I apparently wrote something else entitled Scotchka – way back in 2010. I suppose that once you’ve seen The Room, that shit stays with you. Such a delightful euphony in that portmanteau. Scaw-tch-ka!
There’s some more lightning and I’m a bit unsettled. I forgot to take my day off today so I’m taking it tomorrow. This is a good thing in many ways because there was a lot of Monday work that would have fucked me the hell over if I was trying to do it tomorrow when it’s due. Now, it’s done and I can focus on other things, like not dying of heatstroke and maybe, just maybe, cleaning some countertops and finishing up the last Mike Logan season of straight Law and Order, after which, I emphatically cannot be bothered.
Speaking of things that last in memory and rise like a blade of grass no matter how many times you trim it back, somewhere on tumblr, I stumbled across tonight my favorite painting ever. The Birthday by Marc Chagall.
I look at it now and see how, in some tangential way, it’s informed my writing, my imagination. I remember flipping through a book in the library and seeing it and an instant attachment was formed. I made my own meaning in the absent man dreaming himself to his lover, surprising her with a kiss.
I was, then, oblivious to the impact of the war on Chagall and of the date of this painting, but I think I was not so far off the mark. His wife and muse wrote of the moment this painting came into being: “‘Spurts of red, blue, white, black. Suddenly you tear me from the earth, you yourself take off from one foot. You rise, you stretch your limbs, you float up to the ceiling. You head turns about and you make mine turn. You brush my ear and murmur.’
Sitting there, I felt this picture before I understood it and desiring to understand it further led me to surrealisme, Dali, Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara, dada, exquisite corpses, Maria Martins’ “Even Long After Your Death,” e e cummings, and back to William Carlos Williams and his unimaginably sublime stolen plums. In some ways, that poem is to thank…or to blame…for the fact that I write poetry. The painting triggered so many things in me. That I believe at all in the power of art. That’s sort of a big thing to happen to be reminded of when you’re rather at a loss to remember why in the hell you have this curious writing disease. When you’d rather go lie down in the gutter and let the cold rain reduce the boil in your blood back down to simmering.
A third for the triad. Perhaps we’ll find a homer so we can hit for the cycle: I hope this night is treating you well. Every aspect, good and ill, that we come to somehow share between us. I hope you are listening somewhere not so far away, though we accept that such a place is inaccessible to these, our bestial forms. Avoid their bites, climb to the rooftop and listen with your conch shell against the heavens, and you will hear this same pattering and pulling, a waltz dancing on our rooftops.
If not this, I hope that you are at the least thinking of far-gone things with a wistfulness. That belongs to our shared nature. We are both thinking of near-misses and close calls. We are both hearing something in this rain. If you can do so much, you can know that we are inventing the psychic map, the compass rose, the scale of distance. It cannot be so far that it cannot be travelled if we can put it on a map.
We are not at peace, Surveyor, but at terms, and evenlong after our death, I wish this onyx claw that has scraped just enough skin to be felt…is felt on your spine tonight.
