Back Into The Grey

      Oh, there's something in the water this summer. Last night in a Messenger chat with Young Jeremy, I wound up reflecting a bit on The Way Things Are, and the way one loses contact with so friends-- some close, some not so much, so very, very much so-- As Time Goes By. It led, of course, to a bit of melancholic thinking on the Not-So-Good Doctor's part, wistful rumination on the too, too many people that have for no particular reason vanished into the grey.   Fast-forward to this morning, when a new email reveals that one of my best friends from my residence days (when drinking was Drinking), she of The Penis Placement Torture Prank, got married on Monday, presumably some place in Austria. So that's two weddings and a funeral this summer, with another on the horizon. Will there be a fourth before the year's out? If so, Hugh Grant will deserve an ass-whipping that would make Red Forman proud.

      So,that's one friend from Ye Olden Days accounted for. The last with whom I'd talked was Sonnet, at a reading from her then-new book of poetry for McClelland and Stewart, four years ago or so. (For those not Canadian, M&S is probably Canada's most prestigious publishing house, perhaps the Canuck equivalent of Knopf.)   Alas, so many connections lost, so many misent en abyme. (Yeah, yeah, my French isn't what it used to be.) Such are life's strange divides, things that tend to nag more than sadden per se. It's one of the stranger dimensions, too, of being, as I have been, a teacher of sorts; no sooner does one come to know people than they're off and gone, more than likely never to be heard from again.   That sounds more pessimistic than I intend it; it's rather the fact that underlies so much of the poetry of Wallace Stevens and his heir Mark Strand, that every presence anticipates absence, and that every absence is in itself a peculiar presence, a strange constancy that perhaps one has to be a metaphysicist or a Hegelian to relish. As Mr Strand puts it in "Keeping Things Whole":

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Mr Stevens says it differently: in a world without God, everything is farewell (an idea Mr Strand himself plays with another poem), and one of the implications of this is that even a greeting of welcome is always-already an implied goodbye. Who knows. I'm sure, were I given to think more on the subject, I'd be able to develop all this in relation to the idea of memory, or even to some validation of the Augustinian notion of time. I'm sure there's a sensible accord one could put on all this, on all this peculiar vorticism. But I guess right now, I'm bothered by the sense of time so definitely past, of feeling more old and full of days than I should legitimately feel at my stage of the game, and by the sincerely-asked but the apathetically-unpursued question, I wonder whatever happened to.... But then, of course, we go on with our day-to-day business, everything left to return, like some Homeric shade, back into the grey.

      Something, Mr Cohen says, forgets us perfectly. I wonder. Perhaps not perfectly.

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POSTSCRIPT: Before anyone speculates on such, No, I am not talking about loves or romances; for such matters, I think Mr Cohen said it best.