Thursday

I rose and through the doorway, sliced open, saw him coiled, hovering comfortably over the small shell of her body. The sun casting a glow upon the covers helped mimic the scene I imagined: two purring cats committed to an afternoon nap. This made me happy. Happy for them. The budding of something new, something fresh. One should always preserve the early stage and encourage themselves not to rush pass the delicacy and fragility of new romance. Maturity will come and carry itself forward, and it is then, in age, that we look back on the youth and remember what it was like to be childlike, and simple.

I left early, weaving myself through the park that I walk through multiple times daily. The dog run is being renovated and I wonder, where have all the dogs gone? Do they realize that they have skipped a day at the park? Do they question when they will be back? Are thoughts just a continuous strand of propositions that plague us, rather than serve as any form of fulfillment? See, another question.

I think (over and over and over again) how fortunate I am, that I begin my mornings walking instep with a flow of others—merging from disconnected realms, the veins of different streets—and come flowing together, connecting, crossing and moving on. You arrive in New York City completely uprooted and immediately are replanted. And yet, the fascinating actuality is that as you become (and have to become in order to survive) more in control of your self existing alone (more involved in a one-on-one relationship with your self than you may be anywhere else in the world) you are comforted by all the others the city is composed of, existing just as you, on foot in the early mornings, walking themselves to where they have planned to be. You are a portrait intimately involved in the composition of the city.

Listening to music, no different than all the others I walk up, around and against, I idolize the ability rhythms have to reshape and recolor our experienced reality. The songs I listen to paint different scenes of my morning. The person next to me, listening to something different, experiencing the music differently, is seeing the scene of his morning play out differently than I am. And this fascinates me. It fascinates me that with a playlist complied of only two artists, the texture of my reality changes dramatically. Radiohead freezes all places and things in time. And it is only the people that actively exist and also actively resist the mechanics of time. People stretch in place and weave their bodies around a motionless city. The song ends, the artist changes and Amandine acts in opposition to Radiohead. Listening, I feel cemented and all places and things move freely and quickly around me in season. I move but feel like I am getting nowhere and will go nowhere. I think the more I emerge myself into music, the more satisfied I will be with my immediate reality. Even though that really is a contradiction.

Arriving, I sat down waiting for my “mentor” (brief mention: mid 60s, has changed the course of my life in the past half year, created an independent study with her this semester called Reinventing the “I”. got accepted in the Gallatin’s art festival where she will be my mentor for what I am pursing and next semester we are doing another independent study, she is the most fascinating, soft-spoken and intelligent woman that I have been blessed to stumble across). I began taking notes in my third book—alas, since September I have filled three books of notes, quotes, fragmented prose, thought and the like.

She came tumbling in with more energy than I have ever seen her with. We resituated ourselves in, what we laughed about later, a Kafkaesque closet/copy room, to begin discussing. Except, instead of discussing Nin she handed me two works I had done with a note saying, Instead of responding with 20 pages I want to discuss what you have done when I see you. We proceeded for the next hours to unveil what I had done. Never—have I been so honored or so.. I can’t even find the words. All I could do while she spoke of it was laugh and smile… and smile… and smile. My work is inaccessible, indulgent even, opaque, thick, theorized, masked with symbolism and placed in a surreality. I think it was Nin who said her writing was a language that once people learned would understand how important it was. And so, all I could do was laugh and smile because, now, she knows me, she knows my work, she knows the collection of ideas I work with, the bodies of work I read and she is understanding my language—she is seeing how I define my symbols, my metaphors and unveiling the self that is, always, buried beneath the guises of my writing. To understand my writing is to understand me at my purest, gentlest and most honest. To understand my writing is to discover my reactions, reflections and my idealizations. It is to reveal the mystery which is [perhaps] why I choose to make it so inaccessible to begin with, because truth and reality are inaccessible even to me.