The Hour of Noon
MY FATHER WAS BORN in the shadows of the Bethlehem Steel Mill as the noon whistle blew. Thus he was born, in accordance with Nietzsche, at the appointed hour when certain individuals are granted the ability to grasp the mystery of the eternal recurrence of all things. My father’s mind was beautiful. He seemed to see all philosophies with equal weight and wonder. If one could perceive an entire universe, the possibility of its existence seemed quite tangible. As real as the Riemann hypothesis, as belief itself, unfaltering and divine.
We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away. Our father manning the loom of eternal return. Our mother wandering toward paradise, releasing the thread. In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all. We imagine a house, a rectangle of hope. A room with a single bed with a pale coverlet, a few precious books, a stamp album. Walls papered in faded floral fall away and burst as a newborn meadow speckled with sun and a stream emptying into a greater stream where a small boat awaits with two glowing oars and one blue sail.
Hermann Hesse’s typewriter, Montagnola, Switzerland
When my children were young I contrived such vessels. I set them to sail, though I didn’t board them. I rarely left the perimeter of our home. I said my prayers in the night by the canal draped by ancient longhaired willows. The things I touched were living. My husband’s fingers, a dandelion, a skinned knee. I didn’t seek to frame these moments. They passed without souvenir. But now I cross the sea with the sole aim to possess within a single image the straw hat of Robert Graves, typewriter of Hesse, spectacles of Beckett, sickbed of Keats. What I have lost and cannot find I remember. What I cannot see I attempt to call. Working on a string of impulses, bordering illumination.
I photographed the grave of Rimbaud when I was twenty-six. The pictures were not exceptional but contained the mission itself, which I had long forgotten. Rimbaud died in a Marseille hospital in 1891 at the age of thirty-seven. His last wish was to return to Abyssinia where he had been a coffee trader. He was dying and it was not possible for him to be carried aboard ship for the long journey. In his delirium he imagined himself on horseback in the high Abyssinian plains. I had a string of nineteenth-century blue glass trade beads from Harar and I got it in mind to take them to him. In 1973 I went to his gravesite in Charleville, near the bank of the Meuse River, and pressed the beads deep into the soil of a large urn that stood before his tombstone. Something of his beloved country near to him. I hadn’t connected the beads with the stones I’d gathered for Genet, but I supposed they originated from the same romantic impulse. Presumptuous, perhaps, though not erring. I have since returned and the urn is no longer there, but I believe I am still the same person; no amount of change in the world can change that.
I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different. As a child I thought I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old? I say to my joints, my iron-colored hair. Now I am older than my love, my departed friends. Perhaps I will live so long that the New York Public Library will be obliged to hand over the walking stick of Virginia Woolf. I would cherish it for her, and the stones in her pocket. But I would also keep on living, refusing to surrender my pen.
Virginia Woolf’s walking stick
I removed my Saint Francis tau from around my neck, then braided my hair, still damp, and looked around. Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can’t draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.
I called to Cairo and she hopped onto the bed. I looked up and saw a singular star rise above my skylight. I tried to rise as well, but all at once gravity had the better of me and I was swept by the edges of a strange music. I saw the fist of a babe shaking a silver rattle. I saw the shadow of a man and the brim of his Stetson hat. He was toying with a kid’s lariat, and then he knelt down, untied the knot, and laid it on the ground.
—Watch, he said.
The snake ate its tail, let go, and ate again. The lariat was a long string of slithering words. I leaned over to read what they said. My oracle. I checked my pocket but I had neither pen nor script.
—Some things, the cowpoke breathed, we save for ourselves.
It was the hour of showdown. The miraculous hour. I shielded my eyes from the punishing light, dusted off my jacket, and threw it over my shoulder. I knew exactly where I was. I fell out of the frame and saw what I was seeing. Same lone café, different dream. The dun-colored exterior had been repainted a bright canary yellow and the rusted gas pump was covered with what appeared to be a massive tea cozy. I just shrugged and sashayed in, but the place was unrecognizable. The tables and chairs and the jukebox were gone. The knotty pine panels had been stripped away and the faded walls were painted colonial blue with white wainscoting. There were crates of technical equipment, metal office furniture, and stacks of brochures. I leafed through a pile: Hawaii, Tahiti, and the Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City. A travel agency in the middle of nowhere.
I went into the back room but the coffeemaker, beans, wooden spoons, and earthenware mugs were all gone. Even the empty mescal bottles were gone. There were no ashtrays and no sign of my philosophic cowpoke. I sensed he had been heading this way and most likely, spotting the spanking-new paint job, just kept on going. I looked around. Nothing to hold me here, either, not even the dried carcass of a dead bee. I figured if I hustled I might spot the clouds of dust left behind where his old Ford flatbed passed. Maybe I could catch up with him and hitch myself a ride. We could travel the desert together, no agent required.
—I love you, I whispered to all, to none.
—Love not lightly, I heard him say.
And then I walked out, straight through the twilight, treading the beaten earth. There were no dust clouds, no signs of anyone, but I paid no mind. I was my own lucky hand of solitaire. The desert landscape unchanging: a long, unwinding scroll that I would one day amuse myself by filling. I’m going to remember everything and then I’m going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café. That’s what I was thinking, in my dream, looking down at my hands.
Wow Cafe, Ocean Beach Pier, Point Loma