Deus Ex Machina

After recently posting  a piece about The Graceful Ghost, I committed myself to hunting up old stuff about Valentine's Day for Thursday. I thought about it and expected a paucity of material but this was not the case. Quite the opposite. Too many items seemed suddenly to have a great deal to do with it, and reviewing them raised another puzzle that I had not intended to address, but will.

There's the mystery of the 12th to deal with. I know Valentine's Day is 14th February but it always seems counter intuitive. I feel it should be the 12th. Probably because it has to do with love, and love is a mystery that forms its own clues. Clues come from within. Here, I have worked it out graphically:

You take 12 forward and backward and get a heart with parallel lines down it. The lines symbolize trajectories, lives doing reality along each other --friends, life partners, kids, parents, grandmas and various persons one loves. One of my San Francisco boys is arriving by train today, which reminded me of a walk he, Norma and I took in his city three years ago.

If I remember accurately, we'd just had lunch on Powell near Beach Blanket Babylon Blvd. when we passed the Washington Square statue and thought of Brautigan. Musee Mecanique is on Pier 45 and, if you head among the warehouses toward Hyde, you have to think of Kerouac. Benevolent ghosts. Inescapable poetry. So I wrote this:

MUSEE MECANIQUE

Under oak veneer and
Bevelled glass,
She is sad sometimes.
Complex, an orchestrion
Rattled, buzzing inside:
Something in dark where
Whippens work; something
Stirring in dark over

Pinblock and bridge,
Ridges and racks of
Brass and maple --spruce
Shim slipped from
A soundboard crack,
Lost levers veiled in
Danger and promise.
What dark entails:
Searching after a
Spring fails. I press.
A little felted hammer
Strikes no reply.
Sometimes she is sad
And can't remember why.

 

At the time, my friend (and Valentine but no cards because we're guys), Willie, remarked, "I like the ghosts that arise for me, too, when I walk through the streets of the City by the Bay. 'Musee Mecanique' gives me those goosebumps!" 

This suggests that love itself is a sort of benevolent possession, stirring equally the actions of human beings and prognostic clockwork grandmothers. And, when I am asked when Valentine's Day is, I suspect the ghost impels me to reply February 12th.  It causes people to give me the same look I get when I wake up shouting because my head is stuck between the mattress and the wall. 

Enough for now. There will be no shortage of stuff to trot out on the 14th but I wanted to give the 12th its due.