Asslight

So I'm nervous about starting this. Because it seems public maybe. Maybe?

Or because it's like walking out into new snow, which is really something little kids are supposed to get to do. I like the photo, though, and there looks to be no shortage of snow.
Satchel is out walking Lazlo. Satchel is this stubby grommet of a 10ish year old boy, and Lazlo his torpedo-shaped dirtywhite dog, and they have a sort of matching full-on-ness about them. Both their asses are on fire for this dusk walk. Over the last several years the neighborhood is filling up with new skate grommets and they look at me with complete indifference and incomprehension, as they should. I don't get it myself.

And it's the thing you said the other day about the tragic quality of feeling connected to everything--these kids and their incomprehension and time moving through them. Properly tragic, because it culminates in the complete union of the big IT and whatever molecules we're using at the time. Which seems to present a few curious questions.

Today I was looking at a couple of Howard Finster pieces in the weird jumbled annex of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Dude can't render, and his theology is laughable, or vicious even. It's like he's living in some sort of mythic, nonhistorical present where you'll never have to reckon with anyone different, but then catching a plane to Florida St. to talk to the MFA students there. But so I was wondering about the value of untutored naivete, hardy unchastenable naivete, bordering on willful dumbness. All that painting and in a way never getting really good at it, but getting good at work, good at filling up canvasses with text and color and lines, finding how a new thing begins to crystallize and letting it happen again and again, keep at a tangent as Heaney has Joyce's ghost say to him at the end of Station Island, cultivate a worklust. Just working. Or not just, I'm sure, but doing it, anyway.

Howard Finster and Lazlo and Satchel and me, maybe Joyce, and a man who works at a hedge fund and a young mother who walks awkwardly as though she has MS?, and a fox and a cloud of fireflies, we pass each other in the street. There's not enough light to see clearly by, asslight notwithstanding. None of the others looks up, maybe, and I almost stop them to make them see each other, me at least. Hey! I think, but only stand, unable for like the gazillionth time to say the thing I need to say. They are so much themselves, and they disappear away.