6.

She makes a small question-like sound & I look up from the blank page, which she takes as a sign I am willing to be interrupted.

“There is an exhibition in London about cute.”

“About cute? Huh.”

“If it is still on when you are there I think you should go & see it.”

It turns out I won’t be, I’ll miss it. I’ll miss it, but then I’ve been to the Great Cute Exhibition In The Sky & I can still sense the transmogrifying Typhonic rurr happy honking away beyond the outer limits of my mind sigh. The Absolute Cute.

Such great mysteries here. Absolutely here, I mean. Like our sweet horse daughter, Notre Flamme. Now she was an impossible thing fresh from the womb, some kind of alien cuddle drug, but she will always be cute to me. Objectively (as if there is such a thing) she is already less cute, & of course cuteness is always relative, but

Absolutely, not.

A memory. I am a young boy, perhaps around seven years old. There are kittens. Either we just got a new one or our cat has given birth. Mum, I’m sure it’s Mum, gives me one to play with. She puts a kitten on me & it starts mewing & padding away & she leaves the room & I am alone with the kitten & that is the moment its utter strangeness strikes me, although admittedly it is my own strangeness & thus all our strangenesses too: the sense in which it is relative is a way it is Absolute.

People will tell you Nature is not all Bunnies & Butterflies. They are right. But nothing is all anything apart from perhaps a certain special somethinks. Can they tell you what that means? Have they been grass? Can they conjure the viscerality of the cocoon? Would their heart pump blood through the crumpled butterfly’s wings? Which bit of what are they currently willing to concentrate on?