Faces(38)

(38) For the first time, her smile was light, her glance flighty, and her dimples had never before flickered so gaily on the shiny surface of her happily bulging cheeks.

How lonely! Tonight beneath this
electic light
There is nothing but the cry of
passing vehicles
And an emptiness where no clock strikes

What a desolate banshee cry!

If you were here we would drink the bars of kingsland road
And in brotherhood, raise a glass...

Christ! D H Lawrence is dead. I only realise now the weight of those words
Auden
Dylan Thomas
Miller and Verlaine
All Dead!

The evening is buried
All sense stopped
And i try to call but..

When i think of everything that has ended in the last five years...
When i think of cool evenings in Buenos Aires
Or by the shore of the hudson, the salt tinged air and tango music and
my father driving away alone into the rain of kingsland road

And this cripling lonliness

If you were here i would
talk about the night poems we wrote on the roof
In the west village
The electric buzz of cockroaches
The river of traffic

When i think of Harlem Night Song, Langston Hughes
The fairy lights amongst the trees at Columbia University
Of buying bubble tea, hiding in libraries, or sleeping on college fields.... Oh! The bookstore on the corner of 115th, gone!

The light across the roofs of cornelia street, the sun dying -
Searching the corners of the room and dancing
Curtains sailing pinkly in the evening light
A stranger's piano
Carrying a painting the length of the 1 train the night after the bar

You gargling vodka the night before getting your tooth filled
Arriving in greenpoint on a summer's evening - children screaming from the park
Beer on the terrarce of Enids
Carrying furniture from an apartment on west end ave
Arriving home to find everything
So beautifully arranged on Prince street

Buying pizza near a plaza in mendoza
Stopping to picnic with our bikes and looking out across the fields

The henry miller museum

All cut short. Sudden as a breath.

Les Pensées (40)

Artaud had always loved the thrill of illicit pleasures so much that he confessed his shameful thoughts, to himself, then to everyone, until he had no more secrets to expose and he could only provoke other people with outrageous fantasies, until everything had become so normal that it bored him, and he could only find some final satisfaction in extracting the confession of a remote stranger, to whom he listened with the most sincere empathy and endless patience, reminiscent of an abandoned capacity to get excited by his own little common secrets that he had lost forever.

Opening idea 1

It began before the whispers of children and before a wine glass would smash an end to everything.

It began before her footsteps led a trail through new snow, ending in a pool of emptiness and warmed earth where she had lain.

It began with a train journey from New York City.

"Remind me what we are doing here?" she had asked.

Grand Central Station: late afternoon. The rush and echo of commuters against the marble walls. Camera flashes and chandelier light, the crackle of a tannoy and the steadiness of his reply:

"running towards who we really are."

"running away." she says in her Mother's voice. He shrugs.

"if that's what you want to call it, but i don't believe that's true."

Les Pensées (39)

Artaud was reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's quote that we are who we pretend to be. Having pursued truth all his life, Artaud reflected now that he was no one.

Les Pensées (38)

A bright glare of light filled the room in the early brisk morning. Artaud felt uninspired.

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (14)

Arnon started walking. He walked into the dark night and the bloated circle of colored lights. He was alone, but he barely noticed that he was while he kept on walking. It could have been snowing, or it might have been drizzling, or perhaps it was a clear winter night, he didn't remember. He did remember the blackness of the evening, the coat of dimness that isolated him and embraced him in one present gesture, and the brightness of the sparkles around him that amazed him. His eyes were drawn in all directions, drops of rain stirring a puddle of mud, and never lingered at one spot for more than a second. He couldn't form any prolonged ideas but only short impulses of thoughts. This state of mind itself fascinated him. It was not his nature to be caught up in such a stream of consciousness that constantly renewed itself. Arnon was more used to his own thoughts prolonging themselves and separating him from the distancing reality that surrounded him. The relation between Arnon and the world was vaguely undefined, absent perhaps in the eyes of some, at least not in a constant form that let itself be renewed easily. In what form the relation with the outside world existed then? Arnon thought of the world as a friendly enemy, a benign poison dripping into the hollow bowl of his soul until one day it would spill over and he no longer was himself. He kept on walking, alone, into the night.

Het Uur van de Wolf, Heb je nog steeds vrienden?

Les Pensées (37)

Artaud held her hand, looked into the depth of her eyes fixated on his, and was pleased to watch her gentle smile, but he sadly mistook her unwillingly calculated New York utilitarianism for loving kindness.

Faces(37)

(37) Her pointy, little chin dangled from the broad, heavy branch of her round cheeks, from which two owly eyes peeked out into the evening, her nose a leaf floating in the wind, while the moonlight reflected on her white forehead.

Faces (36)

(36) His nose runs down along a long slope ending in a broad, fleshy bulb, his mousy eyes pushed up by the high white cheekbones to the top of his frowning, dark eyebrows, the whole face resting upon the hooked bones of his chin and jaws.