Vincent Katz
Maine Hours and Days
To Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal
I want to make some rules for this month. I won’t complain and I won’t be reactive. I’ll be responsive, my goal to aid.
8/9/17
Mutatis mutandis. With those things having been changed which needed to be changed.
An essential silence, which even such sounds as there are can do nothing to change.
8/10/17
The strangely soothing sound of the washing machine, a rhythmic chant-like pulse that is the only sound in the silent night. The day was filled with so much driving, the evening working, planning, riding the waves of emotions and discrepancies. Later, the reading of another city, other continent, now pulsing and music.
8/11/17
I’ve been able to see the beauty even though I’ve been asked to answer questions, frequently interrupting a train of thought. An American flag, hanging, blows slowly from side to side in a space orchestrated by pine branches reaching toward each other.
8/12/17
Today, while I was meditating under a huge pine tree, a damsel fly alighted on my hand. I remember other summers other damsel flies alighting in like manner on my hand or leg while I sat under this same massive pine, the pine meanwhile getting older, losing branches, a sign or method to us of how to do it, how to survive it. And I looked at her sleek body. Delicate wings opening and closing, the body segments graduated shades of lavender to purple, and thought, I’m not supposed to observe this.
8/13/17
The roots look like strange animals appearing from the ground. One inscrutable grey fox pointing his nose at me, unswerving, another an odd tufted bird standing, looking away. Low morning light illuminates leaves, faint half moon still visible in pure light blue.
They can’t figure me out though either.
It was a weird day. Charlottesville. And then seeing everything through that spectrum. Not being in New York, being in some other part of the country, where people could be this or that, you can’t tell by how they’re dressed. They dissemble.
In the nice natural food co-op, people looked suspiciously at each other, at me. In a crosswalk, a man leaned out his truck window, said, “It’s a beautiful day out today,” with a tone of recrimination. Later, someone said, “You can’t park there. I can’t have you blocking the pump.” I’m feeling paranoid, but maybe it’s just a normal day in America.
The anger, the lack of understanding. I can’t really take that.
I don’t trust people who give up on people. Thinking now of Fitzgerald, who died at forty-four. In that short time, he was able to give up on Zelda, with whom he had found a magical world of writing as a salve against the pain of existence.
8/14/17
“To be gone in an instant” is a beautiful moment. So maybe to be gone is beautiful too.
There is the work one has done that one leaves as legacy. There is diminution. And then one is gone.
8/15/17
A roundness returns. Light through morning poplars, morning shadows on grass. A colloquy. A coming together of sustenance and feeling. A ride. A conversation. The light shimmering. Some words composed. A swim. A mountain seen in light. Paintings arrayed around a wall. Two shooting stars.
8/16/17
I saw the road being ripped apart by a machine manipulated by a large determined man. Road and earth.
I’ve been trying to keep to my rules. Eight days now. I’m doing pretty well. Enjoying being less rigid in habits and decision-making. I used to determine my behavior so much as a set of rules. Now I’m much more able to adapt.
I’m also more able to see things. Like the phone number on that sign next to the name M&L Seafood. And it doesn’t scare me anymore. One time I tried to write a song about that but it didn’t quite work. But now I can see it.
A quiet pile of junk beside a barn, with healthy weeds pushing high in a patch of grass. Many different kinds of barns. And light on fields and shadows now. Different houses with entryways and porches.
8/17/17
I wanted a place to shoot to, and I saw it, in a pyramidal corner extending into infinite distance. Could I but extend, likewise, into that space, I’d become one with the universe.
A grey day, but somehow one balanced on its own vectors. Tall pines across the pond.
The grey of pond’s surface. Nearer pines, their branches sheathed in darker green.
8/18/17
The same place with the same junk but a different emotion. In the side mirror, a
different look of green leaves, pattern of a wall hanging in nature.
8/19/17
A great cream slate of sky above a bluer light plane of lake. Earlier, we saw a light-colored hawk attack three crows lurking in a nearby treetop. She has her nest at the top of one lofty pine, they perched in another. She seems to have been successful. All is quiet now, except for human kid chatter across the way.
