With me are the plays of Yeats, the thoughts of Coleridge and the Kalevala. It should be pleasant. Do you know the bards who told and retold the Kalevala would do it in two’s, sitting on a bench facing, each with arms around his legs and rocking to and fro? That accounts for the pleasing rocking rhythm of the thing. I’m taking the plays in chronological order, the first appear slight but they seem to be gathering consequence. Very brief, most of them, and simple. I am making something of a study of Yeats as I find him so congenial. As for Coleridge, I’m finally making my way through the unabridged Biographia Literaria.
I am free to read, having finished a massive and tendentious history of Colombia from the conquest to the verge of the real revolution. I am also free to write. The story from August, Hiraeth—a Welsh word for nostalgia, longing for home, was recently rejected on the grounds that it was too retrospective. Editors don’t often give reasons for rejection: it actually helps to know obtuseness was the reason.
El estupido niño appears to have been kind to us again. The rain is supposed to be in short supply, thanks to this meteorological monster, and the dry season regnant until April. But today the hastening clouds rising as the sun claimed away our moisture lingered over the higher hills and downtown Bogota building up wrath. The system swung north and touched us for a little, and the wind is fresh, fresh, fresh. Often from the vantage of this tower in which I dwell have I watched the warring clouds loom perilously close, with grey and yellow skies and flickering lightning ominous approaching. And yet the tower commands so wide a view that what appears nearby is really distant, distant over the savannah of ancient Bacata which is watered and whose rivers run refreshed. The winds change and the wars of the gods are diverted, and from a thirsty window I look up to see the clouds are reft, and blue the size of a Dutch man’s pants.
