Jul 13, 2003

I hope anyone who has not been outside in the past couple of hours will do so soon. The character of the sky and the light in the sky is really singular. A slanted sun, rendering the clouds objects.

It's peculiar how memory works. A given moment (looking at this particular sky, for example) can suddenly open up into another moment and it's almost as if no time at all has passed at all between those moments. Time as a series of linked instances, one piled upon the next chronologically, but somehow in some kind of timeless stasis by way of perception.

In this case, the particular character of the light brought me back to a moment some two years ago where I was sitting on the deck of the Provincetown Ferry, going out to meet my girlfriend at the time, reading Wuthering Heights. I can almost recall a specific sentence, but not quite. I was feeling like Heathcliff (in that bad man loved by a good woman kind of way...) Heathcliff was pretty punk rock. I mean, punk rock for the 19th century, that is. I can recall the emotions I was feeling at the time, though they seem sort of alien now. I suppose only the material character of the moment survives. Some translucent version of the emotions exists, though. More ghosts.

The beach at Provincetown is very nice. I haven't been to a beach even once this summer. Who wants to go to the beach?

No comments: