escarpment

propinquities

Some things are getting... nearer.

One of these would be... a magnum opus. I think it's how I've been intuitively feeling about it; I just haven't articulated it that way because, well... speaking or thinking about it out loud is kind of portentous. ::chuckle:: Also, profoundly ambitious, fraught, philosophically presumptuous, and, at the end of the day quite, uhm... final. ;p

[NB: note the meandering nature of that paragraph, the hedgy language, the slippery usage of ellipses and other punctuation foggily deployed — they are absolutely intentional. And legerdemain. ]

Things in the existential category of 'final' are dense. As in: heavy, conclusive, definitive, irrevocable, mortal. Think of a period at the end of the last sentence of the last paragraph of the last story one writes, of one's life — in it is encapsulated all the words that came before it, and in its placement an unvarnished statement that nothing else comes after it. In cosmic terms, it is a black hole, into which everything falls and from which nothing emerges.

But oh... the journey to it; well, it's what really matters. And it has been what has taken the attention of the bulk of my waking hours in this year 66 to 67. Or, to be a bit more inclusive and accurate, the years since late 2022.

There's a book that sits somewhere near the top of the ziggurat of 'to read,' 'read,' or 'in process of being read' books on my bedstand. It's quite substantial now, and is a daily, teetering, and permanent reminder to me of the fleeting, quicksilver nature of time and of human life — the one encapsulated in my mental image of an old fave gentian blue ceramic coffee mug from my Berkeley days with the logo, "so many books, so little time" (that I must've bought from Cody's [RIP] or Moe's or Black Oak Books [RIP] or the Ashby BART Station weekend flea market ::chuckle::).

See if you can infer what book I had in mind for this post (list is in order of the literary ziggurat's height, from top of it to the floor):

The ziggurat has to be, of course, 13 volumes tall. Not 12, not 14... 13. ::chuckle::

And the book I had in mind, for the gnomic subject of this post? The Lacayo, of course. One does not fancy oneself anywhere near being of the likes or ilk of Titian, Hopper, Matisse, Nevelson, Monet, and Goya. But one does fancy oneself now in the throes of latter-life creativity, of the sort that arose spontaneously in the blush of youth and young adulthood, an era half a century ago now for me. "It Turns Out that Old Age Can Be a Time of Daring Creativity and Triumph," as the initial-capped text on the book's front jacket flap says. Or, as its very subtitle declares (also in initial caps): How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph.

[ NB: although, tbh and real talk? It was the book cover design with that Hopper canvas on it that caught my eye first, the infinitesimal instant before the actual text/title. ::chuckle:: Why? Because I'd written a post in TFR in days of yore using exactly that image to accompany the text of it. It was titled: in the blue room. ]

So. What is the gnome here, in the "gnomic subject, etc."? Well, that's for you to divine or infer, and it ain't that hard. A glance at this Pessoan baú's contents (already a year and a month's worth of days and titles) will easily yield the answer.

And so the work goes. And so it goes.

[ I slipped it out from the top of the pile and put it on my desk for its cameo... ]