Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Gloomy Tuesday

Tuesday is originally the day sacred to Tyr, the god of the sky and today is dominated by the sky, with its big grey presence and its never ending dreary rain! Everything is soggy and I find myself checking the thermostat to see if it's too cold to do some clay work. I don't need to check it, if I have a question about the air then it's not a good time to try artwork. Back awhile I would have had my camera out, trying to capture the subtle shades of grey in a cloud or the textures of a rain dampened lawn. I don't do that very much now but I tend to think that what I've done stands on its own, needing no sequel or follow-up. Besides I'm not sure that the screen captures the details an eye can take in. Maybe that's ego, maybe it's being lazy but I'd rather try to stay warm and find some distraction. Food is good.

I started simmering a bit of game hen about 4 PM and it's pretty much ready to work over now. With a bit of celery and tater and maybe something in the allium family... ya never know how far this could go. A lot depends on my spinal issues, if there's a lot of details and staying in one spot I might just pass, so the fibromyalgia doesn't get pissy. Amazing that perception of reality could shift so. I started out thinking I was fine and even after the various accidents I felt pretty good, occasionally twinges of pain but nothing too bad, until that winter and then the cold taught me that my body was not my slave and that I could be very unhappy inside my skin. Nonsense.

That I would have to stop pounding hot iron, or oak stakes, or axing some tree or carrying a bucket of clay from the local stream just never occurred to me. I figured I'd skate along fairly unchanged. Boy, that was just what it was: naive. Your consciousness is framed by your body, by what's in your gut and what's in your groin and what's going on inside your head. So when your spine is making all kinds of body parts hurt you had better believe that YOU are going to change and in a deep way. I always thought I existed and more or less created my universe through perception, but consider that with chronic pain you have to ask, "Who would wish this on themselves?".

It's not that it defines you, but, for instance tonight, when the therapies and nerve blocks and cutting and so on don't do crap because it's cold and rainy and you hurt, what are you to make of your hold on reality? Why would any consciousness want to roil in this kind of surface? It staggers the imagination. On the other hand, if the Universe were relatively young, maybe this slapping around is thought to be "fun" by the slapper. Nah, I think it's just the way things work out. My parts move better in warm weather but my brain works fine regardless, so here I live and look forward to my snowshoes.

I'll drag this old hulk around like Captain Ahab, who killed Moby Dick and dragged his stinking carcass across the ocean to the nearest harbor to brag about the hunt and the end of the great white whale. Nobody will know the final part of my story either, because like Ahab the final words are written after the means to transmit them are cut off. You could type all day on an excellent blog, only to have it wiped out with a bit of lightning on a nearby tree. That's why we save when we can and send when we must.

No comments: