post-squash gedenken

The small table beside a glass wall
that overlooks an indoor pool
is where I am. There. Sipping coffee.
Watching swimmers. Waiting for
the café-lady to serve my toasted bagel.
With her thick french-canadienne accent.
With her "There you go, Madame.".

Meanwhile, a 30-ish-looking couple conquers
the table next to me. Chairs scrape against
a tiled floor. Although they don't appear to
be together, they speak easily. Something about
her injured back and how physiotherapy is not
helping. Standing up to show him the extended
pose that her last session required, she
complains that her pinched sciatic nerve has
been re-aggravated. She is pointing to the spot.
He shakes his head and suggests that massage
therapy is a better choice. She nods and sips.

"Are you feeling logey?", he asks. "Cuz I am."

"Logey? What does that mean?
Is that even a word? Or did you just make it up?"

"Maybe I made it up. You never heard of logey?
It means not-really-tired-but-just-relaxed."

"I'm going to look it up when I get home, you know.
How do you spell it?"

He shrugs. There is something in his voice.
The way his mediterranean skin and hair are set
against a beige-shirt-beige-sweater-and-beige-pants.
Dark against light. Suddenly, he glances over his
shoulder, looks directly at me and smiles, just as
I look up. Brown eyes. It is one of those rare
moments that trigger a flash of re-cognition.
As if it has already happened. This is my ergodic
loop, the one I've dreamt before, the one where
time tracks back upon itself (although I have
never understood what those moments mean).
He turns away and the moment floods back in.
Voices, people: it all reboots. I continue reading.
Durrell quoting DH Lawrence's Twilight in Italy.
The sheer beauty of DH Lawrence's Sicily.

Outside, grey November fills the air with
an impending smell of snow. White moving South.
White flying sideways across the sky. White
lines across a white lake, while inside, swimmers
reluctantly pull themselves out of the pool.
This confluence: the cheerful french-canadienne
accent, one hot-buttery bagel, cold wind seeping
through the windows, brown eyes and that strange
familiarity of Durrell's Spirit of Place.
His notion that we are all hyphenated
to a specific sense of place,
"as if the landscape were more important
than the characters."

I wonder if Shakespeare understood this?
Durrell's theory of culture, that culture is
a function of geography. That the unmistakable
signature of a place lies in its geographied
sensibility and that landscape causes the
national character of a people
(unless of course,one lives at right angles to it).
"The enduring quality of self-expression
inhering in landscape..."
Hidden magnetic fields, indeed.

The invisible constant of a place
grasped by just sitting quietly
and listening to its rhythms.
The ancient crust of daily life
embedded in the air, like old tide lines.
What are those personal correspondances that
one occassionally discovers in particular places,
that inspire specific energies? The way some
places fill one up with ideas, inciting one
to write, while other places leave one feeling
completely drained. Or logey.

Futhermore, Durrell's idea that landscape
is a literary criterion. That one can define
classic books as ones that are
"tuned in to a sense of place",
their ambience and mood established by it.
The ones that couldn't be written anywhere else.
Slow-moving orchestrations of place.
Those evocations.

If so,
if Durrell is right,
I am lake and evergreen;
the frame around a glacial-limestone escarpment
with no less than 36 waterfalls.
I am the pulse of a place that ticks away
with a particular climatic heartbeat beating me.

"It is a pity indeed to travel and not get
this essential sense of langscape values.
You do not need a sixth sense for it.
It is there if you just close your eyes
and breathe softly through your nose;
you will hear the whispered message,
for all landscapes ask the same question
in the same whisper, 'I am watching you -
are you watching yourself in me?'"
(Durrell)

Outside, the grey November sky fills up the air
with an impending smell of snow, while inside,
swimmers reluctantly pull themselves out of the pool.
This confluence: the cheerful french-canadienne accent,
one hot-buttery bagel, a stranger's eyes and Durrell's
spirit. This ergodic loop. As the couple leaves,
I watch them walk away because he reminds me of
someone else, someone from somewhere else
with a sense of place I'd like to know.

I close my book, re-lace my hiking boots
and wonder how my particular geography
informs character and self-expression?
Perhaps I know it much too well
to recognize it. But then again,
one just needs to listen.

"No tongue: all eyes: be silent."
(Shakespeare)