The water in the River has been ferocious,
the surface shifting with a new madness.
The first snows of the season
have fallen and melted away.
More rain, more snow,
and the River broadens like a god,
full, drunk from the heavens' libations.
For what did the sky pray,
that so much rain and snow
should plunge into the water to disappear?

The familiar, indecipherable string of words again this morning, like every morning. Johannes spoke in a way few people do -- the words themselves had been disconnected from the meanings we tend to attach to them, for the most part, and "Did you check the mailbox" may come out of the nowhere, while "is you ginger hair new" has no obvious correspondence to reality. But that is irrelevant.

Johannes smiled when he spoke, and one could tell more from his expression and hand gestures than the everyday phrases or unexpected comments where he was. He insists on this exchange, and probably enjoys it. Sometimes the words are muffled, but a smile and neutral remark in return might be enough to give the illusion of verbal conversation, which really just hangs over the more important dialogue -- the joy of human community, something about which he is eloquent.

'I wanted to tell you several things.'
'What? I'm listening.'
'It was all so long ago I wanted to say them, I forgot. You know, I sometimes ask myself, when I'm doing something completely mundane: will I remember this? Asking myself this question, I always think I will. Nine times out of ten I don't. But sometimes flashes come back unexpectedly. Maybe I'll remember what I wanted to say a decade from now.'

Wir warten auf den Bus, jeder Einzelne, denn es gibt anscheinend nichts anderes zu tun, auch wenn wir wissen, es kommt keiner. Einer zündet eine Zigarette an, als ob er glauben wollte: Es kommt immer Eine, aufgerufen von Feuer und Licht. Aber sie brennt, wie des Menschen Seele, ab.

I stepped into a river today, though it was no ordinary river; the asphalt didn't seem to move at all. But to the boy who held the tree branch (his wizard's staff, his commander's symbol of authority) and gestured to the other smaller ones, this river was the most difficult of impasses. How easily my feet glided through, how easily I reached the other side, smiling not with the thought, 'how cute!', but with the thought, 'Ah yes, I know this place well.'

Die Alte stand vor den Augen des Kindes und sah nirgendwohin. Ihre Gedanken waren nirgendwo zu finden. Das Kind schaute nach oben und sah ein seltsam aus den Augen kommendes Licht.
"Was sind die Farbe deiner Welt?" fragte das Kind. Es sprach zur Alten wie zum selbst. Die Meine- und die Deine-Welt waren beide noch rätselhaft; die erste noch jung und unklar, die zweite schon bejahrt und sibyllinisch.
"Die Farben sind wie alle anderen: unbeschreiblich schön und doch ständig veränderlich. Das was du "grün" nennst ist mir auch grün, obwohl ich es mit der anderen Hand berühre. Kannst du sehen? Du hast ja zwei Hände wie ich. Ich nehme diese Blume und spüre sie. Ich nehme die mit der anderen Hand und spüre sie immer noch. Genau so wie mit uns: was du siehst, sehe ich auch, aber mit anderen Augen. Die Augen sind's nicht, was sehen. Die sind ein Mittel und auch ein Ausdruck dafür. Es gibt wohl andere Mittel. Das Grün ist und ist nicht grün."

Distant call down the wire, distant train on the line

Friday afternoon.

I'd almost forgotten this sparsely settled area of the country. So many little ponds that come from nowhere, crooked fences that look like they should be in a painting, small white houses with sharply angled roofs that create a contrast with the dark evergreens, the reddish trees with their new-born buds. The tall grass: in this marshy landscape it falls in upon itself in places, burdened by the dew that stays the whole day. Every now and again, a solitary windmill towers in the distance above the trees. The sky is like that in England, very visibly ever-changing, at least in this season. The water shimmers, silver, sometimes a deep blue if there happens to be a patch of sky not filled with cloud; it makes the shallow water seem impenetrably deep. The hills in the distance are blueish. There are odd streams that run through the grasses and bushes like veins and disappear as they approach the hills. Some patches of grass, the kind planted in front of houses, or along the road, or in the distance where there are fewer red-stemmed bushes, the green is beginning to glow brilliantly, but not quite at its full sheen. In more populated areas one sees sheds that look like run-down or abandoned hermits' hideaways. If they were extracted from this setting and placed in the forest, they would be worth so much more to the dweller, they would provide shelter. We are in northern New Brunswick, where the stop signs say both "Stop" and "Arrêt".

