To bed at 11 pm. Up at 3:30 a.m. The Stanley Cup Finals stealing two hours of sleep that I’ll never get back. 4.5 hours of sleep today. 5 hours yesterday. 4 hours the day before. Not sustainable.
I lay there staring at LED letters flickering on the ceiling. This projection coming from a new clock, this one complimentary from a retailer seeking to redress my stinging complaint on an Amazon review headlined: You get what you pay for.
Wally nuzzles up to me, sighs, and rolls over. I slide out from under the covers, dress quickly, grab the camera gear and drive.
I check my weather app: 71° F — 94% cloud cover — 6% chance of rain — Humidity, Southeast Asia immediately before a monsoon.
1509 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak morning walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
I pull in, there’s no one in the park. Correction. No one, except me and the Stamford City Park heavy machine operator combing the beaches, every morning. Yes, it’s intrusive, this large, John Deere Tractor scraping the earth, kicking up dust in all directions breaking the silence of the morning. Is this really necessary, beach combing?
MN: Not a day goes by when I don’t feel grateful that my formative years were all lived without the internet. […]
MD: Maybe part of the fatigue (and potential bulimia) of the internet comes from knowing that ‘everything’ is available to us at the touch of a finger. It’s all there to read instantaneously, or it can be on your doorstep in two days.
No matter the circumstance, human suffering matters. Our attending to it matters. Acts of tenderness are not morally trivial. […]
For as Naomi Klein has reminded us, our demise isn’t all or nothing, at least not for the next few centuries. “There are degrees to how bad this thing can get,” Klein says. “Literally, there are degrees.” As we struggle to figure out how to notch back the degrees, so as to mitigate the suffering that a warming planet is going to bring, we also need to figure out forms of relationality—both to ourselves and to each other—that won’t make things worse.
By the time I finished 10:04, I felt like I understood some options: not being ashamed of the desire to make a living doing what we love, while also daring to imagine “art before or after capital”; paying as intense attention to our collectivity as to our individuality; demanding a politics based on more than reproductive futurism, without belittling the daily miracle of conception, nor the labor and mysterious promise of childbearing and -rearing; attempting to listen seriously to others, especially those who differ profoundly from ourselves, no matter how precontaminated the attempts; spending time reading and writing poetry; and more. Far from despair, I felt flooded with the sense that everything mattered, from meticulous descriptions of individual works of art to kissing the forehead of a passed-out intern to analyzing our political language to documenting the sensual details of our daily lives to bagging dried mangoes to the creation of the book I was holding in my hand to my deciding to spend time writing a review of it. “The earth is beautiful beyond all change,” Lerner repeats in 10:04, quoting the poet William Bronk. The inspired and inspiring accomplishment of his novel makes me want to say that sometimes, art is too. And maybe—if incredibly—so might we be, ourselves.
Photo: DK 5:11 am this morning at Cove Island Park. For more photos from this morning, click here for birds and here for landscape.
Thursday Posts inspired by Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
My job is clear: I must protect the transmission, smuggle it out of the theater, to examine it later in my room, see if it still glows. If it does, I might start to think in sentences about it. If the sentences get bossy enough, I might start to write them down. This much I’ve learned—you put enough in, and eventually, if unpredictably, something will come out.
