Devotion Over Time Equals Meaning: Proust's Mysticism

From Giotto's St Francis cycle

The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is analogy. By these means we are able to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world. 

-Oswald Spangler, The Decline of the West, Charles Francis Atkinson, trans.
[NB-- I started reading this after coming across a reference in KOK's second volume. Haven't finished yet, but found the quote interestingly close to Proust's formulation.  With Proust though, the formulation seems to apply more to personal history.  From what we see of capital H history in In Search of Lost Time, it is attended to and created by people caught in the pettiness of the former, so perhaps there is its fingerprint.]

Diverting Analogies, Pleasurable Loops

Walter Benjamin, in The Image of Proust, trims an outline of the author, from youth to recluse that when held against up against the life of say St. Francis or the life of Buddha, makes Proust's epiphany resemble a kind of holy conversion.  The story is there-- the wealthy young man, leading a life of luxury and excess, experiences a moment that recreates his entire being.  St Francis found his catalyst in a dream, followed by the public humiliation of his early return from the Crusades. He is then moved toward an ascetic life after encountering a leper. Buddha grew up in a palace where his every need was cared for. It isn't until he leaves his palace and encounters a sick old man and a funeral that he begins to seek austerity. Both of their conversions occurred over years and our accounts of them are given from the outside, mediated by dogma.  There is something to be said about the relative seclusion and opulence that attended their youths and the sensitivities that these childhoods bred and there may also be something superhuman about Proust.  The eloquence he displays in synthesizing his memories, in limning the ways in which the significances of a moment, of a belief, or of an idea yield over time, ripen and rot and grow anew, transcends his experience. It transcends the form of the novel and vibrates between novel, essay and memoir, using novelistic tropes as foils for deepening his reader's relationship to the progress of character. If there is within the Bildungsroman the remnants of the Medieval confession, its shape can be found here as well.

What benefit can Proust see in self-study outside of the ability to reach a synthesize, to find his life?  He makes the point that a life without review is basically un-lived, but if this is a question about capacity, it is a deeper question about Modernity. If Proust's epiphany can be taken as a kind of conversion, what quantity should we assign to this shape of mysticism?  If it is a reflex within the human organism, then perhaps we can use it as a bridge to understanding those earlier conversions. If it is separate, irrevocably apart and situated in the a-historical moment of life after the WWI, perhaps it is a new form.

I spent about nine or ten posts devoted to the concept of modern literary capacity (see the IPoStHL tags, if you're interested). The Modern mystic is a kind of oxymoron and, in Proust, the irony of his withdrawal seems convenient to his illness, to his heart-brokenness, and to his misanthropy-- not that any of those reasons would be excluded from the lives of earlier mystics, but in the context of The Search for Lost Time they form a brittle portrait of the author, a human rind that protects the fruit of the work and it seems we can't have one without the other, so the only remnant is devotion-- and I may have mentioned this earlier, but Proust's only true avowed devotions seem to be to time and music.

I recently attended a Bat Mitzvah that my father-in-law, who is not a rabbi, officiated.  The Bat Mitzvah was held in the basement of a home in New Jersey and he mentioned that traditionally synagogues are humble buildings, that the buildings don't matter. Jews worship within the cathedral of time. The phrase struck a chord.

In considering the progress of Charles Swann through In Search of Lost Time,  his assimilation and his rejection from the Faubourg St Germaine, plotted against the backdrop of the Dreyfus Affair, provides ample insight into the anti-semitism of the time. I learned recently that Proust's mother was Jewish but Proust himself was baptized and confirmed as a Catholic (a faith he later rejected). In considering the way in which Proust foregrounds Swann's struggle within society and studies it with such an obsessive eye, I felt as a reader almost assured that the narrator too would fall into the same traps as Swann and lose his standing. The novel instead uses this kind of false foreshadowing to highlight the great folly of youth, that in seeking our models we mistake their errors for our own and remain blind to the personal monstrosities we have been nursing all along. There is an added soupcon to consider Swann as well as a kind of model for the narrator-Proust's assimilation.

