Music from a further room
You sent me a letter in your liquid, spidery script. The characters meticulous, enchanting and barely legible, even after knowing you and loving you and reading pages after pages of your words. And even after a week in the mail between Paris and here, the ink is still not dry, leaving tiny trails and smudges when my fingers move to touch the words or turn another page.
When I pick the letter up again it will be a different thing, telling stories about both of us.
And when you write what you write, I think that perhaps, we’ve found it. So much of what I want from love is in shadows in doorways, moving across your ink pot on the desk. Dirty dishes in the sink and two chairs by a window. Living next to and inside each other, it is in the music from a further room and in the warmth that spreads between two bodies.
And thinking of these things reminds me of my obsession with signs and trails. Since as a kid I bought a book about animal tracks and read it in the back of the dented brown Dodge, while travelling between state parks in Mexico and the Southern States, and probably even before then, I have been so easily caught up in stories (or sometimes the voiceless vignettes) that appear out of nowhere as unexpected presents. A constant archeology of bloodstains on the floor. Wonders suddenly illuminated by attention. Attention directed by circumstance, whoever she might be. It is always a little shocking: A heated seat on the train. Acorns in unlikely places, rolling down the long hill below the university park to lie quietly in the gutter or appearing in a drawer in my desk. Neighbours fucking at 3AM. It is hardly a surprise that I should be, at times, a melancholic.
All of these trails are stretching back and forwards in imagined time, and knowing for the shortest time where I am headed, or where I came from, is probably what makes me the happiest.
It is, of course, in part to do with the endless, involuntary pattern completions that the mind performs as its party trick above all others, and I am endlessly, childishly amused and terrified by the half truths and monsters that spring up all around me. I have a childish joy in misinterpretations and misreadings. I am delighted by the clarity of my mistakes, how unquestionably true they seem, flickering into view, and by the shell of words that quickly move to form their wonderful, ridiculous lies, as scars around the wound that was momentarily opened into another world. And when something draws you back into consensual reality, how much it seems like waking from a dream; and how unreal the lamp by the door that could never have a face.
This is one of my favourite observances on the evolution of human cognition: For a primate in a pleistocene forest, to sometimes hear the sound of a falling branch out of sight, and suddenly panic needlessly, would have been far preferable to hearing an approaching tiger and thinking 'it’s probably nothing, really.’
“The joy that throws everything it has upon the dust, and knows not a word.”
I am so amazed by your ability to learn and by how everything inscribes itself on you and makes your face so beautiful. How to make sausages. You are always quoting things to me, I wish that I had read, and I know that this is a lie: but I feel the opposite; so tough-skinned and blank as to be August and new-born every minute and a lumbering idiot. I don’t know if I sometimes resist learning, to somehow preserve the mystery of revelation without words, but mysteries are not to be preserved, they are to be deepened (as the feller said).
“The only perfect map is the thing itself.” It is already here and waiting for the explorers’ footprints; our mystical home, our dog-eared children and I want to call it the kingdom of God (it has been here for ages), to take away the glory from the solitary monarch. Long live the king’s daughters, until they die in library fires, aged and untouched! I don’t even care what we call it.
I know where I am going. I know my way from here, and I know from experience that it will change and twist beneath me and not even ask for my opinion on the matter, but this is immaterial. It is exciting. It is meant to be a surprise. I am going and I hope that you will meet me at the station.
"And now the ducks are loud in mist enshrouded woods in France & you and I will make a home for eachother & fight & fuck & love.”