the last word

Gaddis...the last days. The mad scramble to make sense of it all, to gain a semblance of coherence. Hands and words flying in different directions. Entropy: the gradual winding down of the universe/body/mind. Learn to breathe-like a newborn, like a Buddhist. 

Accumulate, try and put into order all that has always escaped definition, system. Delete, select, assess, distinguish, judge. Weed out all that isn't necessary, try and whittle it down to a few essential truths. Looking back, as if you were dead already. The ticket stubs, the letters with their frayed edges, notes written in ink, journal articles on obscure topics, copies of the NYRB kept in large plastic boxes, like incubators. 

Is there a single gesture, a simple word, that encapsulates what we are? Our need for a starting point, a name or a number that isn't a name or number.

'Everything undertaken for its own sake is worthwhile'

Cut the chord, like a Gnostic reluctant to venture out. 

Stay inside, live within yourself. 'Short distances, definite places.' All that happens has already happened. 

'The knowledge-and ignorance-of generations is in the hands...a momentary gesture's capacity to contain the timelessness of myth...He photographed all sleepers as if they were the beloved.'
---G. Dyer.

Gedney, in the final hours, the same street photographed a thousand times, making it semi-permanent.What do you remember, which street? Retreat, avoid all touch, out of sight...the inner street...He looks around, and notes that nothing is completed (maybe nothing ever can be). The perfect book is a book of quotes (living (,) in other words). The task: to find the true image, to remember the two or three images that mattered. 

The last words (how many?). The last seven images. Things close at hand. The photos show 'the clutter of his desk, the things he used on a daily basis (paper clips, brushes, stamps, pencils), the things he used for seeing: magnifying glass. spectacles...The last frame is a close-up of his art books..packed tightly on a shelf.'

~~~

Swans in reality are a lot larger than you'd imagined. You observe with great equanimity the ripples fluttering on the surface of the pond. A swan tries to straighten up and unfold itself at the same time. Because this sudden movement comes against a backdrop of perfect silence it seems timeless, almost mythical. You lie down and look up through the branches of the tree to a crystal clear sky. The tree becomes less real, more like a painting. The great swathes of clouds up above move silently together and interlock, as if in a dance, blotting out the blue. There is some great law-like movement here you're witnessing and it is pleasing to think that this process is ageless, objective, beyond any subjective impressions.

An old man sits on a bench away from it all and gazes with such an intensity at the ripples and calmness of the surrounding that he probably forgets himself and where he is. Has he always lived like this, part of him always with the statue's aloofness and detachment or has it only come to him now? I turn to him, my father, my Jew. It is time to leave.