A sampling of my ongoing memoir project
— My friend and I are downtown Indianapolis discovering how little effort it takes to live in wonder. —
We got downtown with the bookstore in mind. It had meant so much the last time, could it possibly continue to pulse like that?
It did and so did we.
We sat for a while in the cafe section with its marble floors and high ornamented ceiling. The building had originally been a bank and they had kept the barred teller windows to decorate the area. The light fixtures were turn of the century vintage and the filigree everywhere looked Gilded Age and old. It was a strange place that presented an illusion, like the halls of money worship had been turned into a cathedral of knowledge. All the years I would be there and sit reading with a stack of books, I felt aware of the bones of bank managers beneath me. I imagined them as restless and resentful at my ease in freely reading.
Of course we knew if pressed that it was a business, merely built around the trappings of thought. Like an enlightenment theme park. But that was bound to be intoxicating. So much effort and planning in building a place I could want and enjoy. It is seductive to feel so valued.
I found the poetry section on the far end of the store beside windows facing Washington Street. I pulled random books from the shelves and then, based on familiarity from a Simpsons quote, grabbed a volume by Pablo Neruda. I read the poem Cold Work:
…Do you not feel in slow fashion
in tremulous and avid work
the insistent night returning?
To dry salts and airy bloods
to headlong rush of rivers,
the trembling witness testifies
Dark increase of walls
brusque growth of doors
delirious population of stimuli
implacable circulations…
Delirious population of stimuli…like a polaroid picture of my nervous system.
I next grabbed a small book of Lorca based on his mention by Timothy Speed Levitch in the late segment of Waking Life, “Beware, and beware, and beware…”
I read the poem The Song of the Barren Orange Tree:
…Why was I born among mirrors
The day walks in circles around me,
and the night copies me
in all its stars
I want to live without seeing myself…
I bought those two books and now looking back I can see what an influence they had on my own sense of poetry. What few poems I have attempted to write, or what it feels like in my head when I try to shift into a poetic cadence, runs straight back to the tone struck by those books in that Borders in 2003.