STEALING AND GIVING ODOR.

Speaking of hearing and singing, James Schuyler’s poetic description of listening to the song of a cardinal perfectly captures my experience of listening to jazz, which I neither “know” as a musician nor a music critic–I’m the least musically inclined person I know. I started listening to jazz more frequently in the past couple of years as an aide to writing. I have a hard time writing in silence, but can’t write with vocal music either. “Simple and right from the heart to the heart…from the throat to the ear” is how I listen to Ornette Coleman, for instance, freely espousing through fog and mist, a song at the edge of sound’s grammar.

That’s James Schuyler at his writing desk when he was living in The Chelsea Hotel around 1989. I can’t tell from the photo, taken by Chris Felver, if it’s early morning or late at night. I imagine it’s “very, very early. Well before Sunrise,” as Schuyler describes his daily routine in this interview with Raymond Faye. And after waking? “Drink coffee and put on the weather channel.”

I’ve been reading Schuyler’s diary recently, picking it up whenever I’ve time to unwind my mind. Which is mostly late at night. Simply incredible how much world gets into his writing just sitting by any old window. Window and page. World and weather. I like his hundred ways of describing fog, for instance. “Fog”–that’s the one word entry for August 25, 1968, and I think the first time fog appears in his diary. And then–July 12, 1969: “Humid and cool (cold feet in red wool socks) fog pressing down on the South Woods like a migraine headache, birds jabbering listlessly”; July 24, 1969: “The fog burned off but there are bits of mist drifting around in the distance like dust kitties…some frayed fog in the channel”; July 3, 1970: “A cold night, rain in the morning changing to warm rain and now fog moving in like blindness”; August 21, 1970: “A few sound[s] are embedded in the fog–a gull mewing, different far off fog horns–like unset polished stones laid out in cotton wool,” and so on. Schuyler’s fog is as clear and bright as sunlight flashing through the windshield of your car.

His thoughts and ideas have the effect of objects in a landscape suddenly emerging from and dissolving back into fog. A startling imperceptible nearness. Last night I came across this entry from “February 22, 1971″:

Creepily misty morning, dank, dark, disheveled and rather ominous, like a destroyer just gone into dry dock. But how beautiful it was at the first light to hear the repetitious song of a cardinal–my pleasure in it is more than just that I can recognize it: it is not unlike that which someone who doesn’t “know” music takes in the songs he does know. Simple and right from the heart to the heart–or perhaps from the throat to the ear is enough, but in that way in which hearing is itself suddenly a kind of singing.

The image of the destroyer docking in the misty morning surfaces, I surmise, from Schuyler’s own private archive of image and metaphor. After all, he joined the Navy in 1943, enrolling in sonar school at Key West, and was eventually discharged in 1944 after his homosexuality was revealed. Close listening, it’s the sound of the cardinal’s song Schuyler “takes in” and improvises on. Active and collaborative reception. If “hearing is itself suddenly a kind of singing,” might reading be a kind of singing too? And what would that sound like? It would be the sort of reading that could reveal a song embedded in fog.

I own countless notebooks and journals, but most of their pages remain blank. The few I manage to start end abruptly. Their opening pages are filled with the energy of new creative projects, first drafts at poems and prose pieces, reading notes, quotes, hum-drum observations and random jottings. Yet they all dwindle into nothingness or stop mid-thought. Notebooks and journals, I suppose, invite forms of writing that are partial, incomplete, and unfinished. My only regret is that most of my notebook and journal writings never lead to anything else. The countless poems, stories, and essays I never wrote! Of course it’s possible this blog may meet the same fate as my stack of empty journals. But I dare myself to keep writing. So I hope this blog will be a sustained effort at writing against a void, despite or because “the darkness surrounds us,” as Robert Creeley wrote. What can we do against it? Write, he sd.