… in a week — the day after Mr UD and I watch La Kid sing with Springsteen at the Super Bowl.

The plan is to follow her to Florida. Not to Tampa (actually, her group is staying in Orlando), but to Key West.

I’m ready for some warmth. A swim. Definitely some snorkeling — around Key West, but also, I hope, in nearby places like the Caymans and Cozumel. So some cruising too.

***************************

When I was young my parents escaped Christmas every year by taking their four children on a slow car trip to some part of Florida, where we went camping. One year the Everglades; another year, somewhere along the Gulf coast. But we never went to the Keys, and I’ve always wondered about them.

***************************

Here’s James Merrill’s house in Key West.

And here’s a little literary history.

I laugh at the way I hunt stones at the beach, but tonight I really look at them, fifty of them laid out flat on a fold-out table in my apartment on the Atlantic.

I’m sitting up in bed, my little laptop on a pillow that rests on my legs, the only light in the room a spotlight on the stones. They’re just to my left. They angle into one another on top of a white kitchen cloth, their striations making them — as I’ve learned to call them — graphic stones. Also lucky stones. Lined stones, graphic stones, lucky stones. Lucky if their white stripe wraps itself all the way around the stone. A lot of mine are like that.

I have my own names for their variants — the white stones with yet whiter lines I call Tres Leches; the tan stones with tangles of raised lines I call Hot Cross Buns; the rare black stones with pale veins I call Cy Twomblies.

One stone – a large gray
oval with concentric white
lines up and down – I call
Pere Ubu, because
it reminds me of this picture:

And really, though I laugh,
stones are sacred, and have
been sacred, to so many for
so long. Mine aren’t sacred
stones, but I handle them
a certain way, seek them
out with a certain seriousness,
and find their texture, heft,
shade and shape — and what
the water and the weight and
the calcite have written on them
— moving.

***********************

A lot of it is the ritual. The special green gloves for brushing the sand off so I can put them clean in my pockets. The afternoon departure, when the sun is just so and the tide washes over the stones and makes them shine. I dart back and forth like a sandpiper as the water approaches and recedes. I cast my eyes quickly over twisting paths of stones as I walk (I keep a good pace — this is a walk), noting only stones of a certain size and smoothness and presence, and then lean down, pick one up, and hold it to the sun.

I marvel at the mosaic shapeliness of the beach itself. The sort of beauty I’m seeing in the long tossed up curving paths of granite and basalt provokes a satori… Roland Barthes, writing about Twombly’s painting and artforms like it, describes a satori as a moment of blissful astonishment at a seemingly negligent, random gesture that somehow becomes supremely aesthetic.

And of course there’s everything else around me — The cold rush of the ocean, the sky’s graphic contrails, the colonies of motionless gulls. My pockets become heavy with stones, and I keep my hands in my pockets and move them over the stones as if the stones are worry stones.

Now I sit on a boardwalk bench and examine each stone yet again, tossing back onto the beach one that’s too small, another whose lines are strong but whose surface is rough, and another which looked beautiful wet but lost its looks in the sun.

Back in the apartment, I wash each stone again and then consider its seams and its quartz alongside the pebbles already there. It’s lyrical.

It was like this twenty minutes ago, without the hills.

Without the hills, but with a dark crimson band across the horizon.

The band lightened, and the sun came up, fast.

Now it’s so bright on my balcony I have to close the curtains to see the keyboard.

The smooth slate sea and the wall of slate clouds resting on the horizon make a city.

Midsky, the clouds break up, and their different tops are the city skyline. Like this.

A little like that. Venice.

********************

“Some would say that there is no greater pleasure than to walk a deserted beach on a cold, sunny day in winter,” writes a woman at the Gulf of Maine Aquarium.

There are many greater pleasures. Yesterday, the wind bit into my right ear and no thickness of scarf kept it out. My eyes were too dry. I squinted at the sand, scouting black stones with white veins, and when I found one I smoothed off its sand with the wrong pair of gloves — I keep forgetting to wear cheap gloves, not the cranberry Coach pair I got for Christmas — and put it up to the light and then pocketed it.

This was a pleasure, to be sure — finding a stone whose lines would lengthen the mosaic something I’ve been writing here.

And being alone was a pleasure, walking the unprinted beach with zen sitting gulls on it. And then I wasn’t alone, because no matter how cold or late or gray it gets, there’s always someone else drawn like me to the beach, eyes down to the stones or up to the sun that now, thirty minutes after it made Venice, makes a little prayerbook illustration.

UD‘s back at the beach.

She got the book and the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as holiday gifts, and last night for hours she did the whole multimedia thing.

First she lay in bed and read the book, the sound of her American Atlantic waves echoing the sound of the author’s French Atlantic as he lay in a hospital bed in 1995 — he died the following year — entirely paralyzed after a stroke. He listened to the water from the balcony of the Naval Hospital on the northern coast; UD listened from an apartment balcony in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Julian Barnes says there’s a “strange, unwitnessed, yet deeply intimate relationship between writer and reader,” and this intimacy is particularly intense when the writer has been reduced to consciousness alone, and when he is writing quickly and honestly, in the face of death.

Of course Jean-Dominique Bauby didn’t write the book at all; he dictated — oculated? –his final thoughts via blinks from one good eye.

The result of this painstaking process is a thin reflective volume, 132 pages of staccato prose… A bit of regret here, a burst of agony there. Stabbing prose.

Ashamed as nurses bathe him, Bauby recalls “the protracted immersions that were the joy of my previous life. Armed with a cup of tea or a Scotch, a good book or a pile of newspapers, I would soak for hours, maneuvering the taps with my toes.” He imagines summer vacationers “boating around [an] island, the small outboards laboring against the current. Someone will be stretched out in the bow, eyes closed, arm trailing in the cool water.” He’s a universe away from them, among “broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom, who have made our nest in a dead-end corridor of the neurology department.”

The only unshattered things he has left are consciousness and emotion. “I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours.” On Sundays, everything dies. “I contemplate my books, piled up on the windowsill to constitute a small library: a rather useless one, for today no one will come to read them for me. Seneca, Zola, Chateaubriand, and Valéry Larbaud are right there, three feet away, just out of reach.” Alone, he falls into “regret for a vanished past, and above, all, remorse for lost opportunities. … [T]he women [I was] unable to love, the chances [I] failed to seize, the moments of happiness [I] allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of … small near misses…”

On the very last page, he suddenly looks at the open purse of his speech therapist:

…I see a hotel room key, a metro ticket, and a hundred-franc note folded in four, like objects brought back by a space probe sent to earth to study how earthlings live, travel, and trade with one another. The sight leaves me pensive and confused. Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back?

And then I watched the film – in that hunched and solitary way you watch when you watch on your laptop, with its little sounds and images shedding their little circle of light… But I felt far less intimate with Bauby than I did reading his prose – even his translated prose. To read his book is to be encased with him in his consciousness; the film’s about too many other things besides his morbid subjectivity. The other things are moving and true — the intensely loving desire of other people to help him, in particular — but you only get the truth head-on, UD thinks, in the grain of the prose, in consciousness unbound contemplating unspeakable boundedness.

And then I got online and read all about the controversy over the film’s distortion of Bauby’s ex-partner and the girlfriend he left her for …