Morning coffee, but it's not been morning officially for thirty minutes, and also morning coffee in the sense of grief—but I don't know what for. Joy too, which is the opposite of mourning, and I don't know what for either. For the most part, over the years, I've cracked open my emotions by listening to records, alone late at night or in the morning, but I moved all my records to my theater space and my apartment doesn't have any means of conveying music, so it's just silence in the mornings. Right now, I don't think this is a bad thing, because I can't use Schubert or Bach or Beethoven as cudgel or crutch. I just have to look the fading-out of the summer in the eye—the death of the summer and the end of another season in the eye—and watch the days grow longer, shorter on my own, slowly shorter, and let my emotion over the finiteness of everything, things wonderful and things terrible, come out slowly, at a human pace, creaturely pace, not sped up by any electronic stimulation. No sad movies, no sad records, no sad poems or books, just the vague, distant, ambient sound of the city and the sensation of bitterness on my tongue.
It's very hard to find joy in giving up control, in denying that craving for predictability. And to quell that raging voice which tells the future to stand still… so the apple you're aiming for doesn't fall from the head of the future so that you have time to take aim. Hold the string back and fire the arrow of your intentions in a perfect arc.
The more I think about it, the more experience I gain, the more I realize that, if you give love expecting it to be given back, it's not really love, but a form of control. Mutual hostage taking. Love really transcends itself and becomes itself in a higher sense only when it's mutually given, paradoxically, without the expectation of being returned. The only love that makes sense is the love that's released in a flood of resignation… which opens up the possibility of joy, opens up space for joy because recognition has left something behind in its wake like a glacier that eventually melts and leaves a canyon or a valley to be inhabited eons later.