The long and winding road

Let’s get the photos out of the way first. This morning’s view of my desk won the toss against yesterday’s lunch. I haven’t posted a food-related photo in a while and I had planned to feature the Sunday meal since it was pretty fine. But voilà – in terms of the  relative importance of both in my life at the moment, the long and winding journey is mostly the one illustrated by the present state of my desk. But to give credit where it’s due: lunch consisted of  lamb’s salad, called mâche over here, served with a Middle-Eastern fried bread called mlaoui, followed by the provençal version of menudo – i.e. flavored with garlic, tomato, fresh laurel leaf and dried orange peel. What the photo would not illustrate is the presence of  invisible but highly opinionated others,  both in my visual field and as voice-overs during the live conversation at the table. The fact that some of those others are fictional characters only diminishes their importance for those who don’t understand (or are afraid of) the mechanics of ‘make-believe’.

Which brings me back to the desk. On which, draft-wise, I’m not so much at risk of deleting the wrong one as of losing my way in the trail of versions, variations, false starts (but with a promising premise) and promising scenes marred by maudlin or overblown writing. Not to mention the fact that the only current, up-to-date draft is presently in my head.

Still reading Erdrich, interspersed with Neruda. Starting to understand what it is about her world that intimidated me so, outside of her tremendous talent. Since I’m rarely envious of other people’s talent, I think my main problem was that she’s expressed so well so many of the things I’ve experienced that I felt there was no point in my expressing them too. But as someone once said I would, I’m getting over it. In a good way.

By  way of disambiguation, as wikipedia likes to say:  when I wrote down the title to this post, the reference for me was to The Odyssey and to another author’s name for a character, not to the Beatles song (nothing against the Beatles but orchestrated pop such as in that particular song? isn’t much my thing.)

Time after time after time after

When I clicked the shutter, the title that had grabbed my attention was the one on the right. It translates as: I want to kill myself but I don’t have the time. Have to agree: it’s a waste of perfectly good time – a limited resource, as we all know.   This may not sound like the cheeriest of thoughts and yet at some point in my early thirties, it did wonders for my morale. One of those God-Speaks-to-Moses moments when the sky opens by a smidge and The Voice whispers: “not to worry, kid; no need to figure out the best way to kill yourself,  I promise you you’ll die.” The kid answers: “You swear it?” The Voice answers: “On your life.” I found the thought profoundly reassuring, since it meant I had one less thing to worry about. Of course, I’m older now so I tend to invite The Voice to take it’s time, really, there’s no rush.

Things are a lot better than they were back then, mainly because I don’t take myself quite so seriously anymore. Plus, I’ve discovered I function on an AC/DC -type system that alternates between ‘noirest noir’ and ‘gurgling fountain of mirth’. It’s an antiquated model with separate taps –  like those hot and cold water fixtures that don’t have a common mixing spout. In other words, feeling ‘just right’  is a purely accidental feature. A temporary event, if ever there was one. Like getting the porridge just right, or the toast exactly the way you like it (and no one needing anything, just as you’re about to take a bite.)

We shall not cease etc. Back to my story where many things have been happening while I slept. Here’s Miles, doing Time after Time – I know I’ve posted it before, in the version he did in Molde. I’ll probably post it again, so don’t worry about it. Oh and just because I hate being a quitter: I picked up The Plague of Doves again last night. Let Louise Erdrich do a better job than I’ll ever manage, so what, see if I care. I should deprive myself of Mooshum’s stories because of that? (But gad, she is good, isn’t she?)

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18:15 A brief addendum to signal yet another link on the blogroll: the MoFo – Museum of folly stuff and nonsense – was a serendipitous find when I went searching for images of Indonesian puppets. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Salutations habituelles, Messieurs, Mesdames.

Making sense

It’s the sort of dream from which you wake up feeling so incredibly incompetent, you  wonder how your hand has managed to bring a fork to your mouth all these years. Incompetent as in: but everybody knows that! – everybody meaning everybody except said incompetent. Never one to be fazed by dreams, I Ching comes up all sevens – in other words, with  hexagram 1. All creative, all the time, supreme success through perseverance, etc.

From which I gather the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes of the sublime and the ludicorous (made up word, I know); the truth is probably in some simple procedure I was supposed to have mastered in grade school, but didn’t. Saturday, November 7th 2009. Another attempt at making sense out of the simple things in life. They’re all simple; it’s the assembly that’s tricky. If you could read all my scribblings, you’d see what I mean.

Collages: take three thousand, two hundred and seventy-eight.

Photo: a side view of the médiathèque.