In the darkness of the winter, in the light of lamps there shine the art deco lineaments of the accordion: its shape and decorations, its curves and diamonds, its modernity and luxury, its simplicity and ornamentation. It is like those times: the lavish life of the 19th century and the streamlining effect of mechanization. On the front the word: Titano—the big guy. It rests in a velvet case. The velvet pours over the front and into the light, a promise of that most pleasant sound.

* * *
I have had my obligatory dose of turkey so that I may further refuse any other such attempts for the remainder of the year. It is a curious thing to think about, isn’t it, how much people like that meal? It goes to show how great a role the imagination plays in the enjoyment of food that people should look forward to rolls, mashed potatoes, dry bread with spices and grease, green beans or corn or carrots or all of the above indiscriminately commingled, and this ridiculous dead fowl not quite as good as, say, the chicken or that best of all animals: the pig. Oh, and the cranberries from out of a bog usually rendered into a can-shaped jelly and imaginatively served up in slices.

* * *
Among the articles of the American Bill of Rights is the right at any time of the year and on the slightest provocation to run a fan. I was thinking of this when I was reflecting on how much I hate fans. When it is hot, there is nothing for it; you have to have fans. It is the heat’s fault and it ought to be hated for forcing the fan on a person. I do not waste my time hating anything but the real culprit at such moments. And I have to admit that plush carpeting and central air-conditioning when one is in Texas is a peculiar and unrivaled luxury—and one I have seldom enjoyed. It is the sort of luxury of the lay-z-boy, with all aesthetic notions swallowed up by comfort much as modesty often swallows up all aesthetic meliorations in some person’s sense of proper attire.

I love the tick of the water warming the radiator in the winter; but I hate the blowing hot air, the roar of a fan, the hum of a fan, anything to do with the constant and intrusive noise of the fan and the perverse notion that anything other than the winds have the right to shift bodies of air from here to there. Even the noiseless fans are not unobtrusive, and I think it is the artificiality of it, the resort to a machine. I find myself wondering if the house cannot be cooled or aired rather by boiling a lot of hot water on the stove with some scented stuff or just plain healthy water and then opening the windows to cool all the vapor down or other circuitous and laborious way to get around the annoyance of this American right to have a fan pointed directly at oneself at any time or place.

Or hanging from the ceiling. I’ve never known any of them to do any good and they look terrible, these fans hanging from the ceiling with their dangling parts, their clusters of lights, their unbenignant lights.

You see them at work, the fans. Some people can’t work without having a fan a foot from their heads. Some of them can’t sleep without the constant noise of it. I admit the fan is pleasant on rare occasions, it just seems to me it is made much of, like the turkey which has not been known to be pleasant on any occasion.

* * *
The noble, stalwart, and half-starved persons who first celebrated Thanksgiving, of course, were grateful to have anything to eat at all. I suppose that goes a long way toward explaining the cuisine that prevails for what could actually a holiday perhaps even characterized by some gratitude. Had they never been in their position—basically starving—they would never have thought to eat the loathsome fowl. Even then, didn’t the savages first bring the fowl along? The gravy probably was invented as some kind of mitigation, a thin and watery attempt at civilization or civilization’s blander proprieties.

* * *
After working at the maudlin reflections yesterday posted and wondering what was wrong with them other than the fact that I should not have bothered to write them to begin with, I have been writing a second instalment on the life and times of one Nutkin, which can be really depressing. Maybe it was the turkey I was unable to avoid working on me, sending on me a dark pall of futility; I’m not sure. One comes away from such occasions questioning the value of life, you know? And then your wife feels it is necessary to turn on some fans.

* * *
There was a bright spot in the day, with the $14 I received from Half-Wit for selling them thirty volumes from my shelves, I luckily found the collected poems of James Stephens. Not, I suppose, that anybody cares.

Prefacing the section of the complex that traffics in the density of bones, of living bones, where I was waiting is an awaiting room with an aquarium and with no TV. I was sitting by the tank since it appeared away, out of the way, and planning to delight myself by reading, but the fish beside me caught my eye. There is a receptionist in that awaiting room who is large and on the scale of Leonard Bernstein: white hair, large ears, large nose—in short: a magnificent old chap on whose features and posture one models all the imagined greatest kings of yore when they are old. He saw me looking at the fish and lumbered out of his place, around and to the opposite side of the tank. Then he injected into the tank a measure of food.

