My favorite border of the year is stalling, the snake has swallowed and digested its tail as it were, and I am in a city without leaves. I guessed that the weather would be tepid, dressed accordingly, and so now (as far as a day goes) I am prematurely fatigued and my eyebrows are waterlogged, forcing me to lean forward and stare at my toes just a bit. {Stage direction: I unbutton my collar as though I am still decent, slouch purposefully, give up a little. No sigh is recorded.} This is a concession I make quite often; I guess on something that need not be guessed on, force myself to adjust, and do the work for the guessing later.
For instance, I am sure that later in our moments here (the plural of moment is correct) I’ll be doing some dancing, maybe playing a little game of charades, miming, anything to yank your attention from the rope of serial commas to which I have tied myself, in order to avoid making an entrance. Like my autumn!
I am good at giving up, and I can teach you, but I’ve heard some Greek guy say that metaphor can’t be taught. I’m not sure. I love the movement of invertebrates; octopuses and jellyfish in particular. They are water creatures, they take advantage of their situation. Do you see what I have learned? Even now my connections are dangling. They are there. It is a matter of giving up.
I’ve begun reading Don Quixote. Last night I drank a Guinness for the viscosity, which is the same reason I occasionally smoke cigars. My family has told me I am Spanish, so when I read this book it is a romantic occasion. I treat the Irish similarly, and the English, and the Swedes, and the Americans, especially Black Americans. I’ll explain myself on another day; suffice to say, I am trying to rework a knot. I give up and I also mind where I commit my labors.
What Donald does for me is not simple, but I am learning something or other. I am convinced that the outline for his project was vague, and that he, for lack of a better term, bullshitted through most of it. It strikes me as improvised. Notice that the first part ends and the action is incomplete. How does one play and at the same moment remain rigorous? Melville is the same. At least, Moby-Dick. {Stage direction: an octopus inches into our car through the subway doors. Di-doo. The doors close. The octopus falls asleep. I hear a homeless man cawing, ” A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life. As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed – ‘Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!'”
Tags: Diary
