Timing

 

I clean the house. When I’m done, I sit down to be grabbed by a different kind of vertigo than that of the vacuum cleaner. I listen to Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, both the fast recording of his youth and the slow kind that he did just before his death. I smoke a pipe and watch the soft rain summoning itself on my threshold. The smoke fixes itself into the transfixion that Glenn is capable of. Music critics enjoy describing what he did as a perversion of Bach. But the perverted kind understand this fool who understood exactly what timing is all about. It’s not about speed, method or technique. It’s about infinity. I turn over a Tarot card to see what I’m in attendance to: Death. I glance at a hag stone I picked on the beach, featuring a dog crying. Glenn is now pressing on the keys in such a way so that I understand my role in life: to resurrect the dead. I lift my eyes and fix them on the old rose I picked up in the garden, planted by the mistress who built the house I live in over a hundred years ago. The smoke now goes out the window to caress the wild field that is my property. Some of the yellow flowers on the patio rhyme with the yellow on the Death card. What does a crying dog understand about infinity? ‘This is good, isn’t it?’ Glenn intones beyond the grave. ‘Very good,’ I say. The wind in the wild grass sounds like the corrupted vinyl, and I drop all pretense. Resurrection is also about timing. Glenn knows it because he asked Bach about it. The red rose also knows it, because it can spell ‘infinity.’ Glenn’s fingers hold me spellbound, and I hear the nails in the Coffin unspike themselves, leaving the room scented by the fragrance of the returning soul.