Mimesis

The depiction of reality. Not unlike what we're faced with, what seems to be actually happening in documented footage right in front of our face, and the various asides attempting to place something in a historical perspective. Dudes at that Swiss accelerator claim they've found something, a neutrino, that travels faster than the speed of light. You realize what that says, the dilemma you might find yourself in, everything you've assumed since 1905 called into question. Bent light, Venus transiting the sun. Something I read recently, unrelated, about the way light refracts. There's that issue, too, about the way charge can change, across vast distances instantaneously. Let that go, I haven't read enough, I'm in the dark, when it comes to particle physics. Debrief me. I need to be doing yard-work and I find myself in a tangle of self-doubt. If nothing therefor something. A chess move, deep into endgame, where everything comes to bear. 42 bottles of beer on the wall, 42 bottles of beer. We're clear on this, right? the way meaning is created? Happenstance, and the fact that your nose re-curves or you walk a certain way. I'm not a judge, but I have opinions, a product of merely surviving. Just saying. The notion of being unique. A red herring. No way you could be. Just another cog in the great wheel as it grinds ever forward. It's late. Fucking bugs are driving me crazy. I'd accept anyone's description of reality. Mostly mine doesn't work. We made progress on the Emily Project, I think we see this in a similar way. Close enough, from my point of view. I must have gotten up in the night, but there's no record of it; usually I leave a note, to remind myself of a dream. Wait, there is something, an art book on the table, Matisse, opened to that first study for La Danse. A painting that was lost for sixty years. Matisse, among other things, was a master at blurring the line between finished and unfinished. Above all, he was a painter who understood the color blue. I remember something now, not so much a dream as a single parting image, a floating figure from a Rockwell Kent mural that had also remained hidden for many years. A fellow stagehand and I had disconnected the broken mechanism that had once opened and closed folding panels in front of a large movie screen. This was on Cape Cod, and an old lady, a patron of the theater where we worked, had said she remembered the mural that was painted on the folding panels as being very beautiful. We believed in beauty, then, and determined to open the damned thing. Kent is an interesting guy, a pacifist who sat out one of the wars in Greenland and understood blue almost as well as Matisse. After we had disabled the control mechanism, we pulled the panels open by hand, it wasn't even difficult, after we had greased the top and bottom tracks. It was and is a stunning piece of work, floating, hintingly sexual figures over a barren landscape. I see the thought-line now, what went on in my brain. We loaded the truck and D took the last show to Kent State, Kent lodged in my mind, and I remembered that mural and made a connection with the dancing figures that Matisse was using to depict what it was like to be alive. He was 62 when he painted that first study. It blows me away, takes me completely out of myself. It is finished, I would argue, because there is nothing more to be done. It was a commission, to fit a particular place in Philidelphia, and he worked on it for three years. There are three versions extant, but that first one, for me, is like the Cello Suites of painting. That's why the book was out, I remember now, and I left it out and open as a message to myself. Noted. I've taken to a life of solitude and quiet. It took a few years, but as B says, you're weaned to it. Everything else falls away. Not that I would deny --- a warm body under the light blanket of early fall, would be a comforting situation: but that I'm fine, alone. Thought I'd try a dash there, channeling Emily. It's becoming easier for me to understand the odd punctuation and capitalization as I read certain poems for yet another time. By my standards Emily is completely modern. My only desire, in that regard, is that we take care of the words. Not unlike something that was mentioned earlier, I forget what, something. I stick my head outside the door, it might be raining; it is, so I duck back to the sofa, reread some Benjamin. Life is such a joke. Being self-aware is a mixed blessing, what you think you remember. I know, of course there are arguments, what we perceive as real. Still, walking in that slipstream, I'm sure something is happening.