Wet grey quiet morning, red and yellow mixed with green in the gutter leaves. Cool blue western sky, the last traces of last night's storm rolled up like a folding convertible roof. Warm in my long brown winter coat, the comfortable one with the turned-up corduroy-lined collar and the worn brass buttons. Sunlight and shadow on wet black pavement, on the VPD cruisers and yellow crime tape strung around the targeted shooting/traffic fatality just east of Kingsgate Mall.

"The everyday." John Latta:

The

Mind brushes off
What it cannot
Hold, nor hold

Itself against, rebuffs
Opacity and indigence
And hatred alike. . . .

Neaera's quick intelligence works like lightning; she gestures with her hands and shining eyes. It continuously surprises me how fast she names her feelings. Most of the time I don't really know what I'm feeling, or am only really conscious of feeling after-the-fact. "I've been thinking..." The world apprehended as a blizzard of discrete details. Schizophrenia: faces leering from trees and boxes and highway dividers. "Ghosts." No background, everything (even "fallen" or '"abject" things) stridently insisting on its own distinctive presence. Lookit me!

"Sometimes I think that this whole thing, this whole business of a world that keeps waking itself up and bothering to go on every day, is necessary only as a manifestation of the intolerable. The intolerable is like H.G. Wells's invisible man, it has to put on clothes in order to be seen. So it dresses itself up in a world. Possibly it looks in a mirror but my imagination doesn't go that far." (Russell Hoban's William G.).

L. and I go walking. L. talks fast into her mobile, squares her shoulders, effortlessly steps into her public persona, the one that parses and constructs narratives for a living. Her loud clipped diction expresses nothing but certainty and confidence, qualities I guess I possess too, but only after-the-fact. I don't know what I'm thinking at any given moment, or what debris might inexplicably bob up from the "drowning machine"'s turbulent recirculation. An inner tube, a smashed kayak, sticks and leaves, a waterlogged canoeist's corpse. But the water's surface looks deceptively calm.
- posted by cjb @ 10:39 AM