Within Jewish history there is the story of historical recursion, of repeated pogroms, depredations and struggle. Recursion is written into the Jewish story. But within rituals, the Bat Mitzvah for instance, we find the routinization of struggles and the joyful celebration of their conquest-- momentary as it may be.  Here we have an adequate parallel to Proust's temporal analogies, the celebratory moment in survival.  However, the kind of experiences that strike the sympathetic memory cannot be ceremonial. The analogous moment must sneak up on the intellect, it needs the element of surprise to strike the deepest chord, which is precisely where the routinization of faith fails.  It's not to say that the faithful are exempted from these kinds of experiences. The tragedy of the content of faith is that it is lost to repetition. It dies to provide the structure to the living part of ceremony. The spiritual crisis of Modern man may in part be due to the failure of religion to adapt out of cyclical and stale repetitions. In Proust's attention to phenomena we may find a temporary antidote.  To see it from a humanist perspective, Proust's --or any -- purported mysticism is interesting only in that it reveals an order apart from that of the mundane senses.  Its reward may be a constant inward search for similitude that cracks out the endorphins, that and a kind of kinship born across the several selves we leave in time. Its price is solitude.  Its corruption is nostalgia.

For another time: song structures and recurrence, Girl Talk and the memory of music, Nick at Night, the memory content of memes, Beckett and forgetting...

The Ear

He cannot move the furniture
through that small aperture, yet
expects it must serve
used with reserve,

To wit, the company that comes
runs to be first in,
arranges what it can
within the man,

who (poor fool) bulges
with secrets he never divulges.

-Robert Creeley

E-Z Listening: Schubert Six Moments Musicaux No. 3

Takashi Murakami Buddha at Versailles. Image by Christophe Ena

Gridpoliteque

Some theme music for gridpolitics by Dremstat: via Vangelis, via Trainspotting, via Tron for fire-y chariot home-karaoke: https://soundcloud.com/gridpolitics/gridpoliteque

Notes on Twin Peaks, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Commercial Art by Dave Gunton

Notes on Twin Peaks, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Commercial Art 

by Dave Gunton

1.

I recently watched Twin Peaks for the first time, binge-watching the 30 episodes over the course of a month on Netflix.  The thought I had 5-10 times each episode was: this was on network television in 1990?  The series is so weird, gory, fanciful, disturbing.  An apparently familiar murder mystery narrative dissolves into a supernatural fantasia, and the show ends, depending upon interpretation, with the image of our hero--our unwavering companion for 29 plus episodes--in the maniacal possession of a demon, as discouraging an ending as I’ve experienced in narrative art.  (Although that ending was only supposed to be a season finale.  When ABC declined to pick up Twin Peaks for a third season, it became the series finale.)  Mostly I felt disbelief that Twin Peaks ever was made and then broadcast.  The highest rated show in the 1990-1991 television season was Cheers.  The next season it was 60 Minutes.

2.

Twin Peaks is a parade of quintessentially American themes and archetypes.  The town sheriff, Harry S. Truman (great), wears a cowboy hat and recalls countless lawmen who strive to bring order to chaos in American Westerns.  Donna, Audrey, and the late Laura Palmer are all femme fatales, good girls on the outside who lure men astray.  It is 1990 in the show, but Audrey wears hoop skirts and saddle shoes like it is 1955.  In fact it still seems to be the 1950’s--America’s favorite decade to romanticize--throughout much of Twin Peaks.  The Double R Diner, where the waitresses wear turquoise dresses, is the town meeting place, and James, riding a motorcycle in his black leather jacket, is Marlon Brando, the scarred boy rebel with the heart of gold.  Meanwhile our hero Agent Cooper is the reformed, born again man who now adheres to a strict moral code, part Eliot Ness, part Tom Joad.  True to their a story about the dark undercurrents of life, the show’s creators, Mark Frost and David Lynch, reference a decade when America’s mainstream was perhaps most triumphant and those undercurrents were most in the shadows.

3.

Twin Peaks recalls the 1950s but it also recalls the 1850s, or at least the work of a man who was writing at that time.  I am not the first (or the second) to make the connection, but the show’s references to the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in particular “Young Goodman Brown” are striking.  In that story the title character, a virtuous young man in a Puritan village who is soon to be married, wanders into the adjacent woods one night to find all of his fellow citizens engaged in devil worship.  He is even presented with his bride-to-be, Faith, so they may be indoctrinated into the dark cult together.  The town is the place of order and virtue, and the woods are the place of disorder, moral transgression, and evil.

