27.

There is a woven quality to the dawn chorus, don’t you think? Something of the tapestry about it? The different voices seem to weave in & out of each other, as if my attention is going over, under, over, under. Also it is very enveloping: all I have done is to crack the door & then creep back into bed to listen but all at once I am surrounded. It is a comfortable & breathable weave & I can’t help but feel it even to be protective. There are certain kinds of bubbles it would be dangerous to think you live in, others not. It is not what it is like to get dressed in the morning, it is what it is like to be dressed in the morning, to be clothed in a dawn-blushed cloud.

I sometimes worry that my work is too happy, as I write that I get a sudden flash of dread, partly I think because I sense the proximity of terror & comfort, the fathomless smile of a kind of natural terrorism. I guess I am reassuring myself that the happiness isn’t always facile.

For instance my faith could be framed in terms of a doubt of the world, so that you understand it less as religion & more as a — let’s just agree to call it healthy — scepticism. & then it is this faith that can ground what might appear as my optimism. & all of this is me coming to terms with what I personally understand as a realism.

The unknown is an infinite quantity. It’s like a kind of trump card except it is far from being merely a gesture one can make in a sort of game — at least it isn’t only that — its action doesn’t depend upon any rules we have agreed to or are able to agree on, its efficacy is assured even by our ability to resist the way it works. However great we are it is always greater, for it has no truck with greatness, it is what it is. It is a curse upon whoever doesn’t want it, & those who really need it are often struggling to accept the gift. Not because the gift is bad but because the world skewers our worth: pricelessness becomes a way of dismissing things.

Every moment, every person, every thought of any thing is entirely open to a realisation I should perhaps just accept to call transfiguration: not a hair on your head has been moved out of place & yet everything is different. Certain links are meant to be missing. What you see is what is not there, unless you just got here?

It seems so unhelpful again. My wife just got off the phone with the doctors. She has been shuffling around like a broken robot since she got out of bed this morning. She borrowed my phone & sat there playing the hold music out into the room via the speaker. I’m sorry am I disturbing you? Don’t worry, I said, it is done.

We have no real idea what is wrong with her but it is very clearly triggered by stress. I try to keep existence from her door but she won’t believe it, or she won’t disbelieve in the world enough to begin to taste it. I probably still put it across in a way that sounds like forgetting to pay the bills. Anyway I can’t seem to give her the realisation, & to be fair it seems mostly me who gives it to myself, or opens myself to receiving it so to speak. I help all I can at home but it is her job that is causing it, although that is the pointing of a finger that branches. The world still isn’t very good at making space for a certain kind of person, it still expects everybody to barge in & to be able to tune out the kind of noise that those who don’t hear it don’t even realise they are making. There are so many difficult people & tiny entrenched injustices. She responds best to beauty from me, she thrives on cuteness & relishes imagination. She is grounded & smart & honestly believes that I am sometimes speaking wisdom. Sometimes changing nothing is the magick & sometimes you are nowt but a broken spell.

My faith I suppose is that this is foundation. Sure it is the house built on rock but I think there are more reasons for speaking in parables than that people like pictures. Because personally I would rather live in a tree house or a beach hut but my house is still rock. Hello again pocket rock let’s put you down & gather some moss. Spring is coming & the trees will soon be covered in green light protest signs. We can elect a new space to evaporate our leaders. Lets kill war by ending the lives of a few stubbornly temporal vegetables. Today I will be making assassination salad. This rice dish I call cluster bomb. Maybe later on, once the genocide is over & we’re patient enough to open up space we can go & fight the poison farmers, protest their dirty protest by taking spades to the shit they pour over the roads to stop the upside down world from cancelling their human right to pesticide. If we still have the right to protest, that is.

If you take one right from me, make it the right kind of wrong.