It was the fat and ugly tropical fish and not the thin and ugly tropical fish that interested me. All three of the ugly tropical fish (not the pleasant little orange ones) were black and white in varying degrees and had bright yellow fins. One of the thin is mostly black and with a white stripe fore and an altogether yellow aft. This thin one also has a prickly and extended dorsal fin it would occasionally flare in pompous indignation. The other thin is more triangular, ridiculously so, with alternating stripes of black and white and the middle white extending to a trailing scarf. But as I said, it was the fat one interested me.

The fat one is fat and round, resembling a pig, polka-dotted white with rather brownish background black. It has large and dark-bluish eyes resembling a frog. It folds his former fin all up and curls it round, rather like a thick hook, and goes with little fins set in ridiculous circles on the side. When the food came it stared and drifted, slack-jawed, with the vapid expression of a frog as if perplexed.

The well-looking orange fish went darting at the food, sucking it in and frequently spitting it out. But this fat fish, this ugly and intolerable water-sow, went with its improbable little fluttering fins affectedly choosing only dainties. A very interesting fish: Matilda Gluttonsworth. The waiting was not long at all.

While Dissidens in Texas is posting songs of Autumn, here in Minnesota we know Autumn only as that which has most recently and definitely gone out of style. The days of three hour walking are under threat as winter starts to grip us like ice on all our waters. And yet not quite like ice on waters: one can still venture out and while there will be weeks of foregoing such pleasantries, there will be weeks in which such pleasantries are not foregone.

I sing of Winter. So does the Ochlophobist, in a way of speaking (although he also sings of Spring). He has been in the barrows of our language, thinking of the word “ruth.” It is wonderfully interesting, so interesting even I was thinking about it not too long ago myself, though I was thinking of a cognate adjective: rueful, and the adverb one sees in fiction frequently: ruefully. The adverb receives the sort of limited usage which makes one want to write a whole story to create a context in which to use the adjective in such a way as to describe a great or weighing or bitter regret.

The epigraph, of course, would be from Houseman:

With Rue My Heart Is Laden

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

—A.E. Housman

It strikes me that were I to write such a story, I might actually be coining the use. But when I read The Cloud of Unknowing I wonder if I really would. The Cloud is full of spiritual instruction, but also of old ways of speech and full of possibilities for speaking. It is good to go back into the ancient places of our language when it was in its Spring. It makes one wonder what season it finds itself in now, though not much. In any event, the idea of using a word as the basis of a story and to fill it with meaning the way in music the theme that receives the variations, or the way the leitmotif is seems full of possibilities.

Speaking of possibilities, words, variety and interesting, here is a chap who is often interesting, sometimes lewd, but always clever and of amazing variety. He has the most peculiar notions—on most days, peculiar enough for me.

On this night in which the cold comes down upon our city, when the lights all glitter in the darkness we renewed our friendship with the Institute of Arts. The Institute of Arts, my friends, is endless. It seems a thing for winter too, that large, bright, dark and varied treasure house. A cluttered shop could not be more exotic (not, at least, and have fountains and clear expanses of parquet floors, echoing rotundas and wide marble stairs), and the nice thing about the art houses of our time (and perhaps of other times, though I don’t really know them) is that they contain so much more than just the fine. At present they have taken down some rather anatomical plant watercolors to which I never paid a great deal of attention and put up a series of 18th Century caricatures. I enjoyed them.

I am the sort of person who likes the modern age, and whether sardonically or sincerely, I don’t mind the modern art most of the time. They have, in their collection at the Institute of Arts, a picture which is nothing but a trick; it is a rather detailed, realistic-almost view out of a window with a canvas on a tripod before it depicting a scene that exactly fits with the view and is only distinguishable by the edges and tripod. But happily, they lent it to the Swedes (of Sweden) and instead put up something far more interesting from out of their thesauroi.

It is called Tempest in Yellow, by Dorothea Tanning, done in 1956 in oil on canvas. It is sort of a surrealist cubism: ambiguous geometrical clouds of chaos, the smoke of burning shapes and color, that sort of thing. In the conflagration, or its aftermath you see a feathered, grey face and then discern the body of a child, riding something, or falling from it. There are oranges and blacks, but mainly yellow, the it is softened all by pale green. There is what appears a bread basket in the mists, filled with, perhaps, pale human limbs or ghosts. One is left thinking: what trouble of the soul! If anybody would like to buy it for me for Christmas, I’d enjoy it.

