Monday.  Start by making a pot of tea.  "What should I be doing with myself..."  You've lounged enough on the couch.  You'd gone out for a walk in the night, heard the murmurs of frogs in the muck, a sound you hadn't heard before, coming as it does up through the fog.


Sunday, a friend wants to check in with you, meeting you for a walk, just as it starts to drizzle.


We get out to the little mowed meadow above the river.  The grass is wet, sparse, muddy in places.  "It's nice up here," she says.

We go on a few more paces. "Well, I read your book."  She'd wanted to take me out for a dinner and wine, her bartender, for his birthday, belatedly, just before the whole Coronavirus Pandemic blew up.  I'd mentioned it, or someone at the bar had, one jazz night, she'd asked about it, so when I went I brought along a copy.

She observes the autobiographical nature of it.  "So, here's this nice guy, spiritual, kind...  but why does he get so smitten with this girl who's just terrible to him, who's an awful human being... I don't get it.  Why does he persist?"



"Yes, I went to therapy for that," I tell my friend.  "'She treated you like a low-life...'" my therapist said, I tell my friend, who has long been a good collector of wines, Bordeaux, not to cellar, but to enjoy, before they turn and oxidize.  We go back to talking about old wine shops, the characters at the Mayflower, which sat down near the intersection of M Street and New Hampshire Avenue.  There was a parking garage below, and the wine buyer guys had a rock band that played there sometimes.  This was back in the 80s...

"Anyway, beyond her being a Helen of Troy, I don't see any reason why such a smart person--you're more sophisticated than a country bumpkin--would spend another thought on her..."

I can't argue with my friend.  Yes, it was a big old waste.  And on top of that, I have to agree with her, I was a goof-off my senior year...  yeah.

Basically, yes, writing that book was a useless endeavor, beyond the mere literary practice of it, a younger person making a study of how books end up written, by blind inch by inch, memories, that sort of thing, a transcription of a mood, even then, barely remembered, thus becoming, essentially, fiction.  Unless it were to serve as some sort of confession, otherwise it's largely useless, and perhaps those confessions are in order sometimes, unconsciously at least.

The path is muddy, the sky, overcast.  The sprinkle of showers have stopped.  My friend's loafers are wet, but she says its not a problem.  What are we doing here anyway, I might wonder, today.  At ten o'clock at night, over the bar, after the jazz show, fine, we're all having some wine, this is the protocol we are used to, but now, us, the paths, people walking dogs, trees budding, the reservoirs, cyclists passing by, different levels of athletic seriousness...

It's painful to think about.  Painful to think a lot on a lot of things right now.  "The bum you became...  for what...  All transcribed with journalistic accuracy," I think to myself.   A conversation to match the mood, the damp sky and all the world thrown up to uncertainty, and with me finding myself up a little too early, having stayed up too late playing an old guitar on Facebook Live...  and not much direction to go in, now.  And not even wanting to read my little collection of spiritual sorts of books, as if they too would lie to me.  Wine that numbs the pain and insulates against the isolation, not feeling so hot the next day, in the morning.


It's always hard to talk about art, particularly the art for which you yourself are responsible for.  No fun at all.  People view your work through their own experience, their own prism, their own value systems, their sex, their perceptions, their sense of self, all of that...  They read what they will into things.  I've had many different reactions from readership of the general, friends I know.  And like myself, most people don't want to touch it, but to make some admission that it is a work of a writer of some kind of skill.


And the next day, waking alone, as always, it's again hard for me not to see myself as a bum, who has made no contribution to society, not done much of anything helpful.  During our walk, as we come back up Elliot Place there by the reservoir, my friend tells me to not be down on myself.  I know you're not going to take this to heart, but you're not a fuck-up.  "In Europe, being a professional like you are at what you do is a very respected occupation."  Oh, yes, I know.  Thank you for reminding me, I say.

(And it does all boil down to what you do as a job, how you earn money.  All the rest hidden, not called into effect and effectiveness...  For which I've not set myself up for well, so it does seem.)



The night before, after the day of the walk with my friend, remembering my yoga, I watch The Seven Samurai.  I'd mentioned it to her and she laughed.  After a long Sabbath celebration, she and her family tried to watch it, but found it impossible.  But I find it entertaining, at least in all its detail, and in the scenes, and the characters too.  I make it on from the gathering of the samurai, to the arrival at the village.  On to part two, the preparation of the little village with its running streams ever-trickling in the background, steep wooded mountains around, interesting old huts and fences, little foot bridges, the old mill, and I watch, on to the commencement of the battle.  It takes my mind away.  I have some wine.  Then I go out for a walk.  Coming upon the strange light from the fog, the trees hanging there in the air visible.  There's a strange light behind the Urban Ecology Center, as if a UFO landed.  No one out at 2:30 AM on an early Monday morning, still dark out.  The houses are asleep.

Down in the canal below, as the trees stand starkly enshrouded in mist, in the warm air, a mysterious sound, faint, but carried through lengthwise down there.  It's a sound like I heard Tibetan Buddhist monks chant once at Amherst.  Or like a contented cat, knowing it's about to be fed her breakfast.  The sound has the element of a comic cartoon spring, sort of like the vibrations of a  Jew's Harp.  The old bullfrogs are waking from the muck, carrying along their song of deep night.



But this is, with all that's going on now, a Dark Night of the Soul.  And any endeavor. any emotional pull will have along with it a dark side.  You'd like it to be all peaches and cream with the pretty girl, but it doesn't work out that way, in fact serving as a welcome mat to a long dark painful place, a place one should be honest about.

Darkness, once it comes, and it comes naturally, is already within us anyway, comes to stay.  You don't get rid of it, at least easily.  You can only transmute it.  Which is perhaps why I took years of time and effort to write out a somber book with Polish and Irish touches.