All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It's like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the vinallelle's form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that bellfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.
From Ondaatje's Divisadero. A book filled with beauty, one I will read twenty more times no less. The literature of Ondaatje's ages well. I am off to the concert hall for yet another dose of Icelandic music in a boy's hat. Bless these days, for they are good.
This split photo of June and Rouge is dear to me.
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