Day Two. Hendrix, Dancing, the Color Blue

Last night I did not sleep.

My screen saver is a black and white photograph of Jimi Hendrix in a brocade military jacket. He gazes open-eyed at the camera. One would say of those eyes that they are almond-shaped. The jacket is straight out of a Jane Austen movie. Or the military ball in Vanity Fair the night before battle. Jimi, the only Black man at Waterloo. Wears it open-chested, wears it to make them mad, wears it for rock and roll.

All the viewers over time on the other side of the camera, with almond - shaped eyes Hendrix takes them apart, dissects them, with the precision of a shred, with lips threatening to smile. 

When quarantining in a small flat, it is important to dance.  Don’t walk to the kitchen; dance instead. 

The detail of the pattern is movement. 

At 3:20, or, as the locals say, 15:20, a band of schoolchildren in uniforms make noise in the street. But it’s July, and besides, the schools have been shut down for months. I must be dreaming.

I can’t dance but I dance anyway.
Blue are the life-giving waters taken for granted. 

“Let’s hope it doesn’t last until winter, it would be terribly depressing,” Rieux said.

Do not take pleasure in the soft blue light of human beings.

          (Last year at this time I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead 

           for my friend Martin, who didn't survive heart surgery.)

Blue in the sky, in the water, in the way Vermeer paints the shawl around a woman's shoulders. Blue as the color of passage and protection, of the light beneath the human touch, deliberate, determined, cautious.

The Jimi Hendrix screensaver doesn’t make it easy to write, but I keep it anyway.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always— 

They are all as bold as love.

Sources: T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton; NYT; Albert Camus, The Plague; Jimi Hendrix; “Bold as Love.” Portrait of Jimi Hendrix by Gerard Mankovitz.