Riding a bike without a helmet
Less and less to read in the newspaper, having read it so many times before: the people’s discontent and the ruler’s discontent with the people’s discontent, and so on as so many literary essayists like to say.
In Lebanon, the entire government has resigned. Brains are being bashed in Belarus. The leader there says people need to “quiet down and calm down.” The owner of a independent press in Hong Kong is arrested by the Chinese government, and an independent journalist in Algeria is jailed for doing his job.
From where I sit the fog is being held at gunpoint in a straight line that begins about 20 blocks to the east and doesn’t end even when I look around the corner north and west. The iconic bridge has been erased. The fog acts as a bookmark between what I can see and what I cannot see.
I’ve been awake since 3:45 am, roaming around my bed, practicing my monolog, awake before the morning paper is delivered. I’d fallen asleep reading W Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire, the essay in which Benjamin asserts that Proust’s great work “may be regarded as an attempt to produce experience synthetically.” I’d left the book open, face down on the bed, an improvised bookmark that permits me to pick up the book where I left off, with Benjamin explaining the “close connection in Baudelaire between the figure of shock and contact with the metropolitan masses.”
Awake, it seems I left a paintbrush full of yellow paint beside the painting I am making. The paint has, of course, dried on the brush and not on the canvas as intended. The painting is called “Fire-Jottings” after a poem by Tomas Transtormer. The idea for the painting, such as it was, was to enclose a poem in fire or at least to make it look like a poem is enclosed in fire. But I have failed, and though the painting does look fiery—one person who’s seen it said it reminded him of the lava flow in an active volcano—there’s no sign yet of the poem that’s supposed to be enclosed in the fire.
It occurs to me that the poem is on the paintbrush on which the yellow paint has dried overnight, and that that is where it will stay for the time being.
It’s now light out, just after 7 am. I’m going out for a bike ride, having already decided that this is the day I will ride my bicycle without a helmet, there being no law against it other than stupidity.