Wednesday, December 21, 2005
beginning the ending
* Stones of Summer: I heard of it though a magazine article about a documentary about hunting down the author, a one-hit wonder whose unremembered masterwork shook some of us to our foundations with its audacity and depth. Dow Mossman had never been heard from since 1972 till this filmmaker tracked him down, and thus was reborn The Stones of Summer – nearly 700 pages of pure poetry, a Ulysses for the beat generation.
I bought it to read it in Hawaii two summers ago but was having too much fun not reading, so I brought it back home unopened. I really started in on it in October 2004, and I just finished with it. Now, I admit that I’m not trained in these matters, I probably don’t know what I’m talking about or what I even missed – but that was one miserable slog of a book. I mean. Oy. It was a Faulknerian journey through the life of a young man, from his beautifully-rendered Midwestern farmtown childhood, through an adolescence full of rage and alienation and iconic characters you can’t quite fully believe in, concluding with a fabulous hebephrenic flameout, our hero having stumbled fatally over the threshold of manhood.
Here’s the thing, though: it was basically unreadable. Each page was full of imagery and beauty, but it made no goddamn sense and it didn’t go anywhere. I’ve read Ulysses, and found it to be endlessly captivating. Stones of Summer: not so much. I couldn’t red three pages without falling asleep trying to parse out its symbolism or develop anything like a damn about any of the characters. But, bless my scrivening soul, I finished it. And that means I can put it away or get rid of it, retrieve from its turgid pages the cool Turkish bookmark I’ve consigned to it for fifteen months, move on to another book that’s a better place for such a colorful cool memento to reside. I even have a good rebound novel already lined up. So there’s something that felt interminable, but wound up, finally, ending – not very satisfactorily, but conclusively. Endings happen.
* My Tuesday night yogini missed class again last week. A staff member came in twenty minutes after we were scheduled to start, to tell us that the teacher had a long-term family-related issue and would not be teaching for three to six months. That’s a lifetime in yoga class circles (I’ve only been going to her class for about a year). But she’s gone now and with her, the nighttime sunshine she coaxed weekly from my joints and fingertips. Ten minutes into my first class with her, I had wanted to slap her – she was just too intense and cheery and personal. I wasn’t there to learn to laugh or love my classmates – I wanted a good hard stretch and that was all. Enough, already, with the sound effects and goofball chanting. That isn’t what yoga is all about. Ten minutes later, I’d come around 180 degrees – her humor and joy and personal connection with every one of us downing our respective dogs there that night were exactly what yoga was all about; I’d just never experienced it before. And now I don’t know if I’ll get there again.
After the staff announcement that class was and would continue to be cancelled, four of us stayed behind in the spacious studio, the lights down very low, listening to sitar music and doing a little freestyle stretching. But the music made me sad, and the postures seemed forced, constricted, inorganic. I left with a heavy heart. Good things end too.
* I’ve written before about my mickey pen, may its memory be a blessing. It’s been more than a year that I’ve been without its firm reliability and jaunty wave of greeting. But lo, just a few weeks ago our clerk went back to the MagiKingdom and brought me back a new mickey mouse pen. I received it from him with delight, reacquainting myself with its many finely-wrought details – and then I noticed one new one, one which brought even greater joy to my pen-wielding ways: new words had been impressed on the barrel of the pen, next to the word “Disneyland.” The new words appeared in black on a silver background that had jaggedy edges, a text bubble signifying urgent, earthshaking news. The words themselves read: “Acid Free.”
O limitless blessings of a benevolent universe! Now I knew for sure – I had it on the unquestionable authority of a tiny plastic mouse: my writing implement was finally free of acid. Or maybe free from acid. Perhaps even free on acid, like some Kerouaked-out tripster. The point is, my pen was even cooler than the old one had been, in that it was Acid Free, whatever that meant. I wasn’t going to dwell any longer on misbegotten months wasted with my old acidulous and confined pen. This one was free and inacetic and I was damn glad of it.
Well, I’m learning that things end. I’ve had the new pen in regular rotation for a couple of weeks now and the new text-bubble with the jaggedy points is already peeling off. I know that acid freedom is an inherent condition, unaffected by the presence or absence of that little silver sticker – but come on people, it was just so cool. I really liked that “acid free” tag. But in another day or so, in an idle moment, I’ll accidentally-on-purpose peel the rest of it away. Then my acid status – free or otherwise – will be a matter of purely personal knowledge, neither advertised nor promulgated on the barrel of my new, allegedly acid-free mickey mouse pen. I guess that’ll be okay, though – it will still write a nice clean line for me, labeled or not. Just because the bonus sticker has peeled away and left me bereft, there’s no reason for me to feel bad. The pen is a good one. All that has ended is the label, and I guess I can inscribe my own remembrances and draw my own conclusions with it regardless.
Recap: Book – ended. Yoga classes – ended. Amusing sticker – ended. I think I’m ready for something to start soon. Oh, yes, it’s late December. It’s all starting again, and soon enough. Maybe it’s just a suggestion from the universe that I needed to clear a little room for the new stuff.
