Nothing Much

Neil and I were talking, nothing important, cell phones or something, the way anyone, at any given time, communicated. We both used to write letters, for god's sake, in response to letters received. A matter of course. Now you just text the person standing next to you, it's easier than actually talking. Everything confuses me, I can no longer answer the phone, I have trouble with simple electrical appliances, I can't walk and chew gum at the same time. English as a first language is hard enough. Throw me a Spanish curve or a French tickler and I'm out of the game. Like I never understood the rules. They can do that? Play with your head, never offer any explanation? I thought they had to stay behind the line. Games are not real life. I thought we knew that. Nothing, it seems, really matters. I argue we could discuss it, all the live long day, and nothing, still, would be there. You could argue I'm missing the point. Probably be correct, but I see what I see. I'm on my way to bed and something stands out, a clear and obvious something, maybe just something I imagine, but something. The answer is embedded in the question. This morning, over coffee, Neil said he'd not had such a long convoluted conversation in years as the one we had last night. We both slept in, because of the lovely rain. It stopped and dried out enough for him to leave before lunch. My reading ranges over the rest of the day, pursuing modernism. Vienna produced two of the most powerful modern movements: psychoanalysis and atonal music. Zoned out, staring at the walls of green, after all this rain, I exercise the power to stop thinking, take an early drink out on the back porch, roll a cig, close my eyes, enjoy the warm breeze. Summer mufti, light-weight cotton pants, barefoot, a sleeveless and neckless tee-shirt. Then another round of Venn Diagrams, the topology of closed spaces. An hour considering the calculus of sentences. A short walk, though I know I will suffer an attack of ticks, and find enough morels to take me into the noumenal realm. Picasso implied, talking about Cezanne, that the essence of modernism lies in its break with nature. I have to think about that for a while, considering translation. There's a concentrated unity, that ignores an absolute depiction of the natural world, I think is what he was saying. Neil is more into Emerson, as I am into Thoreau. Of course. Read some Kafka, in the interest of modernism, and his "baffled transcendence". I never read Kafka late at night, nor most of the French philosophers. Three of Wittgenstein's brothers committed suicide. The huge change, I noticed reading him today, is the shift from formal language (written in the trenches, "Tractatus") to ordinary language in everything else he wrote. Severe clear, before the next rains, tonight, and the soft leaves are dancing in the wind. Dapples the light and confuses my line of thought. It's beautiful. Illuminates hidden corners, and the edges are fractal, Brownian, the way they blur. Something I might make up, if I invented events. Collateral damage.