Sinister: A Tree * A Rock * A Cloud

[Youn Noh]

The only way I can be close to you is through your songs.

Well, that's nothing to complain about.

See, I met this couple and they made me think of the sleeve
notes to 'Love Is A Sign'.  A passenger in their car.  The
streets of Oslo in winter.  A guest in their flat. 
Anticipating garden parties in summer.

No geezer crying into his beer in a Wetherspoon's pub could
write a song as coquettish, as positively flirty, as Number 4.

So the Reverend Beebe said of Lucy Honeychurch, "If she ever
lives as she plays, it will be very exciting."

No, let her play.

See, it's already in the archives:

> I seem to recall that Henri Bergson once said:

> 'If reality could immediately reach our senses and our
> consciousness, if we could come into direct contact
> with things and with each other, probably art would be
> useless, or rather we should all be artists...'
> 
> (Actually this is from the canonical essay 'Laughter',
> from around 1899.)

He laughed and showed his white teeth.  I can't believe that he
ever smoked.  Their shadowed intimacy... and and sweetness!

Still, I had emerged from Euston station, on a quest of my own,
and had walked rapidly in a southerly direction.  The term was
over, but there were still students hanging around, faculty or
staff on their way home.  No photos permitted.  No tricks, no
sleights of hand.

Susan Sontag writes, "[...] W.G. Sebald [...] by seeding his
books with photographs, infuses the plainest idea of
verisimilitude with enigma and pathos."

I don't believe in this.  The streets look different when
you're not there.  (Would I even see them if you were?)  So
when I visit them alone, 'verisimilitude' is not what I'm
after.  I'm weaving my own dreams.  The reader will not
understand.  Might as well make a book of boring postcards,
without captions.  (In that Parr exhibition, I realized that
nostalgia is what saves kitsch from vulgarity.)  The titles say
plenty.

One could walk past without knowing it.  'SOAS' is loud enough,
but no 'SEH'.  The quiet corner of a building.  I seem to
remember red brick and perhaps stone lions' heads.  A
significant history, of which I know nothing.  They say Russell
was a posh aristocrat.  Student magazines.  The future of the
Trevelyan collection.  I read the article at the bus stop.  It
put me in mind of freshman courses on composition--the careful
exposition.  This is no criticism: as you can see, I have
enough trouble getting out of my own head.

So I rolled it up into a telescope, into a baton, waving it in
the air to march in time back to Finsbury Park, where my
hurried goodbyes betrayed my anxiety (or relief?) at parting. 
Cos, you see, it was almost too much to take in at once, so I
lost my head and couldn't remember important facts, like names
of venues and their discography.
 
What I'm after is the disinterested phase in attraction, in
which the significance of a reply is not weighed against the
pleasure of the other's company.  But I feel like that geezer
in 'A Tree * A Rock * A Cloud': even kids can see through me.
 




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