HEAT

Got it going, the 100,000 BTU furnace.  Something primal there. Saying HEAT to the cold, saying NOT HERE to the phlegmatic winter. Watched them set the tank full of propane with their small crane.  A beluga whale full of liquid gas explosive. It is smaller than I thought, and I am actually rather fond of it, sitting like a good dog next to the storage shed. I could take a picture, but there are so many dumb details of the actual reality that a photograph would distract you with: errant blackberry branches, bits of wood, irrelevent tufts of grass, shanks of broken pipe. If I were to paint the scene of tank-and-shed I would clean it up by running it through my consciousness, and that would organize the scene, simplify it. Maybe attention is like an ore, needing to be refined and tempered. It takes a long time to learn to do that, and then it gets called something voodoo like art or skill or expertise or taste or wisdom. Observing simply and simply observing is an accomplishment. 

All this is to say that I know I’m a bit strange in my enthusiasms. Rather German, perhaps. The register boots are new and when you look down the grates you can see light—reflecting back from the shiny new tin. The boots are in turn connected to new big pipes, also shiny, running in parallel between the joists. They are connected to square heat runs from which the runs sprout. The whole thing is sort of like a very shiny beetle with pipe-like appendages extended everywhere. The entire assembly links up to the furnace, of course, and it’s a very good furnace. When it’s on, you can barely hear it, and it sucks new air through a 4 inch straw from outside and vents through an identical pipe.  It’s amazingly efficient at putting heat into the air, leaving none to slop around, so the exhaust can run through PVC pipe (!) to the outside. The blower ramps up very slowly and then, at eight minutes, kicks in to high power, all very quiet, though the force is so strong it actually blew one of unscrewed register grates off the wall upstairs to clatter into the hallway and scare the kids.

I enjoyed that very much.

So we have heat now, very fancy, state of the art, but down in the basement we also have an old inefficient wood-burning stove that will, if you keep it stoked, heat the entire house and it smells good – though consuming literally tons of wood and creating piles of ash. I’m going to use it this winter. I look forward to overcast days down in my newly created high-ceilinged basement, six-foot florescent lights and 1,000,000 lumens falling from between the free joists, banks of screws, bolts, caps, pipes, boards, nails, screws, springs, washers, and tools all on one wall, books on the other, a chair, a table saw, a big-ass vice bolted to a sturdy workbench, fire in the woodstove, and all around me the silent and odorless backup of propane heat, thrumming through the pipes over my head, running heat to my family above me while I work on interesting solutions to interesting problems written in wood and wire (and paper). Re-threading, leveling, connecting. Breaking things down and making things coherent. There is a certain joy in that, leaning against all that is insubstantial. 

Wheel inside a Wheel

This morning I parked my car in the lot and got out into a light rain. Nothing surprising. The sky was low and the asphalt was riddled with dots. In contrast to the car’s coffee and exhaust, the parking lot, near a stand of trees, was fresh and sharp, wet and cold. Fall in the air and the same sort of feeling that drives the geese to array themselves and travel hit me as it does every year. Must be the slant of light, the cold, the smell of autumnal weeds fizzing at the margins of fields and yards, the colors: raspberry and yellowpurplecrimson, the sort of colors that make me think of dyed wool and medieval celebrations (not sure where that last one comes from). Doesn’t matter. At my age there is a certain resonance to fall that gets deeper every year. The urge to travel, to find horizons, to build fences and fires. Maybe I can blame it all on my pituitary gland. Circadian rhythm. The earth is a drum.

And as I get out of the car I’m thinking vaguely of Yeats’ political theory about the gyres, two intersecting spirals that represent the apposition and opposition of everything, that explain history and my place in it. I think it’s cool Yeats found an image, a figure, an emblem to crystallize his feelings about growing older in troubled times and the poet’s role in that turmoil. Such a literate mind at work, it invents an ideogram.

My ideogram is a wheel inside a wheel inside a wheel. These appear in clocks and car transmissions as far as I know. There is a complicated mathematics to the synchronized wheels, as any kid using a Spirograph can sense, but my feeling as I get older is that there are many, many wheels, maybe an infinite number, that all spiral, spin, and revolve. At times, a master wheel – in this case, the seasons – pulls the contraption around to a particular notch and the inner and outer wheels turn madly on their frictionless pivots in response, compensating and adjusting. So the wheels today are being 50, fall, the beginning of the day, the end of rain, the opening up of a new part of my heart work in my new house, the death of my acquaintance Matty, the end of the book, and the like.

This entire system can be ported to language, where rhymes (slant, rich, and full) stand for the various synchronicities that the wheels carry. Where characters and their motives are the distances between stars. Where genres are the toothy wheels. (Caution: Extreme number crunching needed to communicate between these two systems. See the formula at the right).

Regardless of the system, today I felt in the balance. I remember learning to ride a bike and realizing that it’s not in the hands and head, it’s in the butt. You drive with your ass. It’s correcting on the fly, not pointing, stiff, white, and vector-like, at the end of the driveway. It’s pointing and cycling, spinning and wobbling. Balance is dynamic. Look again at the formula above. It’s obvious.

Sometimes in poems there is attempt to talk about the plentitude of accepting what’s around us. I remember the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young lyric “Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice / But to carry on” or the poems of Stevens, and I found it again recently in a poem from a friend of mine, Brian Fay:

The sun shines over the bare branches of trees
unconcerned with autumn, unafraid of the cold winter,
focused only on buds, blossoms,
and cool green leaves in all this sunlight.

So for me, this morning, there was a moment when the constellations aligned. When my age was exactly the time of year, of day, of the decade, of my waking hours.

Locking the car, I hefted my books and walked inside.