Begin at Once

I’ve sat at the page for about an hour and here’s my first line. 

There is such silence in the house, inert with everyone’s sleep. The impulse to write anything mystifies me— what is there to add, to the silence. I am tired, too, and wish I could ignore the stubborn horse within. I have ignored it for periods of time until it tramples me with a desperate clatter and leaves me flat and depressed. But I can’t write you stupid horse! The wild thing doesn’t care about the reader, only the writer. “That’s immaterial, you must,” it retorts. So I must. And if I must, let me begin at once. 

I’m alone on this page. My horse has brought me to its emptiness, large and incandescent, and has left me here. I think of a face I’d like to keep company with and my daughter’s tender eyes come to mind. If I write for you, my love, I’m no longer alone here. This is no longer a page; it becomes the space beyond our life together. 

You are asleep in the next room; your sturdy little legs crooked in the crib you have outgrown. I could walk over and touch your cheek (and I will, after writing this) yet you and I are not really here, in this house of black rooms and one burning lamp. We are here in this page, beyond. 

Here, conversation takes off the mask of ordinary language and speaks in the mother tongue— the primitive language of the heart. And what can I say to your heart on this January 1, 2019? This morning you told me that we hadn’t really started anything new, we had just reset the sun-circle. How can I tell you that everything is this numberless circle? How can I say that all we know about living is circular knowledge, and that it is up to the primitive speakers in each circle to make it known again, for the first time?

Here’s something. Seneca said it, about 1,950 circles ago: 

Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life. 

This is not a new idea to you, because I have a morbid habit of having you imagine a nightly death. Each night, something in you is done, achieved, abandoned, dead. And each sunrise is a kind of superior reincarnation, with the benefit of memory as a rough sketch (note: rough) of the main characters and situations you’ll encounter in the miniature lifetime of the day.

I’ve been living these little lives for a while (as often as I remember to live what I know, anyway). You, child, are certainly a rough sketch of whom I knew some lifetimes ago. Your capacity to change, emerge, surprise, baffle is endless and universal. I am a rough sketch of whom I knew some lifetimes ago. So is everyone else. Each day holds a world filled with a unique array of people and happenings. Each of them anchored only to the memory of previous lifetimes. Each able to change, emerge, surprise and baffle you. Each day an adventure, or a terror you’re sweetly released from by night-death.

This game can really direct our intention for the day. It can loosen the yoke of (even) the immediate past for something unexpected to arise. In my experience, the truly unexpected comes from our different response to the same question. Intention has little to do with power, it’s more of a swift maneuver of courage.

Today was a good lifetime for me. Right before yours ended, you sneaked away from your father’s turn-down rituals and ran to the kitchen, to an unwelcome soapy greeting (in the moment, I forgot it was the last time I would see you in this life, except that now I’ve decided to walk to the too-small crib and pet your cheek).

“WHAT IS IT we said goodnight she’s supposed to be in bed I’m supposed to rush through dishes why won’t this day end?” I asked the forks. “I had another kiss for you” was your reply, tender, wilted. I wiped the soap bubbles on my pants and took you by the hand to the living room. “And what might end this little life in the sweetest way?” I asked finally remembering what I know. You pretended to formulate right there what you came to the kitchen for “a story!” Nope. No. No story. There’s no time left for stories. “A little one!” You ran to your brother’s easy readers and brought back a book about a half-birthday. I smiled, conceding. You sat on my lap. I whispered the simple sentences you can read yourself. (This story I had no time for took two minutes in ordinary sun time; and gave twenty years in the time the heart keeps). When we reached the last page, your skull got heavy and fell into my neck.

There you were: languid, dying with sleep, pressing my carotid the way someone roughly like you used to do tiny lifetimes ago.