MATISSE

Writing somberly is parallel to writer’s block. It’s not a block, really, more like a resistance to engaging feelings.  If I place all the options on a puzzle board, this leads to the center. A fractured life impacts emotional posture and is not unlike physical posture. We slump or stand tall. We love instead of neutralizing, we are inspired instead of stagnant, we romance our passions, and we live to love. My heart is at the starting gate to love again, but the racetrack is missing. I’m undercover! I watch Blacklist or some foreign film in the evening. Most weekdays, I’m circulating between finance, selling furnishings online, shoveling snow, and researching acronyms because the news uses them so often.

The vortex of discontent is a punctured life. The windows of my home reflect the splendor of nature that plays all day long in the winter.  I’m spending more time watching sky stage plays: clouds still, clouds moving, colliding, changing colors, sculpted into aberrations of animals and faces, than cognitive thinking. My collection of records and CDs accompanies the scenery. When I’m sorrowful, I listen to Ennio Morricone; when I need a lift, Vivaldi, Sundays it is Turandot or some other Opera. When I’m a go-go girl, Swing, Salsa, or The Stones, when I feel alone, Sarah Vaughn, Nancy Wilson, and Etta James, for writing inspiration Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Annie Lenox. 

      I don’t see any remedy commercials for a fractured heart. By tomorrow, the despair could vanish, like the rain that puddled us for the last two weeks. Everything I’ve experienced is good in the beginning. So, to begin, I will listen to Begin the Beguine. 

“Begin the Beguine” is a popular song written by Cole Porter. Porter composed the song between Kalabahi, Indonesia, and Fiji during a 1935 Pacific cruise aboard Cunard’s ocean liner Franconia. In October 1935, it was introduced by June Knight in the Broadway musical Jubilee, produced at the Imperial Theater.  

    Henry miller writes in his book, “ Henry Miller on Writing” “Whoever greatly suffers must be, I suppose a sublime combination of a sadist and masochist.’  I suppose that a few of my friends have aligned me as such, and now that I write this, as in all writing, answers blink at you, and then the soul receives them like a wafer of wonder. Perhaps I am, but where that evolved and manifested, I have no time to think about it because the sun is out. I must sit in my newly designed sunroom, a small book library alcove that receives the sun at noon.  When I returned with my phone to snap a photograph, the sun disappeared like a footprint in the sky. Every moment needs attention. It’s twenty degrees outdoors. I am modestly adjusted and receive a thousand weekly warnings to get a flu shot. My doctor has tried persuading me to get a flu shot for three years.  I responded that I’d never had the flu and that my last cold was in 2012. He chuckled and asked the next question.