time again

...

Tired of restraining themselves all winter, the trees suddenly take themselves for fools.They can stand it no longer:they let loose their words-a flood, a vomiting of green. They try to bring off a complete leafing of words. Oh well, too bad! It'll arrange itself any old way!In fact, it does arrange itself! No freedom whatever in leafing...They fling out all kinds of words, or so they think; fling out stems to hold still more word. "Our trunks," they say, "are there to shoulder it all." They try to hide, to get lost among each other. They think they can say everything, blanket the world with assorted words: but all they are saying is "trees"

They can't even hold on to the birds who fly off again, and here they are rejoicing in having produced such strange flowers! always the same leaf, always the same way of unfolding, the same limits; leaves always symmetrical to each other; symmetrically hung!Try another leaf--The same!One more, --Still the same! In short, nothing can put an end to it, except this sudden realization: "there is no way out of trees by means of trees." One more fatigue, one more change of mood. "Let it all yellow and fall. Let there be silence, bareness, AUTUMN.
--Ponge.

for anton, c, and deputy

Continuing on the theme of chemists

the inner workings of the inner elements

Someone asked me: how do you write a post, how do the elements of it come together? (Actually, no-one asked me, but I thought it would be interesting as a second thought for my faithful and unfaithful reader(s)).

Well, I was looking for a book, 'The Common Good' by Tony Judt but my library only had a collection of his essays (in which there was a small piece on one of my favourite writers, Primo Levi). Now, since I was bored, an hour earlier I had been sifting through the cartoons of Ronald Searle (whence the Strauss). And the line I remember from his interview was:

Once you are a prisoner, you never escape being a prisoner.

Now, by one of those remarkable co-incidences I see that in the comments to the post in which this quote first appeared someone actually did ask me this question: how is a blogpost compiled! How freaky is that!

But when did it begin?

Actually, two days ago I woke up thinking: how much evil there is in the world. (Yes, I often wake up with specific phrases on the tip of my tongue or with specific images. Inspired, I know!). The medievals were surely wrong on this" evil is not just a lack, an absence of the good, but something that is real, all too real. So, this thought has been with me for the last two days, waiting for some other element to react with.

And then Ambs tells me that a teacher (if a fundo can be called a teacher) had said to an incredulous class: Hitler was right. Perhaps this was a catalyst? Are inner workings that important anyway?

But three days back I was thinking to myself: really must re-read Calvino's Six Memos (which are really five). In particular: on exactitude (since I'd written on lightness before).

There's something about Calvino's almost scientific approach (or is it a logical, impersonal style of writing?).

Then a line from the Judt essay confirmed it since it was, in effect, a word-for-word copy of Searle's thoughts.

But why write this at all? For who? Only for Ubo, my jew, who is a chemist as well...

"Zinc, Zinck, zinco: they make tubs out of it for laundry, it is not an element which says much to the imagination, it is gray and its salts are colorless, it is not toxic, nor does it produce striking chromatic reactions; in short, it is a boring metal. It has been known to humanity for two or three centuries, so it is not a veteran covered with glory like copper, nor even one of those newly minted elements which are surrounded with the glamour of their discovery.

The course notes contained a detail which at first reading had escaped me, namely, that the so tender and delicate zinc, so yielding to acid which gulps it down in a single mouthful behaves, however, in a very different fashion when it is very pure: then it obstinately resists attack. One could draw from this two conflicting philosophical conclusions: the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life. I discarded the first, disgustingly moralistic, and I lingered on the second, which I found more congenial."

fragments

“We are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.”
--Nicholas Carr.

This very much ties in with a book recommended by anton: 'The Necessity of Experience' by E.S. Reed. Books, music, films...at the end of the day they're just parcels of information that are felt on the blank screen of the mind, unpacked, re-arranged or aggregated and re-configured to form a 'picture' of the thing-in-itself. To talk about the experience of reading a book ...well, one might as well talk about 'red' and other mystical, unknowable qualities. What else is experience but something registered by the mind...what else could it be?

Whether this fragmentation is furthered by the internet and other social processes, whether this dispersion of attention is a symptom of a late capitalism that likes to keep everything at the surface and is replicated in our workplaces, schools, and daily lives or whether it, in fact, represents a fantastic opportunity for learning and sharing remains something only time will be able to tell (don't know what you think).

