Voyager

Bernadette used to joke that I'd never come out and actually claim depression, always preferring my inner weather to simply map itself onto the world. There's a certain slant of light, & etc. McCarthy's The Road turns out to be a pretty accurate mental map of what that inner weather looks like, all dirty radioactive snow, grey clouds, and iron-colored breakers rolling in off the Gulf of Mexico. The landscape's looked that way for so long that I sometimes forget there's an outside. Then something good happens (sunset in Garibaldi Park; a McCarthy sentence; an unusually attentive Toronto audience) and the world shivers at its edges.

(Cohen's crack that lets the light in)

What would it take to make you happy?, asked one of the staff the other day, genuinely puzzled.

Diminished expectations, I guess, though total lack of expectations smells like cynicism to me. I suppose creative productivity (business ownership; gallery managing; elevation gaining; stock tracking) is a fundamental gut-level response to depression. Evidence of oneself. Or, at the very least, fuel for projects to gain enough velocity to climb out of the emotional gravity well surrounding Planet Christopher and start their journey someplace new.

Michelina is a Voyager spacecraft. The photographs are, too. Ditto the "art criticism."

"The Voyagers have enough electrical power and thruster fuel to operate at least until 2020. By that time, Voyager 1 will be 12.4 billion miles (19.9 billion KM) from the Sun and Voyager 2 will be 10.5 billion miles (16.9 billion KM) away. Eventually, the Voyagers will pass other stars. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will drift within 1.6 light years (9.3 trillion miles) of AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis. In some 296,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass 4.3 light years (25 trillion miles) from Sirius, the brightest star in the sky . The Voyagers are destined—perhaps eternally—to wander the Milky Way."
- posted by cjb @ 9:51 PM