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Today I woke up to find that I had indeed not put the cap back on my .005 prismacolor pen before falling asleep. I dreamed I had put the cap on. It is my favorite sort of pen, so in drifting to sleep it concerned me. I awoke to find the cat on the bed next to me, my book open to a chapter on Manet, and the light drifting in through the shutters I’d left open to ensure I’d actually get up.
I couldn’t help but feel cheerful about the class to come. Impressionism and Manet and Baudelaire. I may be into more modern or contemporary works, but goodness, I dream about something like “The Painter of Modern Life” being published in a newspaper today. It is simply fun to read. It may have lost its strength over time, but Baudelaire talks explicitly about serving one’s own time and one’s own time alone. The great thing of Modernity is it’s ephemeral nature, he says. Painters are observers, they are flâneurs (“a person who walks the city in order to experience it”). Am I a flaneur? Does Baudelaire nail my pedestrian ambitions, my wanderlust, my desire for being lost (so easy to achieve in this new city)? I swoon and ogle the excellent reproductions of Impressionist works in my book. The sky is so blue out that I can’t imagine going to school with anything other than the Innocence Mission. I was almost late because I had put the albums on my phone, but it was simply essential to do so. It was exactly that sort of solitary morning filled with a mysterious love. The comforter was so white, the sky such a clear deep blue (deep like the sound of a very large church bell), and my hair even parted how I hoped it would (it never does). I got dressed with purpose. I put on a shirt that is as nostalgic and comforting to me as a baby blanket might be to another. I felt completed, somehow. Compelled.
School is this. Other things are this. Mysterious satisfaction. Invisible comfort. The Innocence Mission trailed into this perfect explanation during “Lake Shore Drive”:
I tell myself now
things I would have told to you,
the smallest plan, the greatest news.
The more days come, the more it’s true
Letter writing, letter writing, article writing, article reading, emails, poems, chats, notes, posts, playlists, albums one can live inside of…
