over there with your rod & cone shaped hat ¬¬
I was speaking to a woman last night ¬¬ she spoke about being interested in the unseen ¬¬ about wanting to speak from the unseen ¬¬ to be unseen ¬¬ or to be unseen while speaking ¬¬ she meant speaking in performance, a performance ¬¬ and I said I’m a long way away from performance ¬¬ that’s what I meant she said me too ¬¬ and I don’t think we were talking about the same thing or in the same way ¬¬
part of it is that she’s an older woman ¬¬ that’s how she phrased it I’m an older woman ¬¬ but she’s only a little older than me ¬¬ it’s a measure of what she was talking about i guess that i don’t define myself as an older man ¬¬ but that’s not the main point ¬¬ she was talking about talking from an unseen place ¬¬ and i wondered if there was something lurking behind that ¬¬ about the unseen being a better or more essential place ¬¬ whatever that means ¬¬
but then you or another woman ¬¬ not an older woman ¬¬ i guess i could say a younger woman ¬¬ yes this younger woman ¬¬ (old young these are relative terms not absolutes) ¬¬ mentioned lighthouses & their sweep their loom ¬¬ and I thought of the glim and the spark across the water ** ¬¬ and i addressed her directly ¬¬ well, you and her and Medusa ¬¬ (or perhaps you are just snakes trying to distract me, to snare me) ¬¬
you make me think of mud ¬¬ (of course) ¬¬ and how mud prevents you seeing how it scatters light ¬¬ unlike a solution which combines and makes thing clear ¬¬ which must be what we mean when we say we’ve solved it ¬¬ it’s clear now ¬¬
but she ¬¬ the older woman ¬¬ she ¬¬ she said w b sebold ¬¬
and i got all weak at the knees because of course ¬¬ tho there’s no reason you should know this, unless you’d been reading me closely ¬¬ or listening acutely ¬¬ w b sebold & all that trauma ¬¬ all that faffing about the norfolk coast on the ¬¬ mud flats ¬¬ writing essays meditating on german complicity and worrying about his headaches ¬¬ I don’t know if he did worry but she ¬¬ the older woman ¬¬ she told me his car accident may have been the result of an anueurism so in a fit of sebold-like fictionalising in an attempt to make things clear by obscuring them I imagined something he may have done ¬¬ that ¬¬ that is sebold and all that implies ¬¬ that always gets me ¬¬ and too this always ongoing subjunctive shift that’s clear as ¬¬ mud ¬¬
and yes it is an ongoing stream of consciousness ¬¬ except that implies there’re banks and directions and some sort of incline or de-cline dee-cline not du-cline> ¬¬
it’s not a stream but as you implied a wave ¬¬ the wave that takes you down ¬¬ draws you to neptune / poseidon since you were talking about odysseus ¬¬ and remember this : odysseus is linked to lamentation to hatred ¬¬ i guess because (a) he was hateful (because tricky) ¬¬ and (b) hated by the gods (made to wander about for so many years) ¬¬ but the thing is this older woman ¬¬ and remember that any woman might be medusa ¬¬ she wanted to talk about sebold and the dark ¬¬ and I told her i’m a long way from performance ¬¬ sebold and odysseus and medusa and mud and lighthouses ¬¬
** On the horizons of the sea—as we see them from the decks of a ship or from the beach—things loom from the glim. For a moment in the glim’s shimmering light and haze we see beyond the horizon, beyond the ordinary lights of our vision. Sailors … are the philosophers of ‘looming’. They tell us how sometimes the looming is distorted. Ships beyond the horizon appear upside-down, skewed on their masts or angled as if they were sinking. But sometimes a whole coastal landscape beyond the horizon is crystal clear, hung in the sky above the sea.
—Greg Dening ‘Ways of Seeing’ Readings/Writings 1998
