Le Passeiste

If it is out of a former life we awaken when we are born, I do not know. Knowledge of that life would be severed with the strings of fate or the umbilical cord, by Atropos' shining shears. Yet something stirs behind my memories, as if my memories held memories, which are betrayed by a vague, and no less intense, surge of feeling.

Daylight courses down her dark hair like liquid. The street is simply burning and throwing sparks. In her eyes, a clear depth. In her eyes I move across great distances, yet I am not pulled toward her, but in all directions toward oblivion.

I sometimes wonder if I am a passeiste. Or if I am like everyone, following Shades down unfamiliar streets until the light is drained from the day, when we can no longer distinguish our prey from the night. I reach so longingly and call so deeply. Am I unlike everyone? Are we all not seeking to repair or replace some shattered or lost image?

But what I feel goes back further. Reflections of which I know no definite origin find me. I walked along a wall embraced by ivy and heard the stones singing from their tombs. I once caught a phantom and held her by the hand on Charles Bridge and we watched the night cover the city like a flood tide. When I was very young, I imagined that Orion spoke to me but called me by another name as if, from his heights, he had confused the centuries.

Travel Fragments: Costa Rica pts. 1-5

1.

Today’s august-
The human honeycomb seethes.
Aureate tides issue from the crystal sky
And radiate, as they sweep down
The shaggy green backs of verdurous cordillera.
Yet in San Jose, even the icons
Are behind fences and wire.

My homeland has a hand in this, but
I am not of my homeland.
I am as everything under the vault of the sky;
I belong to the terrible expanses.
The land rolls unheeding.
The sea rolls unheeding.
Time rolls unheeding.
The land,
The sea,
Time
Do not recoil before such diminutive monsters
As politics, economies,
Or imagined borders.
They level and make insignificant
The thieving passions of man.
They know a wordless generosity
Whose abundance cannot be diminished
And possess no urge for domination.

They give
Pineapple light, blood orange at sunset,
The roaring voice of the Pacific
The song of unseen wild birds in the morning
The lace work and lances of leaves and limbs
The pelting rain falling in open, warm spaces
On roofs of tin or palm leaf
And the people beneath to bear witness.

I too was born by the sea.
In the remote distances of childhood
I was showered in its diamond mist.
Not so distant, sea and childhood,
Not so distant, you and I,
Only a few strides under the sun.

We cannot separate
The crests and swells of time
From the people over which it cascades
And pulls along in its murky riptide.
And yet you are kind to me.
And yet you lavish me
With your language
With your songs vibrating on strings
With your food that you pull like a miracle from
Your fields and the sea
With overfull hands.

With my hands now
Full of variegated
Fragrant petals,
Allow me to lavish you.

2.

Jaguar patterns
Of dark sand
Toss in the wake
Of the clearest water.

Yellow foam
The color of idle afternoon clouds
Disperses across a field
Of soft granules.

Staid rocks stand in the tide pool
Where they were tossed
Under the eyes of ageless vultures
Who took them to be impenetrable turtle shells.

Among fractured mosaics
A tiny Spartan
Sidesteps the bleached bone
Eggshell fragments.

The little warrior
Has compensated in time
By corporeal diminution
And amplified precision of movement.

Eggshell fragments of time
Are jostled in the ebb
Of incalculable days.

Incalculable days spent
Casting lines in the break
Casting nets in the tenor.

3.

I resurface to bask in midday’s seraphim.
At each ascendant peak
Light touches and flashes a star-point
On the blazing veneer. I am
Following the Nereid alighting
From the distant Aegean
When I dive back into the water’s coils.

A conversation between sun and ocean
Unfolds on my trembling cornea.
The horns of the sea sound.
A conch’s low bellow
Follows my muffled ears
Into twilight sediment.

Floating again,
I feel the fullness of my body displaced.
The language of this reality annunciates itself
On the teeth and tongue of light.
My lips are glazed by salty air.
Something is readying to be spoken.

This moment,
A point of reflection
Stilled and plucked
From the spiraling tide of impressions,
This axis of body and mind and place
Is not to last.

An ominous grey beast adumbrates the mountains.
A tremulous groan shakes the throne of the water.

Golden ages only come from the destruction of an order.

4.

