Crap. It's very frustrating to lose a well-written entry. You know that your second draft will miss some of the energy of the first draft, since the process of rewriting is to writing what archaeology is to dancing.
* * * * *
The entry took the form of a list, like my "Current" lists, except without the word "current" affixed to each item: I thought this was a significant departure, at least in how the page looked. The MUSIC I was listening to when I wrote it was by Girolamo Frescobaldi, specifically, his Cento partite sopra Passacagli, which is, as its name implies, a hundred repetitions of a well-known bass pattern. It's the early-baroque answer to all those bands who noodle for twenty minutes over a drone, both in its mesmerizing elaboration of the simplest themes and its tendency to bore the uninitiated to tears. An informed listener will be fascinated; not recommended for the novice. There are chromatic sections of this piece where I swear I could feel the piece lifting me off the ground a few millimetres.
There were other currencies -- ephemera, sadly. I am, in fact, quite keen to record what I've eaten and other trivial details of a day, a Pepys-show, if you will. But to reconstruct it once lost seems indulgent. My day in brief(s): late rising, making coffee, playing music, watering plants, watching Down by Law (and I'll fist-fight each and every one of you for the privilege of being Tom Waits's bitch). After the movie, I sated my craving for eight-year-olds' food with milk and cookies and tofu-"chicken"-nuggets.
I also gave a synopsis of Tuesday, when LJT came to town. We ran into DS in the park, walking M, his daughter, and D, his South African friend. (Seeing him again, even briefly, reminded me what I like about him. Please be ready to slip into your anti-frustration boots at any moment.) LJT is moving to town; I am looking forward to this immensely, since she's a sharp observer of humanity, and I've missed her point of view in the last three years. She and I and ECG had a really yummy mixed vegetable paratha with our dinners. It was ghee-licious.
I asked my favorite tarot site about my relationship with that rather problematic group of people around with whom I palled in college -- I asked for what I always ask for, a seed, to give me something to fixate on that isn't simply the question. I wished to know whether we (as a group) had fallen apart irremediably, and the answer the tarot pack offered was that I was caught in a self-deception. This isn't strictly true, but it put me on the correct track. I think I'm prone to manufacture drama with these people whether they like it or not; it is part of our time and our place. Moreover, there was little to hold the group together when a large portion of it graduated with me and the other portion stayed another eventful year. The facts are (1) I make very little effort to see them or they to see me, (2) there is probably little rancor in our disaffiliation (perhaps individually, but not en bloc). Suddenly important is the process of re-integrating. With LJT in town, there is a critical mass of people from this group to whom I am sufficiently close to spend time with on a regular basis. -- The problem (to explicate) is not strictly self-deception, but a related unwillingness to see the (vast and beautiful) forest for the (intriguing but twisted) trees, since the reality of the forest isn't what I am used to seeking from this group. In a larger context, in this and other situations, the future tense has entered my personal syntax again (storming the door, eyes aflame, a jewelled creese in each hand): my task as hero is to steal certain important relationships from the demon Past and commend them to the demon To-Come.
* * * * *
If I were a French gothic cathedral, I would be
REIMS
You develop the Chartrain model towards consistency and unity; your remarkably compact footprint and silhouette underline the unity of your composition. You offer a wealth of subtly well-thought-out details, such as the sharp pinnacles on your buttress piers, the colonnes cantonn�es which articulate your ambulatory, and the slight projection of the central chapel of your chevet. The rich and varied sculptural program of your west front is highly influential, but the unprecedented system of reliefs on the western interior wall bears no progeny. Many of your more visible piers are merely ornamental: they provide you with little support. Since the Revolution, nobody crowns the kings of France in you any more.
Whatever you do, don't take the French Gothic Cathedral Test.