8/20/17
I don’t know what I signed up for. The sun going down, the light filtering through the trees, becoming yellower as it spreads over the green. The pond in the distance, reachable sound and smell. The person I chose to be with.
There is a time of day and an endless list of things. There is the viewing of time, and its interruption by others.
8/21/17
Manna floats slowly. Not from heaven, but from pine trees. Not manna but particles, bits of seed fluff? Blades of weed grass stretch, swelling, each burst an expression of life. Birds hum and whistle a polyphony, human kid sounds from the house across the water punctuate and a distant motor.
This is the perfect hour for a canoe ride and a sport I invented called fish watching. I can hear one of the two loons from across the lake. Sure enough, the wind is blowing in my face. The wind of nature. Or is it the wind of the earth?
8/22/17
The day is sliding down but still flourishes. There are animal sounds—birds’ sudden animated chirping—and the humans have gone away. A few minutes of quiet. No questions, no answers. The bigger problems wrap around us, but at least there’s an us. Sometimes, it feels as though the best thing one can do is to do one’s own work, whatever that may be—dancing, bricklaying, working at the library.
Now, finally, the sun, even lower, has become more cutting and brilliant. It seems to say that these flies around the picnic table are eternal. Faintly visible filaments from cobwebs illuminated, only now, in branches. And the distance across from shade to this very last sunlight of this typical, overlong, day, hints at something beyond. There is effervescence.
There are certain people who give me something. It’s hard to explain. Someone who is passionate about something, music, let’s say. And their passion leads them to know something, to know more and more, and they are excited to share their passion. The final sun through trees before it goes behind other trees, then land, as the earth turns away from it.
You take the walk from the cottage to the studio, a walk you’ve done hundreds, if not thousands, of times before. But now it is night, so it seems longer. And you lie down on the deck and look up at the stars. It is so amazing that there are stars and that you can see them. It is interesting to know the science that explains why they shimmer, but it’s more important to realize that everyone, whether they know the science or not, sees the stars shimmering. And you see the Milky Way, that beautiful conglomeration of stars that is our home.
8/23/17
All my liquids flowing this morning to her amber quarters.
There are a lot of clouds but it’s still a nice day. It’s very sunny where we’re sitting right now.
I’m waiting for someone to come out of the place I’m sitting in front of. Now she has come out and is sitting in her car talking on the phone.
There’s something about the way the land comes down and makes a shape, smaller and smaller, until it reaches the sea. Seen from a departing vessel, these shapes possess an emotional intensity.
8/25/17
I look up and see so many stars again. How many days will I see so many, before returning to a churning field of exertion? I am attempting patience, and I am learning.
8/26/17
I wonder how well I can communicate, for how much longer.
8/27/17
Bird rhythms in morning, crickets, wanting this to stay. Not wanting to go back to city, ever.
I like the fact that I’ve hosted somebody.
I think I can get by by not expecting too much. If I just take each moment, try to bore into it, I can feel the breeze that comes from the earth. It always picks up when I am having this thought, as if to affirm what has occurred.
8/28/17
A sip of tea, the morning is starting. It’s been quite cold at night, we had to buy comforters for the beds in the cottage. Every day feels like a fresh start—an opportunity to do the right thing, exercise mind and body, communicate with others, provide care.
The sounds of geese coming from the back of my head. I love to sit under this massive pine in the mornings.
The month is ending, two more days. Vacation, too, is ending. It is time to return to the hustle of regular life. My takeaway this month is the Latin word curare. To take care of, care for. That’s what I’ll devote this year to. More cooking, more palpation. And maybe continue the year after that as well.
As the cicadas here continue.
8/29/17
This is almost the last day. I’ve been realizing that I can continue if I can secure a way forward with the determinations of life. Give it to that, not talk, or vaunt, but a simple, straightforward desire to help.
8/30/17
Everything gets broken, but some things get healed. I come in silence, and the silence is poetry.
8/31/17