20131029.0852

The weather around Sherwood Cottage is somewhat...dreary.  It is in the upper 60s (Fahrenheit, of course since I am in the US and still think in such terms), and the winds are gusting.  A leaden overhang of clouds covers the blue face of the daylight heavens.  Perhaps owing to my curmudgeonliness, perhaps owing to some Herbertian genetic memory of my Anglo-Saxon forebears, or perhaps owing to my growing up in the decreasingly-semi-arid Texas Hill Country, I am happy to see that rain has come and may well come again.  I am pleased to see the sky overcast and the whipping of trees and plants in the erratic flows of air that presage storms.

Perhaps also it is because such weather as is about today is good weather for writing, and I flatter myself that I am a writer.  Rain tends to promote being indoors, and such writing as I do is best done contained by walls and lit by lamps electric or otherwise; while sunshine illuminates much, and indeed provokes certain kinds of writing (of which I have been evidence), conditions outside tend to include bugs, whose killing blots the page, and wind that takes the pages away.  Neither helps me much, particularly not in navigating as many pages as my more formal writing of necessity does.  The great indoors, then, is my place of writing, and the rain makes it far more likely that I and others find ourselves inside.

More importantly, though, the rain does much to stimulate thought.  (I note only in passing the Classically sexual reference; how else would Ouranos impregnate Gaea?  Yet that is itself a stimulation to creation, and writing, ideally, is creation.)  Perhaps the falling rain creates white noise, with the benefits ascribed to it.  Perhaps the raindrops carry with them sendings from on high, the transmissions of the old divinities still coming through to their worshippers' descendants--or the missives of angels from the Abrahamic Most High.  Perhaps Tolkien has it right, and in the play of the rain, the mightiest of those who sing enact together some remnant of the creative hymn, and some have ears with which to hear it dimly even now.

To assume such a thing would imply, however, that I hear well, and that is clearly not the case.  I sit in a tacked throne in the basement or lobby floor of the ivory tower, where the walls (so say too many) echo loudly with the amazed revelations of pointy-headed elitists at obvious things or things that obviously should not be examined, and the sounds of good and honest folk cannot penetrate the din through the vanishingly small doors and windows through which they pass or look into the edifice as it falls increasingly into disrepair.  That, and many years sitting directly in front of enthusiastic drummers has had an effect upon me that does not always sound so good.  But neither changes my love of the kind of weather that surrounds Sherwood Cottage even now.