Morning Shadows

      It's 7.30 in the morning on Friday as I sit down to write this entry, a lovely sunny day, a sort of genial, warm day to which many of us in Canada are only now becoming reacquainted. I've been up and at it now for about three hours: I'm a couple of coffees in, a few cigarettes down, the New York Times Sunday Crossword-- issued locally on the following Friday, so it just came this morning-- already complete. My cat, the aptly-named Trouble, is cleaning his chops after an evidently fulfilling breakfast, and, feline aside, I am wonderfully, blissfully, alone. There's a rare tranquility in the air, or a tranquility with which I've not been familiar in some time. A mix disc of soul classics is playing in the background-- "Midnight Train to Georgia" has just passed, the Reverend Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" is riding in the air-- and a sense of completeness hovers with it. Trouble now has perched himself at an open window, staring with his hunter's fascination at the birds chirping and squirrels darting about in the backyard. I have done something rare. I have left the news off for this morning. No CNN or BBC or Newsworld coverage of the atrocities and idiocies at play in the fields of the world. The music has now progressed to Ray Charles, in his inimitable way, crooning that he's a lover man in "I Gotta Woman." Well and huh and huh and huh and huh and huh and haaaa..... And the morning sails as such, like a Ray Charles groove, oh so comfortable, oh so removed from reality, or at least from the reality most of us know these days. The telephone does not-- cannot-- ring while I write this. I have no courses to teach, no silly details with which to deal, no letters to write, save for a few emails I've yet to answer but none of which are pressing in their urgency. There's something remarkably hale about this morning. Baby, I'm hot just like an oven.... Marvin. Help to relieve my mind.... This is the solitude that sails as if atop a crest. Another coffee, surprisingly good this morning, not needed but simply wanted. The music has now shifted to James Brown's infectious version of Charlie Midnight's "How Do You Stop?," a song that always induces me to a shuffle, a pleasant reminder of days when I used to dance. How do you stop / the tide comin' in? / How do you stop / the cold, cold wind? / Tell me, aha! The music is perfect. The coming "Livin' in America" won't ring with any sort of irony, and thanks be for that, at least for the moment. These voices this morning provide a pulse of punctuation. Ray's howls, James' grunts, there's a sunny funk to it all. There's not an ounce of burden to this writing, not a dash of labour; there's no sense of construction, no sense of writing with any purpose, cheeky or didactic, that reminds me of an audience. Ray's back, this time with his magnificent, haunting version of Leon Russell's "A Song For You," a song that always seems to cause an out-of-body experience for me, especially because of lines like I loved you in a place / where there's no space or time / I loved you for my life / 'Cuz you're a friend of mine. There's a half-broken majesty to all this: triumphant but humble, it's enough to suggest a monody could be happy. Dianoia is possible. Time can be held in some gentle arrest. Life is more than time's creeping toward a precipice's edge. It's also the study of a moment's meaning, of a sound, a pulse, a cadence, a certain slant of light. Ray's Simonizing. Oh, help me.... I'm still crazy after all these years.... I don't believe it... I wanna hold on to you.... That's why I'm still crazy after all these years.... The blessèd kairos without chronos. Augustine seems so far away, self-collection an abstraction perhaps to be considered later. There's a transparency to these moments, a transparency philosophy might muddy or mitigate. There is only song, sun, a cat now studying me with one eye open, and this me that doesn't care what this me is. It just is. And it's still crazy. After all these years. I don't believe it.... Oh baby.... You've got me by your little finger... And I ain't lyin'....