Likewise in Twin Peaks the characters continually meet with violence and horror in the woods.  Laura Palmer retreats to the woods for a wild night of sex and drug use, and she does not live to the see the morning.  Her friend Ronette barely makes it out alive.  The Log Lady lives in the woods and prophesies the spirits that lurk there.  One Eyed Jack’s is a casino in the forest over the Canadian border where you can drink, gamble, and pay for sex.  The serial killer Windom Earl sets up shop in a log cabin.  Major Briggs is abducted by some mysterious force in the forest.  There is an evil that lives in these woods, Sheriff Truman says in an early episode.  And ultimately the characters discover The Black Lodge, what may be interpreted as a portal in the woods to a netherworld of horrors, with Agent Cooper and his beloved Annie standing in for Young Goodman Brown and Faith.

4.

I wonder though whether this dichotomy of town/forest, order/disorder, resonates in our contemporary culture.  The more common experience today seems to be to retreat to the woods as a place of calm and escape the frenzied stimulus overload of the city.  Or perhaps these dichotomies look different from the vantage point of New York City, versus the vantage point of rural Washington.

5.

I read about Twin Peaks after I finished I watching it.  Apparently it was never the intention of Frost and Lynch to reveal the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer.  They only did so in season two in response to pressure from ABC, which was concerned about sagging ratings, and believed that the audience needed resolution.  A developing love interest between Agent Cooper and Audrey ends rather abruptly in season two, and apparently the cause was the objections of Lara Flynn Boyle, the actress who played Donna, and who off-screen was romantically involved at the time with Kyle MacLachlan, the actor who played Agent Cooper.  Ms. Boyle did not care to see Mr. MacLachlan involved with Sherilyn Fenn, the actress who played Audrey, on screen.  Enter then, rather suddenly in season two, the actors Billy Zane and Heather Graham, whose characters become the love interests of Audrey and Agent Cooper, respectively.  And of course the show’s creators did not intend to end the show with season two, with their hero in the throes of a demon, but that was simply the last episode that was made.

6.

How, then, are we to accept something like Twin Peaks as a work of art, when the artists are not calling all the shots?  We are reminded that television shows are fundamentally products, vehicles to sell advertising, and but for that commercial purpose they would not exist.  (In 1990 they were used to sell advertising; now they may be used to sell subscriptions instead, but they are always selling something.)  So of course in the case of a television show, the network can have a heavy hand in deciding what the show looks like, from plot, to casting, to direction.  We as viewers want to think of Twin Peaks as Mark Frost and David Lynch’s pure artistic vision, and interpret it on those grounds.  But it is not.  It, like many shows, and many works of art, was shaped in part by countless commercial interests.

7.

Is it then still a work of art at all?  It is tempting to say that once commercial considerations shape in part a work of art, it is no longer art at all, it is merely product.  That seems harsh though.  The dream sequence in season one, episode three of Twin Peaks, in the red room with Laura Palmer and The Man From Another Place, one of the most enduring images from the series: nobody at ABC dialed that up, I’m sure.  That is pure Frost / Lynch madness.  You can’t take that away from us.  So what are we talking about here?  Was the show 75% art and 25% commerce, and we will just focus our interpretive interest on the artistic part?  How can we, when the commercial part had such a profound effect as to force the revelation of the killer, when that was not the creators’ intent (and what Mr. Lynch calls one of his biggest professional regrets).  

8.

And these issues are not confined to television shows but surely are present in nearly every artistic form, certainly every popular form.  Every book, album, or movie that is distributed by a major publisher, label, or studio is shaped by commercial considerations, to a greater or lesser extent. 

9.

No doubt Nathaniel Hawthorne thought about commercial considerations as well.  He anonymously self-published his first novel, Fanshawe, and it did not sell at all.  The Scarlet Letter has never struck me as a work of marketing, but I imagine Hawthorne gave some thought as to the kind of book readers might like to buy.  Hawthorne’s contemporary, Charles Dickens, may not have technically been paid by the word, but he was paid by installment, receiving payment for each 32 pages of text he provided for serialized novels like David Copperfield and Bleak House.  Was he selling novels or toasters?

10.

It seems unforgiving to say that art that bears any commercial influence is no longer art.  I enjoy many such works of art, like Twin Peaks, finding them not only entertaining but deeply thoughtful and meaningful.  Still I find myself increasingly drawn to art forms that are free(r) from commercial influence.  Paintings.  Early 20th century western swing music: the only consideration there seemed to be what would make people dance (itself a kind of commercial consideration).  Low-budget movies.  I used to think that criticizing something as “corporate” was just a tired cliche.  Now I find anything anti-corporate, anti-commercial to be inherently attractive.

David Lynch for CK 

David Lynch for CK 

David Lynch for CK 

David Lynch for YSL 

David Lynch for Armani

David Lynch for Playstation (post twin peaks) 

David Lynch PSA (pre twin peaks) 

David Lynch for Dior (post) 

Dave Gunton is the Fiction Editor of the Paris Review.

Dave Gunton lives with his wife and two daughters in Athens, GA.  You can find him on Twitter at @DavGun10 and on Tumblr at davgun10.tumblr.com.

Walking Shots, Biked Over

Robert Smithson's concept for a floating island.

Stanley Crawford's concept for a man-made floating island. Image courtesy of http://www.stanleycrawford.net/ (buy some shallots).

Love that Smithson painted geological cross-sections.  Always found these so engrossing in text books. 

John Gerrard's Solar Reserve at Lincoln Center.  An LCD screen displaying a virtual solar power station written over a vacant expanse of Nevada desert.

Beneath the watery April sun, an occasional police car or jeep cruised slowly, watchfully, among the bright shoals of cyclists who floated, flushed, moist, openmouthed, above wantonly pumping legs, curiously disowned, jumping knees, and the transparent whir of wheels.   

-Harold Brodkey, Hofstedt and Jean--and Others, originally published in the NewYorker, 1969. 

 I was nearly hit by a cyclist the other day.  I was crossing 5th ave with the light and he came careening downhill with no intention of stopping.  I panicked and froze and he squeezed his brakes until his bike squealed and he popped forward on his seat. We each checked if the other was okay before we started yelling. I had the light, was my point. What if he was a car, was his point. To which I again stated, that I had the light-- this is generally less of a problem for cars. I told him he should watch where he was going and I assumed he was just as much in shock as me, because what if I had been a car? but then I grew furious with him and conceded, yes, it is true assholes who want to go fast and ignore traffic lights can drive cars or bikes. He told me to go fuck myself. I had actually just gotten off my bike. I had locked it up before crossing the street. I had the helmet tucked under my arm as I was yelling at the guy.  I was thinking about this today when my train stopped.  Strap-hanging for fifteen minutes with only the dark of the tunnel on the other side of the window, I became conscious of a fear that somehow time would figure out a way to stop-- time would stop but but my consciousness would remain active, my subway car would drop out of time, my fellow passengers would not age and would not feel time passing and though we'd all be stuck with one another, we'd remain as equally inaccessible as if the train were moving and we were waiting for the next stop. It is with biking that the frustrations of mass transit-- of being held momentarily due to the train traffic ahead, of sick passengers, of investigations and earlier incidents, of the people who look as if they've already died twice that day that stay plastered in place even though there's room in the middle and of the others who wedge themselves through the closing doors, of the basic package of powerlessness the city offers its residents--disappear.  I love riding my bike in the city.  At its best I feel as if I'm floating just eight inches above the city, which is enough to feel euphoric.  The city and its rules peel away.   The biking passages in Hofstedt and Jean-- and Others are the best I've come across for detailing the sensation of riding in the city. 

Frank Zappa plays a bicycle on Steve Allen in 1963.

         

Gowanus

Irricule

Magic hour

Human Sacrifice v. Extra Lives

Boris Vallejo...
I want to say more here, but, really: Boris Vallejo

The upper register of Axl Rose's voice rose over the noise of the dozen arcade cabinets and their light and the light of the dim overhead flourescents made the slice of pizza he bought and set on the glass of the unused pinball machine, Raiders of the Lost Ark, look like something from a Robert Williams painting. The teen with two quarters placed beside the player 2 start button who had been standing there all day popping button combos, dispatching challenger after challenger with his casual joystick grip (three loose fingers), had not given up a life.  He had held his own hunger ransom, setting the slice aside before he started playing with the idea that it would somehow be a bigger challenge than the 5th and 6th graders who pumped quarter after quarter into the glowing red coin slot and slapped the player 1 button.  I was one of them, wondering if the action on the second player joystick was that much better as my avatar was immediately cornered. I hammered furiously on the buttons to try to get free, while he executed a few nonchalant circles with the joystick and tapped his buttons.  My power bar declined to zero and the teen stepped back from the cabinet to do a quiet little two step.

