March 9, 2003
Portage, PA

The snow flurries are blown up and down on every wind. At times they are horizontal across my window. I hear the wind speaking. It brings me great calm, even as though I were in prayer. Silence is magnificent!

Glenn Gould plays Bach’s Goldberg Variations---my favorite is the first variation---it seems delicate and sweet. Once, as a joke, I conceived of “The Goobersville Variations” at type of modern American equivalent---starting, of course, with the Andy Griffith theme song.

Surely I must be mad! Or at least seem ‘mad’ to a great number of people. Oh well. All I seem to want to do is to…to write and to describe in exquisite detail every minute reflection, to savour the luxury of consciousness.

Life lived in the realm of the ‘ordinary’ [the author is not talking about people in a derogatory manner here, as if to say ‘ordinary’ ergo ‘commonplace’ but rather ‘ordinary’ as in a state of muffled, distracted consciousness (ed.)] ---I repeat, life without the ‘more abundance’, everyday ritual, everyday fashion, so pathetically shallow and dilute, even more, a waste of human energy. I am making a moral judgment here! If I am able to luxuriate in the pondering of solitary snowflakes and the precise manner of Gould’s hammer attack---in either case it illuminates a keen vigilance for the passing of time. But if I refuse to do this, all in the name of “my children,” the ringing cellphone, the apparent need to improve society or humanity, then I am of all men most ordinary.

Personally speaking I have taken the Mary’s role and these others are Marthas, active, trying to help, do gooders, but they miss the Lord’s Presence! Ordinary.

I am looking for neither an accolade nor a pat on the back, there is advantage and ample reward for my useless pastime. The wages earned is indeed the joy of the consciousness of reflection. In the end this may simply be a “box of rain” or a dusty manuscript, the nth in a series I suspect will follow me to death.

No, if this is madness, it is madness I prefer. Or if this be drunkenness---as I light another stick of incense and flip the record---then it is sobriety I forswear. How all of this struck me with such great intensity on my youth. If you were to consult my poetic works to find revelry mostly in high spirits at high altitudes, in mind altering states of passion or religion or breathtaking monuments of nature and art, you would discover my dominant with its attendant crash.

So what is it today that fascinates? The very antithesis of action---pure ennui---would that I might slow time even further to elaborate upon this afternoon and in a delicate manner expose its sensuous passing. To rid my prose of exclamation save for innermost refinement---as, for example, I see in the jagged branch that chops up and down amidst the play of the telephone lines. There is a humming in my head but it is not unpleasant, except when it rises to a ringing in my ears, as though submerged in a pool, must be the coffee.