worn but pure, human was the music

While I was making coffee in the kitchen this morning, a bat began flying around from corner to corner. I closed the door to keep him in the room. Opened the back door to provide an escape. He landed above the sink. I continued making coffee and eventually started urging him to fly again with a broom.

Eventually he fell into a pan and I slapped the dust pan over it (“I am definitely going to have clean that pan well”) and escorted him outside.

This all sounds calm, but it wasn’t. My blood was pounding and my hands were shaking. I was glad I had already taken my morning blood pressure before he showed himself (it has gone down the last few days).

Finished reading Sexton’s Complete Poems this morning. Then I paged to the end of her collected letters and read about her last years. She manages to estrange herself from her previous support system of fellow poets and family. She divorces her husband. She surrounds herself with more shallow admirers. It looks like she was cutting herself off from those she cared about. Then she calmly committed suicide. Sad stuff.

I found her poetry deteriorating toward the end. This is not entirely fair because the poems at the end of the collection are unpublished and un-revised. But still, they did get weaker in my estimation.

A section of one of my morning poems by Updike inspired me this morning.

Ohio

Rolling along through Ohio,
lapping up Mozart on the radio
(Piano
Concerto No. 21, worn but pure),
having awoken while dawn
was muddying a rainy sky,
I learned what human was:
human was the music,

natural was the static
blotting out an arpeggio
with clouds of idiot rage,
exploding, barking, blind.
The stars sit athwart our thoughts
just so.

In the next section of the poem he obliterates the “static” and compares the “empty road” to the “hammered melody.”

This made me want to play some Mozart this morning (“worn, but pure”).

I didn’t have a piano concerto to bang out so I turned to one of the piano trios we have been working on and rehearsed it silently on the electric piano with headphones. Very satisfying.

I’m still reading Adrienne Rich daily. This morning after reading a few of her lovely “Twenty One Love Poems” written about middle age lesbian love, I returned to her essays.

Found this excellent sentence:

regarding current loss of community and subsequent public interest, Rich writes:

“When a vast, stifling denial in the public realm is felt by every individual yet there is no language, no depiction, of what is being denied, it becomes for each his or her own anxious predicament, a daily struggle to act ‘as if’ everything were normal.”

from the essay “A Leak in History” by Adrienne Rich

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The revolutionary potential of the Queen’s English | Brendan O’Neill | spiked

“It isn’t only old farts who should stand up for standard English.”

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Approval Rating for Supreme Court Hits Just 44% in Poll – NYTimes.com

Institutions in the USA seem to be in crisis. Just another day in the Republic I guess.

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Ivory Coast – 7 Peacekeepers Killed – NYTimes.com

I find it so troubling when these kind of deaths occur.

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Chinese Activist’s Death Called Suicide, But Supporters Are Suspicious – NYTimes.com

He couldn’t hold a spoon but somehow he killed himself. Hmmmm.