moths

When you’re thinking you’re not having a thought unless you can write it down. If you have a thought but then you cannot write it down you are not having a thought. The thing that seems to be happening in your brain is like what happens when you check a potato for electricity – the potato will have electricity but the potato is not thinking, nor is it thinking about whether or not it is thinking. This line of reasoning will get us nowhere. Check your head for electricity and there will be electricity. Will there be enough electricity to kill a man? No, but perhaps enough to kill a moth that decides to alight within. The head can have moths. Maybe what you feel when you wonder if you’re thinking but you’re not thinking because you can’t write it down, is moths. The powder falling off with the flap of their wings. Their eyes on those flimsy stalks flickering left and flickering right. Write it down, and then you will be thinking, you will have a thought. The shape that remains when you lift their bodies from the dust is the character of the first letter.

you are falling down a blue hill into a violet pond

The dream is a lot like a foreign movie, with a definite and separate narrative offered by the subtitles and the actual action. In a foreign movie, the subtitles are the unavoidable, unmistakable laid down created track of the film. But at the same time, you see what is really happening, and sometimes the subtitles seem right and sometimes they don't but while you're watching one seems to describe the other.


That's garbled, but what I mean is that dreams possess at the very least two simultaneous streams of meaning (not meanings within meanings, a la Inception, but the dream of Inception had all the dreams of Inception been compressed into one totally incomprehensible and inseparable mess of significant surrealism), which at the time of the dream seem not to be at cross purposes, but in waking shudder apart to make themselves singular. Then you no longer can tell what you felt while you were selling pencils from an ice cream stand in a crumbling facsimile of Bombay while air balloons perforated the sky. You try to hold onto the solid items you knew you saw but as they coalesce into anything known, they rapidly stop resembling the items you remembered.

apple

Walking to Jordana's house, I realize that Roslyn was not built for the casual pedestrian. All wind is generated by the speeding metal sides of SUVs and detached trailer wagons. The sidewalk, tapering into moss, is muddy, gritty, unkempt. On this path, I see an apple, discarded that morning. Half the apple's skin is intact, still shiny, distinct ridges of tooth around the edges of yellow flesh. Maybe 80 or 90 ants swarm the apple, moving quickly enough that the flesh seems illusion, the apple taken over. Imagine this: a conveyor belt of ants moving along the immense carcass of fruit to an underground lair. Or this: touching the apple, you must become a part of the unceasing motion, ants seeping into your body, until you too are an immeasurable carcass bound forth by these splinters of self, these plundering specks.