Morning Writes & Focaccia

I have begun to listen to the "Writing Fiction" podcasts that are care of the iTunes U, whatever that is. It may be from the Open University, but I am not positive. Though I am familiar with a good deal of the material--I have spent some time in writing courses and involved in similar discussions--I find it comforting to hear it again. Many of the comments made by writers are candid and warm, self-effacing and earnest. I refer especially to comments on Morning Writes: Getting up early, or staying up late, to write without much getting in the way. Though my Lorenzo Vincenzi weird fiction detective story is going well--I was delighted to hear that Miss Lauren Fulner has read all that I have posted thus far--I thought it wise to take up the morning writes practice. I have difficulty maintaining such good habits, but it is a drive to get me up in the morning and a nice replacement for the recent forgetting of dreams. (I keep a dream journal, but it has been rather sparse lately.)

Anyway, here is what I managed to just finish. I started it upon waking, but the need for a shower and breakfast--not to mention my brother and his wife's noisemaking upstairs--drove to delay its conclusion. It started out somewhat journalistic--the feel of a still groggy mind--but developed into a sort of magical realism-gaslight romance feel. I make light suggestions of the larger world, but it evolves more and more into the anxiety of feeling divorced from that world. I hope you find it enjoyable.

Also, I am baking focaccia today for dinner with a family friend. I may have posted this before, but it changes a little each time. Here is a rough and tumble recipe for it:

Garlic Herb Focaccia

2 cups warm water
2 cups white flour
1-2 Tbsp honey
2+ Tbsp dry yeast

Blend in a large bowl and allow to rest about 30 minutes.

1 & 1/2 cups cornmeal
2 cups wheat flour (I'm using fresh hard red wheat)
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4-1/3 cup dried herbs (thyme, oregano, basil, parsley, black pepper)
four cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp salt

Add ingredients--begin with olive oil and garlic for ease, end with salt to preserve the yeast--and stir until slightly firm. Turn out on floured counter and knead together. The olive oil takes time to absorb, so it ought to remain sticky. Return to the bowl, cover, and allow to rest for at least one hour.

Flour for dusting
Olive oil for greasing
about 1 tsp course salt (optional)

