list

i scrolled through the entire list (reminding myself, just now, of the statement that reading required binding and turning, the leafing through--the opposition to the stretch of parchment, the drawing scroll of paolo soleri, the infinite jest, atop the box, wheeling through the writing, pulling the parchment from the ground and circulating its contents to meet the street once more).  i realized that we had met in some middle, his words and our correspondence of time.  in my own finding of empty envelopes and the dial tone, his knowing less than i had expected (i still remember well, the day that i did not know him). 
he wanted things more, is level, is humble.  he is human when i suspected all at once that he was the other side of me, the wanting out, the laying below, the hiding.  some of this is true.

octogenarian

i read cat's cradle first in florence, found coins and the third language of those four months. we passed it around, further creasing the blue and silver binding. he brought a hardcover narcissus and goldmund to mexico, i sat beside him, not speaking. at the end of the flight, he showed me the edge, golden letters, the finest lines, deepset in the off-gray, royal blue cover.

this was passed too, given away, returned.

d. question 23.

["is addiction just a bad word for passion?"]


do we pursue a passion and an addiction pursues us?
is a passion internal and an addiction external?
are we outside of a passion, attempting to get in, while inside an addiction, trying to get out?

angelus novus

"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one picturs the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that he angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
Walter Benjamin, "Thesis on the Philosophy of History." 1940

Oneiric (film theory)

the depiction of dream-like states in films, or to the use of the metaphor of a dream or the dream-state to analyze a film

For the real houses of memory, the houses to which we return in dreams, the houses that are rich in unalterable oneirism, do not readily lend themselves to description. - bachelard, poetics of space

cipher

fame, noise

in the dictionary, the archaic definition of fame is rumor.
the contemporary definition of a rumor is a 'story or statement in general circulation without confirmation or certainty as to facts, or, gossip, hearsay.
the archaic definition of rumor is a continuous, confused noise, clamor, din.