Rain.
Mercury sheets
Shake the window.
Percussive chorus
In the rafters.
Metallic shouts
In the huddled forest.
So similar
To that silver song of the coastline.
The sound of an army in motion.

Indoor objects
Assume a lonely air.
A grey leaf smacks the pane.
Outside
The equestrian smell of fecund earth
Invades the empty spaces.
Low monstrous clouds
From horizon to horizon
Are again announcing
Hurakan’s nomadic lineage.

Amid roots like boas
Streams are surging.
Hoof shaped pools
Glitter in the forest like cat eyes.
The great trees creak
But no double-trilled bird song
Or arrows alight the sky.
All are waiting
Pretending silence,
Murmuring “Earth, earth, earth”...

5.

The sky, a codice,
Unrolls
The figures of hieroglyph
Clouds.
Wanderers
On the deep orange canopy.
The resinous rain has passed.
Tiny crabs with gleaming black shells
And legs the color of coastal wildflowers
Cautiously study the being risen before them.
New fortitude
Is tasted on the tongue
Is painted on the eyes
Breathed into the lungs
Disperses through the blood.

I watch the second by second changes,
The reddening of the sky
The silhouettes moving out across the ocean
The papaya tint the last strip of blue has taken on
And the face of another absorbed in apprehension.

Experience inhabits the body by duality
That of the medium and the spirit.
I ask the other,
“What is beyond beauty?”
He answers,
“St. Peter in Rome”.

Each object of the world
Is readying to release its light and happiness
Is waiting to be struck by the blacksmith’s peen,
And we must exalt each thing.
We must relearn odes,
Raise everything to its proper grandeur,
Contemplate stones until they flash like stars.

Tributes, affirmations, ovations
Must be written
To the organic digestion of a moment of solemn wonder.
Then grandeur may incorporate itself
Into our own germinating perfection.

One more moment
Of sun
Of shoulders and spine
Sloping in contour with the hills.
One more glimpse
Of sandy hair
Stretched along the shore
Winding in the receding tide
One more vision of her curved body
Breasts and belly
To carry with me homeward.

Second Letter (A Petrified Forest).

Dear__,

There are times I wonder, is all that is left for me the indigence and remoteness of my heart? Everything I try to possess falls through my fingers. I shall have to renounce my hands. Each voice fades more quickly than the next. I shall have to renounce my ears. The visions, the foreshadowing of each successive moment, worlds revolving around a world, have all been proven spectral. I will renounce my eyes. In the fatal, internal black mass in which I will sink I will fold my arms around my knees as I descend and revisit the dreams a child dreams before he is born, the dumb dreams of one who knows only depth, murk, and a muted, strangely familiar beating sound.

Dumb and tacit my heart beats, encased in the body born to carry it. It could carry only this one. My mind races and my eyes expand their sight to enfold each thing that confronts me. Always things are projected toward and from, but the center remains still, isolated, a space within space, or a unique object among all that are possible. How distant is the self I knew, the counterpoise that results from balancing all points of degradation and replenishment, of silence and clatter, serenity and chaos. If I am careless with my thoughts I begin to find other people arbitrary, no doubt a result of this peculiar flow of apprehension. I begin to forget that the bodies in motion and the ringing voices simmering on the miasmic surface of reality are in fact relevant to my existence. I indeed forget my own existence entirely sometimes, or I become as sure of my existence as I am of anything else’s, that is, only as sure as it has moved me to reflect. But I reached out to you, and you returned my gesture; you gave me proof that we are alive.

These words are coming at me from strange angles, pursuing me through flashes of light and shade, but like Daphne I am helpless but to let them twine from my fingers. For only in that elusive moment when the untterable seizes form do I find my safety and reassurance. Only by creating that second skin, “another divinity”, encompassing all I am, am I able to solidify myself and take root in the earth. Our words and our letters one day will be unearthed, my friend, a petrified forest.

I am an object contemplated by my surroundings, a chimera of materials and movements, barely holding my memories and knocking the nails back into the framework of my corporality daily. It is torn to pieces by the wind, by the debris in the gale, by the force and teeth and breath of time. Your letters will be a bulwark. I will use them for foundations and walls, harmonic beams in the Doric columns supporting the weight of stone years. I am so far from everyone we knew, in mind and in place, but your carved visage emerges from the white hot stone walls, painted and sneering, with deep, absorbing eyes. Now more appear, caught in the physiognomy of different expressions, wild spatterings of color about the brow and cheeks, hundreds of marble likenesses of all your magnificent poses and profiles, all the angles that one could describe in stone or on canvas, a whole lifetime we lived together in stilled images. How glad I am, that you have returned my words.

