Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.
Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself?
How wonderful it would be to meet an angel, I mused, but then I immediately realised I already had. Not an archangel like Saint Michael, but my human angel from Detroit, wearing an overcoat and no hat, with lank brown hair and eyes the coler of water.
Time to travel, to acquiesce to fate.
Friendship makes thieves of us all.
Without realizing it, I had said goodbye to traditional employment. I never punched a clock again. I made my own time and my own money.
May the world’s small things fill her with delight.
The thing is, it’s not uncool to worry about people who seem like they’re going on the wrong path. There’s nothing cool about being self-destructive.
Spanish pilgrims travel on Camino de Santiago from monastery to monastery, collecting small medals to attach to their rosary as proof of their steps. I have stacks of Polaroids, each marking my own, that I sometimes spread out like tarots or baseball cards of an imagined celestial team.
My penance for barely being present in the world, not the world between the pages of books, or the layered atmosphere of my own mind, but the world that is real to others.
Question everything.
Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book.
You know, the dreams you had for me weren’t my dreams,” he said. “Maybe those dreamsare meant for you.
Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.
Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. – This is how I live, I am thinking.
Behind her smile I could see o many other things, a catastrophic sadness. I had assisted to the selfless guardians of the unfortunate children who suffered infinite loss, their family, their homes, and nature as they had known and trusted.
Like Jean Genet, Robert was a terrible thief. Genet was caught and imprisoned for stealing rare volumes of Proust and rolls of silk from a shirt maker. Aesthetic thieves. I imagined his sense of horror and triumph as bits of Blake swirled into the sewers of New York City.
All doors are open to the believer. It is the lesson of the Samaritan woman at the well.
More like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.
My Morocco. I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing – of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily.