12-minute trigger is a daily writing project: 1) set the timer for 12 minutes and write soon after waking up; 2) see what happens; 3) continue or don’t (but wrap it up fairly quickly, regardless, as one must get on with one’s day); and 4) lightly edit and post here (or don’t).
Train and traffic sounds. The neighbor’s birdbath fountain’s water sound, manmade to the ear, too clearly the pouring of water into water for the sake of making a soothing sound of flowing water. It comes out sounding like an overflowing tub or sink, or a toilet that won’t stop running. The traffic on this Kansas City Monday morning is a distant, constant hum. The freight trains announce their presence periodically with horn blasts from several miles off. A dog barks. Cicadas and birds, too, a constant sound. It’s a cool enough morning following last night’s thunderstorm that I don’t hear any air conditioner compressors running: a rare and pleasant absence on a Kansas City July morning. I’m on my mother’s porch, her garden in its fullness all around, hanging ferns and potted plants distributed across the porch, larger planters bursting with green and flashes of yellow, white, magenta, to my left on the brick patio I built nearly 30 years ago, when this was our house, my family’s house. Now there’s my father’s house, my sister’s house, my mother’s house, and the apartment I live in with my wife and daughter in Shanghai. A woman in her 60s – fit-looking, short curly hair, shorts and a light top – strides past on the sidewalk, led by her dog, a good-sized hound, his chain lightly sounding out with that cool near-hiss sound smooth and light metal links make when they move against themselves. The thunderstorm has apparently broken what the media meteorologists were calling the heat dome, a weather system that has kept KC – and much of the country – in the upper 90s for the past week or so, with many regions to the west, in Kansas and Nebraska, running well into the 100s. It’s summer as I have always known it, yes: hot and humid Midwest summer. But it’s also a summer that feels on the brink of something that neither I nor anyone else have known, except in stories, in the fantasy and sci-fi and religious narratives that speak of the apocalyptic, the dystopian, the transformative. And yet, now, as another freight train calls out, its horn warm and round and soft in tone as it pushes through the humid air from tracks running miles away, nudging through the web of cicada hum and bird calls (a squirrel scrambles across the trellis over the patio as another one in the tree out front before me shakes fat drops of water from its branches, drops that hit the leaves of plans below with solid splats and thwacks), now, amidst the comfort of these sounds, it’s easy enough to forget, for a moment, the news of Trump and Clinton, of Putin and Erdoğan, of another shooting at a nightclub in Florida (Fort Meyers, this time, a name I know as the site of the Royals’ old spring training camp before they moved it to Arizona), and of record-setting temperatures (parts of the Mideast hotter, briefly, than Death Valley) and of plenty bad climate change news, and of racial tensions and hate (visiting old family friends last night, a friend I’ve known since we were kids tells of breakdowns among neighborhood social networks along Troost and his withdrawal from them: he tired of immediate charges of racism whenever someone shared information about, say, a suspicious figure heading down a neighborhood street trying out car doors, a subject designated by the informer as black, and the immediate charges of racism in response). It’s easy to stop thinking about it all for a moment, but: the train horn drones on and I think I can hear its wheels rumbling on the tracks – it must be all the way over near Swope Park? I can hear the distant rumble of traffic and the flat wet sound of tires on the pavement nearby, the drone of what sounds like a far-off small plane engine, a car passes on our relatively quiet side street, and another, and it all comes in: or rather, I can’t not be aware: this is the sound of the planet, of the what – shall we say anthropocene? Shall we argue over what to call it? Shall we call it the sixth great extinction? Shall we call it, anticipating future historian’s takes on our time, the gathering storm? Shall we imagine a future that encompasses our lives and certainly that of our children, one in which historians as we’ve known them might be effectively extinct, or have morphed into pure propagandists for the regimes that seem to be slouching our way to be born in the forms of demagogues, reactionaries, and nationalists (gearing up for battle with globalists, universalists, Davos Man)? Or is this — the litany of fearful observations, reports, speculations — a case of the world being too little with us, of my having slipped upon waking straight into the toxic media stream (I wake: I check my phone, I check my computer, I’m reading “the news” right away)? I managed this morning for the first time in perhaps two months to meditate, setting up in my sister’s room while my daughter slept on in my old bedroom and now I’m on the porch observing, thinking, writing, and, in this, I’m more present and less passive, mentally, than I’ve been for, perhaps, two months or so. This is here now, I’m here now, and mass hysteria online is: where? Here, too, only a couple of clicks away in my laptop’s browser, and it’s as if it were here and there, too, in the train horns and traffic sounds, the neighbor’s birdbath fountain and the city around me. A moment ago a dove alighted in my mother’s birdbath, some 20 feet away. It drank and bathed then flew off. I thought, for a moment: there, there’s the symbol I’ll read as a reminder of the possibility and presence of peace, too, amidst the strife. The dove is real, and the experience of peace — albeit passing, momentary, circumscribed, local, personal — is real: my mother’s garden is real, and the blossoms that she took delight in showing my daughter upon her arrival from the airport are real — the big beautiful ones, large white petals flashing crimson at the center survived the thunder storm last night, sheltered as they are by the trees! They’ll go soon, and so will we. My body’s already telling me I’m getting ready to go, even if it takes another 40 years or so: arthritis, the aches and pains I’ve heard my mother speak of for so long, the aging my father seems to be successfully keeping ahead of with his cycling and camping and hiking, though it’s clear enough this time is coming to its close soon enough, too, and: my anger at him for not being here, in this home, in this family, with my mother — it persists. But that’s another subject, except insofar as this morning’s writing is a meditation on ephemerality and suffering and embodiment and passing through and passing on. I’ll be a Buddhist at this rate by the time I die: the coffee cup to my left on the table standing before a pink flamingo sculpture (rebar legs and neck, light industrial yard kitsch, wonderful) and beside the cactus in its ceramic pot, the coffee cup a faded mix of pinks and blues, a Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre coffee cup, so faded that it appears to have survived hundreds of rounds in the dishwasher: the coffee cup is always already broken, and this, if I let it, makes its presence here and now profoundly beautiful, important, pleasing: thus I find I can manage to a significant degree the actions of chemicals and electrical impulses in my brain, with effects that radiate throughout my body via nerves, hormones, blood vessels. It’s not enough, of course, but because it can never be enough, the realization that it can’t becomes everything, or at least a glimpse of it, everything, and the body and mind can rest, for a second, in and amidst the world’s breaking.
“Earth laughs in flowers” — Ralph Waldo Emerson