So what if the old state narratives don't bind any more? What information people select and want to share, what stories they turn to and turn out, increasingly depends on their affinities, interests, and tastes (Tony Judt). And isn't the freedom of the net something that unsettles established hierarchies, something that allows us to challenge everything? The resulting lack of solidarity (or, rather, the different type of solidarity) is the price we pay for greater freedom. And besides, wasn't modernity from its very inception about fragmentation, the explosion of the new, the 'anti-classical,' the many-faceted, multi-dimensionality of an open-ended reality?

~~~

England lost. Thank God!! There's nothing worse that seeing the swaggering arrogance of a bunch of over-paid, over-rated spoilt brats. It's not just that they're crap...lots of teams are. It's the ridiculous belief that one can be good simply because one is England. And amongst all that fake bravado what timidity and meekness! I think they need psychological help. Someone commenting in the Guardian hit just the right spot:

The English team visited some orphans in Soweto. "It was tragic to see their sad little faces without any hope," said Umbeki, aged six.

Now, if only Brasil can be thumped all will be good in the world...

wayfaring stranger

the world within the world

there is a world of remembered colours, a rose within the rose, where everything is given its due reverence, spoken to with a soft tongue. you put your hand to the rose; it was moist with dew, as if crying from the night before.

why so many thorns, one wonders. is it because there is a correct approach to everything? how to enter the world within the world?

(photo: courtesy of Roxana)

falling down

a hazy red, a
grain gold, a mauve
of small shadows, sprung
from the quiet dry brown -
archetype
of the world always a step
beyond the world, that can't
be looked for, only
as the eye wanders,
found.

--Denise Levertov.

I-level

I will not be one person again.
---Karen B.

What do you remember? Think of a film, or some music, or a loved one. There is, on the one hand, the direct, fresh experience that is, perhaps, unaware of it even being an 'experience'; a feeling that is so caught up in the wonder of it/her/him that it is blind to itself. Face to Face, seeing I to I. And there is, on the other hand, the memory of happiness, a report, a re-collection that depends on one's ability (desire?) to retrieve and the artistic ability to integrate the fragments.

What do you remember of any person you've come across, or a book? A few, quintessential aspects (as with a caricature)? Certainly not the whole story, the insignificant details (but what is significant? Watson often looks at the same world, the same facts, but in a different way...only later gets the drift, grasps the point, sees what was obvious).

For films Kahneman says it is the final scene. A good or bad ending can change the whole recollection of the experience. Peak-effect. Or it is a weighted average of the last scene and the most intense moments in the experience, as if the mind/soul needed to filter out the rest, reduce it to background material, and pick out the unique, the dazzling, radiant moment.

Is memory enough? Of her. As if by repeating the memory, as I recall, could somehow magically conjure up the real thing. The delusion that it is the real thing, when our selves are constantly falling away...

Solaris.

How can there be a remembering of what you've never known? In films, in films, you often hear a man saying to a woman he's met for the frst time: "I feel that I've always known you" or "haven't we met before?". At other times, you want to remember to forget...

I want to know how to feel

The human capacity (you want to say 'human', not biological, or the mind's) to adapt

dreams

Sherry, posing as the tragic hero that he so wants to be (and isn't)! The crumbling 'where dreams become reality' sign: a sad reminder that reality is a lot shoddier than the dream. A 4 0'clock dust storm, the light worsening all the time. People disappearing into it, others suddenly becoming visible, as if they were stepping out of it. My cousin, had to be led like a blind man..."walk backwards into it,kaka," I said..."this is the only way to protect oneself"

keeping (losing) track

Between chores-
hulling strawberries,
answering letters-
or between poems,
....
returning to the mirror
to see if I'm there.

----

Long after you have swung back
away from me
I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore
on the tide
and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges the pier:
am I a pier
half-in half-out of the water

and in the pleasure of that communion
I lose track,
the moon I watch goes down, the

tide swings you away before
I know I'm
alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black
timbers of me,
a light growth of green dream drying.

***

the white light of mid-day floods into the room, spills everywhere, reducing things to the horizontal, so that they're without depth or dimension (not quite real), blots out any human distinctiveness, decisiveness. ancient chaos, extensive tyranny, bleaching human reason. causes the pages of books to yellow, crumple, words all at sea, esoteric. outside is the same as inside. the parched land as dry as a bone. an excess of light is like heaviness, slowing down the firing of neurons, the quick from mind to hand. everything's become unloosened, more unsure...

your eyes become heavy, unresisting, and start to close, your mind at the outermost doors of awareness. still, you clutch the forest-green lead pencil you love. just the right size, about two-thirds its former self. faint grey marks on the margins of Gelpi's Levertov: a line, a cross, a rare star...

slouched ever deeper now. chin on neck, book just about perched on your lap, slipping. strange random words come to the fore, are repeated, disrupt any train of thought: the slow dissolution of linearity that is the work of the sun. just visible before you is Sen's Rationality and Freedom, firmly shut, sombre, solid, tightly packed with dense thinking, deep assurances; little R in her strawberry-girl outfit, arms above her head, in a peaceful slumber, blissfully dreaming of bears and Scarborough Fair, no doubt. has learnt to let go. reminds you. stars in the sky, unseen by day, quietly existing on their own, without knowledge or fear, like a quote within a quote.

the ritual of structuring thoughts begins to fade, slide. the sun-and-wheat consciousness invades the north, is upon you like a beast...

your mind strays to trivial matters, the hundred and one fragments of dazzling insights collected but scattered amongst your notes and papers, floating, drifting, unmoored...

think back, and back...to other similar summer days, when just a child. who could have thought then, D, what lay in store, what directions our future lives would take or how the past would be remembered? and now? is it so very different now? how the sun undoes time. in ten years, twenty? who will be, what will be?

i awake, jolted out of my semi-inherited drowsiness. the lead pencil has fallen between the gap. can't imagine its lonely flight. o, there's a knot i can't, won't, untie, that binds me to somewhere else. i take up a black pen immediately, and scribble furiously on a blank piece of paper to stave it off, for what it's worth. for we leave one dreamworld only to enter another.

the hunt

why do you always pursue that which flees from you?

what can I do, for I am trapped in this hunt myself!

but with one such as her there is no end to the chase. have you lost your senses?

I only seek a beginning with her. there is no more 'I' to say 'I am lost'.

but look! the gentle one is drowsy, she's put her head to the ground and started to dream. steady yourself. take aim! the victory is yours!

who is to say who will win, who will lose...hush! for maybe this time she dreams of me.

the sweet look, the loving manner

there was no '&'

Oh, the philosopher disrobing herself was right: what is, is; what is not, is not. whether you come now matters little. your image lies behind me. and yet, how strange the days are, for it has pierced so deep, leaving a scar, saddening my eyes...

twice removed

Dougal, just had a fantastic breakfast-near perfection. Two things missing though: grilled tomatoes and fresh orange juice

