17/6/07

The view from above the clouds: a pristine Arctic waste, perfect and monotonous (monotonously perfect?), interrupted here and there by chasms or eruptions of banked 'snow'. In the distance the cloud sheet thins to a watery border, as if melting into some icy, cerulean lagoon, while beyond it the light strikes distant ranges of white peaks, which reflect it like mountain ridges. Strange how in the upper reaches of the atmosphere natural formations seen to imitate each other. The appearances are deceptive: when a plane passed momentarily beneath us, I thought at first it was a bird. There are no normal measures of scale up here, and what seems only several dozen feet below is actually several hundred.
You sweated a lot last night (why? you are not ill) and couldn't sleep. In the morning it was only when you were listening to the radio, or making the coffee, that you remembered your dream, some word or action jogging the memory. N. must have been in it, but what you really recall is C., who seemed to offer some conduit of reconciliation and who had, by some means or other, learned to talk. Not terribly well: I remember his vocabulary was limited, and once you strayed beyond its boundaries he very quickly lost interest: his gaze would wander, and he would fall silent. But talk he could, and our conversation was amicable enough. I recall he spoke about the sea, and whether he had ever visited it (I knew very well he had) and whether he liked it. Only he did not know the word for 'sea'; I had to use 'a lot of water', or 'water as far as you can see', and then he grasped me. I had that peculiar impression, as one sometimes does with children, of having not a 'real' conversation with him but rather a rehearsal for one (since 'conversation' does not come naturally but has to be acquired), but nevertheless he seemed pleased enough to see me, as I was him for a change, and I remember embracing him and patting his sides.

The possibility of the two-dimensional 'spectacular' filmic image becoming three-dimensional and solid, of its invading our reality and supplanting it: this is what the Argentines (Borges and Bioy Casares) felt so acutely. Why? Should we assume that before he wrote Solaris, Lem had read The Invention of Morel?

Riga: its flat land, and its incredibly broad, flat river mouth. A line of pale yellow beach divides the bluegreen sea from the greenblue land, like white piping on the lapel of suit.

The high reflectivity of surface in these large, glass and steel buildings (airports), which seems to augment itself by their great number: on the long corridor to the departure gate at Stanstead, people seemed to be turning right and vanishing into some void, while others at the same time seemed to be emerging out of it and their ghostly forms moving - almost - through me. This spatial disorientation produces an affectless uncaniness, projecting people's bodies into thin air and open space: it produces a spatial confusion amid conditions of banality and boredom, as if attempting to compensate for the latter (remember for example the bus ride from Kennedy in New York: the effect relies, of course, on the presence of a clear, sharp light). Remember also your reflection in that shop window on New Oxford Street: incredibly sharp but strangely colourless, as if the plate glass were lined with some photographic emulsion that fixed only black and white (itself already an 'old tech' notion).