Reset Forty-One, Day Eighteen

[rejectomorph]

There's an odd sprinkle of tiny raindrops as I sit in the still-hot, still, dark back yard. Remembering Saturday, I remember waking with too much too little sleep, but getting up anyway as all hope of returning to sleep then was lost. But because Saturday I remembered Friday (when I repeatedly failed to nap when tired and ended up still awake in bright morning light, which is how I then had too much too little sleep Saturday), I decided that I would nap, and that's what I did. So Saturday I woke up twice, once in the late morning and again in the evening before sunset.

Neither waking was especially pleasant, but then it was hot, and very little is ever pleasant to me when it is hot. It was a very very hot day. It has been a hot night, too. For that reason in particular the odd little sprinkle of tiny raindrops was welcome. They were cool, reminding me that coolness is still a possible thing. Saturday was not the end of the world, it just felt like it. Today is going to be hot, too, but much less so, and there is likely to be more rain. Lightning and thus fire remains a risk, of course, but since that can't be helped I've decided to simply enjoy whatever rain we get and just not worry about mere possibilities, until and unless they become reality.

So Saturday I spent a lot of time with music videos, which is not unusual, but what cropped up went way back, some of it to before I was born. I spent about half an hour with Artie Shaw's 1938 recording of Cole Porter's Begin the Beguine, which my dad had on a 78RPM record. Hearing it played is one of my earliest memories. The video I found was a performance made for theatrical release, and as I was watching it the thought came to me that every single one of the guys in that band is dead. Cole Porter has been dead going on sixty years. June 9 was the 131st anniversary of his birth. How did that world that was so new to me when I was a kid get so old so fast?




Sunday Verse

So The Hall Door Shuts Again And All Noise Is Gone

by Anne Carson


In the effort to find one's way among the contents of memory
(Aristotle emphasizes)
a principal of association is helpful—
"passing rapidly from one step to the next.
For instance from milk to white,
from white to air,
from air to damp,
after which one recollectes autumn supposing one is trying to
recollect that season."
Or supposing,
fair reader,
you are trying to recollect not autumn but freedom,
a principal of freedom
the existed between two people, small and savage
as principals go—but what are the rules for this?
As he says,
folly may come into fashion.
Pass then rapidly
from one step to the next,
for instance from nipple to hard,
from hard to hotel room,
from hotel room

to a phrase found in a letter he wrote in a taxi one day he passed
his wife
walking
on the other side of the street and she did not see him, she was—
so ingenious are the arrangements of the state of flux we call
our moral history are they not almost as neat as mathematical
propositions except written on water—
on her way to the courthouse
to file papers for divorce, a phrase like
how you tasted between your legs.
After which by means of this wholly divine faculty, the "memory
of words and things,"
one recollects
freedom.
Is it I? cries the soul rushing up.
Little soul, poor vague animal:
beware this invention "always useful for learning and life"
as Aristotle say, Aristotle who
had no husband,
rarely mentions beauty
and was likely to pass rapidly from wrist to slave when trying to
recollect wife.