Jimmy Stewart tries to cure his vertigo by climbing a step stool. “I look up, I look down.” Then he really looks down, sees out the window that he’s several stories off the street, and loses his balance. Baudelaire says that the imagination has lost its power to embody Heaven and that it can now only see Hell. Of course I’ll have to go back to make sure I turned on the dehumidifier if it’s summer, the humidifier if it’s winter. Maybe it’s not that I can’t picture heaven--I get an idea of calm on a bus without a screeching five-year-old--but that my ability to navigate the middle stretch has vanished. I can’t see a way through, keep the proverbial even keel in the start-and-stop choppy waters of six o’clock side tracks to the laundry or grocery: delays are always right now. Myra keeps telling me you’re happier than you know. That thought by itself is enough to torment me.
