Meditation 47

24 April 2020

I learned how to remember conversations in the Alzheimer’s home. It helped that they were a bit off. Repeat a key word, retrace a gesture, hold it as if inside the glass aquarium that sits on an old mattress, waiting for bulk pick up.

Everything’s a bit off at the end of the month: old bikes, old dryers, old chests of drawers, old TVs, old tires beneath the monkey pods. Tree mountains. They also walk. The other day a monkey pod pod hit the top of my cap, and I flinched.

Memory is ethical; you take it out of lock down with you, reassemble without funny directions. I’d sit in a hotel room and type. One time I walked to a mall to buy Kaddish; that was the day after she died. The author was not dead, but her mother was. Intention matters.

Trauma is memory’s wound. Spin the wheel of it, try to chart the precise day or week or year it happened. Someone else remembers, but she never said. You’re angrier at her than at him some days. She’s probably gone by now, too. It’s the tooth of the circular saw, smiling through its over-bite.

God I love to be vatic. One hopes that detail redeems the possible over-reach. To teach meditative writing, you’d need to start by looking for the snails who infest the yard. You’d pick them up and turn them to the light before depositing them in the dumpster. Abstraction’s no place to start. Ever.

Three or four lines each is not a form in prose. It’s hardly a paragraph. Arbitrary arbiter of sense-making. Or reaping. He offers to sit in life-guard chairs wearing a black robe and carrying a sickle, but needs funds to get up and down the coast of Florida.

This misfit world where the writer serves by sitting inside all day, and someone else by intubating the terribly sick. “People are terribly terribly sick,” the nurses say, with an extravagance I can’t imagine. What is sicker than sick? Why is she the girl with the far-away look in her eyes?

The engine of our economy is nails and hair and skin. None of these can adequately be distanced, so we’ll call that part off and chance ‘em. It’s one big casino now, and if it goes under, it goes under. The Vegas gunman played blackjack obsessively. Little did the dead now they’d been gambled for.

Repetition makes a life spiritual, or murderous. The Cambodian man with vacant eyes showed the camera how he slit throats by killing a chicken. Every day he slit throats. The teacher talks impermanence so often it begins to seem permanent. That’s a funny word for what to do with hair.