I am drinking in the rare pleasure of being sleepless at four in the morning, alone, lucid, and free to follow my thoughts where they wander. Sleeplessness pervades the entire room. This morning my thoughts are grander than anyone's in the world, in my shabby little house in a forgotten place where the chill seeps in through the walls and strikes at the nerves of my teeth. At this hour I feel close to those souls I know only in books, those deep, dusky vaults whose depths can be plumbed eternally.
~
Should I never find my home, should I never feel that contentment that all men seek, should I always struggle hand in hand with my better nature in a time-worn effort of endurance, may I at least rest a few moments here with you. Oh my dear, the stars are full, the night sky is as broad as the years we have known together. The horror and the bereavement have passed, our fortunes are steady, and my hands feel the pleasant ache of work. What life have we made for ourselves? Sometimes cold and frustrated, sometimes laughter of an evening and smiles that break across our faces unconsciously, sometimes bitterness and tears and sometimes passion, sometimes happy forgetfulness. All the time a contest of sympathies, regrets calmly set at ease, and time lost between decisions. All is as it should be or can be. The gentle touch of the cool breeze, the silence and the expanse of the night sky holding the wind in the grass, the closeness of those who abide us despite everything- it makes one sentimental for carefree days, it makes one imagine them obtainable again.
~
My thoughts are harried down two divergent channels at any given time. They are as distinct as those impressionistic flows can be, though they issue from the same hidden source; such as the trickle which forms a mountain stream, when parted by the rough landscape over which it carelessly flows, becomes two distinct branches of a river. One of these can be as clear and prismatic as the spray from the ocean breaking on rocks and the other can be thick with silt, slow and dark and impenetrable. It is the landscape, the quality of the soil, the type of roots of the trees and grasses binding it, the gradation and the arrangement of geological features; that is, all that the river races over in its obligatory downhill course to where it knows not, that gives the water its character, its clarity or its density. So it is over the panorama of my ever changing moods that these thoughts course, across grounds of unidentifiable flora and unearthly light, toward an indistinct destination at the mouth of an ocean. All the debris they carry in their current, all the stray flower petals and seeds and stones which drop in as well as the sweat of the people who wade into them (whose voices rise on the little ripples but are indistinguishable from the murmur of the water in motion) and the bodies of the little fish whose names I don't know or have forgotten, are portaged along in the steady stream. That is where I find myself now, considering from a high vantage point on one of my peaks these two rivulets, which, I can see, further down the slope widen, gain strength and momentum, and if it is clear in my head and the sun is at its peak and the clouds are thin I can see, very far away, they are emptying into a magnificent and seemingly bottomless depth.
~
At the starting point, always, is a song. There is the innate rhythm involved in each motion, each interaction and reciprocation is the beginning of music, the first break in the silence or the first still moment among the dissonance of moment after moment. Either is the beginning of a song or of a new movement, and as the mind tells the eye that the cloud is a face rather than the play of light and shadow on water vapor, so my will to order tells me it is a song that we make. These are the words of my recollection that I am using to fasten you in my memory, to find and still myself as well in the center of motion. I cannot clamor and grasp for things that have passed, I do not reach out in my sorrow for voices and faces that have faded away. All that has passed is now a vast landscape of impressions, a skyline, a rooftop, a bridge, a mouth... I can only wait in mute patience for some spark to flare like when a match is struck, and I see something of myself in the shadowy eyes in front of me. I am now such a distance from that point, I can hardly remember when we were there. But I can organize my impressions, what lingers, I can see them as songs and I can make houses out of words and places for all of them to populate and they can live with me, in me, changed as they would be, but alive, and I too could live.
I watch with these eyes now seeing 30 years, I feel with these same hands and taste with this same mouth. I know the season's cycles and I change with them, my blood courses with histories. And should I have not lived before? I have lived before- I am drawn to certain people and objects. Those who have known me have known only some vague and indistinct form, they have known a cloud, a vapor. And all I have known of them has been this mist, the words that were spoken across tables or rooms, their gestures, exaggerated by candlelight, or when they were hurt and turned away, or when they spoke of things quietly for fear of crying, when we were silent in the freezing air and the moon hung bright and high above us. But now it is morning, a new morning, and I feel a great hope, child-like, with willing and naive eyes and limbs, passion that isn't stifled and doesn't need to be explained. We are promised nothing more than the next few moments, and so each must be a birth in itself. Songs and words are the vessels of this birth, friends and family to aspire with.
