Tapestry

Apparently typewriters need ribbon. Apparently ribbon is incredibly hard to find anymore because no one uses typewriters. Apparently I am writing my hymns from now on. So he was back to calling his notes “hymns.” He looked up “hymns” in the dictionary. It said that a hymn was “an ode or song of praise or adoration.” Praise or adoration to what? he asked himself. He thought maybe furniture. There was still a lot of notfurniture in what he was again calling his Writing Shack.

The dictionary also had this to say about “hymn”: that it was possibly related to the old Greek word for “weave.” “Weave what” Paul wondered to himself. He wrote this down on a new notecard. Apparently “hymn” means weave somehow. Or it used to. Or its cousin did. What is it weaving? Who is it weaving for? I remember in school we talked about Odysseus and his wife Penelope, who wove a tapestry every day just to take it apart at night. I forget why.

Maybe she wove the tapestry for Odysseus. Maybe she wove it for herself. What did she weave it of? Memory, maybe? Or dream? I think these words make a kind of tapestry, or at least the thread it will be made of. I will weave a hymn to the gods of Literature, out of fiction. My furniture was a try at weaving, but I am shit at furniture. So writing it is again.

He wrote NOTES FOR A HYMN at the top of this notecard.