More than I can say

"Misunderstanding? Misunderstanding!," she said. "What is there not to understand. Which parts of that sentence didn't you understand?"

"The beginning. I never understand beginnings," he replied.

"Well, that's a start. Anything else?," she asked, ironically.

"Yes, but they're more than I can say."

That was profound, he thought to himself, but it would only draw him deeper into trouble. Profound can only take you so far with some women.

~~~

Bits of conversation; vast stretches of silence. Words said randomly, drifting like tumbleweed. There used to be dust storms down here, great gusting winds blowing ferociously, howling through empty rooms, throwing up gulps of dust and depositing them on chairs, tables, books, evenhandedly. And there were even memories of dust storms...old people would tell you about '51 and the red sky and how everyone thought it was the end of the world. But now the old patterns have changed. Maybe it's always been like this though. Maybe we've just reverted to the natural way of things, and those storms were a temporary aberration, something that seemed normal because they stretched and covered the life-span of human memory.

We see the world through a narrow door, our own time horizon. From a distant and more impersonal perspective nothing would be the same. Would there, then, be any misunderstanding or mistakes?

~~~

The clock stood twenty five minutes behind the rest of the world's timekeeping. He woke up at the precise moment that the curtains fell down and the light that he had so assiduously tried to prevent from entering his room burst through like a giant white blot. He woke up with bitter thoughts still circling in his mind. This was his life and he wasn't happy with the way it had panned out. A grand failure might be tolerable, but here things were just petering out in the banal, regular as clockwork. These minor grievances seemed awfully inflated in the early morning light. Objectively speaking they were quite ridiculous: the cutting things said to him, his invisibility at the workplace, the inability to remember where he kept his books, the disappearance of his socks...

It was remarkable to think that this knot in his heart, carried over from the night, would take four or five hours to loosen and unravel before finally dissipating as a dying stream finds hard rock or the levels of the plains. but at least for a while there was a certain sharpness to his being, an angularity to is thoughts, and it would only be by mid-afternoon that the edge would be blunted by dull routines and unstylish talk.

~~~

The lizard darted down the white wall, out of the safety of the mirror's dark side, behind the silver. A straight line-a brief and fleeting achievement. Often, at a great dinner, amidst collective guffaws of laughter and general raucousness,  the solitary lizard would be startled by those wildly gesticulating hands. His dark mind would be frightened, panicked, losing what trust he had in the world.

An observant angel who knew nothing about the affairs of the world might mistakenly join up the dots, imagining an invisible link between the man's hands and the quickness of the lizard's mind, between the heavy and inadvertent gestures and the nimble free will of the lizard's response. If truth be told, the lizard looked forward to the intersection of his own life with that of the humans, the way the the time-scapes of their different worlds sometimes overlapped.

After the lizard's crazed motion he stilled himself, calmed his heart down like a contemplative. For millions of years it had the same patterned thoughts and some took comfort in that, as if regularity itself were a great house to live in forever. Three or four thoughts, maximum. There was nothing new under the sun to say, nothing struck him as particularly noteworthy, more or less startling than any previous experience. His agelessness had evened things out.

But there was a small space for reflection, about 1 mm deep in his mind. Nothing more. And here, as if in a  brilliant coloured glass or the first dream of Venice, there was a faint hint, a glinting shimmer of originality.

Every thirty years or so some migratory birds would fly north and their winter shadows would fall on the wall, traverse it like a beautiful cup sized eclipse, float like a diagonal over the map on the wall, get lost in the lake that was the mirror, and catch the lizard in its net. This movement of darkness was a kind of ecstasy to the lizard, a fantastic eclipse or the presence of a black sun. It broke up the normal structure of time, adding a richness and variety to it. Time suddenly seemed open, like a door ajar. the moments of the lizard's normal life which were full of fear and waiting and misunderstanding now seemed to find another perimeter, another circle touching that of his own life. The burning days, the long years dissolved in that one sweet indelible moment in the bird's elongated shadow. And for a thousandth of a second the lizard imagined he was free from earth. Even though the bird might now be high in the clouds, distant, remote, he had the first stirrings of the feeling  that there existed a life in which there was more than he could say.

~~~

(This was derived, in a very oblique way, from Lorrie Moore's story in Birds of America. The writing is a lot looser than Alice Munro's which is like a tightly wound lock that springs open with a particular word or turn of phrase. You think it doesn't always sound true, but you don't care either since it has its own inner momentum and real life probably mirrors that slipping into and out of truth and untruth.

I should be applying, writing, thinking, digging a way out. Instead, I'm digging my own grave here, and filling it with books. Yesterday Flaubert's Parrot, Bennett's Writing Home and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier arrived.)