Turn out on floured counter and knead, gradually adding just enough flour to prevent it from sticking. (You can use whichever flour you'd prefer; white for sweeter, wheat for heartier, cornmeal for sweet and slightly textured.) Divide into pieces (three or four loaves, probably), knead further and flatten into white circles or rectangles. Lightly grease baking sheets or pans (I've used round cake pans pretty successfully before), place loaves on sheets, then flip to grease both sides, and allow to rest. After thirty to forty-five minutes, indent the dough slightly and sprinkle in some salt. Let it rest about ten more minutes before baking at 400 F until golden brown, which is something like 30 minutes. Enjoy!

~~~

Now for a story...

First Mate,
23 June 2010

My mind is scattered, as if to the four winds. It is not that things are on it, but that it cannot support anything. I rest the simplest of figures, equations, notions on it and it just flattens and disperses like a cloud. The cloud mind. The cloud mind is a symptom of unpleasant things, a reality dealt with in the present that others have never detected, at least not to the prevalence of today.

I feel no duller than I did yesterday or the day before. In fact, friends and family can still remark on my wit and good humor, but it is all spoken ad hoc and when they remark on past conversations or jokes, it is all I can do to not burst out in tears. I cannot not summon it. The memories, the words, the depth, it escapes me altogether.

Only Jessica knows the truth and now I am frightened by her.

I have responsibilities. I am mate of a ship in the sky. We carry goods and people between the skyscraping cities. Many, many goods can be fired at lightning speed on electric currents over the land, they whiz and surge on their thin rails and make it where they need to go in a matter of minutes. Don't pack up the good china in them, it will probably only make it there in elegant little shards. Reception has contraptions for that to, if you let them use it, to mend the breaches in objects when you pick them up, leaving the faintest raised mark, like a forgotten scar over the porcelain or glass or what-have-you.

If you can afford it, you go for the dirigibles. The height, the view, the elegance, the excitement is unparalleled. We ascend higher and higher every year. In the thinness of the air, we go faster and faster, but without the bump and cajole of the trains. Here one can find a warm blossom of freedom, a flower that does not grow along tracks but where there are none and never will be.

It is in the sky that one must track a new course every time. Some routes are well-established, but with each new height and each returned season the currents change, the rivers in the sky transform. Early attempts were made to chart it, but the crew to do it was quick to discern its mercurial nature, its reinvention of itself over so short a period. Now, smaller craft dot the air and send out conditions, as fickle and unreliable as weather reports. Many have gardens on them—some with soil and others hydroponically in suspended marbles—to sustain the crews of one or two or three for their long expeditions to nowhere. I, on the other hand, need destinations.

To write, to dream, to recall; I cannot make sense of it. I am grasping at clouds, at straws, at the very sun and stars and moon in the sky. Something waits for us so high up, so far above the world. The more time I spend here the more I can feel it. The freedom of the winds is not the easiest of gifts to bear, and how I have borne it for so long.

This failure of mind, I suppose, is the result of some softness, some sensitivity to the world that the captain lacks. He is a hard man, determined to do his job and very little else. He has a locket with a print of his little wife back home. For a while she traveled with him, but it boggled her and she eventually confessed to hating it. She wondered where all the green had gone and asked everyone why they didn't miss it. She gardens, the captain would state, as I it were an explanation.

Those early flights when the captain was just starting and I still toddled after my mother and older siblings would go one for weeks, months. A global expedition was made by a crew from somewhere; they were short but fortified men, with the hard angles of mountains on their faces. They laughed easily, I heard. I met two working together on a flight when I was just a boy, eagerly throwing my weight into each tether, my fingers through each knot, my mind out in the rushing air. The men said the flight had made them all silent for months after their return, that it had gone just about as planned but no one has suspected the loneliness of such a sojourn. Even among friends, they said, it was all they could do to get out of bed. One man, with a week or so left in the expedition, flung himself overboard. He was a widower with a child, a daughter, who was cared for by his sister. The sister was distraught upon the telling of a story, an accident that had done it. They all knew otherwise.

We of the sky are far away from what makes us human on the Earth. I have read of evolution and out ancestors coming out of the trees and onto the plane, how our brains have developed to facilitate cohabitating in larger communities, about other mysteries of ourselves that I do not understand. Now, though, when I can muster the thought of it, I wonder what changes are afoot, what novel creatures we are making of ourselves in the sky.

I dread the silence of the long journeys of those early crews. We land frequently, sometimes multiple cities in a day. The captain is away from his little wife for such long stints, I wonder if she recognizes him anymore. I can think of her now, of her odd, almost child-like youthfulness; rosy cheeks, curly hair, fair complexion, short of stature, bouncing with energy—at least when she first boarded—and wonder why the captain does not return to her. Perhaps it was a marriage he did not desire, something hustled together in the wake of family tragedy or a surprise pregnancy—they have children, three I believe, of which the captain speaks little.

Our distance from the world at first bound us closer together. Richard, Germaine, Rose, Terrence, Keith, Julienne, Seville, Austin, Johann, Castor, Xin, and of course Jessica; these men and women have flown with my for years, my gales are theirs and my clear skies are theirs. We have adopted a silent language, one that includes the captain and one that does not. We accomplish our tasks, share meals in the galley, stroll about on deck, and appear in the infirmary when one of us is taken ill. Words, though, they continue to evaporate out of our hands, our mouths, our minds.

Jessica painted a mural in the galley on her off hours. It is a long cord, its individual threads coarse and defined and reminiscent of bulging muscle. It is set against a blue sky, light clouds to the left and malign thunderheads to the right. Where there are damages in the rope, Jessica painted complex knots to secure it. The mural is wide, filling the galley with a faintly blue light with its reflectivity. We applauded here and she smiled and nodded and said very little.

Afterward, she and I drank together. I have known her for many years and in fact recruited her for the Aspire when she first began to fly. I was not first mate then, but I had promise and the captain listened to me. That was still when the Aspire was a MkII; now it has become a MkXI, with very little of it remaining from those more rustic days. The new ship rises up around the old one, like a vine snaking all over, even inside where walls or frames or bars of metal are replaced with lighter material or sturdier girders. The captain aims to keep the mural in good repair throughout, which does cause some slight delay in the renovations.

After a few drinks, I confessed to her things that one addresses after drinks. My admiration, my satisfaction with her joining us on the Aspire, and then my anxiety about fading concentration. She smiled all the time, laughing a little at my earnestness. I thought of pushing her with affection, but her firm body language and slightly condescending grin deterred me. She spoke to, but mostly in the silent language of the crew that she had learned with indomitable speed.

That was months, maybe years ago. Time functions differently at these altitudes. It does not speak clearly anymore, but echoes and reverberates; dealing unforeseeable repercussions to the mind. Sometimes, between the clouds or in the stars, we fancy we can see the future or the past. These episodes give us chills and shivers and shudders. They are not alarming in their content, but by their reality. These images come with an unwholesome clarity, a dream-like certainty. We only acknowledge them with our silent language, movements of hand and suggestions of the eye; perhaps it is superstition, but to do anymore carries its own anxiety.

Jessica began to paint them. She keeps the canvases—made from spare wood, a sheet of steel, large shards of glass, a tightened length of sail—in her room, tucked into a wide, flat locker in the back of her cabin. She has less and less time to paint between the frequent landings and disembarkations, for which I am thankful. They are infused with that same certainty, that same unsettling reality. I wonder if she sees them more clearly. I attempted to speak with Germaine, Rose, and eventually Xin about them, each of whom I assumed had at least seen the image above her bed of a starflung walled city, but could identify in them a firmness of purposeful disinterest, took their cues, and avoided the subject.

I have spent eighteen months aerial. Eighteen months without more than an hour set foot on solid ground. I ignore the banister of the ship, what lies beyond; I make a point to not look upward, to see the invisible nations there. Jessica has taken up silence against me; not just the silence of words, which is nearly ubiquitous, but true silence. She speaks only sparingly to others, but makes eye contact and gestures to acknowledge others in passing. I fear her and, sometimes I fancy, she fears me.

We are skybound, always reaching greater heights and always becoming forgetful of the world beneath us. That world, after all, is so often displaced by its sisters seen like dreams through mist or between clouds or from impossible distances. The longer we are away the closer we approach them, the larger their renderings, the more fearful their actuality. My whispering mind, the flitting distraction of my every ghost of a thought, I wonder where it goes. I think that it is steps ahead of me, guiding me ever upward. Guiding me to places I refuse to see.