In Which Wind Stands in for Wind

01/30/2008 6:33 AM – 7:02 AM

The wind is passing through with gusto. Where must it needs go at such pace? Thick diction without cause. The house sways in its progress and shakes in its regress attempting to find its place of precarious balance, putting off collapse until it is inevitable. Many years from now, I would hope.

The cold flows round my room marking a circuit traced by cigarette smoke. It always does when the wind rises up from the south and flings its way across the city to the north. It is strange to imagine that the south brings the chill, but standing up, above the city, one watches it whirl and knows that it comes no more from the south than it does the dirt beneath. Too much Shakespeare, too much. Without being Shakespeare as small consolation to the readers. But the mystery of unknowing the bottomless is too tempting to forego. Pining for nothing and that should not be. One should always pine for something. It connects you to the work and lets the cold file by without remark save muttering, “it’s cold,” and wrapping the blanket tighter round. A man that doesn’t seek adventure is just a corpse that seeks its hole. Pine for something.

The thing is what it is, not symbol of another. The wind is the wind. The cold is the cold. The waning dark, the waxing light, just dark and light. Ahh, too much thought spent on mysteries of mysteries, not enough on base nature, which while subject to moths and rust and thieves, is there. You cannot know it, but neither can you poke your finger through it like so many tattered aphorisms. Perhaps that is the start of Wisdom, when you seek to turn your back on it, citing that “it prophets me nothing.” But then, what makes gold gold, if not the abstracting eyesight of Wisdom? But then, rebutting, gold is just gold. It’s the ridiculous valuing of scarcity that prizes gold above a cabin stocked with food and wood and books. Sour grapes, old man, sour grapes. The Boy from Denmark’s tragedy was not one of indecision, nor thinking too much, but thinking over well. So. Does one emulate the Prince or the Counselor of Aphorisms? Both die, you see, and Ophelia, poor Ophelia, loved them both. She dies too. Only Horatio and that fool with a sword that commanded men to death for an egg-shell survive. The straight-man or the asshole? Neither. The play’s not over yet. We still have several acts in which to whoosh about the stage, signifying nothing but ourselves as wind. “More life,” says Harold Bloom, “more life into a time without boundaries.”