Harvest Notes I.
from "Diary of an Unknown Vintner"
Seems like the first two weeks will kill you.
For some, the single day off on the weekend, is spent finding words for the pain.
In that, it recalls pre-season high school football, the few weeks of August devoted to daily workouts, one morning and one in the afternoon, the wind sprints, the struggle as the body adapts to a more vigorous regimen. Back when body and soul were fresh, untainted with worldly experience.
It is a different experience at the opposite end of a lifetime.
Pain and memory are intertwined.
The sole reason I was able to write Sunday, was the twelve uninterrupted hours’ sleep. The sudden awareness of pain only seeps in after immediate exhaustion fades.
Bodily pain is a mixed blessing. It signals physical damage as well as the unseen process, and mystery, of healing. However, it also removes all doubt about the fact that one is very much alive.
As the logistics of living arrangements and travel begin to sort themselves out, the crazy schedule should abate, maybe settle into the rhythm demanded of efficient work. To have even an uninterrupted half hour to think each morning, seems an unattainable luxury at this moment.
Much of the commute is focused on the traffic and drive, but there is a second track that seems to be writing, not a first draft but a refinement of what has been written before, an editing and organizing of larger themes that one spends an entire life chasing.
I recently suggested that a book may come of jotting notes on index cards held in place by a thumb, on the drive. There is the assumption that sooner or later, the growing stack of cards, those that can be found amid the clutter, will be deciphered as a goad to memory. Every once in a while an apt, unexpected phrase results only to be forgotten or rendered into paper mache in the work shirt or jeans pocket.
Perhaps the sodden paper and cardboard can be hand molded into the shape a a small book even if the writing, begun illegible and made worse by laundry soap and rinse, vanishes. Perhaps a roughly fashioned artistic ornament to dangle from the rear view mirror as reminder of the great but unrealized ambition to write.
That harvest is a metaphor, is uncomfortably trite. Nevertheless, it seems to prise open the cover of the deep, subconscious well of images drawn from past and present.
The pain and exhaustion are embedded together: a matter of timeless muscle memory. The brain is put in an uncommon and unfamiliar place until sleep and time remove immediate experience of discomfort, to memory.
It is foolish to celebrate exertion except that, by contrast, the awareness of the forgotten or unappreciated richness of everyday life brings forth a sudden seemingly bottomless gratitude.
Perhaps that is the bottom line: the inexplicable sense of renewed awareness, and with it a thankfulness that is too often forgotten in the course of everyday affairs.