The Alien Message Is “Listen”

But that’s Disclosure Day. This was real.

I wish I wasn’t thinking about improving the house while I’m trying to meditate . I wish I wasn’t thinking about improving the house when the house clearly needs more than extra book cases.

My mistakes are showing, and so is my lack of foresight . N has his head in mathematics and music, and now that cold waste winter is over, the garden. I butt heads with the material.

The refrigerator, in situ when we arrived, is a studio apartment model for a cheapskate anorectic, and its crisper compartment has become a cryonics facility for Walt Disney. Overnight it freezes celery, turnips, bacon, anything . A week ago I removed the drawer, but even without the drawer it turns the fresh green stars of the Farmer’s Market into rods and clods of ice. The simplest solution would be to buy a new refrigerator, but the previous owners enclosed this thing in a narrow niche of hand-dyed wood. To replace the refrigerator we would have to demolish the kitchen and neither N nor I wants to remodel the entire kitchen simply because the produce gets rigor mortis.

I wish we still lived in Rhinecliff because I miss seeing God at the end of every day when the sun goes down over the Hudson. Maybe that should be I miss seeing God at the end of every day. Saugerties isn’t exactly Godless; I estimate there are more people of real faith in Saugerties than in Rhinecliff, which is a place rational and superstitious in equal measure, but because of its overwhelming daily God treat, is also pagan to the core. The term pagan conjures up Scandinavian witches, Norse myths, Greek gods, the Mithraic sacrifice of the baby bull, but if you call an American place pagan, you sound like a missionary, a conquistador, or a righteous Puritan settler.

I miss the sunsets.

N rehearses with Eva’s polyphonic choir at the Morton Memorial Library every Wednesday evening. They are between 30 and 50 singers who sit in the folding chairs around the perimeter of the big room and practice weaving their voices together .

Two weeks ago while he rehearsed , I had dinner looking out over the water with John and Miranda, whom I have known since we were babies. The high wooden stairway over the train tracks partially blocks the river view in perfect Ashcan style, industrial yet full of pathos, the station is 100 feet to the north, but it’s Amtrak, so the trains are fairly quiet, and rare.

N joined us after his rehearsal , ordered some fries, and we drove back across the river into the place where the sun had set.

Last Wednesday was N’s last rehearsal with the choir, my last chance to have a reason to sit on that terrace looking at God as the sun went down behind the river . Henry and Jenny joined me. I am just getting to know them.

N called to say the Library was double booked, so the entire choir was going down to the river to practice.

Henry, Jenny and I caught a few secondhand polyphonies drifting up from the water, but it was hard to tell because the words are Georgian, Bulgarian, Sardinian, Ukrainian, and polyphony has no tunes. I am also tone deaf.

The sun descended, the Hudson silvered like a lake, blue-grey and blood-brown, lit by a breeze. It was as beautiful and full of indistinct meaning as the water in V’s new movie Visitation, so I told my new friends its story: the house by the lake outside Berlin, the people who live in the house between 1923 and today. Communism follows Fascism, the house remains, the people are transient.

The lake at the end of Visitation hits your heart with grace, humble and vast.

N joined us after his rehearsal and ordered a festive variation on the usual fries, pigs in a blanket. The rest of the choir began to materialize from the wooden stairway over the tracks, and gathered at a table in a corner of the terrace. N gathered up his remaining pigs in a blanket, and went to sit with his kin.

You could feel it coming , feel it coming. Their voices in the corner of the terrace in random groupings of after-practice murmurs, and then, like a marshaling of the breath, a quiet, a settling into focus in that circle of chairs around the table, and then they sang.

Words we didn’t know and notes I’d never recognize , because I can’t, a chant in a strange language, circular and rounded and full and light and golden wove and rose and grew, stayed with them and us.

It wasn’t a performance, it just was.

Grace and fairness, rounded and full.

Listen.

N was so happy afterwards.

“You’re finally making friends in Saugerties” said H the next day, “ and you have to have dinner with them back in Rhinecliff?” Henry and Jenny are her parents.

I said : “Listen.”