epiphany and epilepsy

[apiphile]

Walking around Soho first thing in the morning, waiting for Klein's to open, after an unexpected day off work, watching the world setting up. Thinking about the history of the place, of dark rooms, of work dormitories, of how 'home' is a 20th century luxury extended at last to the urban working class. About politics, and obedience, now that squatting has been outlawed. And about the much-vaunted 'Bigger Picture'. These days there is the night sky, and the aerial shots of the earth. The Big Picture stretches on for distances so vast that they become history and not geography, physics and not history. The Big Picture is an infinite map of space and time. Even in the small picture that is the thousand-year history of a city, the ground-level insect-eye view of events isn't privy to the beautiful stain that accumulated existence leaves on the sterile perfection of dead nothingness. There's little to choose between the frenzied passage of delivery vans, the squirm and division of protozoa, and the bursting, collapsing stars or their jiggling component atoms. And movement was on the face of the deep. There is vertical connection everywhere I look, so why do we find the horizontal so hard?

It is usually impossible to tell you're having a temporal lobe seizure until it passes. So much for revelatory wisdom.

Poetry

It Will Pass