Be not afraid, the light is growing.
My sweetie has embraced “process,” and so, remarkably, have I. This is big. She has a studio now where she can place her baby grand as soon as Mayflower gets its act together and trucks it down here from Dubuque. There’s even a bathroom of sorts, with an actual toilet. When she steps out the door, she can see for 90 miles or more. But all her music and books are still packed in boxes, a terrible frustration for a scholar like herself. What’s more, our actual housing situation remains in limbo. With all the work involved in outfitting the studio, it’s likely to remain so through the end of the year. Everything’s a process, nothing ever finished — the actual way of the world, of course, now proudly loved for what it is. There was a time when nothing would do but closets and sidewalks, neither of which is to be had in our rented piece of “old Taos.” (No overhead lights, wall switches, or flat floors, either.) We are, eventually, “so out of here,” as she said the other day, but only as it flows along with all the rest.
And I’ve become a 63-year-old blank slate, each day completely open in a personal sense. Oh, I have my tasks and stable-cleaning obligations to myself, but what I’ll actually do from here on out is up for grabs. Nothing to prove, nothing to atone for. I used to have “issues” with my wife chattering on about things I thought I didn’t are about, and now I hang on every word and gesture. Every second is a precious eternity.
When my cell phone rings, if it isn’t her, I may not answer.
Comment by K.J. Webb
1 September 10, 2008, 1:19 pm o'clock |
“The actual way of the world, proudly loved for what it is”: Those are stirring words, Mr. Farr, deserving to be inscribed in your heart, over your lintel and on your tombstone!
I query the “blank slate”, however. It seems to suggest that the only way of getting access to the immediacy of things is to forget all that came before. No one can ever do this, of course. But why is blankness a necessary precondition anyhow? Present experience is always more intense when there’s a frame of reference. When you’re listening attentively to your wife, you’re not listening to the words of a stranger. Her words don’t disappear into thin air, they go to build up your portrait of her as a whole person. They’re not flat, they echo.
That’s true of everyone’s words. You know from many previous posts that I like to quibble and test formulations. Annoying as that may be to you, it’s a thing you know about me and has helped to form your idea of me (along with some pretty distant recollections from high school days). That’s the context permitting you to conclude (I hope) that I’m not just poking a stick in your eye for the sake of meanness.
Until lobotomized or euthanized, each of us holds the world inside himself in the form of a many times scribbled upon slate, not blank since the day we came squawling into the godawful place trying to figure it out.