Afterwards

Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness’, which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.

---James Wood.


Chronicles of the sun. Same old, same old. The summer is too long, made up of too much forgetting. Your mind becomes monk-like,reduced to one necessary thought, focusing on each segment of time. In the mirror a number of paintings are seen obliquely, in a row. In real life you fail to see this, the mirror catching an angle of vision that escapes us for most of the time. 

You open a book and the sun is there, there on the pages before your eyes:


'The summer was too long.
Lay now thy shadow over the sundials,..'

---Rilke.

The faint, blue hour of early morning, your head full of many thoughts, some sad, some profound,, carried over from the night, but as the light clears and the hours strike, all evaporates. Afterwards, you wonder to yourself, what was that but a smudge of understanding. And now the day will play out with all that is half-remembered.