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From Winter Solstice to the longest night– -28 in Livingston, -41 in West Yellowstone– to morning. Now we climb from the dark hole of the year.
Here’s to the ducks and geese I saw huddling along ice shelves of the Yellowstone River on my hour walk at dawn, the house sparrows filling out skeletons of lilac bushes in brittle, shaking masses.
“…the terrible oppression of that raging, life-sucking vampire force sweeping over the desolate world. Disembodied things– the souls of those, perhaps, who had perished here– seemed frenziedly calling me in the wind. …We were the only pulsating creatures in a dead world of ice.” –Frederick Cook, 1911
The seating area for this coffee shop spilled over into the connected movie theater with the pandemic. After I found a picturesque window seat they started filming outside. First two cowboys rode up the middle of the street and hitched to the bike rack. From there, an entire cast of characters has materialized. There’s a roughneck in motocross boots and a Meateater hoodie; a fisherwoman in rubbers that are turned down on the top and carrying a spinrod; a couple in camouflage with duck decoys and accents of hunter orange; a Richard Brautigan character with iridescent aviators, straw cowboy hat, denim jacket and pants, and fake mustache, strumming a guitar with the case set out for change; a professional type with conspicuous brand logos from running jacket to ankle socks; of the latest to arrive, one has a full-suspension mountain bike and shin guards, another, Stihl suspenders and safety glasses. Some of them have walked confidently through the doors for the cameramen, only to drop their stride and walk back out. For a while a story seemed possible and I assumed they were shooting a movie. Now it’s a full-blown farce of the type of person who would live in this town. I assume it is a commercial but I can’t guess what they are selling. Everyone is white. No one looks over thirty, not even the one with a longish salt-and-pepper beard. The one with the guitar is hamming, getting louder, approaching obnoxiousness. Actors turn to my window and peer in the glass. They’re not looking to me, though, they’re adjusting their costumes. Yet I imagine myself getting the casting call. I see myself through the book I’m reading; it’s another prop, and I am the coffee shop fixture. The text is from 1956 but the cover is dated in a way you wouldn’t fake (late 90s/ early 00s). The word “Existentialism” dominates. Around it, the walls of a shadowy room float outward; a bare lightbulb dangles from above. What is the nature of this relationship, between the people, and their parts? I’m taking notes from my book, copying them into my computer. From Rilke’s Diary of Malte Laurids Brigge, I type,
“We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and be real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors.”
I better get out of here. There are shelves to be built in the garage.
I’ve almost blogged a couple times about the woman who visits this coffee shop everyday. She’s my mom’s age. She has the figure and pipes of an opera singer. She starts by inviting any single person to her table with open arms. She is the self-made welcomer of the place– she grew up here– and is soon hosting a conversation that incorporates as many other tables as possible. But it’s not a conversation any more. Her voice hardened, at some point, and is picking up momentum. She’s quoting scripture. Her voice is indiscreet, courting tears and glory and wrath and hilarity.
Today, it was talk of cold turned to talk of earthquakes turned to talk of prophecy, and the tears she shed, the other day, imagining the Flood, how it felt, because that really happened. I, at my distant-as-possible table, respond in my way. I put in earbuds and queue up “Hot Rats”:
–Stefany Anne Golberg
“One of the reasons that knowledge is in a state of useless overproduction is that it is strewn all over the place, spoken in a thousand competitive voices. Its insignificant fragments are magnified out of proportion, while its major and world-historical insights lie around begging for attention. There is no throbbing center. …There has to be revealed the harmony that unites many different positions, so that the ‘sterile and ignorant polemics’ can be abated.
“I have had the growing realization over the past few years that the problem of man’s knowledge is not to oppose and to demolish opposing views, but to include them in a larger theoretical structure.”
–Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, 1973
the tea cannery 