~~~~~

Walking in the early morning, lost in the fog. I can barely see ten feet ahead of me. What difference does a number make? I can barely see...

The sun-at least I think it's the sun-seems strange: small and meaningless; the winter sun is so sad, a pale shadow of its former self. Tired of giving, it withdraws into an irreconcilable point. The greyness of the skies has invaded its being. I walk on. I stop at the kerb and stand on it, peering over the edge like the captain of a ship, searching for land, any land...Through the open fields. Like Marcovaldo I lose all sense of perspective-what is distant, what is near at hand? I think to myself, to others I too must appear ghost-like. Only the 'craa' of the crows jolts me back into existence. Black. Invisible. Twice removed. The voice is all we have to go by.


There's nothing like the betrayal of the voice.

--Richard Ford.

~~~~~~

Meet an old student. Like a bolt from the blue. She's half mad. Now a film director who sees Marx and Socrates in her dreams. The day is wasted. Why do I count the hours?

~~~~~

Over breakfast F tries to convince us that the motivation for all our actions is our own satisfaction (or, if you want to be fancy, utility). I can't be bothered. Second thoughts: Better to concentrate on the scrambled eggs and coffee!

~~~~~

Notes on the 'Notes':

To think, to really think, is to take a step out of the dense fog that is one's own ego and see other people. One is forced to..or at least one imagines it so. The personal is extended to the impersonal. And then further: the other is not just 'the other'. We stand before the boundary between subject and object, me and you, with awe. The edge is the place to be. Achtung. We shudder before the law. The Law is a line. But already this is too abstract. The soul tremors before all that is different, caught between an infinite respect and the desire to transgress. Is love the only way the 'I' escapes its own boundaries? Volo ut sis.

Perhaps not. Aren't all of our actions a direct or an indirect expression of longing for release? Play. Lost and found.

Justice, truth, what are these but the ability to transcend one's own perspective. But 'transcend' does not mean abolish. Part of us wants to reduce all of our moral ideas to some principle of unity (happiness, utility). Part of us longs for the monotony of the desert, the open blue skies with its harsh and piercing light. But the other knows the value of darkness, of ashes, and returns to the unsystematic dialectic of subject and object, personal and impersonal. There are plural sources of value, spheres of justice. And what we seek is not justice as an idea but the incarnation of that idea in our very acts.

There are points of clarity, illumination,a round which we circle. Cling on to them. but sometimes they grow darker, denser, like a knot. Coherences and correspondences, a pattern to our life, not isolated moral thinking that is occasionally applied to life. We want a set of interweaving principles as well. Structure and light (the Red Tower). We want to see the stars and feel them.


Two worlds collided.

I was there.

You were standing.

And they can never tear us apart.

Individualism as a heightened awareness of separate worlds. But we are never so removed that we cannot imagine the lives of others. Through sympathy we can transcend the determinism of the world and the scientists. The pupil of necessity, the Iris of love.

The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.
----Iris. M.


Attentiveness: to know what is distant, to know what is far; to know the ground beneath our feet.


Spiritual reality is the same as ordinary reality.

There are hierarchies. Yes. There is what some (Mill?) would call a 'true' happiness. But the real mystery is at the level of Maya. The ordinary is so much stranger than we think.

Good modes of attention and good objects of attention.

What is 'inner' here, what is 'outer'?

Attentiveness to the void, but also to the details that fill the world, that are the world.

One could walk in an open field for ever. An absence of ritual starves the imagination.

If not utility, then what?

Duty? But duty without moral experience, a dense background of moral fabric, may seem arbitrary. We can only move in a world that we can see.

'But you can't explain duty, can you? And what if this heteronomous principle conflicts with one's interests?'

'Yes, there is a limit to explanation. There are boundaries to everything. Sometimes there are no roads.' Insofar as we are modern we rebel at the idea that anything is 'given'. 'Conflict?' 'Surely the light comes to us from elsewhere ?'

