A Preposterous Day

It was a preposterous day, rain-soaked and sprung with mishap. I burnt the coffee, for example, and then, when I made another pot, someone came to the door. Cal it was, engaging me in pointless conversation, wanting to speak to my landlady. So I skipped coffee and headed out. My bike had a puncture so I had to get the bus. I bought a silk shirt, nonetheless, in Spittlefields market. That was perhaps the highlight of the day. There was no changing room so I was obliged to try on the shirt in front of the mirror, and in front of the woman running the stall. “It shows off your physique”, she said. Empty sales patter of course, but better than nothing. Sometimes the form of a complement is enough. Meanwhile, my intestines turned themselves into a fist lodged to the left of my stomach. Any understanding of me must start from the recognition that my body employs its resources against me. When I got back, Cal was still there in the kitchen, smoking with the landlady. I ran to my room without saying hello. I wore the shirt and tried to write. I heard her in the kitchen, the landlady: “He stays upstairs, rapt in secret studies. Insulating himself against the world.” “the world?” I mutter, "no only yours"; “secret” I mutter, "no only from you". I looked out over the back garden, and into the other back gardens. The rain had stopped to reveal a great silence. But then I could hear a noise from my stomach, a strange noise that I did not recognise. I regretted eating the croissants. Two large croissants I’d eaten for breakfast. I’d intended to soak them in the coffee but of course I had skipped coffee and so they had been dry, too dry for my stomach. A catastrophic error. You think I’m being melodramatic, but you do not understand my body which is not like other bodies and therefore translates only imperfectly into language. So, the croissant breakfast, a roller-skate under the feet of the day. That was it, I think. The intervention of Cal, resulting in the badly metabolised croissant and the petulant decision to begin the day without coffee. Cal was the culpable agent in all this, turning up on the doorstep at the wrong moment, asking me pointless questions about my teaching, then making some joke about the music I was playing, which was Bartok. “Bit high brow for a Sunday morning this, isn’t it?” Cal had quipped. Demanding my complicity in laughing at my own music, which is a subtle form of violence of course. Bartok is in no way “high-brow” in any case. Bartok with his piercing clear blue eyes and delicate frame, who translated so many wordless beautiful things into music. Like his eyes for example, the blue of this eyes. No, he did not translate them into music but continued them in music. He was able to continue his blue eyes in musical form, or what is incipient in his blue eyes was then completed in music. Fuck Cal anyway, who conspired with my own body to sabotage the day. At the desk now, the silk shirt, salmon pink, seems like a souvenir snatched from another world, a miraculous shining talisman from the Orient. I can still hear the noise in my stomach, it corresponds to no sensation. It is free floating and unattached to any sensation in the stomach. And this makes me wobble, this inability to source the noise. To attach it to the body. But then I realise, and this is the only laugh of the day, a laughter of relief, then I realise that it is not my stomach at all but the cooing of a pigeon in the tree outside.