A Minor Theme
It has already gown so hot here that streets and outdoor patios empty of life by noon, a fact which suits me well; I am fond of the extremity of heat, which reminds me of mind-breaking exercise; particularly when combined with bright light over lidded eyes, it so overwhelms my perception that my conscious internal monologue abates at last and gives way to an impressionistic, even dream-like stupor: the stupor of summer, of half-awake hours on a towel on the sand.
This morning, I walked to the coffee shop near my house to read and sweat and listen to my dogs pant themselves into exhaustion. After arriving and ordering, I realized that -as usual- I’d forgotten my wallet, and -as usual- the girl behind the counter offered to let me pay later, but -as usual- I declined, hoping that with enough walking back and forth my mind would learn to remember.
But there is little one can do to consciously direct the memory, which in its refusal to absorb work details, the concerns of lovers, the conversations we share with scarcely-tolerated office-mates, the dates of empty ceremonies, is probably the most honest part of the mind. It works according to its own dark set of rules, a hierarchy of prioritization to which you do not have access; it chooses what to retain, often to your embarrassment or detriment, and it chooses what to recall, sometimes in a rush of associated visions that seem to have come from nowhere at all.
My memory is exceptionally indolent, as am I. Last night, Yumwatch mentioned Steely Dan, which called to mind the amusing fact that they attended my college (and wrote disapprovingly of it); I also heard their song ‘My Old School’ last night, as part of difficult-to-explain set of circumstances which I noted in a comment on her blog at idiotic length. Last night, after seeing her post, I decided to look up several old professors and see how they compared to my highly unreliable memories of them. I spent perhaps half-an-hour reading about them, and when I went to sleep my recollective apparatus, which behaves as a rusty, complexly malfunctioning antique machine, must have decided to keep Bard in its short-term cache.
So when, hot and spent, I returned from the labor of acquiring coffee this morning and entered the cool, dark house, I was not merely surprised to hear Will playing Neil Young’s ‘Dead Man’ but actually taken aback by this modest confluence of themes, all directing my attention to that final year at Bard, when I walked endlessly in the heat peculiar to the North, less humid but perhaps more intense, intently listening to ‘Dead Man’ and despite my distressed state occasionally thinking of how wise Donald Fagen was to say: “I’m never going back to my old school.”
