Card Sharp

Early morning Barton Springs Swim Report, 9/5/2023

In the dark a rasp-voiced woman shouted at somebody in the park. She didn’t sound in danger: it was a monologue. She was furious. No voice answered. No pause in the speech. I shut out the sound the usual way, with water.

It happens sometimes, pre-dawn shouting. It might be the rowing team on the river, or runners encouraging each other. Last week I heard some unsettling call and response that went on a while, all men, but I couldn’t make out what they were asserting.

I said I’ve been thinking about the uses of dullness lately. I’ve been thinking about mystery, too, but that’s not new. I don’t like fiction—art—that’s entirely explicable. I think my best thoughts in a state of befuddlement.

Here is a painting I look at every day. It was an impulse buy in Lyme Regis two years ago, the only piece of art for sale in a used bookstore that was about to close. There are many unreconcilable things in this painting, which is why I keep looking at it. Who is the figure in the mirror? Where is he sitting? The central figure is so charismatic and odd, large and both masculine and feminine, dreaming or perhaps working with the man in the mirror to cheat at cards. Is that dress Victorian? Her inward expression slays me more than a direct gaze out ever could. I love the outfit the woman at the left is wearing, with its striped sleeves, the yellow and blue of it. I love the round purple hat on the woman on the right.

There’s a tag on the back from the Dudley Art Gallery, saying that the artist is Alan Bridgewater and the painting is entitled The Three Friends. Why does that definite article change things so much? Who is that fourth figure with his own drink and his own cards? Whose tumbler is at the edge of the table where the three friends sit?

No answers to that, nor to question of why the woman was shouting in the dark this morning. I swam three laps, and got out quite late for me, after 7AM, to see the pair of Egyptian geese toddling alongside the pool, honking, honking. Their utterances, like the woman’s, were rough and urgent, and we surrounding humans decided they were honking at each other, goose to goose, no need to pay attention: we couldn’t, we decided, possibly understand.