are your eyes shut?

Another brilliant scorcher of a day. The back garden is filled with health workers eating grilled Asian chicken with noodle salads  while they  sort out the  world’s problems over a working lunch, one bite at a time. The  d0gs have all been exiled to the front garden and are furious. Exiled from the party, so unfair. I make soothing noises to my pupsicles and carry out jugs of iced tea,

Summer is drawing to a close — the last alfresco  bruncheons, the last garden parties — and I have not yet made  my famous lemon and mint sorbet or put up jars of  tomato puree. There are  bowls of chilled ripe Genoa  white figs in the fridge and heliotrope flowering away in scented lilac splendour in the  garden, but slowly, inexorably,  the summer is fading away.

 

Dreams follow me out from sleep into the morning routines and I  jot down  incoherent  notes and  images, letting this too distill. Thinking of Lars Iyer, the disenchanted philosopher of  post-modern dread:

Who experiences the dream? It is necessary to reconceive the locus of experience – not is it the personal ‘I’, the one who is able to sleep or wake, but the exposition or unfolding of this ‘I’: the ‘il‘. The chance of this unfolding is there from the start, inhabiting experience as a kind of possible impossible. It is not a recurring dream, but what recurs in every dream; it is not the bearer of the personal secret, the key to a psyche which the psychoanalyst might unlock, but the exposure of the inside to the outside, the disclosure of the prior imbrication of the possible and the impossible, of time with time’s absence. ‘Perhaps one could say that the dream is all the more nocturnal in that it turns around itself, that it dreams itself, that it has for its content its possibility’. To what latent desire does the dream attest? To the desire to be extinguished in the instant where the ‘il‘ comes forward to take your place. The desire for the essence of the night, the interminable day.

 

 

My much-loved friend came safely through the  surgery  and  I feel we can all breathe freely again, pick up tea cups and resume conversations, play light music and .dare to laugh out loud. I sat over coffee this morning thinking about Lent,  deprivation and abundance,  mysticism, the eland coming down from the mountains to the  rivers, the small white bob-tailed buck jumping fences in the orchards, the  golden light on  mountains slopes all around the  valley,  while memorising  a poem titled The Field by Dana Levin

 

The antelope white against the charred hills
           eaten by fire,
the golden trees, the upstairs window,
           something

is running across the field,
           can you see it coming
through the yellow grass, can you see it coming
           from the windowpane,
are you closing the shutters, do you think it is rain?

           The wind banging the shutters back, the antelope,
the golden trees, the skirt of your dress
           caught on the wire, the trampled grass,
the barbed fence, something

           is running over the field,
do you think it is crows, do you think it is dust,
           are you huddled
under the window frame, are your legs cold,
           are your eyes shut?

Something is running across the field—
           The wind hurling the shutters back—
The antelope, the charred hill. The yellow trees,
           the parted field.

 

 

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