For ever returning,

An Unaddressed Letter.

Dear __,

I pick up the pen after many years of silence between us. I have always thought that perhaps something beautiful could come from that which has been destroyed. It only takes time, and I think of how the sea rose and ash and fire rained on the Minoans, and now the cliffs are crested by the most stunning white villages, and that caldera arches out like my two open arms over the broken water as I try to pinch the peaks of Therasia between my thumb and forefinger. Not so many thousands of years have passed since you and I jumped from the rocks and shot deep into the blue, against the wind. Odysseus slept there too, and the journeys across our ragged home town were no less a miracle, no less fantastic. I have nearsightedness; my past is always attempting to eliminate itself. I come upon my memory and find it shattered. Voicing your name sets rise to a strand of unfettered images, of night skies and dismembered streetlamps floating by, of fields with fires and people gathered about them, of the momentary, pulse-like pauses in conversations beneath the cross of the peninsula. Time scatters friends like a wind lifts seeds from their capsules, it nudges them over the edge and their descent is eased in the forgetful nature of the wind as they are carried along. I am eager to follow one of these mistrals down the complex of hallways which house the inhabitants of my consciousness. I am anxious to come upon a certain door, behind which sits on a darkly stained desk a rather large ledger of accounts.

Ash and fire rained into the sea, and the sea churned and frothed as in a feeding frenzy, and the water was red from fire and blood. In the primacy of my mind, in the outland where memories dissolve, all of this recurs. The skull of the sky and the skull under my skin are choked with ash, stinging my eyes as I grope my way from the epicenter. We are shot into the air and plunge into the earth or into the Aegean depths where the Beautiful One once lay like a bloodstone on a field of sapphires. A constant rumbling shakes us out of our youth, the scream of birds unheard. We wandered from our youth like the shocked survivors of a geological disaster, gathering what little gems we could manage as they poured from the belly of the land when the quake rent it to shards. Whatever of value we could collect from the rubble of experience, from our destroyed home, we carried under our belts in dusty leather pouches or in the flinching pain of certain recollections.

A ringing lasted in our ears, but after listening to it for some time we both realized that this ringing had always been there, from our very earliest memories, and it was just the disaster that brought it to our mind’s attention. The distracting ringing of something distant and intimate, something generating from the reaches of space and also from the veins, and vibrating and washing over all of the matter in between. And it eventually came to a point where we no longer heard the ringing, as our senses accommodated to this ever tremulant and buzzing reality. Our thoughts, too, simply began to oscillate and resonate with this same frequency, as a pane of glass shivers in its frame against the wind. The thing was, we knew this of each other instinctually, we could tell it in fragments of sentences and it would be fully understood. The violence of youth, the misunderstanding nature of our immature desires, the inherent awareness of some ineffable mystery linked to the understanding of our lives, all of this was clearly read in the face when it distorted itself to speak and the words became almost ornament. And now I take to searching for those words and they are absent. What I find are gaping chasms, distance that is mounting that will never be retread, and a body that seeks to eliminate itself. Days fall away and my meek utterances do not even agitate enough to cause concentric circles to ripple across the surface. I move to speak but I halt. What do our lives have to do with each other, besides chance proximity?

Unfathomable forces disperse everything from the center. The universe will expand until all the planets are cold, stars will exhaust their heat, even the black holes will whirl themselves into oblivion. Then there will be only time left alone to age unto itself, to eventually disperse, come apart at its seams, and fragment into tiny shards of the past, present and future. When time collapses, will we meet again, when the little broken mirror pieces of reality tumble and collide on the unimaginable plain? Were our lives only to fade into that secondary sonority, the other constant song, the past, whose waters are always lapping at the jagged rocks still lying scattershot where they fell when the sea rose and ash and fire rained on the Minoans?

I am reaching out to you, my friend, always,

Signifier and Signified.

A dream.