I wandered around this time, not going systematically through any gallery other than the ones with the 18th Century cartoons. Much as I enjoy looking at a nine-foot canvas covered with what appears to be rolled-on stucco of a must peculiar indigo—and I do enjoy it, honestly—I can’t help being struck by the effrontery of modern art. The chaps that do it are aware that art ought to speak as part of a conversation, but they seem also aware that the conversation somehow has dwindled out before they learned to speak. In the deafening silence they paint in clamor, anger, exasperation and exhausted technique (like that? Exhausted Technique. It just came to me). None of them are anymore into subtlety, it seems. Even the thoughtful one called Human Soldier was executed in the rather obvious medium of ash on linen. Ash: as in what is left over from burning things. It is the sort of thing one just knows the artist is dying for somebody to ask him where he got the ashes from, you know? And the sort of thing you want to refrain from asking since you’re afraid it involved crematoria.

It is a pleasant place, the institute of arts: so varied. They had some kind of Indian festival with hippies playing sitars and gourds and a sort of night-club atmosphere in the coffee shop. You’ll always see artistic types at the Institute of Arts, and they are quite as interesting as anything you’ll meet reading Philip K. Dick. And then you can go and get a dose of the 18th Century, its silver, some reproductions of its rooms all authentic down to the paintings in bad taste and stuffiness. Or you can get some of the simplicity of Japan or some of the idolatry of the Canaanites which has not yet, it seems, been quite eradicated.

It reminds me that they have a Jewish gallery. It has artefacts but also boasts a series by David S-something or other. He’s a recent chap (b. 1932, I seem to remember), and his prints, or paintings, or whatever they are are—in the immortal words of my wife—cartoony, but not cartoons. On the surface things appear plain, like a good children’s book, except there are elaborations that are subtle (bubbles in the body of the fish looming in the background, double lines in some of the outlines though all the eyes are spared irises, and conglomerations of activity or little things like a chap riding the lion pulling the chariot of an obviously-about-to-be-vanquished king who holds a bow backwards and aims the arrow drawn with the wood of the bow at the king). One has to look a while before noticing the bubbles in the body of the fish, and after that one actually notices the fish = subtle, at least to me.

The city at that time of night rises out of the darkness like shooting shafts of light, like rectilinear explosions of underground energy in frozen reticulums of darkness. So many interrupted rows of light, one against the other with the suggestion of shape made by the limitation of the light is good to see. It is good to see thick plumes of smoke lit from underneath, hanging over the glittering lights, brooding in the frozen dark above. These are the times. Tonight I will fight criminals alone in the darkness, and listen to—on this cold night, on this cold night in which the ice all creaks—that best of all best books: Till We Have Faces. What shafts of rising light in nets of words await!

The winter sunlight shows the curled and rootless leaves scattered by the exhaust from the bus: exhausted leaves, forsooth! Mysterious music on the radio sounds, feeding this nostalgia that shines like candles in my midnights, my developing nostalgia for the 20th century working backwards into regions I thought once were dank and dark, in which are now more candles being lit.

The music is the Asrael Symphony by Joseph Suk on this unemployed Monday morning. It ends and is explained in the parking lot to the Government Service center where the county court is, and the county library, and guards the way to Shingle Creek.

Shingle Creek is freezing up. The wind explains it along with the temperature last night. The geese maintain a holdout where they swim, they walk on the ice but still it holds against their vandalism. The ducks are gone.

Weird, pale men with long, grey hair and always, always sunglasses walk egregiously into the library; they stop, they stare, they pirouette sometimes and otherwise endeavor to attract attention as they stand in line or veer abruptly discriminating to paw the paperbacks. Away toward the entrance of the government services a woman with her large bosom mostly exposed carries herself through the twenty-seven degree sunlight and passes inside: her pimp must have his day in court. Flamboyant bling and throbbing Cadillacs flash in the parking lot, and there you see strangely harried mothers with long faces and with dangling infants, decrepit, leprous invalids, teenagers with a budding flair for aping thugs—for aping anything at all, women clad in skin-tight everything but boots and fur-lined jackets, shapeless, lumbering masses of indeterminate sex—creatures Gary Larson might have drawn, nefarious government-dependent types, bland-handed businessmen on cell phones—raucous or evasive, the indescribable old men who read the newspapers, the tottering aged without wealth . . . and me: here at the library we are, the underworld.