'But duty is only a matter for the will, not for vision'

The absolute as a moral goal is already part of knowledge.

We are involved in the mystery of lived time, our being here and elsewhere. What is true is 'beyond' but its reflection is also here.

Places and time are an expression of that second space.

Spiritual reality is the same as ordinary reality.

beurrre

What is Man?

Who asks that question (except Woman!..sorry, sorry, couldn't resist) ?

Who could answer that? God...perhaps.

Economists, of course, have a particular view of man, homo economicus : rational, self-interested individuals as an ideal-type. The absurdity of such a construct is not in question-even if the reasons for his emergence are less easy to ascertain. The simplifications required for theory-'tractability'-spring to mind; the overlap between political and economic liberalism: the disembeded individual, abstract citizen, General Man, precisely, free from (the hierarchies of) society, religion, race and who is invested with rights.

Simple, fundamental motives (self-interest) which at once eliminate both the need for, and explanatory power of, highly contestable and conflic-ridden ethical motivations as well as the dubious and unstable role of the emotions, passions (Albert Hirschman). In any case, 'self-interest' is a self-evident axiom, an 'indisputable fact of experience' (Lionel Robbins), something that cannot, therefore, be falsified or overturned by an appeal to empirical reality. Or, alternatively: 'as if'.

Perhaps the question is redundant. All one can say is what we do, not what we are. But is causality enough? And how can there be a science of behaviour if there's free will, consciousness (as pointed out by the brilliant neo-classical economist, Frank Knight, seventy five years ago)?

What is butter? If in Paris, would this question be intelligible? Who asks such questions except, perhaps, the philosopher? Certainly not the mullah, who would be too busy scoffing it down.

won and lost

I am so lated in the world, that I
Have lost my way for ever.

heavy-handed, yet a winter mind. the intelligence still bright, instinctive, fresh as snow. what words can be spoken now? ...they are there, scattered correspondences, soaked in a deep familiarity, a tender intimacy, so much so that you begin to wonder...you Spy her other life, as if through a clouded mirror, as she reveals herself to another, jousting recklessly. what strange assai is this?

she was the master, looking for a slave, the cruel curl of her lip disguised by a gentle voice. how time is upon us. the settled gravities of the days bear down. so much so that you cannot tell any more who has won, and who has lost.

in the courtyard

in the courtyard where i watch it fall
the rain is coming down in widely varied measure.
a filmy discontinuous screen (or tracery) at the center
it's an unrelenting shower
relatively slow but rather sparse
an endless light precipitation
fractional concentration of sheer liquid meteor.
close by the walls to the right and left
heavier individualized
the drops come louder in their fall.
nearby they seem the size of wheat grain
over there a pea elsewhere almost a marble.
on window frames and railings the rain scuds horizontally
while on the undersides it clings in rounded lozenges.
molding to the entire surface of a small tin roof
that's visible below
it trickles in a thing skim moiréd in eddies
from the imperceptible bumps and ripples of the metal sheet.
in the adjoining gutter
it sluices along with all the application of a shallow rivulet gently pitched
then plunges abruptly
an absolutely vertical strand rather loosely tressed
straight to the ground where it shatters
and dashes up in glittering bead-tipped needles.

each of its forms has its own particular pace
a correspondingly particular sound.
it all exists intensely
a complicated mechanism precise as it is fortuitous
like clockwork whose mainspring is the weight of a given
mass of vapor in precipitation.
the chiming of vertical strands against the ground
the gurgle of the gutters
the tiny gong tones
all proliferate and resound together in concert
with no monotony with delicacy


when the main spring runs down
some few wheels churn on awhile
slower and slower then the whole mechanism comes to a halt.
at that point if the sun comes out again
everything soon vanishes
the glittering apparatus evaporates.
it has rained.

---Francis Ponge.

