The Reformation interior

"...the 17th-century Dutch painter of church interiors and perhaps the first purely architectural artist. He created beautifully complex spaces out of Reformation interiors..."

The frontier has been drawn in, the wilderness is everywhere. Your hands broke, the words slipping through them. If I could remember, I'd feel less cold. The human soul in November awaits the first light, forgiveness. You have a sense that there's another room in this room. 

Gagarin, at the frontier: "there ain't no God here". And when he got home?

~~~

'at last no longer longing
in a flowering of lights
[here]
low in the historical dark they disappear into.

...

desire/desire's
inside track.'

---Alan Shapiro

There was a time, there was a time when man was nothing-do you remember? Nameless, sort of. And that time is like now. But for a while we are like nothing, survivors from a golden state, the way golden pollen is older than the mountains (JB). 

Each love, each pleasure is, it seems, also a memory of something else, some older time. There is a kind of "Platonic" remembering which stretches beyond experience (as narrowly construed). But if so much is true, then something of the future, too, is with us already. It is incredible that so much of the world could find its way into such a small space. 

Somewhere, off the central line, there is a tree, a house, a room crammed to the ceiling with books, mostly unread or unfinished. There's something of my life still there. 

Now that Ariel Sharon is dead one thinks: the stark interior, if projected outwards, makes a wilderness of everything.