6 february 2018

Favorite listening for an ebbing winter: Morgan Evans-Weiler’s Unfinished Variations (for Jed Speare) (2017). This is music that does not avert its gaze from the desolation. It acknowledges the desolation. “Hello, desolation,” it says.

I also love Violin/Sine (2015).

Last night I had a dream I was falling from some great height. As I looked at the evening sky suddenly I could see the whole earth there, rotating wildly, so I saw all the oceans and continents whipping around. Neil Armstrong was falling with me, and I asked him how it was possible to see the whole earth, since we were still within earth’s atmosphere ourselves. He explained that we were seeing it looking back through the rings of Saturn. Soon we’d have to travel back through the rings. This was a dangerous thing to attempt.

I didn’t have a parachute, but somehow I landed unharmed. I was in the yard of my parents’ old house, the one where we lived when I was in high school. I went inside and was greeted by a kitchen full of people. But not my family. Strangers.

Earlier in the night I dreamt I was with a childhood friend. We were full grown, but we were in the back of his grandparents’ Buick, and they dropped us off in our old neighborhood, the one where we lived until we were about six. I wanted to sit on the edge of our yards and talk across the street, the way we used to. But he was already walking away.

Proposition: People who are still alive can also have ghosts.