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ever dumbening
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A growing, mid-January warmth has my feet and hands tracing arcs around. I think back, almost certain it was taken nineteen years ago to the day, to a photo of my brother and I standing in front of our house in front of the old gold Chevy Citation, tennis racquets in hand. We were amazed, this being our first California winter, at the possibility of tennis on January 17th. Today, though, I bat about dust balls and dusty ideas and memories.
Cleaning is always a risky proposition. Procrastinators and perfectionists need not apply. But the warmth and the resultant cloud of perceptibles released by my newly acquired paperwhites insist; I don't even have time to protest.
Aside from the standard arguments against cleaning, there's always the fear of discovery. So many frozen moments re-thawed. Often it's simply a case of Oh, I Was Going To.... The real danger, though, comes from finding savory thorns: those bits of ourselves that stand perfectly poised, straddling the line of pleasure and pain. And what are we to do with them?
Five years ago, cleaning meant coming across undergraduate ghosts. Today it's China and Colleen. Photos of students, postage stamps of Chairman Mao, a few scribbled thoughts of Beijing in a tiny spiral-bound, and a scratch-paper note from her.
"I saw this empty paper and it made me sad that I didn't let you tell me what infuenza is. The paper just waits for us to fill it. And the pen lays across it, as Seamus Heaney says, as a Spade. Tell me, tell me about the flu."
So what, then, do I do with this thought, with this paper? My apartment is scattered with gifts, large and small, tangible and energetic (thread-like). Which of these many chemicals floating around me are anabolic, which catabolic?
Ou duan si lian, a Chinese cheng2_yu3 (an idiomatic saying), tells us that even when the root of the lotus is split the threads above are still intertwined. To parse the past is tricky indeed. Where ends the rope of the ballast and where begins that of balloon? It's quite possible that I would not be typing these words were it not for Colleen--the gifts she gave were innumberable. But these words are most certainly mine, as are these current triumphs and defeats. Ironically, she even opened the door for me to view ups and downs with considerably more parity. But where to cut the rope, the ropes? How long do I have to continue cutting, and when will the ropes simply fade and dissolve like modern sutures?
It's always a gamble, with only a temporary decrease in dust.
Stick or Hit?
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