The Sooty Sponge of the Sky.

Four or more times I woke this morning and rushed to the screen of this glowing machine, searching for the glistening letters I knew would be stacked next to each other, word by word. My dreams followed my steps across the room, hazy and startled by such sudden movement. Usually, they have time to settle, to set themselves to the pace of my mind. But, this morning, full of energy and excitement I let them ride the tail of my desires and they were shaken. It was not until the fourth time I checked that I found the words, full of breath and perfectly moving through my muddled morning mind. I read them over and over again; I inadvertently whispered them aloud- so beautiful were they built. They rolled off the edge of my slightly moving lips and I felt the form of them and their measure.

My dreams are just now popping up in small and flatly colored bits. I was chased through a large building full of doors. I knew each person who slept behind each door; I could see the layout of each one of their rooms, but I could think of no where to hide. I almost jumped out the window but I wasn't entirely sure that I was who they were after. I had an accomplice and he had vanished somewhere into the whitewashed walls.

I am awake now and listening to Mozart's Requiem. It tastes like Death, an odd thing to have for breakfast. I am also inhaling the rhythm of written words; they echo inside me and jostle the memories of so many mornings past when I woke to know the depth of someone else's words, when they shook inside me and I breathed my own words back where there used to be only empty air. There is a whole world of words, and they are stacked atop each other, to be continually built and never to fall. Yet, it is so different to stand here, to speak the words that usually take so much care to make. They spill, carelessly, half-thought, from my lips and they fill the room around me with hurried sound. And yet they are happy sounds that break the silence.

The front door just blew open from the wind and when I rose to close it I knocked over a bottle of wine. It spilled and shone red and bloody against the wooden floor, a sudden flash of color quickly mopped up and absorbed into the perfect whiteness of a paper towel. Across the street a bag is caught in a tree and is shivering in the wind, caught just by it's edge. And despite yesterday's perfect weather the trees are still bare but spring is just beyond the horizon, a mere 19 days away. Already, I have felt the great relief of prolonged sun, of arriving to work with the sun still blazing through the windows. And, also, I have felt the great relief that these words lend. Already, I am teeming with aplomb, lost in the comforting sound of the clicking of keys and awestruck by the ease with which these words can flow. But, also, I am grieving for all of the days I have lost to long sleep and too much drink, days where words were intimidations, where they stood to scare me, to show me all the things I couldn't do, I hadn't done.

And perhaps it was the winter. Perhaps it was the lack of sun, that things sat in darkness and covered by layers of dirty ice and slush. I feel as though I am rising out of that slush and into the arms of the trees, thick with leaves and life. I long to swim in lakes and let my limbs carry me across the many miles. In A Happy Death Patrice Mersault is always swimming and I have been reading these intense descriptions of his lengthy limbs outstretched and lapping away beneath the laborious sun. He swims beyond himself, his body only a machine, moving in perfect rhythm, a rhythm which encompasses him, which is entirely himself. And Mersault feels all the world around him with a melancholy depth that I too often feel. Yet, Camus' existentialist leanings separate me from fully believing in the morals of his story. Mersault feels great emotion but does not attribute it to anything but to a vague, general idea of life. Still, Mersault lives inside me like so many other people made of words and I shall once again gather the strength to make myself of words. And this strength lives alongside others.

"As far as the eye could see and at regular intervals, huge black birds with glistening wings flew in flocks a few yards above the ground, incapable of flying any higher under a rainswollen sky heavy as a tombstone. They circled in a slow, ponderous flight, and sometimes one of them would leave the flock, skim the ground, almost inseparable from it, and flap in the same lethargic flight , until it was far enough away to be silhouetted on the horizon, a black dot. Mersault wiped the steam off the glass and stared greedily through the long streaks his fingers left on the pane. Between the desolate earth and the colorless sky appeared an image of the ungrateful world in which, for the first time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair of innocence, a traveler lost in a primitive world, he regained contact, and with his fist pressed to his chest, his face flattened against the glass, he calculated his hunger for himself and for the certainty of the splendors dormant within him. He wanted to crush himself into that mud, to re-enter the earth by immersing himself into that clay, to stand on the limitless plain covered with dirt, stretching his arms to the sooty sponge of the sky, as though confronting the superb and despairing symbol of life itself, to affirm his solidarity to the world at its worst, to declare himself life's accomplice even in its thanklessness and its filth. Then the great impulse that had sustained him collapsed for the first time since he had left Prague. Mersault pressed his tears and his lips against the cold pane. Again the glass blurred; the landscape disappeared."