A field of dandelions in bloom; I’m always suckered in by the brilliant yellows and greens; a salad of color. As Dorothy drifted to sleep on her opiate bed, I want to dive in with apiarian bliss and absorb the rays of the sun. An illusion evidently, because time will undo the beauty- all I’ll be left with is an army of defoliated stems. A ghost town of weeds; no floral Eden. As hope springs eternal, so does the inevitable fall.
I figured out a long time ago that my psyche was shaped by the 1969 Chicago Cubs collapse. As a twelve year-old, I had invested heavily in the summer of hey-hey and holy mackerel. When the season unraveled in an agonizingly slow striptease of error and frustration I should have foreseen that the next spring would deliver an equally devastating result to my first attempt at dating; she said yes to the dance, only to dump me for my best friend two days before the big event. I waited five more years to get back on the saddle only to be bucked once more; this time dumped just before the prom the day after purchasing the tux. So I learned that to truly be happy (I at least had sense to opt for happiness) I would have to live in the moment. Expectations, forecasts, hopes, omens, and predictions were for losers. As Jim Harrison once quoted Charles Vizenor, “The present is a wild season, not a ruse.” Harrison, with only one eye open in the functional sense, has taught me to savor life as it happens. Take in what is before you with all of your senses. What lays behind doors two and three is irrelevant.
Harrison also wrote that, “as a writer it was his privilege to edit the world.” It is a privilege, one not to be given up so easily or taken away. While I do appreciate the critical eyes and ears of those around me (and I do think that listening is far more worthy than speaking), I cannot cede the responsibility to form my own universe based on observation and judgment. I appreciate the frames that artists put on their work; objects and moments can be captured that would surely be outside my grasp. I think back to Sam Mendes’s silently blowing trash bag in American Beauty; the poetry of movement created from garbage. But true epiphany comes from framing our own visions. I think back to last fall when my wife suggested we participate in a reading group at the Newberry so that we could get the momentum to read Gravity’s Rainbow. The discussion leader was both a scholar and a gentleman and offered educated insights informed by many prior readings. Sitting in those sessions was like going to the dentist though, and we dropped out by page ninety; my true revelations came when viewed through my own lense of experience. What’s the point if framed through academia? I’d be an asshole anyway if all I did was wait for the right moment at a party to slip Slothrop into a conversation. I guess I just did. What an asshole.
So here’s to a museum without walls. Keep an eye out for truth. Use Simone’s word for a day in a complete sentence that means something to you. (Can you tell I’m a middle school language arts teacher?) Take Robert Penn Warren’s advice and yearn “to touch the ironic immensity of afternoon with meaning.”
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