Rat's Alley

'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'
I think we are in rats' alley	115
Where the dead men lost their bones. (from Eliot's "The Waste Land")

I almost made a mistake this morning and started to ask myself the BIG questions like, "What does it all mean?"  Really.  That can happen, even after a certain age beyond which you would think one would have learned better.  But sitting with coffee and confusion in the early morning when duties compete with desire for your attention, it can happen.  Fortunately, I was able to put it in check.  The questions have not gone away, of course.  They linger on the periphery of my consciousness, but they are at bay.  

It is Sunday, and I think of Wallace Stevens and his questioning piety.  I've seen his photos and have heard recordings.  I wonder if he was happy?  Hemingway broke his jaw one Saturday night at a party in Key West.  Stevens is reported to have apologized the next day.  Sent word, I think.  

E.E. Cummings, too.  And Robert Frost.  And Pound.  And, of course, that hideous Mr. Eliot.  Sunday morning questions and the Poetry of Religion.  

It is the metallic light, I think, that makes me shudder, this silver, tinny light that makes the world seem two dimensional.  I will have to leave soon for the mountains and mountain skies and the deep, rich shadows and the sound of the wind coming through the trees from miles and miles away.  There, looking down at the deep blue glacier lakes that reflect the blueness of the mountain skies, I will think differently, though I have felt the big emptiness sitting there, too.  

Sunday mornings.  I think of Manhattan and the Museums, especially the Met.  Sundays at the Met, a real cathedral to the worship of art, another faith.  I stop short of saying "the true religion."  But I always feel something deep down in my bones when I enter it.  I feel like the Egyptian wing today, I think, then to the Icons.  There I would be succored.  

But I haven't that nor anything close to that here today.  There are shopping malls and tourist attractions and the moisture and the heat and the reflective glowing of this metallic light.  My nerves grow bad.