Always moving
I’m finishing reading The Art of the Wasted Day, a book of essays about the lost practice of leisure time by Patricia Hampl. I’d been waiting until I completed a bunch of tasks to properly earn reading it (whatever that means), and packed it with me on a trip to Telluride for the (incredible, heart and mind expanding) Original Thinkers Film Festival. It’s a series of researched essays about leisure and about writing essays, about reading and writing and learning without an end goal in mind. Every now and then, Hampl breaks the narration to get into speaking directly to her recently deceased husband. You always thought…she’ll begin, and then we know her train of thought has shifted. Because the book is about what to do with all the time the absence of someone you love leaves behind. It’s really very good.
One morning while in Colorado, I woke and dressed and walked to the hotel restaurant for a breakfast and coffee by myself. I brought the book, a rather heavy hard-covered light blue number, thickened by my flags and markings, along in my canvas shoulder bag and felt so luxurious sitting at the table with my book and my coffee with the mountains (look at that picture) beyond the window just ahead of me. Ten minutes after I was seated, someone I’d met the night before sat at a table beside me, a woman who I basically had friend-love-at-first-conversation with. You know the type–you meet someone and talk to them at a party and just adore them and wish you’d known them longer? Anyway, she sat to have her own leisurely breakfast and asked me what I was reading and as I went to explain this concept of leisure, I was struck by the irony of all the flags and marginalia in my book. I can’t even read a book about leisure without marking off what parts I’m going to use later. I felt a little ashamed by that, and if I’m honest, maybe a little bit of pity for myself. But reading on through the book, Hampl’s thesis is that the essay itself is an act of leisure (it doesn’t feel like it quite is all the time). The act of allowing our thoughts to meander, to ponder what we’ve gathered: through living, through reading, through crying and through conversation, is an act of surrender to the unknown. Well, now I feel better. I still wish I had a bit more time to spend on the meander, but perhaps that will come for me.
“Life is not a story, a settled version. It’s an unsorted heap of images we keep going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow. They never quite die, and they never achieve form. They are the makings of a life, not of a narrative. Not art, but life trailing its poignant desire for art.”
—Patricia Hampl The Art of the Wasted Day
Sharon Fagan McDermott
The Body Dreams Itself
into an avenue of steam, the streetlights
glow a slick sheen. And down this road,
this August night thick as wet wool, a car
rattles. The body dreams itself heavy,
heavier—into the muscled flank
of a horse straining at a plow and then
it dreams itself a stalk of corn, husked
and kerneled, ready to be pig feed.
The body dreams itself a lime and thus the dreams
are technicolor—scarlet, turquoise, safflower.
(And lost are mirrors, shadows, wavering
reflections in the lake.) The body dreams itself
a postage stamp licked, a dirty sock, the twisted
wires in a phone. It loses its memory
and becomes the flavor of cauliflower, the gap
between a note tweaked from a saxophone
and a woman poised to dance. The body dreams
itself pocked, festooned, dwarfed, and slathered.
It wakes in its own arms,
loose flesh, glass
bones.
Your prompt is so obvious: “The body dreams itself…” let yourself and what your body dreams itself meander. See where it goes.
Also this essay in Poetry magazine is so good and funny and a little heartbreaking. Read it.
