Still Sundays

December 19th.

Open books no one can read. Eclipses. Iqbal: “Poet as a human being.”

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

New York City is an ice cube. You can slide around it but know you can’t really go inside. It is indeed a glass menagerie. Glamorously inaccessible. It will get worse and then thaw. It’s a false sense of stillness for much moves within.

I had three lengthy email exchanges, quite personal, with three very dear friends.

I recalled a humorous tweet on Twitter  some months ago. It said something along the lines that we will soon have volumes of authors’ electronic communications available where as before we had letters he or she may have written or received. I wondered about that given the wikileaks wildfire is still burning or being tossed as a combustible liquid.

I thought these “Still Sundays” were rather personal. They may not appear as such but they feel so.  Perhaps it is more my upbringing than the law training where I was taught all words are personal. You are personally responsible and will be held liable for the words that come from you.

My imagination switched to high definition where my mind was a wide screen monitor and the movie of strangers reading these emails played.

I was disturbed. Not panicked but simply interrupted.  Law and growing up with an inconclusive expectation of privacy trained me to stand by my words so when charged I can think at breakneck speed.  So I wasn’t quite worried. I let the movie in my head continue with a few intermissions.

Two days after the movie felt played out I happened to pick up F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up. It has letters to Fitzgerald from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe, etc., his letters to many, some personal, others mere formalities, and of course pieces from his many note-books where he jotted observations, thoughts, etc.

That night before I turned off the headlamp to fall asleep, which sometimes switches the lanterns on for dreams, I thought: there Self, you read pages and pages of his letters, what do you now know about Francis Scott Fitzgerald? I smiled at the final thought before gearing into sleep: his trapeze was made of certainty even when he wobbled in whirlwind moments. That and and he loved Zelda very much. Nothing else. You know nothing else, Self.

I am often told—-inaccurately—I am an open book. I suppose then I would be the big print version if all my electronic correspondences and letters were public information. A magnified me.

I am an open book—with many volumes—that can’t be translated.

We are all open books; it’s just that most people simply no longer take the time to read. We can never read another unless we crack the Morris code within. Message Error: “Information exchange transmission incomplete.”

We can only know another to the extent we understand ourselves.

So here it is: a total lunar eclipse on December 20/21, 2010 coming up next week. Ready or not. Most of us are ready even if we don’t know it. It will be the first total lunar eclipse in nearly three years, the last one being on February 20/21, 2008. I can recall February 20, 2008 as if it was yesterday. Well, like a yesterday I have scrubbed, bathed, and dressed up in a dry-cleaned suit to be presented for a hearing. I no longer represent 2008 and neither am I the judge nor jury at this hearing. Just someone walking past the courtroom. It’s not my case any longer because it is 2011 soon.

It is the second of two lunar eclipses in 2010. The first was a partial lunar eclipse on June 26, 2010. I remember June and July of this year too. I was suspended in World Cup delirium.

It will be the first total lunar eclipse to occur on the day of the Winter Solstice (in the Northern Hemisphere; Summer in the Southern) since 1554. 456 years. Four hundred and fifty-six years. Centuries waiting to be aligned.

I read an article where an astronomer said, “It is not of any significance. Luck of the draw. You got four aces.” He is right to the extent that what we don’t understand can either mean nothing or everything.

The conundrum isn’t whether it means something or not. But that we forget. We can hardly recall last week, last month, 2008, let alone any other year, so 456 years is an abstraction reserved for awe and applause then to be set aside like a wet bathing suit you are too lazy to properly set out to dry.

“Complete knowledge will destroy the liberty of human choice,” said Iqbal.

Even if we could recall the past, even if we understood the significance of this astronomical alignment, we can always choose what it means. Free will is not so freeing when the conductor is Fear.

Around my closest friends I am a kid. Yesterday I was at a Christmas tree-trimming party with some very close friends and I took a moment to be grateful that my friends found it completely normal that I was a tree and the tinsel should go on top of my head. The little kids seemed to be doing that and having fun so I too wanted to have fun. Besides how much more could I eat in one night? I can hear them now if they read this paragraph, words wrapped in loving laughter: we did not think it was normal, we just accept you.

My mother would say, all of you—“all” being me, my siblings, significant others, our friends and anyone of any age who steps inside my parents’ home—all of you are kids. “The Peter Pan Household” we are called.

The philosopher and poet Iqbal wrote about poet as a human being as follows:

Come, dear friend! Thou hast known me only as an abstract thinker and dreamer of high ideals. See me in my home playing with children and giving them rides turn by turn, as if I were a wooden horse! Ah! See me in the family circle lying at the feet of my grey-haired mother, the touch of whose rejuvenating hand bids the tide of time flow back-ward, and gives me once more the school-boy feeling in spite of all the Kants and Hegels in my head! Here Thou wilt know me as a human being.

We are all poets if we want to be.

Marco Rojas says during the most excruciatingly complex yoga poses where breathing feels like a phenomenon, “Be a kid so you can be a better adult.”

I will be on a farm surrounded by almond trees and heavy fog tomorrow night. New York, New York, I must leave you tomorrow for the holidays to be with family.

Like a kid I will listen to the cosmic alignment without trying to decode what it means.

~a.q.s.

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