Now passing through an area of birch trees: the white of the trunks makes me long for winter, but then the sharp contrast with the white and the dark and the browns wouldn't be magical in the same way. Everything has its time.
The sky is turning more blue, the clouds are thinning. But I halted my typing for five minutes to watch the shifting scenes, and the clouds have returned. And we pass through a particularly marshy area where the water almost looks black. This is place whose earthly drama is often dictated by the weather and, in particular, the sky. Now there are those sharp arrows of rain grazing the windows, like Zeus' bolts of lightning, even though they're made of water.

We'll be in Moncton, New Brunswick in ten minutes -- the main French-speaking city in New Brunswick. "Merci et au revoir": so ends announcement. Moncton is a pretty spot with a flair for the arts, even -- yet I find the wilder areas here so much more appealing. Fleet Foxes as a soundtrack suits the landscape.
The sun is shining again; this time everything is reflective from the rain.
There's much more rubbish now that we're passing through the small city. An empty, large, round building without a roof looks like a littered version of the Colosseum.
There are still mounds of dirty ice-snow here piled up in a parking lot. I thought it would have melted, but I forgot that Moncton and the surrounding areas tends to get a lot more snow.

-------

Listening to the Doves. 10:03 came on and of course, being on a train, I listen to this song in a different, more personal way. There's a rainbow that's been passing in and out of view.
We drove by a house; there were about seven children and three adults or so all waving as the train passed. I waved back, though I don't think they can see me. We are about 15 kilometres away from Rogersville, a town that has a trappist monastery. A year ago or so I heard these fine monks got into trouble with some authorities: apparently they weren't following certain regulations with regard to their treatment/care of the farm animals. Disappointing to hear. I remember when I was there I was quizzed by one of the people there about my beliefs, asked whether I was "a seeker". "I suppose so, in a way," I said. Though I think he sensed my discomfort and let me alone. I didn't need to elaborate that I was not seeking Christ. It's funny: of the lot of us that went that weekend (there were five or six of us), only one was a Christian at the time. A bunch of Non-Christians going to stay at a monastery for a weekend... It was still incredibly good for me. I got a lot of work done that weekend, without the internet, without anyone knocking on the door, with the sound of chanting in the background, with our good conversation in the evening and walk outside in the greying November. It was a kind of quiet I'd like to experience more often.
It feels funny going through this area again, not really being of this place, but having loosely tied memories, a certain familiarity and appreciation.

The water in the harbour is clearer and calmer today than it has been in the last few weeks. Sitting on the boardwalk, one can look down and see much farther than would be expected. Still, the effect resembles a cypress tree painted by Van Gogh.
An unusually large starfish, so close: and then several more appear as if from nowhere (though it's just how the eyes work), and dozens, countless tiny comb jellies with two long tentacles apiece. One even puts on an impressive light show. The predominately red light moves quickly along the radial canals, which recall the ribs of an umbrella. In the centre there is from time to time a spark of green-white.
Minutes pass. The bright one floats downward, and it becomes more difficult to trace its movements in the increasing depth.

amidst silk boxes and clay
the veins in her hand a blue echo of the thread of my shirt
next to the woman beside her she looks like a child
but feels as old as stone

Good morning, starling.

You perhaps will not bask unthinking in the sun, privy to an idyllic landscape of gazelles and grass -- or seal yourself in the ice of the north; perhaps the earth is too old, too wearied. The overwrought early-twenty-first-century sentimentality (we'll say, for instance): maybe it's nostalgia, maybe it's fantasy, maybe it's willful delusion like a breath of fresh air. A slow-motion YouTube video of an undefined African scene set to Yanni and a Sufi poem. Sincere thoughts, perhaps. It is curious, this shibbolethic birth.

