fiction 

1.17.20

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If I write today it may be a list of facts.

 

I noticed I’ve been letting others things envelop me slowly. Writing today is to stoke the embers of my ability to perceive. The things recently that I “think” or “understand” and “come to see” aren't symbolic, denotative or analytical, but slow-moving and geological- more becoming ingrained in my cells than etched at the front of my mind. I wish I had some rose pastels to color with, to unfold the hue out onto the hotel notepads in pools. 

 

Something that I kind of felt recently is that the making of a culture is belief in the validity of one’s own stories, and the elaboration and reiteration of stories across media. That’s why I was so wounded that all of the many photos of xxxx failed to develop. I wanted to be able to see us in fine-grained, high-definition, and to hold us in my hand.

the way we were in the mirror.

to be able to find new meaning in the gestures of the way we are right now,

like the way the behavior of this mythologized Greek woman Iris comes to mean aerial speed and ethereality, by the reiteration of these traits of her in the telling, 

in the etching in marble, 

in the remembering 

that Iris ran barefooted 

along the rainbow in this way.

 

But it’s also okay to not repeatedly write things down if you know that they exist in your mind. I heard about someone who was diagnosed with Alzheimers and knew that he was going to begin forgetting soon, so he would repeatedly write his son’s name on notecards.

 

I want to write the more personal things that I treasure about him, but I feel intuitively a little mystic-quiet about it, like saying them is just not the thing. 

 

In chemistry, a reaction can only happen if it’s spontaneous, and the only way that a reaction can be spontaneous is if it increases the entropy of the universe. So that’s rather bleak. Maybe I feel that writing about the way I feel about him wouldn’t grow love but simply accelerate the denotization of our attraction, and if a relationship is a process of knowing, there is still more of this flower to be opened as long as it is yet undefined.

 

The room is posh, with a bright blue bag with tea from Fortnam & Mason, and squares of Turkish delight made with pistachios, dates, and rose petals. 

 

We took personality tests on my laptop; I am an INF(J/P) and he is an (I/E)STP. I like extroverts. I like floating around with them and sort of vicariously socializing. Without extroverts around me, the years of my life would probably float away as I quietly formed deep emotional connections with soap opera characters.

 

Since I heard that Orwell lionized coal workers as the “grimy caryatids” of industrialism, I’ve been a bit put off the word caryatid, I think, as I try to assess if these buzzy green shoots belong to sub-surface tulip bulbs, and I didn’t realize it had been commonly literarized from architectural theory. xxxx feels the shoots may be due to global warming, and that we may all die. He sometimes expresses mild disdain for things as part of a subtle character-comedy, but there is often a kernel of truth. The tulips, and the idea of endless summer, do seem symptomatic of the way some aspects of the damage of climate change are being manifest like a dumb animal that smiles at everything because it has a diminished consciousness. Really the most vicariously painful form of behavioral symptom of an injury that an individual could witness. Irradiated mutation.

 

I write at the hotel and answer an occasional Slack message, and take breaks to walk around at length. There is a harpist playing today. My intuitive nature is sometimes polar to xxxx’s analytical nature; he says sometimes it’s like you don’t believe in science. 

 

We have a similar sense of beauty; maybe there was a time when I thought that logic and beauty were antithetical, but there is proof otherwise in classical Greek art, and the harp music. Mozart on harpsichord. 

 

Some but not all facets of love can be defined as chemistry. 

 

We both have ambient glamour

and add flair to scenarios

like a Dubai chef tossing gold dust

across a tray of amuse bouches.

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