Parsifal gives me my best naps.

I may have mentioned this before but no matter, the day is different so the result must be. I seldom know what I’m going to write, I begin and see what comes. Often I end up in a different town, the topic having carried me like a tide. It bores me to know what I’m going to say. This is how conversations operate as opposed to speeches or sermons. The grade-school instruction how to write an essay is guaranteed to bore: introduction (thesis) – supporting paragraphs – restate the thesis… wake me when you’re done. I trust in aleatory magic: haphazard, random, dependent on unexpected occurrences. This makes our strolls suspenseful for both writer and reader – where are we heading? The word aleatory comes from Latin for rolling dice. Continuity depends on sentence linking to sentence, like train cars. If each sentence connects, we shouldn’t wreck, but hey, at least we haven’t yawned.

Parsifal exerts nap magic as its long slow murmurous melodiousness tugs like a dream. Some of you, I know, don’t like Parsifal, so its narcotic effect is spoiled by irk. But if you love Wagner’s final opera, as I do, your spirit can bob in it like a hot bath. And there’s plenty of it, more than four hours of music, not including intermissions. I just now woke after two hours of refreshment, momentarily uncertain where I was.

Naps, for me are a coping mechanism, to rescue me from despair. My optimism depends on strength: might (capacity) gives me might (possibility). I do most of my work in the hours before lunch, sometimes scribbling in the we hour, then through morning. Every hour has its distinctive coloration. By lunch, I’m a dishrag. Soup and our streamed college lecture make me insuperably drowsy. The world described in the headlines makes me intolerably glum. I’m convinced we’re hurtling to hell – and what can I do about it! Woe are we – help! Through magical earbuds, poured from infinitely capacious clouds, harmony, melody, rhythm, reassurance relax me into dream.

With luck I wake with my quiver of words replenished. I am a warrior again. The old tend more to gloom because we have less strength. Our tomorrows are fewer. We have more experience of ineffectiveness. We are less susceptible to the delusion of hope. In the end, we know there is no hope, that all dissolves into dust, all rivers flow to the sea, but when the blood pulses and sinews flex, it doesn’t feel that way. Maybe we can’t fix the world, but we can leave it better for our being here. We can compose Parsifal.

Or if not Parsifal a paragraph – that connects you and me – and makes us feel less alone. Friends ask what we can do in this dire hour. You are doing it, I reply, that is, we are asking what we can do, we are talking, and our conversation insensibly consoles. Alone we are impotent but together, if enough combine, capable of marvels. That is my hope for our miasmal moment. We can discuss, demonstrate, encourage, contribute, grow a Victory garden, tend the wounded. One can run for office, another write. From each according to their capacity. The mightiest can do little and each can do a mite, which together might relieve our common dread. That conviction is the effect of a nap. Bless Parsifal and all communicators for contributing to our common cause.