The fog seems to want to cling more to the lowlands. Mornings are clearer or maybe crisper is a better word. Hay bales pop up wherever the machine drops them. I can appreciate the randomness of that.
Morning walks are lovely. So quiet…me, birds, and the occasional deer. Then there is that ever-changing morning sky!
I went to the library writing time of pure silence. No one was there but me. I worked on getting a new short story into one of the forms of short fiction. Later in the week, I made it exactly 100 words. The title and author do not count as words. I like how it came out. My very first murder. I titled it Stairs No. 1. Now I can do an entire series of short stories centered around stairs. Have you ever read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space The classic look at how we experience intimate places.? My copy from graduate school was dropped into a bathtub by a friend I loaned it to. And since then has become more impressive with all the discoloration and ripply pages. It is wonderful to hold.
I asked one of the men I have coffee with (a trained architect, now my age) if he had read the book. It seemed it should have been required reading for students of architecture. No, he had not. So I bought him a copy from Amazon. The cover is not near so romanticized as my copy that is all grey shadows of angles, but the text is the same.
From the back cover:
Thirty years since its first publication in English, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space remains one of the most appealing and lyrical explorations of home. Bachelard takes us on a journey, from cellar to attic, to show how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our thoughts, memories, and dreams.
My copy is from 1994.
How he describes the feeling of going upstairs contrasted with those when we descend downward is so spot on. The downward travel of basement stairs is there in Stairs No. 1.
Anyway, my joining poetry groups and a recent foray into time with those writing prose has made it quite clear that my tribe is more likely my own company. Did you know that poets want to talk about the importance of getting published? Which actually means someone a fraction of the poets age decides if there is enough space in their next publication for the words that may have meant every emotion one could possibly expend through their pen.
And the prose people were similarly focused on what sounded like following a prescribed formula for getting an agent to notice their next best selling novel.
So here I am. Still planning on going to the poetry reading this week…just expecting less in meaningful dialogue. Did you just see that word “dialogue”? One of the poets last month took the ue off the end! I wanted to ask if that was correct. But looked it up instead. You can lop off the ue if you want. But it still looks like a misspelling.
Okay, so I retreat into drawing and stitching to get more comfortable. Nearing the very last page in the Basket Gathering Book, I added the image of the use of Jed’s last bit of willow before he passed away last month. The basket makers put it to good use with talk of Jed and how much his kindness and knowledge affected us all over many, many years. I will turn the page and fill in the last of this book before making another one to continue on with my escapes into memory.
Til later….