In That Great Gettin-Up Morning

Having slept….I’m coming back out of the primordial ooze…not of a sudden but of a gradual, cell by cell, loitering up the ladder into the texture of voices, listening to flowers open, sketching conversations at the hummingbird feeder. Now is the hour to be cherished. I’ll elongate it if I can.

The muses are conferring, nakedly across the spectrum. Out of the muck, a lotus. From the fog, the illusion of clarity. Yesterday’s montage reconfigured into a pattern. Calligraphy in the scraps. This is the place of first permission.

What is allowed is a clue here, a knot there untied. Breadcrumbs to the door.  But the unsolved case remains. No, Holmes, not elementary, only put to rights for a while.

Leave it to the Brits with their endless chief inspectors, constables, double-agents, moles and probing clergy-detectives chasing ultimate questions. More than a match for our private eyes, our Sam Spades digging into traces of our mortal coil.

I am a sleuth. And so are we all. Trying to make some sense of life, this mystery… chipped away by any creative act. A brief mastery. But always a piece of the puzzle missing or a few extra ones after we think the jig-saw is complete.

Sometimes I fantasize a whodunit when a hand reaches out from behind a curtain. A shot is fired and the henchman flees. An inspector bends down over the body, Who did it, Mac, who did it? But all Mac says is, Whiskey, I need a drink, blood trickling from his mouth. That yellow-bellied sonovabitch, he whispers. But Mac, tell us and he utters, L.B, as his head drops.

So now we know, it must be Ludwig Beethoven or Lucretia Borgia, two-thirds of LBJ, Leonard Bernstein, Lord Byron or Lauren Bacall or Elbie, the janitor or L.B. Ipswich, the millionaire recluse or none of the above and maybe he was saying, I'll be damned, as he stared into the opaque.

Sir A.C. Doyle was likely a man who valued his naps. He passed the habit along to Sherlock who, with the aid of Laudanum, could have several getting-up mornings a day and they were all great. It’s not the stupor of narcosis but the clarity of vision coming out of it. Crime solved! He got his culprit, always an aspect of Moriarity, aka, Evil, Death. Who Dunnit begs the larger question, What’s It All About, Anyway …and Then What?