A pinball machine always looks fun, but it seldom satisfies the way even a quick 16 bit death does.  Lights and bumpers. A glass coffin showing the height of mechanical-age fun.  From the speakers mounted near the ceiling, the sound of an intergalactic arrival broke into the rude quick bird whistle of Steve Miller Band's Jungle Love.  I looked at the teen.  He was old enough to drive, to have a steady girlfriend, to have a part-time job, to under-age drink and casually use drugs, to jerk-off.  He was wearing fingerless black pleather gloves.  He was thin and he never acknowledged the other players, never chatted with the other teens who controlled the other machines. He just played.  

-----------

Recently, I met a former boxer at an end of the summer pool party.  We spoke a little bit about diet and he explained boxing to me.  My appreciation for the sport has always been limited, but boxing, he told me, was a mental sport.  You take two men who weigh the same and who are more or less evenly matched and the sport comes down to their preparation, their mental toughness.  He was still going through a prolonged period where he forbade himself most meat, sugar, wheat, dairy.  In the months before a fight, he did little other than exercise. He refused sex, coffee, alcohol, and nicotine. He went to bed on time and woke up early.  I was struck by his sense of dedication, his self-discipline. It was this time, he said, that mattered-- the months before-- that decided the match.  

-----------

I finished In Search of Lost Time at the end of this summer.  At a point soon after Proust stumbles upon his epiphany, that life is joyless unless we learn how to live outside of time by finding those analogous moments within our lives and allow their resonance to take hold, once he has decided upon his life's work, he offers a statement about friendship that, while appearing partially true, and certainly apt within the confines of the Parisian society he has described within the preceding volumes and doubly apt as a justification for the hermitage he undertook to write his masterpiece, it misses what may have been one of the keenest portions of the novel's deeper play.

...the artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive)...

This is different than both Lemuel Gulliver and Friedrich Nietzsche (who wound down their lives talking to horses). This is the man who sees the horse as his contemporaries and who reluctantly obliges the social norm by passing time with another person. There are a number of inconsistencies through the last volume, Proust worked on Time Regained up until the moment of his death. And though elsewhere in the volume, he states that the novel itself is only an optical apparatus that allows the reader to discover a greater portion of his or her self, this point strikes me perhaps as the last tragic sliver of Proust's blind spot, of the depth of his loneliness.  Though our lives are plagued by uncertainty and the experiences of our growth and education are in fact just the shedding of layers of ignorance and misunderstanding, it is precisely the play of these points through time that allows us ever to achieve any claim to clarity or transcendence, even if that transcendence is only turned inward.  We may misunderstand one another in situ so that later, when we are ready, we can misunderstand to a lesser degree.                
---------------

The boxer went on to tell me about a man called Electrolyte, who he visited in the Bronx. Electrolyte ate only bland foods. He kept a battery pack on his belt.  He could turn on a lightbulb by holding it in his bare hand. He pulsed energy directly into the boxer's muscles.  I mentioned I had heard of yogis in India that had gained control of their involuntary reflexes by deep meditation and could turn their body temperature up high enough to light a small piece of paper on fire.  It occurred to me, to be a boxer, to be alone in his kind of physical and mental discipline, it would be a relief to find a man like Electrolyte, a man who had mastered his body and and broken through the daily discipline to find some strange deep power lurking within, but I noticed the boxer was smiling and I couldn't tell if he was putting me on.  

---------------

In 2666, Ingeborg recounts in one of her early meetings with Reiter (later to be Archimboldi) that the capstone on Mayan temples would be a block of obsidian polished to transparency and that the tribe would gather in the temple in the midst of a human sacrifice and the light in the temple would be filtered through the blood and the obsidian and this is the light in which they would see one another.   

