NOTICINGS: Not a dream
Field Report from the Nervous System
TeddyIt’s around 5:30 a.m. and I’m restless.
No dream—just a swarm of thoughts, worries.
Trump is itching for war.
I’m wakened by the wail: No one is stopping him.
The Commander in Chief is being obeyed.
In the dark I rummage around the room, trying to decide where to sit, whether to move my cushion. I pull the plug from the printer.
No light.
How I loathe instrument lights—printer, phone, computer. They pierce. They suck air out of the room. They blind and they hurt. They wound.
This is not political commentary.
This is primal alarm.
This is my mammalian signal:
Where are my brakes?
Men in suits around a table. Screens behind them. Black drapery.
A performance of command.
Not strategy. Not care. Not gravity.
I want Beethoven.
His Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, “Heiliger Dankgesang.”
Even though the laptop is in the other room, I shut down the screen’s light. It too penetrates. I reclaim the night. It is my biological right.
I listen.
Gradually, I sink into interior dark spaces.
This is where I want to be.
More than a glimpse—this is a plane of possibility.
Alban Berg completes the Beethoven.
Next: Nathalie Stutzmann, Handel’s aria “Ah, mio cor, schernito sen.”
Yes.
I sit.
Stutzmann sings the other half.
Not gratitude, but betrayal fully voiced.
The aria does not rush toward repair. It stays in the wound.
Her voice has gravity. It descends rather than pleads.
The grief is dignified—almost judicial.
This is what has been done.
Put together, these works form a complete circuit:
Beethoven: I lived. I am still allowed to breathe.
Handel / Stutzmann: What was broken must be named without flinching.
No spectacle.
No speed.
No violence-as-amusement.
Only attention, weight, and time.
I wasn’t seeking escape.
I wasn’t seeking nostalgia.
This is resistance by depth.
Usually, I stay up. I can’t.
I go back to bed.
Teddy hasn’t moved.
Good. He’s still here.
Continuity exists.
Another sinking—this time under covers, my sweatshirt hood pulled close to my face. Images from the past float in. I see them. I feel them. They disconcert me. I don’t like seeing these parts.
And I allow.
Have at it, I say.
And I mean it.
The more, the better.
I don’t remember now who showed up. It’s a combination of accumulated past and last night’s conversation over bowls of chicken soup with A—an innocent, it seems, of language, history, literature, nuance.
Still, she is climbing out of the box of her performative American life. Many are. As am I. She is painfully informed by her sister’s mental illness.
Illness?
How about signal?
A reflection of all of this.
Hello, darkness.