Someone opens a door and steps out into the hallway. A character presents himself to me from a light wood-colored door at the end of the hallway of periwinkle blue and almost olive green wallpaper of an intricate, indiscernible pattern. At the end of the hallway is a bright window and through it an obscure city-scape and the intimation of an ultra-clear sky. The door opens and he silently emerges, this as-of-yet nameless character, and he pauses mid-stride as if he were startled by something. I am behind the wallpaper, and it seems he is looking for me, the unseen seer, and I think "Is he coming to report himself to me?"

At first I guess that he is I, aged decades, emerging from my cloister into the hallway of my own invention, pausing, distracted as I cross the threshold, feeling something, and involuntarily searching for the source of that feeling in the minutiae of the olive wallpaper and its intermingling lines. He is all but bald with tufts of white hair about his scalp and ears, his face is pinkish and shaved cleanly and he is wearing glasses. He emerges from his wood-colored portal, and what is behind that portal I have only hints of: a brown, thick carpet, a darkly stained table with an open book on it, a couch with a depression on the left cushion. Other than that darkness, oblivion. I am frightened at the possibility that he is I, and that I am realizing in that startled moment that I am being watched by myself. But I am the eyes of the wallpaper; he stops and stares into my eyes and I see that he is not I. He is a character that came to me from oblivion in the monstrous apartment complex in my dream, a monster himself, and a ghost, but he is not frightening in the least.

Another dream.

I am walking a street from my youth, the one where a lake sits above the ground and lily pads and reeds obscure the elevated water.

Katherine Anne is sitting on a bench outside of a small, white building. She is at a small, white table. Her brown hair is blowing in the breeze. We do not speak, but she returns my gaze. The paint is peeling in little ragged white petals from the table in front of her and on it is a child's game, a box with plastic colored blocks on pegs to allow them to spin. On each side of the blocks are letters and numbers, a different color for each letter and each number. When spun they form different words and combinations of numbers, possibly dates.

I become distracted and peer down the road past the elevated lake. The road loses itself in a thick green forest beyond, and beyond that I know is the home I grew up in. The forest is bright, the light is golden on the limbs as it is on an early summer evening and all around me is still and silent.

Myopia.

At times I feel my thoughts are cushioned by my porous, spongy way of sensing, I worry I am inoculating myself against a certain terrible clarity with this myopia, this ancillary reality. My eyes dwell on the sky too often, and so my writing is overfull with remarks about the weather and the land, or stimulated by memories of broad seascapes and great forests that only exist to me now, at this moment, as a series of inconstant photographs accompanied by a lingering perfume. What stands outside of people, the objects and daily phenomenon of our lives, when transmuted into a substance of our body, are utterly unique to us and are absorbed and nourish us singularly. The things beyond the thin border of our skin, those objects and animals are only created by our witnessing them. Beyond that margin are the mysterious things of another plane, and it is on their terms that we all must relate, with our garbled, languishing tongues.

A thunderstorm penetrates, the hot sun penetrates, but to one another people only come close but never breech any barriers. They press their mouths to one another’s, they try to enter into each other’s eyes, try with words and gestures to hypnotize or teach each other. They mumble and grasp for permanence, looking for immortality under the flesh of another, in the veins of the other. All in all they try despairingly and fiercely to find a mirror and an echo.

The first human words uttered perhaps were imitations of a thunderclap. Animals sing and call in a language that is a burlesque of inundations, skies trembling with storms, the imperceptible noise of the growth of plants, the erosion of mountains, and the cold wind blowing sand in the desert. I am no different, acquiring my speech and my temperament from the confluence of forces and objects inhuman, seeking out a mirror and an echo in the lightning spirals of a tourbillion.

A Solitary Swimmer.

To slip into the ocean, to actually be there, not imagining it any longer- not isolated by the abstractions of distance that invariably separate a memory from the sensations that etched it into our past. When one recalls a sensory impression, an event, the body arches backwards toward it. The brain reaches out through the fingers and toes and face, imaginary arms extend to feel again what was once not at all an impression, but an instant of the numinous and ineffable present. Something lifts which was weighed down in the center of the body, and images accompany and accentuate this completely motionless motion.