Wölfe, Haare, die hohlen Männer
Alles wiederholt sich
Ständig
Motive der Woche
Prophetische Nichtigkeiten

Lists of future activities were scattered around, along with the dust from the accumulation of days. The place had not been abandoned, by either time or inhabitants; the space had undergone a dramatic change. Plans still remained plans of things to come (always of things to come) and never saw realisation, were never reigned in and brought forth -- how often we get ahead of ourselves trying to collect our thoughts while we're walking through the dust collecting at our feet.

A tree bereft of perhaps three-quarters of its foliage swayed in the breeze; perhaps its waving was a sort of call of encouragement to the people standing around, or at least a visual distraction from the wandering, staring, and the half-hearted hoping. In this scene there is no crying, although in other places that is common. In this scene there is no speaking, though one would hope to hear a word -- again, as encouragement (always of things to come). The ground beneath had long ached under the strain of contradiction, until it snapped itself in-to joint; but this unexpected adjustment brought a sudden increase of dust.

She recalled the last time she had seen dust like this. There were once streets here: once -- it all seemed so indefinite by this time. There was a house and an old attic full of long-forgotten furniture, boxes, papers and ornaments, all coated in a thick layer of grey. She ran her finger across the top of a dresser as she had seen someone do once in a film, though she had worn no white glove. The trace of her finger, the impression on the dust, was, she thought now, a strange kind of trace --- one that takes away materially rather than leaving behind. But then she looked at her finger and found the reverse; the dust had left a trace on her.

She looked around and took a piece of paper from the rubble: a shopping list: candles, bread, bananas, film.

Some things we do not know how to accept. We may be familiar with our self-inflicted woes, and cherish these simply out of that familiarity. The moment we are handed joy, how do we respond? With disbelief, incomprehension, at best a kind of clumsiness if perhaps we are accustomed to seeing it elsewhere, almost independent of us; but when it approaches, hand reaching out -- it is there we falter; we think: 'You must have the wrong number.'

light

There is a tea light candle on the window sill too small to shine above the wood holding in the pane. From outside it is almost invisible, hidden by the ceiling light, the street lamps, the left-over almost burned-out Christmas lights. But whereas the others shine or glimmer with an unconscious intensity, this small flame glows with intention.

Giacomo Balla (1871-1958)

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. 1912.

Noise, speed, movement -- these are words associated with the Futurist artist Giacomo Balla. His work tends to have a strong abstract quality such that the viewer doesn't necessarily recognise in the image any particular familiar object right away -- or if he s/he does, it is brought forth by lines indicating sweeping changes and motion. The painting of motion inevitably seems a bit of a trick, doesn't it? "I shall paint a series of moments within a single frame!" Says the magician. But even film does not do this -- each frame is an individual photo. And yet, isn't this in itself something quite amazing? How do you separate one instant from the moving the river of which it is a part? And then look at the language I've just used -- 'a part'. We partition as often as we can --- of course. We cannot see the whole world in one glance; we see it as a section, or what we perceive to be a section, because the continuity is too blurry, too outstretched to be contained by our eyes; and so we segregate and then try to amalgamate. And thus we pull 'moments' or 'instants' together like a string of pearls and suddenly it's not the movement of a painting that seems so absurd, but its apparent stasis. And yet when we say this, we forget that the painting is not merely a portrayal; it is a record -- not of the thing it represents, but of the motions and strokes that went into its creation. And, of course, it too is constantly changing, some colours perhaps at a greater speed than others.

I wonder if Balla was thinking along these lines as he painted the chain-links on the dachshund's leash four times, along with its (temporal and spatial) matrix. Did he hear it too?

Sometimes it is enough to make a pot of tea. One need not always drink it.