It Is Too Early for Symbols

I walk to the kitchen and the hissing kettle rises to a click and summons a clean, penetrating silence. It is a complete silence, very unusual in Tangier—so quiet  that I take special care not to clink spoon against cup as strong, English tea darkens.  It’s half past seven. I’m never up this early on a weekend, so free of a hangover.

Padding through the living room to the balcony I look on the garden opposite with something close to the same joy it invoked when first seen two years before. Then, wily Abdelwahid had given the place the hard sell but it wasn’t needed. I will live here, I had said inwardly, and I live here still, if only for a few more weeks.

Those trees now turn in a gentle breeze much as they do every morning. A contrast to this are the darting swifts, but the two owls are vacant, off somewhere in places I cannot follow. All these phenomena I experience for what they are, not what they mean: just a very immediate perception of sound and sight. Gazing at the contrails of a passing jet, mercifully no trite metaphor for journeys materialises, and I trace its passage with no particular emotion I can articulate. It is too early for symbols. It is just a thing in the world, beheld briefly.

With reverent hands I touch the potted plants’ leaves and stems. Most are spiny but one is waxier with darker leaves. It once flowered red hibiscus and then stopped suddenly. As I water them from the top, the water drips slowly and enlivens the soil. I teach the word petrichor to all my students.

To the bookcase inside, to leaf through old passages dimly remembered, smelling pages each with their own aroma. I read gladly a while, happy to absorb myself in other people’s dramatic decisions when I’m determined to make none of my own this day.

On the rear balcony, no cars sully Rue de Fès. It won’t be long before the first bikes appear. Something about the alpine blue of the sky sends me to the glacial mountainscapes of Peru, and I reminisce on my time in those sacred high places many years ago. From there my mind wanders through channels seemingly of its own choosing, layered with either the simple appreciation of now, or very faintly nostalgic.

*

When the first conscious thoughts of action appear I cannot say exactly, but they come with a stealthy insistence, smothering what came before. By ten o’clock I have convinced myself the transcendence of morning is just a primer to something supremely important like putting an ad on Facebook for my hoover. The grill needs cleaning too. These sorts of achievements can be chalked on a board. That, say the old folks, is a day well spent.

So the morning surrenders not at noon but two hours before, and the chore-ridden hours, the too-bright sun, follow.

And that is the struggle laid bare: to remain a child of the morning, full of wonder, or become the man of afternoon, getting things done.

Ah, but that is what I am talking about! Those are symbols and metaphors. I’m not quite sure I like that last bit.

I must have written it in the afternoon.