Loggy, unstaged, and aimless Sunday, th’unhappiest day of the week. I go back to sleep, reading, a scant hour or so after waking. Or I transport my bearish self to book emporiums and drift about listless, pawing word-grubs, caches of word-grubs. I find Hagiwara Sakutarō tragically handsome on the cover of a Green Integer book, and plunk down the dough, for it and Toby Olson’s Utah, unable to determine (or recall) if I ever read the latter. It’s not the one about golf, it’s not the one about the miniature horses. Toby Olson looks like an Old Testament prophet. The clerk asks if I like the Green Integer “series,” and I do a Dylan thing, “Some of them, not all of them, some of the time, not all of the time.” Sakutarō:
This utterly unknown dog follows me,
shabby, limping on its hind leg, a crippled dog’s shadow.
. . .
Ah, I do not know where I’m going,
a large, organism-like moon is vaguely afloat ahead of me,
and in the lonely street behind me,
the tip of the dog’s thin long tail is dragging on the ground.
Driving back, at Main and Williams a car with Ohio vanity plates: VISIONRY. Pilot’d by a man who resembles a young Al Green. The license plate border’d by that line about “come the rapture” and the “unmanned” vehicle. That’s the definition of rapture, isn’t it? To be completely unmanned? No more corpulence and sweats? No more tether’d heart? The cumbersome body replaced by what? Light? Music? Lite music? (Speeding off, I think That plate should read VENTRILOQUY, stomach talk, side-of-the-mouth talk, wooden-puppet talk, the idiot wind.)
~
A 5 a.m. revery of someone’s [a poet’s, she is not a painter that I know of] paintings, three-dimensional, high intricate polychrome’d (motley, inlay and marquetry?), and huge, lining one side of the dirt road that ended at the Chukovsky’s farm (Otsego County, near Gaylord, Michigan, where we bought eggs). Possible triggers: the newly garish lavender Victorian, the book for kids call’d The Big Orange Splot.
~
Finish’d: The Disappointment Artist and other essays (Jonathan Lethem)
Misreading: IMAGINATION DEAD MACHINE for Beckett’s IMAGINATION DEAD IMAGINE
Beckett, “Enough”:
All that goes before forget. Too much at a time is too much. That gives the pen time to note. I don’t see it but I hear it there behind me. Such is the silence. When the pen stops I go on. Some times it refuses. When it refuses I go on. Too much silence is too much. Or it’s my voice too weak at times. The one that comes out of me. So much for the art and craft.