All through the night you were in my heart, all through my heart, so that when I woke up, startled, it was strange not to see you about. I carefully watched over your image, tended to it. The courtyard was neither full nor empty. All night ...like a song I once knew. When I awoke it was as if I had forgotten the words and all that could be expressed could only be done so mutely, secretively, without you knowing. Life, like music, returned to a series of black scars on a blank white page. (I'd missed you). Yet who is to say which was more real? You, dreamily quiet at night, slowly breathing in time with me, or the cold, absent you I wait for day after day?

Gestures, jesters

By the end of the 19th century gestures had ceased to exist for the western bourgeoisie.
---Agamben, The Man Without Content.

The self-revealing gestures of the soul.
--Kenneth Clark commenting on Leonardo's 'Last Supper'

There are some gestures that appear to be highly stylized-the 'mudras' in Hinduism/Buddhism, the attestation of divine unity in Islam and so on. There are others which are culturally specific or maybe linked with a particular vocation or the land..anyway, such a connection, if it did exist, remains largely forgotten in the mists of time...

[aside: the Greek 'Moutza' seems quite similar to the Punjabi 'lanath' and both are, perhaps, connected to shame.]

Traditional civilisations remain faithful to their decor. A Chinese interior of fifteenth century could equally date from the eighteenth...compared with China and the rest of the world, the characteristic of the West in matters of furniture and interior decoration was undoubtedly its taste for change....The beautiful was represented by the feast-day costume, often handed down from parent to child. It remained identical for centuries on end, despite the variety of national and provincial popular costumes.

At that time [1700] the world gained a new lease of life and spread everywhere its new meaning: keeping up with the times. From then on fashion in the modern sense began to influence everything. In fact, the further back in time one goes, even in Europe, one is more likely to find the still waters of ancient situations like those we have described in India, China, and Islam.

---Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism.

Is this, then, the secret of the west's success: the ability to constantly re-invent itself? Is this an indication of its boundless, restless energy, its joie de vivre or might we detect something else going on here?

The quote has the authority it does because it destroys all authority; it is picked up and isolated from its social context where it had meaning and value. It is abstracted from a living tradition, a lived experience. In a similar vein, the collector acquires things whose value has either become completely privatized (my things) or destroyed in the process of being brought into the nexus of market exchange: a mere thing amongst things. It ceases to remain something fundamental to our social world and belongs to a spiritual economy whose barest outlines we do not even fathom.

In some sense, then, the modern west can only accumulate relics from the past, can only stage the past in some spectacular display (museums). The art-objects of other cultures are , first and foremost, viewed as 'objects' in setting that has no or little relation to the web of life from whence they came; they cannot be touched or handled and they very rarely touch us. Instead, they must be displayed behind a protective screen, to be gawped at like a fetish, some lost remnant of a past that no longer informs our present or maps out the horizons of our futures. For sure, we may marvel at some technical ingenuity but on the whole, we are only moved by surface phenomenon. Our response is merely an aesthetic one.

Could there be any clearer indication of the negation of the past as a vibrantly illuminating principle for our current thoughts and actions? Instead, the past is well and truly 'killed', stuffed so that we can think of it as passed. Our unhappy consciousness may on occasion be struck by a sense of nostalgia but this quickly evaporates on coming into contact with the real world again.

This loss of tradition (call it what you may: authority, continuity, cultural transmission) is something that is not to be mourned we are told. But perhaps art can now only be a story that tells of the ending of all stories, a perpetual state of mourning is all we have to cling on to....

Modern dance always seems so clumsy, clownish-a free for all. Just do it, go with the flow, express yourself. When the most elegant of dances grow out of highly ritualised movements and one can say the same for the most passionate as well-Flamenco. Perhaps we need to think of creativity in other ways now...

