Thinking of vistas in Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts. Thinking: the title fits this, an ache, a wetland of blurred polluted roadscape. The fields endlessly going by and into memory.
Thinking of how we must respond – even in not admitting to responding – to memory, yes, to a landscape, to a sight, to a disconnect of emotions, insistent and tidal, in the songs we hear, the smells, the tastes, textures of rock and bark and flagstone and subway seat. The internet allowing us to express in words wonders, but not to experience them, or only fleetingly. And in life only if there is time, if we are permitted to, permit.
Thinking also, how hard it is to sing in words.
I try to make up a singer, a woman who sang full of space and pain, for Aida to fit her pain, her longing in. I can almost see what she looks like, how she sounds. Her name, Patty Devine, sounds like she’d sing soulfully, Urban, drink-addled, though D. thinks that name signifies a Country singer. I don’t know. I like that sort of space too. A changeable, changing vista. Room, hopefully, for the reader to hear what they need to, out of her non-existent mouth.
Schietree 