Wednesday, February 01, 2012

A New Leaf and an Old Cloud

I’m starting a new notebook, at (near) the start of a new year - and maybe it can bring a little fresh mojo to my craft.  Some new juju.  What I need, i guess, is a solid jolt of positive moju.* And maybe this is how it starts. 

My last notebook served me well for many months, which is to say, I never lost it and everything I wrote in it stayed where I put it. But maybe that’s just the classic profile of an enabler.  It let me ramble as randomly as I wished, with long (for blog posts) pieces of fiction and poems that represented a month or more of active writing and editing.  My last post was one of those, a labor of love that kept me busy over scores of bus rides and dozens of nights sitting up with the boys while they fell asleep.  Maybe it would have been helpful for me had my notebook asked me to account for myself a little better.  I’m not sure in retrospect if that work necessarily represented the wisest possible use of my resources.

Well, that’s spilled ink that won’t fit back into the pen.  All I can do is close out a well-used, fully-filled notebook, and open up this new one in the hope that I learned something the last time around.  I like the new book, but that’s usually the case.  I’m curious to see if, in using it, my writing changes.  Or if I do. 

It seems a good opportunity to step back and refocus my vision - away from crazy tales of sybaritic excess undertaken by mysterious Europeans I’ll never meet, in favor of over-analytical recapitulations of exceptional little moments from my own experience.  Anyway, I’ll give it a try.  If I hate it I can always go back to distended literary bloviation.  That’s the sort of thing I tend to do, you know. 

So here’s a nugget from the halcyon days of my youth.  It was a time in my life when I would consider myself pre-disillusioned - still energetic and hopeful and able to work with total commitment for a future I couldn’t even pretend to imagine.  I lived in a sprawling megalopolis that fed the world a steady diet of glam and drek (or, as I like to call it, “gleck"), yet I somehow retained an idealistic naivete that today I find hard to credit even though I lived it my own damn self.

My feckless enthusiasm for life had me often checking the skies.  Whether searching for familiar constellations that fought their way through the local light pollution at night, or checking the depth and color of smog layers, or exploring whether the cloudlessness above was more or less cloudless than it had been the day before, my eyes regularly roamed the heavens.  So it stands to reason that I saw the big cool cloud.  What surprised me was that every one else seemed to see it too. What continues to surprise me to this day is that it still seems to be floating around with me. 

The afternoon had been warm and the sky had been, per usual, a cornflower blue bowl overturned upon the simmering pottage of the city.  I’m not sure why I was outside to notice it - it might have been that my mom called me out to see.  She’s something of a skygazer too.  But whatever called me out, I was fortunate enough to be standing in my driveway late one day when a magnificent lenticular cruised overhead. 

Lenticulars are clouds, bearing the same relationship to other clouds that Lamborghinis bear to other cars.  They are sleek and smooth, shaped by winds that pour over mountaintops into forms of exceptional aesthetic appeal.  They bulge, striated, like a bicep clenched in the sky; they cut through the azure like an ocean liner made of dreams.  As of the date of this particular story, I’d never seen one before, but I’ve seen several since - and this one was by far the granddaddy kingpin majordomo of them all. 

It was massive and elaborate, riffled with deep grooves and heavy with sculpted protuberances.  It was, without a doubt, the coolest cloud I had ever seen.  I stood and watched it, openmouthed, as zephyrs pushed it south, gently reshaping it, offering me a slowly-shifting vision of its indescribable fabulousness.  The sun was dipping lower in the smoggy sky, lending the cloud sublime hues of ocher and tangerine set off by rich purple shadows.  Eventually I realized it had moved on and passed me by, slipping inexorably toward the Hollywood Hills where updrafts and errant eddies inevitably degraded it. Come wash-up-for-supper time, some twenty minutes later, it was still a big impressive cloud, but not the cloud it once had been.  With a shrug at its impermanence, I retreated indoors. 

But perhaps that shrug was not entirely called-for.  The local evening news did a short feature on the cloud that night, and the next day lots of my otherwise-oblivious classmates were talking about it.  The cloud was like a celebrity, or (since we were in L.A., where celebrities were somewhat run-of-the-mill) a visiting dignitary or member of royalty. A few weeks later, Los Angeles Magazine ran a photo spread about the cloud, with the same level of breathless fascination that it typically reserved for up-and-coming starlets or fancy hotels, memorializing it with gorgeous semi-permanence. 

I say “semi-” because I have been looking for copies of those photos on-line, and I can’t find them.  I guess 1970s-era local magazine meteorological “permanence” only goes so far.  But in my mind’s eye, I can still see that cloud - maybe not with perfect clarity anymore, but I can see it nonetheless.  It continues to inspire me to look skyward, to watch for that which will disappear before my eyes, if not even more quickly than that.  There are things of beauty in the world and some are short-lived.  I owe it to myself to be on watch for them. 

And that looks to me like a pretty good way to break in my new notebook.  Let’s see how it goes from here. 

*Moju: I didn’t even know it at the time, but this is exactly what I need.