As the body sinks into the ocean the mind changes. It is as if the eyes are reading a piece of musical notation, and the brain at the same time is attempting the dual effort of visually conjuring every gesture of each living member of the orchestra. A friend said to me, “When you submerge your body your thoughts focus only on the acquisition of the next breath”, which isn’t entirely true. That notion is there, but it is reflexive, like the stride of your legs as you walk when you are not aware of your gait and the swing of your shoulders because you are distracted by a particularly lovely building or the height and depth of the sky. Your mind is not detached, rather, your mind and your body coalesce into essential movements. Your breath is taken, but you do not notice, you thrust your limbs through the darkness, you think to open your eyes- but not yet! You hold off, treasuring the last few seconds of such an unaccustomed experience. I was tempted there to say “unnatural”, or “inhuman” experience, but this state is utterly natural and utterly human. Sometimes the instant after one awakens from a long sleep, there is a momentary disconnect between the mind and its surroundings, when there is no immediate lingual response, when nothing is named. All of what we sense is contingent on our associations to what we have named. Sinking into the ocean, we are briefly without names for things.

On this particular trip to the ocean, advection from the south had carried smoke on its winds from a wildfire in North Carolina. There was a slight acrid smell in the air, and here and there hung low clouds of white smoke in the windswept trees and long grasses along the island, giving it an even more alien look than usual. I have always been struck by the trees here, short and wiry, with trunks like bleached vertebrae and tufts of white-green vegetation exploding from the limbs, all grown sideways and off-kilter from the force of steady sea wind. I come here and I too strip myself down to my essentials. I wear as little clothing as possible. My back and shoulders become red in the sun. I lie in the sun with my eyes closed and feel its warmth touch every hair on my arms and legs. I eat the food of the ocean, scallops, crabs, shrimp, and fish. I bask in the water from which my sustenance is pulled, I eat vegetables grown and cooled and strengthened by the salty breeze. To eat what comes from the land you live on, to be of the land and the water, to know your humanity all the better.

My shoulders and back and cheeks are red. I walk across the hot sand, not feeling the heat at all. My eyes peer off to the horizon; they are inevitably drawn to that long, endless arc on the other side of which I dream someone is looking back toward me in their imagination. The cold at first stings when the waves begin to touch my knees and thighs, so I throw myself into the break. I am under. I am swimming outside of myself and inside myself. My head and shoulders break the surface. The water is no longer cold, but has diffused a perfect equilibrium of temperature throughout me. My head bobs and watches simultaneously the sun glinting off the sea through the slight haze of wildfire smoke and the motion of gulls circling above in an almost perfectly unbroken sky.

It is said that those who love books are those for whom the world is not enough. On the contrary, at times such as these I am absolutely content with this world. And it is because I will eventually leave that I set down in words all that I can recall in my thoughts and body, so I may understand my contentment.

Thoughts Surrounding "Anna Karenina"

Happiness is a far more vague word than truth. Happiness one feels; truth one senses after distance and consideration. Happiness is a composition and mingling of moments, a realignment of the past with the present. When I experience a situation that rings with truth, however, it is like a stone wall, immovable, implacable, cold and indifferent. Happiness and sadness alike are made of cascading memories sent tumbling through the present by some interloping impression. Truth exists alongside time, both endlessly and recklessly destroy and create. Truth and happiness have nothing to do with each other, though they touch at so many common points. I’m not trying to philosophize about it, I don’t care to define either, I will use both words as they suit me.

I am watching the shadows of tall trees shaking in the wind. The sun is hot and bright and the shadows are strewn across the tables and the walk and the faces of the people talking and eating. I watch the entanglement of shadows writhe and dance across the brow of a young man talking to a pretty young girl. I watch them smear and distort, darkened as if by ink. A man next to them is almost snoring. I myself am holding a book in my hand and drinking tea and noting the dancing limb-shadows, the violent leaf-shadows that no one else seems to notice. I look at people as I look at myself, as filters of experience who either are crushed or uplifted by what they have known, either made weaker or stronger than the quality of their original nature. Surrounded by people, I wonder at their happiness, I try to read their story in their faces; I listen to how they speak and what they speak about.

“The singing women approached Levin, and it seemed to him that a thundercloud of merriment was coming upon him. The cloud came over him and enveloped him; and the haystack on which he lay, and all the other haystacks and carts, and the whole meadow with the distant fields all started moving and heaving to the rhythm of this wild, rollicking song with its shouts, whistles and whoops. Levin was envious of this healthy merriment; he would have liked to take part in expressing this joy of life. But he could do nothing and had to lie there and look and listen. When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him.”

