Still Sundays

May 15th.

Some dance for the dead because they somehow still live. Sooner or later you come to what you recognize. Art is the marrow in the bones of time.

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

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Rain came with a rapid succession early morning this Sunday. Rain has a heavy hand some mornings when it pours like this. It’s not sweet, smooth and aromatic like some cat in a dream that walks by you.  Instead it is a wake-up call by the sergeant of time. The drumming pour shakes you awake.

Oh New York, New York you always get dirtier after the rain. Cloudburst rains, like tears, although they flush cleanse a lot but not without showcasing all the grime (the glitter and filth alike).

I went on a long walk Friday. Down 8th avenue from 34th street till I had reached the beginning of the New York labyrinth: intersection of West 4th and 11th. Usually the cross-section is a numbered street and an avenue, the grid with which most are familiar,  or at the very least some noun intersects a digit, but below Greenwich Village the streets are as good as if within a dream.  I know I am lost but I don’t try to find my way out either. This usually works if one is not running late to meet company, otherwise it can be frustrating and often many resort to hailing the land sharks, the quasi-omniscient yellow cabs.

You can only go so far without finding your way. You can either ask for directions or keep walking, but sooner or later you come to what you recognize to take you where you want to go. In New York. And in life.

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I learned a friend passed away this week. Days are a blur, time is drunk, I am sober.

I met Valerie on a bus ride from New York City to Philly during my hiatus from New York in March of 2010. I happened to be back in New York for a short visit although I was temporarily docked in California. I  was on my way to visit one of my best friends Erica. In the past I had driven whenever time would open the gateways to a long weekend to visit her and I had never minded the drive. But my car was now in California and it was my first time taking the bus. I was surprised to learn how convenient the two hour bus ride was compared to driving and how many commuted daily between Philly and New York City for work. It was the most uncertain period of my life in some ways. I suppose all life is uncertain but I was hyper-cognizant of how undetermined everything seemed and in fact was.

Valerie, an attractive woman in her 50s, was a widow without any children of her own but had two step-children, and filled with a vibrancy only reserved for those who are dancers in a sky where stars never burn out. She was president and CEO of  the successful consulting business she began twenty-five years ago, providing training in technology and critical business skills to private and public institutions.

We kept in touch via email and when I finally returned to New York City in June of 2010  she came over to stay for the weekend. She was in great physical health and none of the nail polish colors on her toe nails matched. She said she had always painted a different color on each toe nail ever since she could recall. She had been to Ghana so she could relate to my attachment to South Africa and desire to return to Africa. She mentioned I must visit Kenya. Ghana had just lost in the World Cup and I was still gutted over that loss.

There are people who come in our lives and speak a crystal truth so clear that we have no choice but to see ourselves anew.

She said something to me that weekend. I disagreed with her although I knew the accuracy. Her being accurate demanded a shift in my worldview which I was not prepared for or didn’t quite know how to manifest.

In July of 2010 I was still not convinced that I was going to do this—this writing thing—for life. I just wanted one shuttle ride to touch the light of one loony story and return. Doesn’t everyone want to go to the moon once? The galaxy of stories are a compulsion now and frankly I don’t know how far my gear will take me but I am way past a lunar landing. Small leaps, giant steps, dark holes of chaos, collisions with eternity in stillness…

The inertia induced by fears offers a comfortable and tempting guesthouse against gliding in horizons that are at once dreams come true and dreams I never dreamt.

We kept in touch but I didn’t see Valerie again given I did begin writing seriously, which is to say, I started living in some bubble that only I could prick every now and again with thoughts of mediocrity or upon persistent requests by friends to join them to smell air outside the creative air pocket.  Luminous nebulae appear brighter than they actually are. The only way to come up for air when dressed in this hydrophillic scuba gear made for the ocean of words  is to convince myself that what I am doing is somehow just not good enough. If I don’t, I can stay here without regard to much, where I can feel every cell in my lung exhale words, a respiratory system beyond ‘good enough’ and ‘great’.  It’s a dance for the dead because they somehow still live and stories and art is one medium.

Out of the blue is sometimes so blue it is black. Valerie had just finished ministry school, an area she always wanted to learn more. She gave her first ‘sermon’ on Sunday, mother’s day, and died Monday due to an unexpected heart attack. Her sister who returned my mother’s day text said, “It was her time.”

Her sister also said although she had never met me she knew of me because Valerie had mentioned staying with “a woman named Annie in New York who was a writer and she had befriended her on a bus” and “and child let me tell you, Valerie never, ever, ever stays the night at other people’s houses.”

I didn’t know this. I had never even said I was a writer.

However, Valerie did send me one email that had said, “Always take time to pick pennies, it will remind you to trust yourself.”

I told my mother about the unexpected sudden loss.

Mama said, “Miss every day if it so is, but live every day too.”

Death is indeed a continuum if you are living.

I only wish Valerie had expressed how special it was for her to stay with me. I would have liked to know then too. Although I don’t know how it would have made any difference in my hosting.

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I watched Herzog’s spellbinding documentary  Cave of Forgotten Dreams last night.

Although at one point we might have been evolving we are most definitely trapped in some destructive stasis for quite some time.

But this is no surprise, evolution has always been a struggle against entropy, perhaps entropy is our natural state then.

We have paper money without real trade, we are exchanging without sharing, we are creating with metaphors never experienced, singing to lyrics we are not even capable of actually feeling because we will never allow ourselves certain experiences. We are drawing caricature images that are a reflection we can’t see because our eyes are open too wide and the mirror within cracked.

Civilizations have come and gone, risen and fallen, again and again.  Art is not merely to leave our personal thumbprint, despite how often we think that. I can’t help but wonder if art and literature is indeed an attempt to leave artifacts to remind us of what we are capable, the good and bad. Maybe a generation will come and finally spiral out of the dizzy cycles.

An artist tells a muse he could create the best portrait ever if only she declares her love for him. She answers she loves him but not the kind of love where she desires him. He can’t create that portrait although he continues to create.

I wish for him to meet the spirits that live in the cave of forgotten dreams, where they created spellbinding art without even as much as signing their name at the bottom.

In humans, bone marrow in large bones produces new blood cells. Bone marrow is also a vital element of the lymphatic system, as it produces lymphocytes and acts to prevent the backflow of lymph. Lymph picks up bacteria and brings them to lymph nodes to be destroyed.On average, bone marrow constitutes 4% of the total body mass of humans.

Art is the marrow in the bones of time.

~a.q.s.

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