never be again not only because life moves on, but because it's not even there anymore - - in an age of darkness that returns from time to time and that can only be treated by escaping to find light again at least for a while - -
(I'm not prone to depression and so will never really understand, but I wonder if that's what "the black dog" is like that I've read and heard so much about?)
- - a year and place you can't go back to for reasons of both time and space, not only because it's not even there anymore, but mainly because, so far as we know, time only moves in one direction, forward, is only available to us in the present instant, and, except for telescopes peering into the Universe's past, we've not yet discovered ways to time travel into our past to change things.
Yesterday morning: Ben Rinnes 587x105 completely loaded down with wood pellets, leaving port for the power plant at Studstrup, Denmark. Where is she now? IDK, but she's one of these little green ship-shapes, either still in the Gulf of Mexico or on out into The Atlantic.
RSF&PTL