I had a visit from the black dog last week, but thankfully the visit was short-lived. (Knock on wood). I immediately spotted the black dog and so started going through my list of things that stave it off. Photography, exercise, read more poetry, listen to music, move around more, various mantras, chat with Kimmy Beach. What you see here are the photographs from day two of that time. I had read an article by Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic about people who eat the same thing every day. Which reminded me of my favourite sandwich photo shoot.

FTR I don’t eat the same lunch every day, but I definitely see the allure.

And then there was this post where I quoted from Sarah Manguso’s book Ongoingness about keeping a diary:

“To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget. A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records.”

And then there were the sandwiches we had on our first trip to Rome in 2018, the windowsill replete with sandwiches.

So really, it’s thanks to sandwiches that I’m feeling more myself.

Also thanks to reading this by Adam Zagajewski in his essays, Slight Exaggeration, where he talks about how art shouldn’t remove itself from what is “painful, even ugly, that every quest for clarity, radiance, must proceed through full consciousness of what constrains us. This might be one definition of rapture: rapture means to forget pain, ugliness, suffering, to focus only on beauty. But purely rapturous works provoke only my opposition or indifference. Precisely the endless battle between heaviness, suffering, and illumination, elevation, forms art’s essence.”

You see, I had sort of pledged to meself that I would try to keep this space filled with more joy, more radiance, more goodness, and more uplift! And I still do pledge this very thing. But I also know that to come to something more artful, art-full, that it’s going to need to proceed through that “full consciousness of what constrains us.” Otherwise, it’s just gonna be fake anyway. There’s just no way you can live in this time, (or really any time ever) without experiencing the flip side in one way or another. As AZ recognizes, when we’re only ever fed joy or rapture, it is going to start feeling not so great. And I don’t think we need to belabour things, but just acknowledge the constraints, the black clouds/clods of whatever visiting despair, so that we can get back to the business of uplifting one another, back to joy, rapture, radiance, and yes, fun.

So yah, the black dog came, I fed it a sandwich. That appeased. And here we are.

So yes. Poetry to stave off the black dog, too.

And another kind of great thing happened. I bought a book because a poet I know, Rosemary Greibel, has a poem in it. And it’s a lovely one! It’s in a collection called Books and Libraries: Poems. But as it turned out, the first page I turned to (not even kidding) was the poem by Paul Valéry:

The Angel Handed Me a Book

Placing a book in my hands, the angel said, “It holds all
you would wish to know.” And he vanished.
So I opened the book, which wasn’t thick.
It was written in an unknown alphabet.
Scholars translated it, but produced very different versions.
They disagreed even about their own readings,
agreeing neither upon the tops or bottoms of them, nor
the beginnings, nor the ends.
Toward the close of this vision, it seemed to me that
the book melted, until it could not longer be told apart
from the world that surrounds us.

(translated by Carolyn Forché)

So angels, everywhere, as I found the moment I began writing Everything Affects Everyone.

As for music, I’ve had Donovan Woods on replay this past week. I was playing his tunes while taking these sandwich photos and I think they affected the mood. Which is maybe a strange thing to say, but true. Of course I learned about him via the great CKUA.com which you can listen to anywhere in the world online.

And I don’t know, when I’m thinking of packed lunches (and I do) I also think of the Boss’s “Factory.” Listen here. The lyrics:

“Early in the morning factory whistle blows
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light
It's the working, the working, just the working life

Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life
The working, the working, just the working life

End of the day, factory whistle cries
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes
And you just better believe, boy
Somebody's gonna get hurt tonight
It's the working, the working, just the working life
Oh it's the working, the working, just the working life”

So in short, here’s a cheer to the art that moves through the black clouds all the way to radiance. Here’s to carrying on, to ongoingness. And hey, let’s not forget to give thanks for the memorable sandwiches, the morning light, and all the angels who put books into hands…..

December 3, 2021