Refuge

Refuge continues to be taken in the imagination. Revive, forget. Real-time encounters and digital declarations. The words in which I might have once detailed them have fled abruptly, as has the need to do so. The mind, not the page, contains all now. It flicks through at random these deposits of memory constantly looking for something … perhaps a reason for why I am as I am, why things are as they are. Is there a pattern? A puzzle to solve?

How participatory does one need to be in the act of life? Does chance, for example, need to be nudged?

Are some just meant to live in the shade?

Picture credit: Softening Shades of Twilight, 1993, Eyvind Earle (source: WikiArt)

From journal, October 2023.

THE END

Pain

The advance, the retreat of pain. Like the sea. Rough, calm. Like a mountain. Sharp, numb. Or gone, vanished. Its existence questioned.

Picture credit: A Mountain, 1909, Wassily Kandinsky (source: WikiArt).

From journal, September 2023.

Hunt and Gather

Crave the past, resent the present, dread the future. Caught in a time warp, frightened of letting go. Alert, tense, a little dazed. On the lookout for pain. In weariness – tension and tiredness – hope for some release, for some peace in solitude. But the outside – the dead materialistic world – intrudes, breaks in, discards routine and inserts convenience. A human worker ant or bee will pick and pack and deliver goods to me since I cannot now hunt and gather.

Picture credit: Supermarket, 1997, Tetsuya Ishida (source: WikiArt).

Written September 2023.

A Patch of Sky

Pain, mild, moderate or severe, has a curious way of blotting out thoughts, actions, past or present; of displacing information, the essential, the researched, the trivial; of blurring recollections, the new, the aged; of fogging the brain; of revealing traits usually self-contained. It lets in however dark fears and vague surmises; reduces the body to a malfunctioning machine; and turns the outside into an even more scary and 'utterly alien place.' All that remains is a patch of sky framed by four windows.

Picture credit: Sky Study, c. 1869, Edgar Degas (source: WikiArt)

Quote from The Rings of Saturn (I) by W. G. Sebald.

From journal, September 2023.