Moroccan Dawn (Asileh 2000)

I don't always know when I'm right, but I sure know when I'm wrong.

Quarter Flash

Something's happening.

Is this really me? Oh yes, now I remember.

Waking. In stages, one level at time, rising out of the well of dream-mired sleep. She is already up, writing in the next room, her day's work half done. This one, this me, doesn't yet open his eyes, my eyes, wanting to savor the slow arrival of wakeful consciousness. No rush. Fat with time: Laurie Lee's lovely phrase comes from nowhere.

Body is all. I begin to check it out, already imagining myself focusing on each sinew...but my mind's problem-solving bureaucracy intrudes before I get to first base: What's a sinew?

Go away, I pout, just let me be with the feeling, the awareness of having a body in the first place, why do you always have to intrude?

I'm part of your body, my mind responds. And it's started, before I've even opened my eyes, the daily, second-by-second internal dialog, self versus self.

The metal grillwork on the window above my bed interrupts my mental bickering. Eyes must have opened. Effortlessly, I'm counting the wrought iron components, their tapestry of spirals and tangents presenting my ever willing sponge of a mind with a curious geometric puzzle. 26 of this shape, 14 of that. Asymmetry. I fret for a moment, imagining a different pattern, where each side is a mirror image of the other. Then I'm off again, debating the overrated virtues of symmetry.

Have the birds been calling all this time? Why only now, as I'm getting bored with geometry, do I hear them? Descriptive words come, intruding into sensation: chattering, twittering, chirping. I decide I don't like labeling the sounds. And off I go again, remembering something I read by a naturalist who commented, ruefully, that when a robin becomes a Turdus migratorius, the knowledge gained has to be weighed against the innocence lost. I think of Earle, who knows and loves birds, in their innocence and their complexity. I remember how, as he and I would lope side-by-side along our favorite trails on Sunday mornings, how he would suddenly stop dead in his tracks. I'd overshoot and come back to him, momentarily irritated at losing the rhythm of my stride. Goshawk, he’d whisper to me in a voice filled with awe, pointing, and I'd see a tiny black shape far overhead. I once wrote him from Ireland: About fifty black winged things just shot by the window. They're birds, right?

I pad to the bathroom where my pee falls loudly into the bowl, the start of my morning ritual: pee; wash hands, face, back of neck in my cold water wake-up sacrament; brush teeth; say hello. Good morning Barry, I say to the frown in the mirror. Jesus, I'm old already.

Louisa is in the room behind me. I ignore her, well aware of her desire for privacy. Alonetime, we now call it, an awkward portmanteau of a word. Playdate, I think, mind running on. Oh, I'm back in bed. How did that happen?

I check the time. Six-ten. I must have turned the light on. Where's my book? I'm reading, once again, Joan Tollifson's Bare-Bones Meditation, one of the three paperback books I allow myself when we’re cycle-touring. Reading doesn't do the process justice. I'm breathing, chewing, devouring it. I'm allowing, questioning, considering it. She writes, The most important book to read is yourself. If you read that book, you will have read all the others. I put the book down. Why am I reading it? Why am I stuffing my overfull mind with concepts about concept-free living?

I can't stop, the book is back in my hands. Writing is an offering, she tells me. To share, to clarify, to play. Yeah, right on, remembering the year of planning, researching, writing for my last book. The hardest thing I've ever done, I sometimes say. Was it really that hard?

Hard? I breath deeply, suddenly aware of my penis, rising to greet the new day. Where did that come from? Spontaneous sexuality streams through me, warming, exciting my entire self. Still reading, I hold my penis, gently stroking the glans through my foreskin. Then I wonder what it would be like to be circumcised, and irritation and anger arise at the thought of that dreadful quasi-medical, quasi-religious ritual. My foreskin is home to half of the hundred thousand nerve endings in my penis. Do I get double, the pleasure, double the fun a circumcised guy does?

The soft sensuality I'd been enjoying drains out of me. I'm back into concepts, arguments, fears.

Relax, I tell myself. Just watch. Notice.

Who is this unbidden little dictator who waits in the wings, quick to proffer these pseudo-zen platitudes? You relax, I offer back. I'll do what I want to do.

We spar discordantly, my observer-self, my observer-of-the-observer self, regressing infinitely. Meanwhile, also unbidden, dawn kindles the whitewashed wall opposite into a luminous sheet of white stucco. I'm glad we sleep with the window open.