grey zero

'I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid.'

Miles above the grey clouds are swirling around with a ferocity barely imaginable. Down here below all that is translated into a dense and rich fog that settles and will not clear, even by mid-morning, such that a gentle grey blanket covers us, making us invisible and unknown to one another.

Your bones are cold but three cups of hot lemon and honey keep you going. Today you imagine inhabiting some long sentences, washing over you, rather than focusing on words that get stuck in your throat.

One wonders how this country might have developed had it not swerved towards the Arabs and had it not been drawn to the frontier, the tribal belt. What softness and gentleness is lost when all we think of is war and survival?

Books to look out for next year: a biography of Walser and a translation of the love sonnets of Louise Labe (NYRB).

Your throat has packed in, your strength collapsed; your Ray Bans sit idly, upturned on the desk next to a small and delicate bottle of "dollar" black ink and a strip of paracetamol, punctured and holed-out. The winter mark sheet and a USB (on which there is an image of a gentle reader) rest on Hazlitt. Mekas's Walden, Glenn Gould's Idea of North, bottled water "with added zinc".  There is a kind of world down here, tainted but intact. Blue matches strike to light the world red for a second. 

Miles above the grey clouds are swirling around...