Sketch

August 25, 2021

“She’s not a girl, who misses much…” dedelededede..is running through my head. My lovely imaginary friend John Lennon sang that, long ago. It was recorded, then reproduced a thousand million times or more. I must have heard it through an equal number of plays. The song still exists, de facto, the hour it was recorded preserved in time. The preserved sound is now sold as little discs or streamed across the internet. The man who lived and sang does not exist beyond recordings, now. The days when recordings of him were first made and I dashed to the shop for the timely purchase of a copy do not exist, now. Those hours have been used up, drained of time. They were not preserved. Those days did decay. The days were consumed. I think the days consume themselves.

There are days to live through and to pass by, all the while ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ plays away. If you keep playing the song, time gets lost. The imaginary world’s ether exists for each play of the tune at 2 minutes/45 seconds. Other time exists but you don’t see it moving. You are in art’s world, it is talking to you and you are listening. Outside, the days are moving and, to paraphrase Carl Sandberg, they slip away on tiny cat’s feet. The song ends, you look up and the singer is no more, the studio painted a different colour, someone quite young-looking at the front desk. They don’t know you.

After the days a recording is made and replayed, somewhere in time, there are days finally to rest. To rest as a pussycat tired from his journey between water and food dish. There are days to rest and clean ourselves and reflect. Those are the latter days. Those days are the days this old pussycat has found. I sit in the window sill, mildly curious but separate from the world outside. The dying sun creates long shadows and shapes for me to imagine as monsters or to remember as heroes. I am aloof, there is a glass of distance/time between my awareness and the new shadows across lawns.

I reflect on and I miss the belonging sensation produced by following a rock and roll group and rising with each of their financial/artistic successes, awaiting their every move with breath bated. My soul heroes. I reflect on and miss the belonging sensation produced by reading a new exotic book by some obscure-no-longer poet or writer. I reflect on and miss wandering museums and puzzling on the pieces stored there. Recordings. Paintings. Messages to the future. Reminders of the past. One soul saying, “hello,” to another. A place to be. I miss that of living.

At the deaths of each hero, the besmirchment of their character, the disappearance of names from the tongues of officials, the shift to a new popular art form or artist name, I deflate a small amount. We are, I am, farther and farther and farther away from the loveliness of youth. That time has consumed itself by being rootless as a tumbleweed and using up one minute, then the next. Some of the past lies face down in Brian Jones’ swimming pool. Some sits on library shelves, lonely for the wild noise of acclaim and criticism. Some gets puffy from plenty, rattles around a big ol’ house somewhere in Connecticut, it’s last tune cranked out and a hell of a lot of money gone.

There is no more excitement of spring, only recordings of it. I can sometimes hear that spring but the recordings are getting pretty scratchy. I have autumn in the yard, whose colour distracts from any replayed warmth of rockandroll guns. Green days may return, in our immediate awareness, but spring is not eternal and each time the green returns, it is a different shade. The only thing eternal is eternity. Ha. Time changes without much warning, the sunshine modified by a tipping and winking of Earth. Spring, which fed on itself, grew into it’s mature summer and will fade. We are finite. The moon is finite. The sun will burn out and turn cold. Do we come around again, in some other form? Perhaps not. “She’s well acquainted with the touch of a velvet hand, like a lizard on the windowpane — the man in the crowd with the multi-coloured mirrors on his hobnail boots — lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime…” (Once more around, for a bowl-scrape of the sweetness.)