““How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange mother-of-pearl shell of white, fleecy clouds that stopped right over his head in the middle of the sky. “How lovely everything is on this lovely night! And when did that shell have time to form? A moment ago I looked at the sky, and there was nothing there- only two white strips. Yes, and in that same imperceptible way my views of life have also changed!””

“He left the meadow and walked down the main road to the village. A slight breeze sprang up, and it turned grey, gloomy. The bleak moment came that usually precedes dawn, the full victory of light over darkness.”

“He looked at the sky, hoping to find there the shell he had admired, which had embodied for him the whole train of thoughts and feelings of the past night. There was no longer anything resembling a shell in the sky. There, in the inaccessible heights, a mysterious change had already been accomplished. No trace of shell was left, but spread over half the sky was a smooth carpet of ever diminishing fleecy clouds. The sky had turned blue and radiant, and with the same tenderness, yet also with the same inaccessibility, it returned his questioning look.”

I am reminded of the first time I appreciated the night sky when I was young, on the bank of the Patuxent River near my home. The moon is full (at least it is full in the flawed recompense of my memory) and I am surrounded by my friends, but no one is speaking. It is a clear night; the stars are thick and full and in motion, and long skeletal fingers of ghostly clouds are daubed and smeared here and there. At the full height of the sky I finally see the Milky Way. And at my feet it is all reflected in the silently passing water, and in that surface among all the other wonders I see my own wavering outline, and I am unsure at first of what the dark mass is crouched there, startled and unsure of its existence even then.

I am isolated in this memory; it lingers behind every experience since. These singular memories, perhaps meaningless to another, but resounding within me with all the force of life, these partitioned moments, when wonder starts in stillness; instants that stand solidly apart from happiness or sadness, points that sound deeply in strange and inaccessible tongues and tones... stone-like truth.

An Introduction.

My hours are bracketed by silence that is, as Kierkegaard notices, the qualitative opposite of silence. My silence ends when I exorcise whatever has formed internally within that silence. I cannot picture opposites perfectly; I can only pronounce the imperfection of my memory. I try to define notions and colors in the thick of a stone-white cloud. I try to make out a landscape, to allow my breath to blow mists and fog from the forests and roads, so my eyes can apprehend the hillsides and the sun and the faces of the people moving about, so that I might find my way to them through the inward noise of experience. Behind all of that flows another channel of thought, one whose current laps at the bank of all my experiences, trying to pick and pull and carry away any little thing into the next inevitable silence.

I am nothing; my quantity is similar to that of sunlight reflecting off drops of moisture on the lace of a web strung between blades of grass in an isolated, untended field. I am spun by a spider into an infinitely fine web, at each cross-section the contact point becomes a word, and the slightest breeze tests my strength. My intuition and my intellect are those ultra-fine threads winding from word to word. Everything is filtered through; each second of the day is run through like a sieve held in a stream. I reach my hand and thought out to whatever sticks, trying to take hold of what the spider is not already gobbling up.

I am nothing, and how can nothing have an enemy? But I do have an enemy, and this is my fight against it. As the universe teaches, everything came from nothing. So the enemies of that which is nothing are all the forces that prevent it from becoming. I know that it is true, that something can come from nothing, because before I was born there was only an abyss, and then at the moment of my birth the world came into being. I am aware that for me to have been born there already had to be the world in which my mother existed. I’m not arguing against that, but that is her world, and this is mine, and our worlds, as all people’s, are as alien and as intimate to each other as the sun is to the sea. The sunlight hits the sea and shimmers, it moves in flux with the surface of the water. All of the opposites coming together on one thin surface of movement and experience, all the different elements of water, wind, and air, and all the animals in the depths and the sky that require all of it to exist, becomes a fine mesh that we absorb and sort, and that becomes our universe.

Because my thoughts are my own and your thoughts yours, because they comprise the lattice-work of our lives, and because the only commonality between us is language, I stare through a stone-white cloud and try to create a landscape on which we can meet. I try to stave off the enemies of becoming; I try to focus my energies on one goal, that is, to exist.

These writings will be the voices I remember, the images that form that I find worth saving from dissolution, the letters I write and receive that find no other proper place, sketches of faces, descriptions of walks, studies of bodies and buildings and moments, stray thoughts that have solidified into sentient feelings. These will all be products of silence.