On the drive to the pool, I saw the low-hanging tangerine moon and thought, “Oh! It’s been ages since I’ve seen the moon.” I know nothing about the rotation of the earth, but it felt true. Outside the dressing room, a baby raccoon stood on a wall; my subconscious responded as thought it were a tabby cat, and I wanted to pet its humped back. I didn’t.
I’ve been thinking a lot about dullness. Dullness in fiction, for one: in years past I would have said I was categorically against it. This week in my graduate seminar we discussed one of my favorite small novels, Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, and I was struck by its purposefully dull opening. Sometimes some flatness can be a screen upon which to project brightness.
Swimming too? Maybe. Every now and then I swim in an outdoor pool at the YMCA. At Barton Springs, I swim in the dark, two or three laps. I’m invisible, right up till the time somebody nearly runs into me. The Y pool is lit up even before sunrise, with lifeguards, and it’s a relatively small pool. I swim back and forth and I lose count and I stare at the big clock till I’m done and I’m bored witless. It’s like writing on lined paper. I can do it, I’m probably better behaved, but I feel confined. At the YMCA (I am not Y, not M, not C) I think, I’m swimming I’m swimming I’m swimming.
But at Barton Springs, I never do (apart my from my occasional Dustin Hoffmanesque moments of wanting to knock on somebody’s snorkel to say, “I’m swimming here!”). It is true that my senses are dulled: I can’t see, can’t hear. I have no aerial view. I can think of bright and irksome things.
When I got out of the pool, the baby raccoon was gone, the moon was gone, the sunrise tangerine, as though answering the same question as the moon, but later.
I love designed, composed dullness. I’m trying to figure out how to teach it these days, as though those moments when your mind wanders away from the book you’re reading could be some of the author’s intention.
Oh, so lovely you.