Coda

It has turned cold overnight. I can hear wind shaking the tree limbs outside my dark windows before sunrise. It is a good suggestive sound. Today will be different. There will be a change. Is that what I hope for?

Codes. The philosophy behind what we think and do. Or maybe only "do." The problem is that they are open to ridicule. Any well defined code is. If yours can't can be ridiculed, you have not worked on it enough. Try harder.

Here's one that has been identified in the N.Y. Times Book Review by Leisl Schillinger:

Don’t be fooled by the trout, the dogs, the pickup trucks, the whiskey, the cowboys and Indians, and the war stories. Beneath the rugged trappings of Jim Harrison’s manly fiction hides the tensile, scorch-proof frame of the red-hot romance, whose heroes are totems of an idealized, brute masculinity. In the feminine version of the genre, the heroines typically possess awesome powers of desirability. In Harrison’s spin, the male leads aren’t much to look at (usually), yet they possess awesome powers of desire. Whether a whippersnapper of 12 or a “geezer rancher” in his 70s, the Harrison hero unfailingly sparks the ardor of any girl or woman he encounters, even when he’s sick, drunk and drugged, having his teeth pulled, passing kidney stones or dying. He doesn’t mind if a woman is a few decades older than he is or half a century younger; whether she’s a king-size Lakota divorcée pushing 60 or a “miniature” young nurse with a boyfriend. Nor does he care if she’s cruel or kind, married or single, straight or gay. Whoever she is, if she’ll have him, he’s up for the job.

An "idealized, brute masculinity." Harrison didn't say this. It is just what Schillinger finds evident in the works. She doesn't care for them much. She concludes her review remarking that whether you appreciate Harrison's work is a question of taste, "and perhaps of glands." The first part of that statement is obvious, the second part needless. Perhaps Schillinger's code could be mined, too. She has a website you might enjoy.

I'm not touting Harrison's book. I haven't read it. I don't care for the Brown Dog character. Some of the spoofing is too much for me. But Harrison is more complex than Schillinger's totalizing paragraph lets on.

The sun is up now, slipping in and out of the cloudy sky. For a moment, the leaves of the oaks across the street are fired a bright red and gold. But now the dullness has returned, the sky an old bruise. The cat lays on my feet and the gas heater fires up. I am hungry, and there is a good breakfast bread in the kitchen full of dates and nuts and raisins. I will heat it up with too much butter and drink a glass of thick whole milk, wholesome organic stuff that feels like velvet on my tongue. I have Christmas cards and Holiday cards to write. And there are presents I must buy. I think that people will be out today shopping on the Avenue. I should take some photos today just to show you.

I just remembered that tonight is Vespers at the beautiful little college chapel near my house. Years ago, the first time I went, I was swept away. The chapel, the music, the light. I felt positively medieval. Remembering it overwhelms me just now.

There was a girl once. It is shameful, you will say one day when I write about it, when I get there some years from now in my slow, slow narrative. She called me on this night ten years ago. She wanted to come to my house. Terrified, I said yes. She was late, then later, so I left and went to Vespers. Oh, I am leaving too much out. I am forced to now. If I tell you I weeped, you will not know why. But I did, trying to hide it from the people I knew. When I came home, she was there. From that moment to the turn of the century, I burned with the flames of hades and paradise. But I can't tell it now, I think. No, not yet.

For too long afterwards, I lived in a terribly adolescent state. I'm still like that with things like this song. I've posted it before. I'll post again, probably. Call it neoteny.