So jump on. No saddle, just straddle the withers and away we go like a trick rider, standing up, flipping over to one flank or the other while the mount canters around the ring and then, at full gallop, charges out of the rodeo palace like in The Electric Horseman when rhinestone cowboy Robert Redford decides enough is enough, this animal needs to be free, and he propels the horse up and down random streets in this dusty Western town, pursued by police cars until he finally breaks out of the grid into the open prairie outside of town and outdistances his pursuers.
Sometimes it works that way. And sometimes the horse takes charge and ambles up into the nearest clump of tall grass and weeds, like a horse named Tennessee I once tried to "steer," yanking ineffectually on the bridle, in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, in my teens, while it ignored this inconvenience on its back. Metaphors do not come with a guarantee of performance. But the idea is just jump on and see where the words take you or you take the words—out into the starry night, up into the weeds, or—c'mon horsey, giddyup, c'mon horsey (while a Mr. Ed laugh track underscores the indignity)—nowhere.
And at three o'clock, the hour up, the wrangler wipes down the horse, who hasn't broken a sweat, and asks, "How was it?"
Magical. Exhilarating. We were one animal. The wind in my hair, the wind in his mane. Next time we go full Pegasus. Pega-sus, Pega-sus...pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty Pega-sus...
I'm here, in the morrow. Pushed it to the last fifteen minutes of the day, which being the morrow, is Wednesday's share of Tuesday. Except the morrow is actually Thursday now. So I guess I missed the train to Morrow. As the Kingston Trio noted in part of the soundtrack of my boyhood, "Morrow is the hardest place I've ever tried to go." That song was a little exasperating to me in a just-kidding way. I often tried to figure it out, which was probably a fool's game. Yesterday, aka today, wasn't bad, but if I don't put the concertina back in its box, I'll be none too fit for today, aka tomorrow.
Not quite sure what I intend with that title. Probably a statement of contemplation: visiting this blank white space for the first time in more than two months. It often starts out with staring in a mirror, writing does, but pausing at it now, the phrase seems a little disturbing. Staring. Not looking, gazing, or even peering. A fixed look, a bit nonplussed, discovering something, perhaps. It reminds me of one of my son Matt's early films, which he co-directed with a friend, called Solitude. Partners were given a stock script often used as an acting exercise, and asked to interpret it any way they chose to. He thought of staring in a mirror.
But as Lewis Carroll demonstrated, a looking-glass can be an opportunity, a portal, a conveyance, The white space, it turns out, may start out as a mirror, but often becomes a screen, alive with pictures that are conjured with the concatenations of words. It can also go back to being a mirror.
I will leave this mirror/monitor for now because it's nearly one, my butt hurts, and I haven't stacked the dishes. But I will return on the morrow, also known as Tuesday, and see where this goes.
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