There is a passage in Patrick White’s biography The Flaws in the Glass where one can read that he hears a chandelier tingling when someone argues in another room. Of the things I’ve read in that book that image has resisted the test of time or since c. 2003. For me it represents tension manifested in an object whose response is to act within its environment. An inanimate object giving meaning to a delicate issue such as personal discord by way of a fragile object. I know it is redundancy, but it needs to be defined. It also represents a certain calmness which is rather British in its self. Keep calm and go about your business. The idea of affronting tension and grave situations with a peace of mind is an art. Not easily mastered of course. Specially if you have latino blood in you like me which tends to explode. I would imagine the glass shattering into a million bits.
I thought about this as I walked along Main street. At 3 am there is no soul other than mine walking about the streets. I shuffle the feet, an unlikely sauntering of sorts, kicking everything in my path, mostly fallen leaves from last year’s autumn and which survived the rakes and fires because winter’s snow fell upon them. The pleasure lies in living and savoring the moment as one feels the elements caress one. So I take time to feel the air caress me whilst one’s burdens pain one. What comes to mind often is the way one deals about one’s world. So I kicked a beer can, the last drops of the hops fly about as the drops gave new colors to the leaves as the splashed liquid touched the brittle leaves. Not that nobody cares how the changes come about but I have enough time to see the color spread in the many shades of a brown and withered leaf. The same way one pays attention to the flying insect whose path towards wheresoever is only going somewhere because we happen to fasten our sight on its path as it goes where it needs to go: in search of food, shelter, rest or just flying by sheer impulse where other forces reckon their lives, their direction, their duration on this life, my life.
It’s comforting to hear noises which seem to have always been part of the 3 am repertoire. Like the sudden chirp of a bird. It breaks through my train of thought and crackles the wet and humid 3 am silence where the dark shadows cower at the idea of a dawn upon them. So I began to think about what I cower at and it usually is me running away from what I feel. I usually like it very much at the beginning as the broth of emotions stir old and new feelings but like everything else, I get bored really easy with it. I prefer the newness of it all, a permanent euphoria which scientists have now proven that isn’t possible. The excitement that comes along with it is ever so ephemeral but after a while things don’t happen fast enough for me. I want the whole enchilada now. I’ve changed somewhat. Or so I would like to think. As I approached the corner of Hamilton and Main I stared intently in both directions awaiting to see if any car was about to pass by and decided to wait it out instead. I saw the traffic light lit bright red and yellow wasn’t too far behind but the seconds in between dragged on so I was obeying the law to a T as Hodge & Kress (88) would have me to. Although I could of easily have walked on red as I read once, why should a red light decide what I should do? I wait instead, there is no hurry and I enjoy the silence of it all instead.