Sunday 

8 October 2017

— wind as ever from the west

Good Morning All, 

Ten minutes ago, I finished putting together the Day Book for 31 December 2017. After that, I saved it into the Day Book folder, then made the pdf copy and saved that in the pdf folder. 

Up until today, my next step was always to make a copy of it, change the date up at the top to the following day, and tuck it away for tomorrow. That way, I had the fonts and settings and symbols ready to go. It was then just a matter of replacing the poem and prose and pics with the new stuff.

I did not have to do that today. Very weird feeling.

Two quotes come to mind:

The first was one of Britta’s favorites. It’s from The Sound of Music. Captain von Trapp says to Baroness Elsa Schräder:  “Activity suggests a life filled with purpose.”

The key word—the stickler—being suggests. 

Or in other words, have these Day Books been merely an activity that suggests I have a life? 

The second quote is from Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting for Godot, a play which bombed on Broadway, but at its next venue three years later at San Quentin prison, the audience of felons understood it so well there was after the final curtain nearly a minute of silence before the thunderous applause began and continued. 

The quote comes towards the end of the second act, in the middle of a soliloquy, after Estragon and Vladimir, the two bums, have been doing not much of anything for an hour, other than to try to think up things to do and talk about. 

Vladimir, the more analytical of the two, comes close to having an epiphany concerning his life:

"Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?
(Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir looks at him.) He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. (Pause.) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can't go on! (Pause.) What have I said?

That whole soliloquy is fairly bothersome, but the kicker for me is: Habit is a great deadener.

Is it? I’ll tell you flat out, I have enjoyed the heck out of putting together each and every Day Book. Terrific poems. Wise and Witty quotes from the birthday folk, and certainly not least the pics mostly from Holly mostly with an occasional one from Johs. (The two of them, I am happy to report, share all of December.)

In other words, I have enjoyed the Day Book entries for their content, and also for the pleasure and minimal craft of assembling them.

By no means least, however, has been the self-imposed task itself, which I could both enjoy and grumble about. 

"Come on, Bheka, get up, you gotta do the damn Day Book.”

“Yeah, yeah, ten more minutes,” I’d mutter. “Snooze control.”

“No, now! Or else I will put What a Friend We Have in Jesus into your ear, and you will have to sing it all day.”

“No, Jeeze, anything but that,” I’d reply and toss back the eiderdown.

Conclusion: who knows? Maybe like Estragon and Vladimir I have been sleeping, thinking myself awake. Maybe not. Is there, in all truth, any way to tell for sure? 

If I have been sleeping, the Day Book has been a most pleasant dream for me!

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

 

P.S. Yikes, reading that over, I better add the caveat: Please, please do not feel under any obligation to tell me the Day Books have been a pleasant dream (and/or never-ending nightmare) for you. I wrote all that up there simply because I wanted to get down in words how I was feeling upon completion of the Day Book.

 

P.P.S. A couple of Holly snaps. One, I would hazard, is from New Hampshire. The other is from the Zen Gardens, that place I’ve written about where the farmer dug a pond, built hills, and gathered rocks.