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Samedi 26 décembre | Stephen Sprott | Maybe All This
I was so happy when, at long last, I could stand just for a minute or so and get my bearings. It was confusing because I felt like my body was on its own, somewhere behind me. If I thought about moving my hips forward a bit, they went backwards by mistake. Too much movement in any direction would send me crashing into the floor. I was a little surprised at how heavy I am. On my feet, it's not a great effort to hold my body up but, with my hands pressing down beneath me, I can feel, up close, the unwavering demand that gravity makes on things. Were the floorboards to give a little bit, I could plunge straight through them, down through the cellar and into whatever dark hole lies beneath. I would plunge head-first. My poor head. It would not have to contemplate such an event were it not stuck underneath me like this, dethroned, lost in a rush of blood. But it's a good lesson for the head, to get a sense of what it's like down there and to see how hard the feet and the legs have been working all this time. And what a nice chance for the lower limbs to show that they can be the head and keep the body from tipping over. You can pull yourself up with your legs. It defies reason for there is nothing they can grasp. But somehow it happens! It must be some new joy at getting to pull when always they must push. I regret that there have been so many years in my life before doing this but from now on I can tip myself over every day. How else can I get the mind to cede some control? Suspended, it can't ignore the weight of its body and the weight that the senses give to thoughts that would otherwise float out lifeless, chemical, like invisible plumes through an inverted world.
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Mardi 24 novembre | Stephen Sprott | Maybe All This
It was late in the evening on 9/10 in Tokyo when they started broadcasting live pictures of what was happening in New York. Unable to explain what was taking place, the reporters lapsed into a prolonged silence while the camera looked at the two buildings wrapped in smoke and at the bright blue sky behind them. How could it have been so blue? It could have come loose from an old postcard. I was looking at this, as they say, in horror. But it was really a catatonic daze that kept me from believing or understanding what I was seeing. I thought it must somehow be a mistake but there it was, in silence, the black plumes rippling upwards across the towers. It looked like Andy Warhol's Empire, his movie about the Empire State Building. The city's skyline is such a powerful emblem. Did people even speak of skylines before New York had one? It soars too high above to see it from within but it hovers in a long, jagged line through my consciousness. And because it bears the traits of its residents, their flaws, fantasies and their manic persistence, I feel tethered to it. But what the TV was showing was not the skyline at all but something terribly real and extremely vicious in its scale and cruelty.
When both of the buildings collapsed I went blank and headed home in a stupor. I was downtown, trying to catch one of the last trains out of Shinjyuku station. People tend to work late in Tokyo and so many people could have just left their offices at this late hour. Catching the late train also meant riding with a lot of drunks who had rushed to the bars after work to quickly drink their fill. When the train arrived and its doors opened up, a great flood of trench coats rushed in from the platform. Those who had managed to get a seat were opening up books or manga cartoons or listening to music. The rest stood face to face, or looked out the windows at the passing rooftops and the blurry signs and lights. The drunk men had rosy cheeks and made little pirouettes around the hand straps. A typhoon had threatened to pass right through the city the night before but it had changed course at the last minute. In its stead there was only torrential rain and then an extraordinary sunset, with more colors than I had ever seen in a sky. So there was a look of relief among the passengers. Their umbrellas had dried out and a crisp air had followed after the storm. As I looked around, I was certain that I was the only one who had seen what had just happened. I felt like the agent in a science-fiction story, who is sent back to the present, knowing the disasters that loom ahead. I wanted to shout the news to everyone. Then again, it was almost possible to imagine that, for as long as I stayed on this train, there had only been a typhoon, nothing else. It was a strange and sudden pleasure to be surrounded by life as it should be, by lots of faces tired from work, happy to be going home.
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Mercredi 21 octobre | Stephen Sprott | Maybe All This
MY HEARTBEAT
A furtive case of arrhythmia stole into my heart the other night and stayed there, upsetting its delicate work for two whole weeks, before it disappeared, shuffling off into the dark. I've had, in the past, the occasional surprise that most everyone gets, when the heart makes itself known by suddenly slipping out of sync. By the time my attention turns inwards, the conductor has already returned and the four chambers have resumed their circular dance. What was so strange about this episode was that, with the conductor gone for such a long stretch, I was left alone with the players, listening to them try to remember their routine. I'm guessing it was the ventricles that were the loudest, that kept trumpeting at each other, making it impossible for the two upper chambers to hear their cues. I did go to the doctor and he printed out a sheet of the free jazz music I had been producing. He also gave me a mild anti-arrhythmic drug that didn't seem to have much effect. But this was not unexpected coming from a double negative. In the end, it was at my yoga class where I found my conductor again. For an hour and a half, I lay down with my chest propped up, my shoulders back, or else bending forward, stretching out the left arm and the left chest, then the right arm and the right chest. Lying on the floor, I breathed out in discrete sections. From the base of the abdomen, I exhaled into the lower chest, and from there into the middle and then out through the upper chest. The inhalations that followed were both natural and deliberate. Do other animals besides us consciously alter their breathing? I suppose some of them do, though I don't think my cats would have ever bothered with that. As I raised myself up, I let my body do its own breathing and realized that my heart, in its silence, had settled back into its proper state. At rest, I can slow my heart down or else I can get it racing but that cycle of pressure and release, up and down, right and left, has to be precisely that way. For the symbolic center of the body, it's such a modest organ. Only when it's unsettled do I feel its heavy thump. And when I fall asleep, it carries on with its tireless rhythm, spinning my blood in quiet loops around my body.
