black sun

But how did it begin?

With fragments of sentences, books half read, people half imagined, which is to say: with reflections and traces, and memories and a chaste heart. To travel, and leave everything behind, to grow in lightness (Calvino), only to realize that you haven't moved an inch, as in all the best traveling. 

At Penarth pier, as a young boy, you look down through the planks to the sea; the movement of the world, the slow rocking against the fragile creation of human hands. Old people shuffle past you, from another world, death on their purple lips. It seems like this moment is forever: memory is the stillness of the soul in the world. Snow clears, the frost bites back from the windowpanes, seasons turn and wisdom escapes you. This series of attachments hidden, like an underground stream, the fabric of our lives woven from far too many various threads to have any coherence.

'In the evenings especially, when the candles have been lit, a hypochondriac sadness, without object, like a blood-red tone over everything.'

"Have you had your mid-life crisis yet," a friend asked.

No, not yet. Why, what does it look like, and what colour is it? 

A crisis requires too much energy, but if it comes then it will come. May the Lord give us strength [he says, quickly looking for his religious hat]. 

Yesterday at __'s birthday party. A room of poets and writers and artists. Suicide contemplated to end the boredom. Except quiche and cinnamon rolls served by old Emmanuel kept these thoughts at bay. Even little r was quiet, saw through the fakery, and busied herself by stuffing her mouth with potato chips with great sense of purpose, a renewed sense of life's charms.