Caesar

This past weekend, and the days leading up to it, made for wonderful connections. Megan visited for dinner and conversation and brought a bottle of port and seemed delightfully comfortable here in the railroad apartment, with Nick and myself. I met this woman in a coffee shop as she studied Barthes (for pleasure?) and, sitting next to her, how could I not say something - I felt an urge to interrupt her if only to say that I, too, had been reading Mythologies and bits of S/Z and had she been smitten like I had by "Soap Powders and Detergents" or "Red Wine"? At that moment I'd been decoding two articles about experience and silence for A.B.'s class and, quite pleasantly, Megan expressed her own interest in my reading! I would come to discover her aptitude for both sketchwork and photography and soon love her honesty and calm demeanor; and so I made her and Nick stuffed butternut squash with wild rice, raisins, pumpkin seeds, and agave nectar and the three of us ate as we talked, drank as we laughed. This seems trite but Benjamin says the most important things are the simplest and can only be fully understood as great when one says so just as simply.

And then Tanya D. stopped in for a few hours on Saturday afternoon. One of those muse-meets-ingenue situations which had me buzzing with excitement and gratitude. She's so petite and was adorably dressed, all bundled in cotton and knits, her multiple bags and cases constructing a cocoon about her. She and her Bronica, she and her suggestive brows. But I found her open and attentive and interested in what I said, I of course returning the courtesy tenfold and noticeably smitten (I didn't care a lick about this). Since Nick's a doll he prepared whole wheat chocolate-chip pancakes for the three of us - Adirondack 100% pure maple syrup on top - and we talked about her two dogs and our two cats and what it means to live with trauma and, comically, about swingers and people having children who should never have children. To feel common with someone like her animates me. I live!, I might have thought. She and I live!, I might have added in silence.

She's got this wicked photographic eye (just like Megan, although each possesses her own optics) and took some shots of me, me and Nick, of the light in our bedroom and the zero-light in the living room. We talked all the while. My mind didn't go fuzzy but it seemed foggier, not heavy but light. Maybe unsaturated. Synaesthetic. I was reminded of what I love most about my current life and what I mean to do with it.

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Between the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is

Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:

The genius and the mortal instruments

Are then in council; and the state of man,

Like to a little kingdom, suffers then

The nature of an insurrection.

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II Scene I