Tuesday, September 30, 2003
 

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without relections, leaves
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knolwedge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

Wallace Stevens. "The Plain Sense of Things."

I was meant to be a modernist. The time in which I should have been has passed.

The sky here is that faded-out blue color, not quite winter white, that it turns in fall. All the trees are looking slightly more skeletal, and the leaves are faded green. The sky always looks like spidery old faded wallpaper to me in early fall, like something out of the past. I think it's a wall in an old clapboard house, with a porch and a dirt yard. I've been seeing that house for years, sitting in its dirt yard in the sun. No trees around it, but I feel that there are some nearby. The house is in the bright sun, but I think that this sky belongs with that time. This sky always looks more familiar to me and real, somehow, than bright blue spring and summer skies or stark white winter ones. I feel like I've seen it before and have always been seeing it. I've always felt like I was meant for some other era. Out of place, out of time.

Elvisette philosophized at 7:00 PM