februaries

i fear i have written a post which only a very few will understand in part, and only i, myself will understand in full. but, if you read and if you find that you understand something [anything], then let me know. i fear that what you will read lacks unity, but these were my thoughts just as they came, and i hope that will be enough:

i have often taken space (or time) to verbalize my thinking about music and how it can function as shorthand for memories, how listening to a song can be the closest thing to re-experiencing a certain memory.

so i will try, briefly, to describe what it is like for me to hear the album Post-War by M. Ward, because it is what made me sit up in bed and pull my computer out and write.

["one."
the guitar strumming begins,
"one. one. one or two won't do..." ]

early february, 2007.

i have a new bedroom, and it is in virginia, and i am in it. the empty white walls are so bare i could almost believe that it’s impossible to fix anything to them. the carpet on the floor is the incredibly thin, cheap kind. dark grey-blueish-green. it is my mattress: i have been sleeping on floors for a year now.

the place is not sterilized like a hospital. it is chaste like a monastery – but not really sober. not stern like a the monasteries that populate our fiction. it is more like a monastery i once visited in Southern California.

the austerity reminds me of things i could not bring into the room. not a matter of prohibition, really, but more like trying to bring darkness into the light. it simply cannot come. i am on a journey that began a few years back in Los Angeles, thanks be to God.

the light will come in through the windows everyday. the light is so fresh here that it makes me doubt if light really comes in windows everyday elsewhere on earth.

i will spend a few days wondering, perplexed about what i am doing. most days, however, i will wonder what i could possibly have been doing up until now.

and now, remembering, i think of dear friends. the little things that i should never have said. some big things maybe i should have said. and the hurts that all these “should-haves” have caused in others, and how if i were to turn back the clock i would try something different, although i do not know what. [i made a lot of mistakes.] dark classrooms commandeered for movie-watching with dearest friends or other more clandestine activities. a surreal glimpse of the future: 72 angelic beings in their mid-twenties, just returned from the four corners of the earth [barefoot and carrying no staff, i imagine them], facing joblessness, plan-lessness, being-understood-lessness, all gathered in a huge room laughing at a russian dance because each one knows what it’s like to watch people doing things that seem ridiculous and have to pretend it’s the most natural thing in the world.

back in north africa, i think i am lucky that we humans are too small to see how very far from home we often are. i can see what is around me: a skyline over here, over there a long dry stretch of dust-meadow spread out all the way to the horizon, the hills that punctuate it here and there. but i am not able to see all the forests, the deserts, the oceans and coasts, and the miles and miles and miles between me and every other place that I ever considered home.

captain