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Saturday, November 13, 2004 |
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I haven't been paying attention. My calendar tells me the new moon traveled past us yesterday. The dark one no one notices. What seeds did I plant? to whom did I say good-bye? in my ignorance. I also learn, from remembering to check, that today at sundown Eid al-Fitr begins--the three-day feast that marks the end of Ramadan. Guess I'll break out the ice cream. I've begun studying hard. My morning hours until one o'clock, which used to be my work-for-money time when I was a profitable freelancing enterprise, now comprise my writing-and-study time. I don't know whether it's true, but I've read that Jung could not bear to listen to music of any kind, so powerfully did it affect him, so overwhelmed with emotion would he become. I know now in a way how he must have felt. I almost can't bear to read poetry or even richly descriptive prose these days without being brought to tears. It's almost painful, these revelations, when they're crafted well. It used to be painful to read work done poorly; now I'm just amused, as the song goes. My bedroom is complete: shelves are in and filled; my little green writing desk; my iconography--the huge Library of America poster of Henry James, deity of Compulsion; my little framed photos of Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams; the engraving of Walt Whitman. And too the taped-up photos torn from old magazines and wall calendars--a snake's scales in extreme close-up; Ansel Adams' black-and-white stones and high plains; the vivid sea-turtle cover torn and kept all these years from a 1994 issue of Natural History.
I read Elizabeth Bishop's The Man-Moth this morning and burst into tears. I read it again, and wept again. What has come over me, that I can't contain such beauty? I'm saving it to post at full-moon time. |
