On this night after the full moon...
I didn't do much that was useful today; papers and needed actions were before me on the table, but I hardly touched them. Instead I read vaguely, drifted past screens... glowing electronic screens of course, not the rice paper screens of Heian-kyo, but the effect is not dissimilar.
For a long time such days have been sources of guilt and anxiety to me. Over the past few years, being in analysis, studying in Zürich, and actually getting some writing done in fits and starts, that anxiety has lessened. It still makes such a day into a peculiar arrangement in grays, of sadness and luxury overlapping in different shades.
I think of that eerie image from Lud-in-the-Mist – a frieze found in old houses: human figures fleeing from the moon, in standard poses, wide-eyed faces staring back at the moon as the hands are pushed forward and the feet freeze in midair. This static image of time, and the fear of time: is it a fear of mortality, or more the awareness of passing seconds?...
It is another time of dreaming and forgetting: the forgetting is annoying, frustrating, but at least I know I am dreaming, because I faintly remember doing so. Which feels as though something is being done, at night as I'm sleeping: there is the (admittedly introverted, unrealistic, but not unreal) sense that things keep meaning something, they keep going somewhere, even though they escape my conscious awareness.
The moon makes everything seem so small, and distant in time....
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