Sacred Time

Quiet Sunday morning.  Peaceful.  A guest still sleeping, I must finish this up before I am obliged to entertain.  Saturday was a miracle of productive laziness.  This morning it is a wonder to me, really, how so much transpired without effort.  There are days the live on in memory, I know, for being miracles of perfect nothingness, days like movies, effortless, seamless, not Newtonian but bracketed time, Hopi time without flow. . . sacred. 

It is too mundane to recount, I think, the day beginning as usual, reading, writing, cooking up pictures, gym, sun, a trip to the studio to make prints, a luscious lunch, grilled wahoo reuben, sangrias and mimosas, then a ginger and rye before shopping for luxuries, drinking and laughing, looking at the HUGE new book of Peter Beard's work by Taschen at Anthropology (the only bookstore left in town), massage bars and lotions and wires and clips to hang pictures and then home for more gingers and rye and music and a nap, then marketing for fish and vegetables and berries and shortcakes and heavy whipping cream and Dale's Pale Ale and wine, then scotch and more music and bed, falling asleep to beauty treatments and a long, long massage. . . .

I don't know.  I guess I recounted it after all.  Sort of.  There is much left out.  And now a cloudy day without rain, soft morning light. . . . 

"I require a lot of alone time," I say.  "There is much that can't be done except alone.  You can't read or write or make art except alone.  You can't think some things except when alone.  I am like that, but then I enjoy company, too.  Mostly it is just the idea that there is the opportunity for company.  It is a balm, I think.  You are not alone that way, just by yourself.  Then when you have company, it should be something powerful and electric.  It is the mundane march of human existence that deadens relationships.  I mean, it builds them, too.  You can't have families without that.  But I was an only child and had much time to myself." 

She came from a family of six sisters.  That is a movie script, I think.  It is not something I can grasp, that experience.  They are all close and go out together often.  It is nothing I object to, just something completely alien.  They must love to play together, for she is the playful sort.  She treats me like I am a little sister, I think.  Last night she rolled some needle roller all over my face so that it stung and swelled up a bit, then she put hydrochloric acid on it.  She said it was a "beauty treatment" but she was laughing much of the time.  I imagined it was like a trick you would play on a younger sibling. 

"If mom finds out, you're going to be in trouble!" 

I don't mind at all, though.  It beats watching t.v.  And I smell so good from the potions and lotions she rubs into me.  It is too much, really.  I know it cannot last, and I know I must mythologize it so that it stays on and lives forever.  Pictures and words.  They are all that will last, and when they are gone, there will be nothing else anyway.  When they are gone, there will be nothing but the brutality of existence where violence and sex are the only pleasures.  Pictures and words and good cafes are necessary luxuries. 

Today's picture reminds me of a Sargent painting, though I realize my framing is a bit more radical than his is most of the time. 

The hissing of the lawn.  Again.