crypt of accumulation
The golden morning breaks.
It is 4:20, and I am on a train traveling north, to Seattle, but I am facing south. The movement is like a backwards wobble. I like to organize things on trains, like disparate lists, bills I've never opened, e-mail. Steering small writings into their appropriate drawers.
The contents of my bag, which almost qualifies as a more stylish duffle, includes several notebooks: one for grocery lists and "administrative" lists, one for UDLE meeting notes, and one for everything else, a rogue, capless tube of lipstick, three NetFlix movies (a documentary on Andy Warhol, Tarkovski's The Mirror, and William Graves' Symbiopsychotaxiplasm), scarves, mittens, headphones, iPod ear buds, 4GB of John Lennon bootlegs, unfinished client project work that I filed away under the assumption that I'd get to it this weekend, miniature mock-ups of comic books that I swiped from work, scissors, a Youth bus pass (Safeway believes me when I give them the puppy dog eyes and tell them I'm 17 or under, saving me $50 in transportation expenses EVERY month - I've done this for almost two years now), Klonopin, extremely powerful B vitamins that turn your pee Mountain Dew sallow, pens of all thicknesses, paper samples, business cards, more bills that I've managed to open but never actually look at (mostly medical), The Secret Life of Plants, the 2006 edition of No: journal of the arts, and a handful of kumquats. And some nuts. Oh, and a bag of dry black eyed peas (?).
Travel makes me want Diet Coke. Everyone on this train is drinking it. We were talking about Diet Coke the other night, over the Spinach Madeleine mac 'n cheese that I made for Matt and Bethany, before watching the Tammy Faye Baker documentary. We're starting a casserole and movie night. [Non-sequitur: Is Minnesota the only state that calls casserole "hot dish"?] Apparently, Diet Coke contains the same additive that is found in the anti-depressant Wellbutrin (the one that almost gave me a heart attack at work two years ago), thus explaining that special quiver you feel pumping its way through your nervous system, hands and feet, tenderloin. Tammy Faye Baker never went anywhere without one.
The train is stricken in golden. I have been thinking about playing music again. One of my unintentionally well-kept secrets is that I was a classically trained pianist for 14 years, from the age of 4 - 18, until I decided against attending conservatory and opting for an English degree instead. Thinking about pianos often gives me a sensation similar to that which some childless women have when they are around newborns. I well up. My fingers are tendrils reaching for the nearest light. The fatness of keys, the rigidity and softness of sharps and flats. Sheet music always held a synesthesia. The cream of white keys. A very nice friend has offered to possibly pay for the cost of shipping my spinet from Mississippi to Portland, which costs roughly ~$700.
I always want to ask my musician friends what is most likely the most unanswerable question. How to perceive arrangement? How to make the violin here sound good next to the guitar there, how to conjure layers, sing harmony, and so on. Many of these things are not "how" situations. I can still play some Chopin etudes and Rachmaninoff concertos, even the most nuanced of Debussy preludes, in their entirety, with a little practice, but the closest I have come to composition is writing simple Farfisa organ accompaniment to some of Derrick's old songs and banging a tambourine against my hip. Derrick taught me how to sing harmony, kind of, but singing is an eclipse to me, and I am a shy moon. I can't really belch it out like some people can, so I usually hum along, or drink enough to convince myself that I CAN sing that Stevie Nicks song until my throat bleeds. I did get pretty good at singing along to some Yo La Tengo songs, because that chick and I operate in the same register. Secret admirer of the Bone Thugs. Bonesetter.
We sleep in rooms that people leave.
A nice poem from that No anthology:
I resume my day of a rabbit,
my night of an elephant at rest.
And, within myself, I say:
this is my immensity in the raw, in jugfuls,
this is my pleasing weight, that sought me below as a pecker;
this is my arm
that on its own refused to be a wing,
these are my sacred writings,
these my alarmed cullions.
A lugubrious island will illuminate me continental,
while the capitol leans on my innermost collapse
and the lance-filled assembly brings to a close my parade.
But when I die
of life and not of time,
when my two suitcases come to two,
this will be my stomach in which my lamp fit in pieces,
this that head that atoned for the circular torment in my steps,
these those worms that my heart counted one by one,
this will be my solitary body
over which the individual soul keeps watch; this will be
my navehall in which I killed my innate lice,
this my thing thing, my dreadful thing.
Meanwhile, convulsively, harshly
my restraint convalesces,
suffering like I suffer the direct language of the lion;
and, because I have existed between two brick powers,
I myself convalesce, smiling at my lips.
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mmmm... prolific.