Tonight Tonight Times New Roman will be the lucky font to convey The Thoughts of Carrie Gooding (IN CAPITALS). Because ... the cause being ... newspapers are all about time/Time are they not? The only picture on the cover should be the chap with the hourglass ... considering of course the sudden rush to the shop to buy The Thing/The Time/The Times/The Guardian before the day is done. Saving the day! Saving time! Like a person in a cartoon flicking from picture to picture and the past pictures burning into indeterminate blackness as they fall through the seive of the memory/of my memory/for your memory may not be a sieve...
...things fall out of the net of Time ... those words so carefully aligned to those times in those diaries ... they hide in the nebulosity of the ink-blot of information, and then they are behind rather than in front of the YOU ARE HERE on the time-line ... it is mischievous of them ... they must be hunted like snarks with railway shares, with railway timetables, with little lists ... the dot dot dots are tick tock ticks ... they are footsteps down
I am "drifting into the arena of the unwell". It is so often "four in the morning". I am so often playing that, very quietly, very badly, on my boyfriend's Spanish guitar, at "four in the morning". For that is when my mind runs like a newly-bought T-shirt - onto everything else, turning my life an Aesthetic and highly impractical shade of pink ... like a ketamine-lobster ... ever turning the corner like Sartre's ... The Pierrot of the Minute is evading me. "Here comes a candle to light you to bed! Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!" "Utopia... Utopia..." Insomnia... Insomnia... This is Plato's transcendent and static realm and the crackling of the static/stasis is deafening me. Hands over ears! Hands over eyes! Hands over mouth!
(Illustration: by Gustave Dore for Edgar Allan Poe's poem 'The Raven')
I wake at 5PM. I think until 9AM. I sleep until 5PM. I wake at 5PM. I think until 9AM. I sleep until 5PM. I am stuck on a carousel and it is accelerating ... if I jump off it will be as though I jumped from a train ... and the chuggachuggachugga chuggachuggachugga of my thoughts is running away until I look at them from a dazed distance and dive into the ink of the sky while the stars sear into my pinkening reddening eyes ... the owls ... the owls of Gormenghast are becoming and consuming me at once.
Witless of how his death by owls approaches he mourns through each languid gesture, each fine-boned feature, as though his body were glass and at its centre his inverted heart like a pendant tear.
HEROD
. . . wherefore do I hear in the air this beating of wings? Ah! one might fancy a huge black bird that hovers over the terrace. Why can I not see it, this bird? The beat of its wings is terrible. The breath of the wind of its wings is terrible. It is a chill wind. Nay, but it is not cold, it is hot. I am choking. Pour water on my hands. Give me snow to eat. Loosen my mantle. Quick! quick! loosen my mantle. Nay, but leave it. It is my garland that hurts me, my garland of roses. The flowers are like fire. They have burned my forehead. (He tears the wreath from his head, and throws it on the table.)
(From: 'Salome' by Oscar Wilde)
- They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
- Out of a misty dream
- Our path emerges for a while, then closes
- Within a dream.
(From: Vitae Summa Brevis/Untitled)
The inevitable realignment to The Time of the Masses stands in from of me and points at its watch ... I will have to dive into it and lose myself ... a sketch of a person into the ink of the crowd ... but for now I stand differentiated, one of the strange few who wander 24-hour shops in search of sustainance forgotten and a rememberment that Humanity endures.
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