I didn’t want to write today. I wanted to draw with the colored pencils in that cup there, the colors are so lovely and I hadn’t done it in quite awhile. The more I tried to start drawing, the more I wished I knew what and how, and looking as it were through the page into some distance, some landscape in my own imagination, with a sea and a hill and grass and houses, off into the horizon. I started to draw, but instead of the sea, it was just lines and circles, and though the blue was suggestive, it wasn’t any better than the blank page. I kept going with the lines and circles, following some logic internal to them, but leaving as much blank as I could. Eventually I realized it was a bike frame, when I put the back wheel on, and so I lay it down in the grass, rather than try to draw a rider for it to be going on fast as it seemed to want to. To keep something of the horizon that started me off, I shaded in a sunset above everything, and somehow it’s right now it looks kind of like the flag of Italy or Iran or India. Anyhow, somewhere far away, where people come from to America. And this fooled me into writing something after all.
Our way of fooling ourselves can really, if there isn’t much else for us, be a healthy thing—Jess was talking about this. It’s sad when you put it like that, you immediately want to fill in that much else there might be, since of course there is much, much else, but then, is it for us? We only can be so much, for so much, with so much. In a time we can’t know for sure unless we ourselves cut it short, and pick up and move. There’s such comfort in being lazy, and how can you call it less natural than the doing and yearning and inspiring part of life? Or how can you make it pejorative, when if there’s nothing that needs to be done, the best thing is to relax? Those energies are all still there, just quiet, waiting—and in the meantime, feeling the fullness of them without the effort of displaying and putting them to work, is a kind of contemplative pleasure—if you’re confident that when the time comes you’ll be able to produce what you want, if you’ll recognize it if it comes, and do the right thing. Otherwise it’s marred, and isn’t it maybe this that causes us to keep busy, doing something, even if it’s not very necessary, just to keep from thinking about it? I would include my own writing in that, though it is me trying to think it out. I would like to give it back for the blank page sometimes.
Maybe this is what Cass meant about intellectual endeavor and killing time so often coming to the same thing. But I don’t want to call anything I’d willingly do killing the time. I don’t want it to sound as pompous and useless as intellectual exploration, either. I do want to learn. Even while doing nothing, I like to think I’m learning and growing into myself. Riding the train so much is good for that. Thinking about the matter and the feelings—don’t they arise from it? Don’t they stress and relax it and give it meaning? Isn’t everything some scale of this movement, and stillness only ever partial, and consciousness only ever its self-reflection? Where is the best place to put all this saved time we find ourselves with, if not into learning and growing and doing nothing? Just doing enough so that those bad feelings of laziness, uselessness, and insignificance don’t come creeping in, but we can be at ease, waiting patiently.
I guess it must be for death, ultimately, until we can believe in something after that—if not for own little consciousness, then meekly wishing well those who’ll come after, and laying up some good thing they might get to use. Maybe I’m just tired today, but I’m maybe just working for a pay-check, too, and in these empty days I’d like to hear them say, that is enough. Put up your sword, Peter. Don’t worry, there’s money in the mouth of this fish. And cast the first stone. To just stop with the tests you know I’ll pass, and give me what you can give me, while I take care of what you can’t and never could, though you’d pretend you did—the learning.
I think if anything it’s what I can understand by spirit, blowing where it lists. Asking for it and wanting it seems to be the only thing I can do, and letting it guide my actions and give some direction to my thoughts. If that’s eternal life, I don’t know. At least it’s saving my life so far, and not killing time if I can help it. I didn’t write yesterday, either. The library didn’t open till noon. So I went t the natural history museum instead for awhile, dreaming museum dreams, looking at Cypriot urns and icons. Then when it was open, with Martin Luther King, Jr gazing from the walls, and all the big windows, I was reading Teresa of Avila instead of writing picture books, and walking over to see Jess, and tutoring in the museum of unnatural history, if you can call it that.
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