Dappled Light

They mowed the verges on Mackletree today, with a pickup load of prisoners to pick up trash, and it is a thing of beauty. No matter which way I come and go, for the next week, it'll be lovely. The two miles or so that Mackletree runs through the State Forest is one of the most beautiful roads I've ever seen. Rarely ANY traffic, and I often stop, sit on the tail-gate, and roll a smoke. Did some prep work for the main gallery change-over, scrounged some more cardboard, bought three different kinds of tape, to conduct my tape experiments. In the afternoon the decorators for some event tomorrow night came in, to set up tables and decorate. I had to get them a few things, then retreated to my office, anabasis (a good book by Zenophon of that title) is a habit of mine, to escape the confusion. I wrote a book titled that too, as I think about it. I like it, I reread it recently, because a reader was rereading it and commented in a message. The publisher left out a section, I remember agreeing to that, but I don't remember what section, I must have a manuscript copy of it somewhere. The book is beautifully letter-pressed, a handsome thing, but I was under the influence of Pound then, and I tended toward the opaque as being somehow meaningful. The last decade, I've tried to be clear. It's at least as difficult as fiction, what you need to include, what you need to leave out. Strikes a nerve, is the best way I can say it, like a tap on your elbow. The funny bone. Even the earliest of the Velazquez paintings are dynamite, 1618, that old lady poaching eggs. Bodegones they were called, kitchen scenes. So real it infringes on our sense of reality. Everything just so, defying paint's inability to actually speak. Attention to detail. Something Chuck Close learned from Sargent, the gestural quality a single loaded brush-stroke adds to the trail of a gown. Once you start looking at things with a magnifying glass, you are well and truly gone. I keep one on my desk at home, one in my backpack, and one in the center drawer of my desk at work, and I use them all everyday, to look at something. The world is theater, over the top. Astra was explaining her deportation, Barb sat with me at lunch, said that John would be in, after work, and I agreed to go over for a beer. Which I did. John stood us to a couple of Irish whiskeys, we both have cheap tastes, Paddy, rot gut, in a field now populated by a field of designer drugs, and he told a great story about finding a WW1 hand grenade. Life doesn't get any better than this.