Instruments

For my birthday, my brother got me an ocarina, which, despite having very little experience playing a flute, beyond the recorder, I have of late become quite adept at playing. Certainly, the Dorkmuffin probably didn't appreciate my atonal fumbling at all hours of the night, but that is neither here nor there.

I've had an idea of late, because the wbriting of my dissertation has led me to something of an intellectual impasse, of writing a narrative. I say "narrative" and not "novel" 1) because it seems to me there's nothing much new about novels anymore and 2) because I want to write a work of criticism that is neither straightforwardly historicist in the manner I know my committee wants but can't quite manage to say nor yet another masturbatory exercise in self discovery like so much of this PoMo lit-crit crap I read on a daily basis. This act of criticism/narrative is likely yet another in a long line of elaborate projects I will abandon the moment I realize it will require actual work and discipline, but even so, I like one of the fragments the idea has produced so far. Here it is, completely without context.

"The whole examination room was dark, a living history exhibit you see at one of those themed parks on the East Coast, except I have the sense no one visits this place much not even the sun. Everything is dusted, meaning there isn't much dust for such an old place, but nothing really looks clean: solid metal instruments of examination from an era somewhere between blood-letting and MRIs covered in discoloring blotches of tarnish and in some cases rust. Aunt's old koto leaned into the corner next to the medicine cabinet, and if I hadn't known better I'd assume it was like every other instrument in the room, outdated, without purpose, and without any use beyond anachronism and decoration. As I tiptoed around the room, a stray thread from the hem of my jacket got caught on a protruding nail head, and when Aunt saw it, she grabbed a forceps from a nearby desk, pulled the string taut, and severed it at the hemline with a pair of ancient snips. She grunt-sighed in her usual way, obviously put out for having to exert herself in any way whatsoever. So she went back into the parlor to listen to her programs, noiselessly shutting the door and leaving me to my own devices."

The whole thing is likely to be about music and poetry, but you may have guessed that already.

Ode of a Dying Winter

It's getting to that point where the temperature has risen high enough above zero that I feel guilty for taking the bus instead of my bike. The other day driving on the way to a movie I rolled down my window to happy couples and fattening nubiles thinning their fleshes with pounded pavement; I rolled it down cuz the car was getting hot. I thought it was the imminent spring. Turns out it was the heater left on from the night before.

I have pleasant memories of the winters I have left behind and great hopes for those to come. The awesome puddles that are day by day turning the plains of grass into midday marshes have rendered even my awesome steel-toed boots all but useless. The water gets into everything like a humid Japanese winter. I make my way through these dripping, thawing late winter days with thoughts of massive icicles,

six and a half boys tempted the four-foot icicles with rocks:
one proven immortal when it shattered in his head,
another mortal when it pinned him to the rotting earth

and with the books of poetry, philosophy, and comics I read on the toilet for which Colleen went out of her way to procure a wicker basket, because, let's be honest, I'm slowly but steadily moving every book I own into the bathroom. There, I recall, with a little help from Edna,

There was upon the sill a pencil mark,
Vital with shadow when the sun stood still
At noon, but now, because the day was dark,
It was a pencil mark upon the sill.
And the mute clock, maintaining ever the same
dead moment, blank and vacant of itself,
Was a pink shepherdess, a picture frame,
A shell marked Souvenir, there on the shelf.
Whence it occurred to her that he might be,
The mainspring being broken in his mind,
A clock himself, if one were so inclined,
That stood at twenty minutes after three--
The reason being for this, it might be said,
That things in death were neither clocks nor people, but only dead.