Where I've been

July 12

Tonight I’ve been reading on the bed, golden orange ocean layers, rain mist glowing in; tea and chocolate. The reading has been successful: the sentences were improbable, lucky events in the universe, singularities, wellings-up into a present, the crests of a rush of time; more than that: owl-glassing to other headfuls of reading, the mind-space of other books visible down the big glasses, skimming like film unreeling down the side-caverns of looking: these glances seem to catch the infinite, the death desire of the hop between worlds, a pleasure promise fulfilled and felt but outside of knowing; nameless happiness; a reach of mind to which everything is present, every soul knowable in slow, private silence. There is, too, the gesture of will’s internalizing the means of this pleasure, shaping the props that support the visions, reasoning, forming the triggers, creating the conditions for lucky accidents: a room of one’s own, mine preferably open, rest, jobs done, no plans, reliable privacy, tea, book, paper and pen, no thematized readiness or strict course of action, just being somehow already guided. And where it goes: this self-space arena of wall imagery bending, motion spreads of pink and white Korean letters on bounded nightscapes unfolding, letter chains dealphabetizing in radiophonic scatter plots, fine mesh dotscapes of simple sound, where friends really meet friends, faceless, the mind knowing itself in action, visible in the color-banded trace trail of its movement.

July 17

I am thinking about the purity of the lucky accident unamplified, allowed to burst brightly and die, a luminous moment of connection left alone, not used or applied or extended or transferred; unrepresented, unresearched, unexcavated; grasped once in inarticulate fullness and never again approached in confused half measures, never wrongly remembered in insatiable desire, never pictured as an emissary from some greater kingdom, never discounted in future desperate flashing groping for the most distant evidence, the barest mention or crudest mock-up in decaying matter; you never have to mention it to people who wouldn’t understand, or to someone who would too enthusiastically assent; no merchandise bears its mark; there is no repetition of its circumstances. A whole science of human behavior could study the desperation of recall, all the false incantations, all the rituals drained dry, the objects of their prayer never again to come to presence, all the collectors of scraps, the hoarders hoping their fragments might be made whole in some future constellation shining out of the trash; all the dream visions from one’s past, every uncomprehending fantasy of absorption, every failure to grasp the thing whole, every object that radiated some inaccessible world, every walled-off source of knowledge, every picture of meaning and presence elsewhere, every gesture of faith in coherence, sun-shaped sense; the crass worship of the artifacts of this trust, the discarded outer forms of the thing that flees; the sadness of being older and trying to pull the same trigger, trying to make real the object of some impossible fantasy (actually falling asleep now