17/100, misplaced things, possibly lost

make for yourself a life...

Walking in Glasgow, say shortly after dawn but it would be a lie, because dawn on the west coast this time of year happens some time around 5m and I am not likely ever to walk anywhere at that time apart from home; say instead Glasgow around 7am, say the sun’s up but not warm, say there’s still dew on the grass, say just above the ground there’s a haze, say the glasshouses in the botanical gardens loom almost silver, as if balloons, and say you’re walking and nothing smells, not yet, it’s not warm enough for that although you want to fabricate it until there’s the hint of pine on the air, just for effect, even though certainly there is not, say there are rhododendrons in different stages of bloom, an assortment of colours and they are so beautiful, familiar too, from childhood woodland walks, from climbing a hill last year in search of the dead, and the ferns are hardly even unfurled, babies in the womb, as you descend down to the river, last sunset you walked until in the west, the sky bruised itself to sleep. As you walk, a line, half remembered, mis-remembered probably, from a Jonathan Safran Foer story, a story that kept you alive, that’s the thing, it’s easy to say writing keeps you alive, it’s trite really, you’ve said it so often, it’s just one of the things you say, in the same way the children roll their eyes when you say it’s a Frank O’Hara day when you take them for a coke, how nice it is, you say every time, to be having a coke with you; yes, you walk and you think the line you’re thinking of was written something like this, you think it went make for yourself a life you can believe in and it kept you alive when you’d lost all faith in your last life and this loss of faith was a force you didn’t think you’d have to reckon with and were certain you were too weak to withstand, because faith is for the sure, the certain, the strong, and you were none of those things when you were demanded to make for yourself a life you can believe in, but that story of the aging magician was a rope enough to hold onto it. It and the last lines of Bukowski’s Post Office, in the morning it was morning and I was still alive. Maybe I’ll write a novel, I thought. And then I did. And then I did. I wrote a novel. And now I am writing another. I did what the line said, I made for myself a life I can believe in but the book became lost somewhere, I have to think it’s misplaced, I have to believe it’s simply out of sight, I have to believe this because it wasn’t just a book that was there during the cataclysm of the before and after, it’s because I refuse to look after my books, I’d happily throw people who don’t break spines out the window, a book’s for loving, it’s for dropping in the bath, it’s for cutting the front by mistake when you’ve used it as a base for a hasty lino cut, it’s to open and find a child, now nearly 19, drew in with marker pen at the front when they were only 3 and yes, you were cross then but you’d give anything for it now, in the same way you’d like all your lost things back, after you lost everything you went through a spate of losing other things, as if to say you didn’t care much about loss and its effects, see, your lack of care seemed to say, how little any of it means to me, and yet, and now how you want the book and for the rest of the line too, something about calling a fork whatever you like and your tastes have changed now, you find Jonathan Safran Foer too cloying really, too sickly sweet, too excited about being a vegan, but it did what it needed to do, that line; this life of mine, something enough to believe in.