Still Sundays

November 14th.

Art is the “creation of a beautiful universe out of the chaos of formless matter.” Boulders of desire underneath silence.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

Photo Courtesy of Ed Yourdon.

Some Sundays, although still, are without bells and whistles. Why would stillness have grandeur of any sort to begin with? I just mean this morning is beautiful but is certainly devoid of an expectation of some magic discovery that might await the cul-de-sac of stillness. It just is. But then again, magic itself  just “is.”

I don’t wear a watch. An object placed on my wrist feels heavy, constricting, almost as if something is cutting off my blood supply. Yet, oddly, I have many clocks in my apartment. Those who have been inside my home laugh at the absurdity.

I don’t want to hold time but I want time to hold me.

Today the ticking from the clocks sounds louder. Maybe it really is that quiet this Sunday morning in NYC. Maybe these are the vibrations of silence that indeed most fear. They pulsate all that can’t be articulated and one is pressed underneath the boulders of desire to attempt communication.

I am in a new relationship with silence.  I have never minded silence like some do, but this is a new sensation for me. I am listening in silence. I am speaking in silence. I am listening to silence. I am speaking to silence.

I blame writing for it. I thank writing for it. This experience is not unique to me. The more I read about certain authors, poets, artists, whose work has been familiar to me long before I considered writing seriously, they all fell to some kind of a silence.

We are afraid to go  to that silence. Having fallen off the cliff of noise, I am happy to report it is not so bad. The nights can be long but hardly ever dark.

I miss my late literature professor, literature mentor, good friend, Bud. I found a letter of his the other day. He wrote emails but wrote letters too. He said handwritten letters slowed us down to capture the moment. The heat of sentiments secreting through one’s finger and thumb holding the pen or pencil leaves an imprint on the page that can be revived by the reader upon each future reading. The smudges due to time can hardly shake the life in words on paper.

The letter I found thanked me for a book I had mailed him. For Christmas? Maybe I had mailed it for no reason. I do a lot of things without rationales delineated by societal norms. I just told someone yesterday was my birthday. It sure felt like it.

Bud thanked me for the book mostly because it was a genre, contemporary fiction, he would normally never have explored, unless it concerned Native American literature.

Not really sure why today’s stillness brings Bud. Well, literature always does, I suppose. I have been reading John Gardner a lot. Again. Reading Gardner feels like listening to a lecture by Bud, in class or reviewing a term paper of mine during his office hours for one of his many courses I took, none of which ever earned me an “A” but once. Bud died without ever seeing any of my creative writings. He had only read my critical essays on literature and poetry and my emails to him yet he could confidently comment on the future of my writing if I “ever took it in that direction.” That being where I am now.

Bud, like Gardner, would say, “I know it is hard to accept but most work is shit. If you don’t want your work to be shit  then you are going to have to work very hard for it. Which means you are going to have to work very hard on yourself because you will have to deal with the consequences of your choices. In so doing, you have to make an evaluation, if not a judgment, on other’s choices. And those others are the characters in the stories. You are going to have to take a stand. Most people can not take a stand.”

Iqbal wrote about Goethe’s Faust:

Goethe picked up an ordinary legend and filled it with the whole experience of the nineteenth century—nay, the entire experience of the human race. This transformation of an ordinary legend into a systematic expression of man’s ultimate ideal is nothing short of Divine workmanship. It is as good as the creation of a beautiful universe out of the chaos of formless matter.

I borrow Iqbal’s words on Goethe’s Faust to say, Art is the “creation of a beautiful universe out of the chaos of formless matter.”  I work with formless matter. Fragments of dreams, tattered tales, memories at sea. I am not sure about the standard of beauty but a universe exists in each character. And as it is with exploring the universe within ourselves I barely scratch the surface of the beauty of raw truth that is our human fellowship.

Now that I have put the “creative clutter” of Tuesday’s stories aside until the completion of the first draft of the main manuscript, I am inside this dark cave. I have to feel my way around without much light and understand the drawings on the walls.  I am scared of caves. No metaphor; I mean it literally. What meanings can I find in something so literal. Fear like love is quite literal. So literal that we are at the mercy of metaphors and similes to describe both. Paint me with metaphors of the cave that is writing.

I want to place an atomic bomb and detonate my fears for once and for all.

Boom.

Yet we know the consequences of the destruction caused by such an annihilation. Fine, I just want to swat the fear flies ruining my meal of dreams.

Some days I am walking in New York City and am transported to a different time and place.

The photo below was taken in 1969 by Ed Yourdon. I  can still see and feel that New York when I walk. And in that New York I feel many other cities.

It is Sunday and I am off to Marco Roja’s yoga where I will feel less burdened by the boulders of desire underneath a silence I am becoming familiar with.

Stillness is the ticket to the circus of “Divine workmanship.”

~a.q.s.

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