Letter, Now Your Turn

 Hi.

You have been on my mind a lot today.

How are things progressing with the situation? 

Me: Colorful things. Small things.

 

Oh, and large earthly things too.

Life is good. I can still see stuff like this.

 

And even though I successfully weaned coffee from my life last summer it is back. And I’m so happy about that.

Reading a magazine found in a thrift store for one dollar, Art in America (2004), and learning more than I did all of last year and feeling better about the world. I kept closing my eyes and repeating: "Blue Four" "Blue Four" in case I need that info-tag for trivia night somewhere, somehow.

Saw a woman, earlier in the day, performing surgery on a pigeon on 38^th and 7^th avenue. Just kept walking.

Sister The Great was there and we sat in the park and admired high up healthy trees on pre-war balconies larger than my house. Apartment arborist specialists walk amongst us. Did you know that? Then you hear music, car noises, dogs, people, and then back to that first thing...is it live music? A piano player in the park. I heard about him earlier, but was still surprised to walk up behind. I looked away. I'd like to know about him but the timing wasn't right.

 I haven't decided if that is a good idea.

 

And then this staircase happened. 

 

In the Merchant House Museum. By myself up on the top floor a file cabinet that flaps open out and then up and then in. I first looked because there were tiny plackets that said “Biography” or “History.” Inside the 1850-1920 era books are archived and tagged in acid free waxy paper. Curious, yes. But they were perfectly human and I wouldn’t change a thing. You know I was flashed with the thought of doing that around the house. Uh.

And back down before anyone saw. 

Hope you are well—but I always am hoping that is true about you. There may be a new word for that emotion which I'll try to make up tomorrow or maybe next year I'll learn one in another language. Early thoughts: himmet, tholler, zess. If you want to talk more about Our genealogy road trip idea I’ll listen. But I think I’m too lazy. Or I’d rather continue to go with the made up version already in my head.

Cheers!

R

1.

"...Oh some metal bar in Kalamazoo on my 21st birthday"
 "Please go on," I said.                                         
 She recalled wearing a "gold sparkly top and black jeans."

2. 

We were reminiscing while standing here:

She later said that the bar was called Peppers and the band was called Backseat Romeo.


3.

Los Angeles 17

Know Your Heroes: Clarice Lispector

I can't quite say what it is--and that appears to be normal.

"Genre won't help: there are parables, fairy tales, nightmares, sketches, prose-poems, meditations, interior monologues, newspaper cronicas...she considers herself sui generis, an isolado, and, indeed, her choppy brushstrokes often seem those of an alien." -Lispector translator Alexis Levitin

She was so good at explaining gestures and small moments:

"When the monkey jumped onto the woman's lap, she repressed a frisson and the shy pleasure of one who is chosen."

Then I found this slip of paper in my library copy of Soulstorm, her collected stories.

The paper is from a hotel in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. I looked it up and there is a Clarice Lispector Avenue on the map. And it felt, having a few other books of hers, very much as if the publisher had added this slip on purpose so that a reader could have an extra layer of meaning, a perfect weirdness, [tell me you know that feeling when weirdness is perfect, right?] a nice mystery that can't be explained.

She wrote in "Such Gentleness":

"A dark hour, perhaps the darkest, in broad day, preceded this thing I don't even want to try to define. In the middle of the day it is night, and this thing I still don't want to define is a peaceful light inside me, you might call it gladness, gentle gladness."

"I am not a thing that is thankful for having been transformed into something else. I am a woman, I am a person, I am an attention. I am a body looking out through the window. Just as the rain is not grateful for not being a stone. It is rain. Perhaps it is this that might be called being alive. No more than this, but this: alive. And alive just through gentle gladness."

Detroit: Flamenco Dancer in Diego Rivera Hall, Heidelburg Project, Belle Isle, See Through Buildings, Walking Through Fisher Building On The Way To Bar, Bar, Lawnmowers, Green Dot Stables, Scarab Club, Old Photo