The Future

I am disconnected from all things just now. It is an odd feeling as if I am floating and disembodied. Last night I slept nine and a half hours. I do not sleep like that. I woke in the daylight rather than before dawn. Disorienting. It is psychosomatic (is the term still used?) I am certain, for I have too many stresses and strains. Nothing goes right. A fight on every front.

Today I read that the novelist Barry Hannah died. I've read him and liked him without thinking him a major talent in my library, but I enjoyed the fact that he was there. Word drunk is what Jim Harrison called him. Drunk, too, I suspect. The New York Times eulogy points up the difference between Hannah young and old, the softening of attitudes and prose. For me, it is just that another of that old hell boy crowd is gone. They taught me some very bad lessons that shouldn't be forgotten. But the world has let them go, I think, as much as passed them by. They were Outsiders, in the old sense, people estranged from what they knew. We needed them, but that is a hard place to spend a life.

I try to look to the future, but I'm having trouble. It seems to be going in the wrong direction if that is possible, somehow steered off course by natural and unnatural phenomena. Must I turn to horoscopes and ouija boards? Should I throw the bones?

But there is no use in that, for each of us knows the last line to every novel if it is continued far enough. We all know how the story ends. There are really no surprises there. I think the Greeks were right in their attitudes about all that. The only life after death is being remembered. And therein lies the tale.