The wind outside today is brisk. The flags are all in motion and people ignore them, wear their monkish hoods or huddle, but go in the clear air clearly defined against the world until they come inside.

After I write I order Latte (the Malebolge Café, I name it); I leave the library carrying with me none of its books. I have my midnight books and toils and need not theirs. For now I smell the pungent smell and walk out through the entrance to the court following a neat grey man in a blue suit. He passes by a Metro, and I watch, but there he doesn’t stop, of course. And then I see him approach a rusted Sentra whose trunk he unlocks and where he stows his brief. Innocent until proven guilty, I think, the very words to write above it all; there goes our Rumpole, never for the prosecution . . . except for once. I toy with the idea of following him: Is this the car he uses to throw any people off? Will he changing over to a lawyer’s car in another distant parking lot?

No, he’ll pull up to a disreputable bar and order another glass of Chateau Thames Embankment, luv. It shows the metaphysical nature of justice. Only one of the brake lights on his Sentra works I see as I approach and then pull up beside him, going another way. When I glance over, before we depart—I to my decaying suburb and he downtown—I see him staring forward, slightly slumped: thinking or melancholy or (having prosecuted?) both.

I wonder why the ducks haven’t gone yet. How cold does it have to be for them? The swallows are gone. The turtles and the carp are nowhere to be seen. No more crickets or bugs making loud the underbrush; not much underbrush, come to think of it. Shingle Creek is very clear, you can see the leaves on the shallow bottom, the sun makes bright scythes of light in the rippled silt. The geese are there all right. I even saw a beaver heading across the water today. I suppose it has to freeze over completely before all the waterfowl split. Stupid ducks.

A day for looking down, not up. A damp day and with cold that the bones know. A day for meek geese pecking at the lawn and glancing around but not above.

Above, the gaze swims in an evasive sky which is all light without distinction, with varieties one cannot seem to see; a sound absorbing sky of low clouds and woven fogs confusing all the light to make skies indistinct—except the passing bird, the wires, the tops of trees.

I’ve wanted to draw the lines of trees: the repeated simplicities make beautiful complexities of black against the grey. A dangling leaf in the bare branches suggests Christmas.

And the eyes descend. The boles have faces and the trunks are arms and all the druid trees stand in this mysterious light reproaching the domestic lawn from which they spring, heaving the earth in indignation, speaking with the roots of language of old ways, perilous times significant with death and woe and better joys and consequential life.

The snow is melting on this quiet day, but remains in those sometimes unpredictable places where it can keep sufficient cold. On lawns in plain view, in hollows and underneath the trees it lingers suggesting something of the patience of winter. Winter has begun claiming the trees, lingering last on the scattered leaves and promising the howl and fury after which repose, repose and white beauty, winter and the icicle.

But not yet. It still is wet, and the cold finds my face and strangely bites the hand that holds the book. The ducks still swim in the dark water where the triad river birches rim the tarn, those flaking and disintegrating trees under which the strangely slow and quiet squirrel goes gathering and sniffing, all subdued. No druid fury in these wild trees; no twisted trunks; no writhing arms.

And Seamus Heaney writes of bog queens’ golden bones, of all the skulls of Dublin, of Norse swords that rust at rest, and writes from all the roots of language: nouns such as glib and bleb and firkin and the verbs kin and bell. Language remains in the roots of trees and in the ancient bones, the rocks and stones and gold of memory. For language is what makes the marrow and tissue of memory, what structures, remains and binds, enchants and shines like the ancient buried treasure of the bogs.

A flock of circling grey pigeons breaks the sky—among them goes one winter white, but only one, white as the slow smoke that issues from the houses and is claimed, like the breath that mingles with the dampness of the air.

On this day of damp and after first failed winter’s onslaught: language. What will make his North enduring? and my place, my Minnesota place mysterious without peat bogs rich in tale and treasure, without the rusted sword or gold rinsed in the secret waters?

The roots of language that connect like the long roots of the druid and indignant trees under these skies on which one cannot look but against which the world lifting up arms and wings calls out are secret, slow and swift and press out of the sky, and call through the indignant trees, the patient thatch of peeling river birches and the fir clamorous with wrens to the consciousness of those who walk under its ways their mysteries.