Sleeping on it

When I was troubled, my grandmother always told me to sleep on it, as a solution would come, and invariably she was right. I only needed faith that a solution would arrive, as it often did. Even though I didn't believe her, a solution would often come while I was sleeping. I think of the scientist Kekule and the inventor Singer who both slept on it as well, when faced with a conundrum and no obvious answers in sight. Kekule dreamed of benzine carbon rings opening and closing, as if they were linked arm in arm like girl gangs. And Singer dreamed of a sword fight when he was trying to resolve how to get the thread to loop through the needle and to link a stitch. They were stitching together memory and dream with practicum. Sleeping on my math book before a test did not yield any tangible results.

TheNarrativeMethod.com prompt

Due rent

Jack Gilbert once said in a poem that the Lord gives everything, then takes it all back again, along with the woman (Linda Gregg), because the rent was too high for our psyches, and that whole memory recollected in tranquility thing bites us on the ass whenever we revisit the past. But it is also filled with bogs of quicksand, where the only rescue is of the self by the self. The easy way out is to not remember at all. So many friends find that memory has already eroded and slipped between the mossy cracks and steppingstones of regret. Things they were so positive they didn’t need to commit to memory—except for the early years. All those first loves, and deceptions, say, a long weekend with your lover, when you said you were with friends—and not where you said you’d be. Perhaps you got busted or tripped up on your own stories. Nothing like clandestine love among the ruins of a society so corrupt, you couldn’t imagine anyone even caring what you did, and with whom. This is all speculative fiction you know. There was no lost weekend, no hotel in Paris where you looked out the balcony toward a future that would never come. You were so impatient, and you could see the light on the horizon, that one that would never arrive, nor would it spin overhead with the wheedling stars. This was long before the corpse of poetry came to visit you. But you’ve never been to Paris, not on a Thursday, or even in the rain. Just those black lines, a deluge on the page, and you’re left wondering when and where the rent is due.

2/22/23 Write On! Terri Glass

Unforseeable music

When I was young, I was asked if I would like to have a piano, and I said no, behind my crocodile tears, I wanted to play so badly, but sadly, I said no because all the piano tuners and musicians I knew were blind. Because I thought you had to be blind in order to become a good pianist, I said no. One of the musicians was Lennie Tristano, the famous jazz musician. I went to school with his son, Steve. And Kent Weaver was the local piano tuner. An early image I have of them is strolling down the low road to Lagunitas, a small country road, arm and arm, with someone who was sighted, leading the way. One time my friend was at a party in a little shack, deep in the woods, the weed was good, but it began to rain on their parade, the shack leaked, and it was too dark to see their way home, so Kent, the blind piano tuner, led the way home by heart.

Galileo’s birthday

He took up the lute at a young age, his delicate touch, so like the angels, they said. He came into his talent early. His father and brother were court musicians who composed for the king, and also for the birds who gathered on the windowsill each morning. All he ever wanted to do was to play under the warm sun, but the dark chiaroscuro of shadows drew him towards the night’s secrets. He was mesmerized by the parabola of the chandelier as it swung in perfect time to the beating of his heart, and by the poetry of numbers, that pure form leading him away from his medical studies. He told his students it was impossible to understand the world without mathematics. The musical intervals of the lute strings, a divine measurement. The laws of nature are mathematical. They made bets and tossed weights off the tower of Pisa. And the freefall race was on with no clear winners. It seems Aristotle was the loser, something no one wanted to hear. Especially the church. But poverty no sooner slammed one door shut, when another opened in Padua. There was a woman he fancied, they tied a loose lover’s knot punctuated with a son and two daughters, but he never married because the sky beckoned. He turned his telescope on the Milky Way and said there are more stars up there than anyone could possibly imagine. He listened to the music of the spheres, and said the earth was not the center of the universe, shattering the foundations of the known world. And the celestial world was far from perfect: Jupiter had fixed stars. Venus waxed and waned like the moon. The moon was not a translucent pearl, it had holes and craters, for chrissakes. The earth moved, the tides rose and fell with the moon. The spots on the sun were like fertilized eggs. Food for thought. The evidence was clear—Copernicus was right, the earth circled the sun. He named Jupiter’s moons Medicean stars after a student and patron of his, Cosimo of Medci the ruler of Tuscany. But that did not protect him as the church charged him with heresy. The long arm of the Inquisition found him. The earth was the epicenter. And yet it moves, he muttered. Though he could no longer publish or teach, even a lifetime of house arrest did not shake his certainty in a heliocentric universe. He sent his young daughters to a convent where Maria Celeste carried on his studies. He suffered from insomnia, devoutly prayed the seven psalms of penitence daily, but still he went blind from looking too long at the sun. 

2/15/23 weirdly I began this piece on his birthday.

Before the storm

As I drove down Hicks Valley Road at dusk, three flocks of starlings converged over me, accompanied by the first drops of rain falling on my car roof. It was astounding to see hundreds of starlings murmurate overhead. I stopped my car right in the middle of the road to watch them pulse and bend and weave a dark curtain overhead. The bursting of their wings as they moved in unison was like ocean waves, or a gust of roaring wind in the pines. I thought: wow, such big drops of rain, the beginning of the storm. Only in this case, I found out it was a shitstorm. Literally. My car was splattered in birdshit, as if the storm clouds had taken up fingerpainting on my windshield.