So, I'm up fairly late making another batch of braised short ribs, having left the last one on a cold electric burner, not knowing it wasn't hooked in fully, before going off to bed on the night I was drinking vodka and not counting them.  It had been another day with mom chattering away and after a long nap after going out with her in the daytime, around 4 in the afternoon, I woke from a long nap and started cooking, first with the Ruffino Chianti, and then, using that to cook with, a Beaujolais and again I wake up more hungover than I should be, but that's how it goes.  Mom's been calling out Help, help, kill myself, the usual self talk from her Eames chair and when I come down stairs it half surprises me that she's actually sitting there quite calmly reading intently.

As soon as I'm down, though, in the kitchen, heating the filtered tap water in the kettle, checking on the spare ribs, for my tea, she's getting increasingly emotional:  why won't anybody talk to me, my mother just died, what can I do to help, oh, please, somebody talk to me, and by the time the tea is steeping she's just about in tears, and I explain to her I'm making breakfast for us, and when the eggs are lightly fried with a little water in the pan, on the plate and the slices of fresh sliced turkey, I call her into the kitchen and ask her to sit down at the table.  I've made a piece of toast for her, whole wheat, from the kind people of Meals on Wheels.  I sip my tea, cooled with a teaspoon of ground flax seed, an ice cube, one, for good measure, so I can wake up now.

We take a drive, it's a cold kind of dreary day in the low forties range with a hidden wind, but the hillsides are waking up from winter, soft wispy green in the branches, the willows advanced, the forsythia along, and we're out by Sterling along the Western branch of the creek, through the old towns strung along the old roads and the hills.  I take pictures of things that bring emotions to me, and maybe you have to be pretty desperate and depressed and trapped in order to be moved by the roll of land with corn stubble rows and fields with the budding trees beyond that, or the rows in an orchard, or a partially abandoned Christmas tree farm.  We're taking the long way around, I guess you could call it, to Sterling Nature Center.  And along the route I pull the car to the side of a quiet road and take a picture with the camera on my iPhone, lifting up my glasses so I can see the little screen better.     Old houses, shacks almost, old window panes rippled by time, the trees budding over there above the stream, and then the fields and more fields by farmhouses.  

We get back and mom still wants to talk and talk and talk.  She talks about the cat, how surprised that this is the same cat.  Will there be other people joining us?  She's hungry, and fortunately I picked up a rotisserie roasted chicken on our way back, so a couple of slices off of that, a little bit of mustard, then maybe she'll just go upstairs and be quiet.  When I put my coats on, layering, to go out for a walk she says again, maybe she'll just go upstairs for a nap, okay, and I step outside, but I don't get very far, not even past the parking lot, because it feels really cold out, and this week, yeah, I think I'll just go back in.

So I'm sitting here, and mom's gone up for a nap, and I'm writing about how the pictures remind me of Hemingway's philosophy of prose, of writing down what you saw and how you saw it, the thing that gave you the emotions, and when I look back on the screen of my iPhone at the pictures, I see there is indeed something that remains, and that even brings back the emotions, and there is within the pictures something like the agreements in nature, so that make a true composition you allow it have happened, and then you see it later on still, how the trees seem to agree with the sky and the ground and the things living and growing on the earth, and if you're careful you can almost see how the things of human beings can fit in with all that as well, though now they are old things, weather-beaten, by and large or often enough.

I'm writing this and then the phone is ringing, it's my aunt, being supportive, and I'm happy to talk to her and share with her the events of the week we had to take the cat down into the depths of Syracuse metro sprawl with highways and ramps and disorienting clusters of commercial structures that later made me feel very glad to be getting away from.  

And Grandfather Vinard would, when he'd decided he'd had enough, he would simply get up from the family dinner table and out the door and walk all the way down to Lynn Beach, all the way from Park.  He was a policeman, he walked a beat, later in life, he had white hair.  And I'm glad I have the inkling of this same gene within me, and how I really must strain to deal with the constant talk, the talk made worse by my mother's old age.  

I have a nice conversation over the phone standing in the back, overlooking the bird feeder and the cat's yard, ducking in to warm myself, and I share how for the last three weeks I have not received the expected unemployment insurance payments for the Pandemic Relief, and other concerning things that make me sick to my stomach, on top of the anxieties I have as when I leave mom in the car to run in and grab the necessary groceries, for I know she will be complaining about how long it took me, and the little fork lift taking something out the side garage door of the Big M market in the old train station, and "did you see anybody you knew," so that I'm bound to be confused by something with that tugging beeping signal in the brain going off and it's a wonder I don't get in a car accident with her beside me.