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Jeudi 24 septembre | Stephen Sprott | Maybe All This
BIRDS
Just in front of me a sparrow lay dead on its back where it had fallen, its stiff little legs extending straight up like they would in a cartoon. Perhaps it happened sometime the night before or earlier in the morning. I don't think it would have been wrong to leave it there and let things take their course but this little death seemed to have struck its victim with such dramatic force that it wasn't possible to ignore it. I dug out a small grave and, wrapping the bird in leaves, I picked it up. He was quite handsome, with a glossy black mask, a gray and white chest, and a tawny robe that was still bright and clean. The air continued to pass through the feathers, gently lifting them up and out from his body. I used to have a recurring nightmare in which I would fall back-first from the top of a tree. It was a tree behind the building where I lived so I'd sometimes stand beneath it with the hope of bringing my dream safely to the ground. Birds must have the same nightmare in reverse – weighted down with leaden wings, desperate to rise up from all the unseen dangers that lurk on the ground. The earth is surely a difficult subject for birds. Throughout their lives they descend to a treacherous terrain in search of seeds and insects. Just one look at their spindly, bobbling legs and everyone in the area knows they are foreign and vulnerable. How do these small birds cope with the constant dislocation and fear? They must have developed over the centuries a kind of avian fatalism, one that enables them to believe that their beautiful coats are as good a defense as any. What else could explain the merriment with which these creatures greet the day? I imagine this sparrow was still singing as he tumbled backwards into the grass.
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When I was twenty-five I bought a Greyhound ticket from San Francisco to Charlottesville, Virginia. It was actually an accordion of tickets, linking together about a dozen cities in between. I would have liked to explore all of those places but I had bought a single fare, which meant that I had to keep riding, switching buses at every stop. On the bus from Sacramento, the woman who sat next to me had just escaped from a religious cult. She spoke for hours about brainwashing and about the beauty of California. She had heard that Maine was also nice and that work wasn't too hard to find so it was worth a try. Several soldiers on leave boarded the bus in Reno, Nevada. They were a loud gang but they were friendly and relaxed. As we passed by the salt lakes of Utah and up into Wyoming, it felt like we were all on leave together, leaving everything behind. There were so few cars, scarcely anything at all. The empty highway stretched out into a thin line, cutting through the wide and solemn features of a prehistoric planet. As the hours passed, those features slipped away beneath the midwestern sprawl. We were late to arrive in Chicago so I missed my connection and the next bus out was heading back west, to St. Louis. It was at the station in St. Louis that my sense of destination became increasingly blurred. The next bus took me to Louisville, another one down to Nashville. Before dawn, I was in Knoxville, Tennessee. The waiting room there was painted a turbulent shade of blue and I had eaten nothing but packets of trail mix for the past three days. Feeling dazed, I went out into the street and walked in the half-darkness until I saw the lighted windows of a diner. The waitress offered me coffee but her accent was so strong that I couldn't answer until I saw it in front of me. After eggs and toast, I returned to the station to find out where they would send me next.
Stephen Sprott, August 22nd 2015
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I don't think I can say yet that I play the piano, but I've been meeting with one over the past few years, just late at night, or first thing in the morning. I've been learning to follow its notes up and down the scales and I've been going through the short pieces in Bartók's exercise books. It's not long before the left and right hand are asked to work at different rhythms and to make surprising steps and rests. And it's not clear where to look. If I look too closely at the notes, everything slows down and I've lost the meter. If I watch one hand too intently, the other one wanders off. So I try to look on from afar, dispassionately, just enough to discern the patterns on the sheet and the shapes that my fingers make as they nearly strike the correct notes. Using this method, I have managed to get through the first few pieces in Anna Magdalena Bach’s notebook. I've played them hundreds of times now, inscribing little minuet memories into my muscles. I try to get out of the way so that they can take over while I listen along. Of course I can hear it when something goes wrong but it's been interesting to find that the wrong note feels wrong to the finger as well. Even if there were no sound, there is a visual beauty and logic to the patterns that the fingers sketch out like a cat's cradle across the keys. When my fingers have woven together a passing musical likeness, I move on to the next piece. Immediately the baroque threads get tangled up. Notes ring out in strange clusters and at such a glacial pace that the sound of the train going by and the shouts from below fill in the gaps. Over and over, I retrace my steps, trying to find the path out of this woeful, accidental modernism. At the rate I am going there is scant hope that I will ever become a very good pianist but this doesn't bother me. It's fun to be a beginner, every day, unsure of when and how the music will come.
Stephen Sprott, August 22nd 2015
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It was about five years ago when I started, for no reason, running. It was a novel experience at first, to go from not running to running. Suddenly everything was moving. Swinging the arms and swinging the legs, I felt like a cartoon chasing after the Hudson river. It kept going. When do you stop? So I ran further and more often. I ran in the parks, in other cities, in the countryside, through the woods. By now, I am running nearly every day. This way one never has to look out the window and decide whether or not to go. If you run even when it's too hot or too cold, or when you get soaking wet, your running body becomes less particular and more like a blank sheet of paper and then all the sheets slowly pile up into a journal, recording all of the changes that make up a year. You come to know very well the weight of the air and how firmly it clings to your skin. You can feel how much the summer heat presses down into your lungs. Or how the frigid air coarsens the walls of your throat. You develop as well a kind of punctuality where you can measure time by how far you've gone. Minutes still pass by wasted, never used, but the ones that are caught have a more physical dimension. This is maybe the most curious aspect of running, that it transforms you into an instrument for measuring not just time but the difference between geologic time and human time. The body records over and again the exact distance and exertions of an hour, and thereby proves that the other time, the one that drifts, or lurches forward, stands still or doubles back, is wholly unmeasurable.
Stephen Sprott, August 18th 2015
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