~~~

Gosh, re-reading this makes me sound rather conservative and highly opinionated! Er...don't even start reader!

Strange, when you really don't care much for authority, when you think that much of what passes as 'continuity' is really stagnation or a desperate kind of boredom. And isn't it true that what is said here flies in the face of a lot of the 'open' , 'blue' and 'broken circle' posts?

Certainly you still think that the 'staging' of the past (for political and cultural uses) is one part of modernity-but it's only one part, and evidently not a central feature. To say "can only accumulate.." is bordering on the polemical.

But what about the gestures? Cut to the chase, Watson.

No, the world is till the world, and simple gestures are still unmiraculously understood by most. The fundamental things still apply as time goes by. A sigh is still a sigh. There is no failing of language or words, there are still as many (good) storytellers as there have always been; I wave, you wave back; I say something, you blush. I have to make a sign to show I've no more soul to reveal to you, and you're still a clown. Which gesture, jester?

For Herr dougal

T was quite happy that the tablighis had finally come to his office to try and convert him away from his evil shia ways. At least now he can't complain that he's being left out!

Cracked me up, to be honest.

Now, dear dougal, art thou a Christian yet? At least the Christmas cakes would be something to look forward to, no? C of E, old bean? What do you say? It's either that or back to Judaism?

freedom

Mullah Chomsky: the other day I overheard someone say that the great thing about Chomsky was that it's almost impossible to disagree with him. My point exactly! Isn't there something that verges on the polemical in that style of thought-or is the problem that we're looking for black and white answers, clear cut distinctions?

After all these tens of thousands of years we're still hung up on what separates one person from another: race, religion, gender, class...

freedom: there is a freedom that is held in common and a freedom to be quiet, alone, without a name..

not the best song on the soundtrack ("with smiles and smiles" and "a falling down" are wonderful, but still...)

~~~

and now, dear reader(s), you have a choice of
Sen on freedom...

or

.

the silence within. the silence without.

'Feeling himself unable to go forward, he must destroy the accumulations in which he has recognized himself and come to put his trust in the possibilities of the unknown'.

what is 'recognizing' (oneself or another) then? is it not a kind of affinity for silence, a search for a truer, more essential character?

the white space has its own density, its own sense of light, time. is neither full or empty, beginning or end. distinctions! the white, like the black, that passes beyond the thing. how to stand outside of oneself (ex-stasis) whilst within? to be and not be (which is neither thought, nor action)

'light from without would slowly reveal the light within...the white as a denser substance-some ghostly reminder of another place in which Rothko once said he could breathe and stretch his arms'.

andree, we were already ghosts

When first things first didn't hold...

There was a net. Andree's black net. It would keep us afloat, was full of wondrous, brilliant stars and it was like a black sun, a heart full of mystery...


But it was destined to fall. Heavy as lead, solemn, holy like a whale. We marveled at it. Did I say "it"?



I thought I saw a face. I got lost. Saw someone, after all this time wandering in the emptiness, someone not quite real..perhaps too real...



And then a strange peace came over us as we stared north, which was our true home. Lost, together. This strange, serene light between us. Land, sea, sky were all one.


Dear andree said we will eventually disappear and our lives be nothing but a distant memory. What could I say? From the very first moment we met, andree, we were already ghosts.