But then, oh fuck, I hear the steps coming down and across the living room and toward the kitchen, so I thank my aunt and turn the phone over to mom to say hi, and when mom's done she comes into the kitchen and when is dinner going to be ready...  Okay, so, I just fed her it feels like, but I've got some red quinoa cooked to quickly microwave, and the pot of the spare ribs is there ready to go, so it's a simple dinner, I'm not even hungry, and hopefully she'll just go up and be quiet afterward.  She got it earlier, when I was sitting at the kitchen table about to write at the laptop after doing the dishes in the tub...

Later I try to return to writing, but even with coffee, no, it's run its course, and I go back and look at the pictures on the screen of my iPhone and upload a few of them for my friends to see, having a small sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, besides the quiet seeing of the agreement between the trees and other trees and with the land and the sky and the life that inhabits the Earth.

What you do not realize as a young man, a younger fellow, with no way of knowing, is that the further away you might go from whatever might be regarded as official and approved language, the accepted language of the professional academic, or the lawyer, the money, business and policy analyst, that should you stray from that out into the creative mind, the attempt to capture experience with some intimacy that one day you realize you've gone far beyond the bounds, into a kind of madness, from which there is no returning from.  You might make perfect sense to yourself, but to the mass bulk of how you are received is tainted by the regard of you as a kind of madman, a person who cannot fit in.   Where and when did this happen?  Where did you cross the line?  But there is no line, only a steady continuum, so that you can go as far back as you might like or be able to remember and still find only that sort of person who now, as we know, cannot fit in, even if technically he could speak with just about anyone, politely more or less, with the friendship and friendliness the species is capable of, or if he had to perform certain kinds of jobs, but ever more restricted as they are by rules and standards of conduct that might be so expansive as to coexist with his innate sense of humor.

And there you are, slowly watching it all, how events of a certain kind have had their universal gravitational black hole pull on your own being, and each act of struggle against that only pulls you in deeper.  And there are things you would like to turn off, to be spared from, but unfortunately your heart is just big enough to endure and to still care, even as the slow destruction comes to you as well, like a family's genetic code.

I do not see the surface of nature so much as to just stand there and shoot it, knowing that behind this surface there are things that emotionally move you, and deeply.  Maybe it is some overall rule of nature never quite elicited, never quite fleshed out along with all the other observations of science and theory, the way the things in any scene in which the nature of the planet is inclusively there beside us, before us, the way things of nature communicate with each other, an agreement come to, easily, seen in the light of the emotions a human being can carry within himself.  I stop by the road.  I get out, with my little electronic camera, whenever I see something, feel something, and then all I need to do is quite simple and easy, as long as you take to time to ask yourself the question, what do I see, what am I seeing, what is making me feel this.

I suppose the madman is scraped raw enough by the every day emotions of him not fitting in so well, having no place to go and call home, but unfortunately, every where.  Under the tree.  By the old orchard.  Up on that hill in the creaky old barn, or upon the seat of tractors lined up by the road.  Where the birds are.  Beyond the fields.

(Hemingway, along with them, had a fine instrument, and one that got banged around a lot.  Was it all the booze, on top of concussions and other shocks that brought an end to his peace...  But the damage too, one might imagine, made him feel things so that he could see them and render them into sentences.)

I wish I could sleep now, but I cannot.  I'm sure looking at the screen does not help.

To be led, to be guided by that instrument, the one of emotion leading one on to the intuitive realm where poetry, science and insight gather in order to better see and understand, is a good and fine and useful thing.  But, because of the instrument’s hard wired attachment to the heart, as we say, can make for a life more fraught, one might suppose.  In a cold rational world, yes...  to continue on is a hard defeating thing. 

The estimation of what one man, one human being can or has achieved is better done when the subject, the author, largely disappears.  Which is hard to do, a hard and almost careless act.  Could one be Hemingway and still be capable of disappearing into the poet science?  Only through the act, obscure, done in complete privacy, coming up again with the unexpected, the creative unanticipated surprise of finding one’s own self directly before a thing.

One wants no tricks for all that, wants no cheapening distraction for his own instrument.