-----------------

A sacrifice is made in Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle.  Volume 1 shows Knausgaard propelled through adolescence on a marvelous vapor trail of petty happenings and deep transformations.  While reading I had the sense that the author was confronting his feelings about his life and his family in real time, that he was not editing.  The use of his family's names in part provides this, but so too do those half-digested bits about his older brother, Yngve, that breakup the breath-taking house-cleaning sequences (seriously-- the command of detail in the house-cleaning parts gives order to the whole book) to his time finding suitable writing space in Sweden. He admits to as much when he mentions that he had attempted to write about his father several times before and here he has done it, but it seems he still could not express his feelings about his father, instead he exposes his father's death and his family's role in enabling or allowing it to occur.  The key seems to reside somewhere within all of those mundane details, all of those hours poured out in the first volume, an inability to grasp time as it passes at its slowest and an equal inability to grasp reality, to seek a redemption from time's passage, an absolution.

It may be worthwhile to note here that though Proust speaks a little about his father in the early volumes of In Search of Lost Time, his father is otherwise unmentioned as the books progress and remains a kind of sphinx written in to Proust himself and his desire to make good on his literary ambitions, his detailing of the life of Swann and the other men of the Faubourg Germain.  I don't know whether this was an act of conscious or unconscious suppression.

Knausgaard's expression feels compulsive, but it also feels willed.  In breaking the rules, in sacrificing the names and his impressions of those in his life, Knausgaard takes away a measure of their dignity, their privacy.  He is solitary and presents himself as much, as an outsider within his own family (even his grandparents asked him to stop hanging around so much) and the act of publishing his book establishes this isolation and ensures it. He cannot, at least at this point, navigate past his need to speak out and may in that adolescent way seek to redeem himself and his family by decimating that same silence and coolness that allowed his father's death. He sacrifices his own humanity to try to get at the truth.

--------------

As an aside: even saddled with picking up the fractured plot pieces from the ends of the various Marvel movies that have been running the shew-biz game for what feels like a decade now, Guardians of the Galaxy may be the best American movie I've seen in years. It takes a painfully accurate CGI raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper to deliver the message that everyone has dead people, it doesn't excuse stupid acts of revenge. Even better, it just knows how to have fun.

Knowhere-- the floating head of an ancient alien being/ mining outfit.  If you want to speak to twelve-year old me, he'll be wintering there this year.   

             
Steve Miller Band Serenade
Panda Bear Last Night at the Jetty

Flag Stud

I don't always drive into tornadoes but when I do 40 is not enough

When its shell breaks, the egg slides, lead by the yolk, to settle in the low point of the pan. The albumen spreads. As the heat takes to the pan, the albumen finds its edge and begins to cloud white. 

There's a man I see on the train infrequently.  When I do see him, I have trouble looking away from him. His forehead bulges forward. He wears thick glasses.  I can't tell if he can see me. His eyes don't appear in the glass of his lenses. I have yet to spot his eyes. Behind his glasses his skin is dark, as if bruised. 

Beside me there's a sleeping woman. Her mouth is open. The Gucci insignia is set into the periwinkle nail of her ring finger. Versace glasses. Braids. Skirt suit.

People on my car keep their eyes closed. Some bear pillow marks on their cheeks. When a young man walks into the middle of the car and complains that he looks around the ring fingers of the people of New York and  no longer sees any engagement rings, the people on my car stir.  He's moved into their room. He's speaking in a fluid non sequitur that grows in its anger. I've heard him before talk about the billions of dollars he has, how Jay-Z speaks directly to him. His sneakers are white, dirty and near collapse at the heel.  His voice is broad enough to allow no one to feel it directly but it becomes so loud it's impossible to ignore. The nuisance of an alarm clock.  The faces wrinkle as they cannot slap it back to snooze. 

I have pink eye. 

I woke up with my right eye sealed shut. I strained to open my eyelid. The best I could do was open it a quarter of the way and the room looked soft, glaucous until I made my way to the sink and massaged my eye open, cleaned it then admired the swollen lid in the mirror- what a shifty look it gave me having one eye more open than the other.

Of the few who appear awake, a middle aged black woman in a t-shirt that reads "I don't always drive into tornadoes but when I do 40 is not enough" is writing in an oversized composition book. She has it in her lap and appears to be using it for landscapes. I remember not to check her face after I read her shirt. I look away without looking up, without measuring the pieces of her I can see.