hurricane irene

11:05, saturday. It's raining! if it rained like this for a month straight it would probably be a problem. this is a pretty respectable downpour, you can hear it like a clock ticking, the pelting progress of time. hearing rain for time is probably a truer measure of it in the same way that an impressionists chair is really the truer chair. how sad it would be if we felt time in the clipped interruptions of our human seconds; it'd be like seeing the world by the atom, with the cavernous spaces between nuclei and electrons. there's so much in between, so slippery, and there are a billion clocks. rain is a better clock. rain is time for the mind at large, for the unreduced mind. rain does justice to the great messy torrent which is the world moving, and not even straight, i guess snow would be the better analogy for the messiness of time, moving sideways and taking its time and then blindingly down all at once and then sometimes even moving backwards, back up again on the thermals of memory, except that snow doesn't make any noise -- but then again maybe that's appropriate. what, other than a fascist marching band, a soviet five year plan makes claims that time makes noise as it passes? time is silent. hey, it's snow, not time

also, 11:29, the rain has stopped. the sun is coming out again, the buildings have noticeably brightened.

12:32, back from shopping, that was hectic and funny. situations like this, situations where there's something universal to talk about you realize all the nonsense people have kicking around in their brains. people are harmless enough when they shop silently but it's an unhappy revelation to learn what they've been keeping cooped up in their skulls. one musclebound man with a sharp patch of hair on the top of his head was expounding on the toughness of koreans and their little delis. great. a universal happening like weather lets you see in everybody's head for once. when a dog barks after lightning strikes i know why he barks. the sad thing about that discovery and that opportunity is to find out nobody's thinking anything very interesting.

8:31, irene's moving at 16 mph. hilarious to think of it as a fat lady jogging. sixteen measly miles an hour! this is taking forever! i was expecting disaster tonight for god's sake, this could take all week! the people who have died are those having heart attacks from being so anxious about the terribleness of the storm. also, one guy fell off a ladder. this is shaping up to be pretty disappointing. my hope is to get some 80 mph winds so that i can pretend to be mary poppins on our stoop. that is my fondest wish. s and i made a delicious dinner and watched the life aquatic which i think is pretty second rate. there are some good bits. generally speaking, id like wes anderson to bric-a-brac my life. i think that's his greatest talent by far. s and i have pancake mix for tomorrow morning as well as ample supplies for pb and j into the foreseeable future. we are prepared and undaunted.

wind is a kind of magic too. it raises an army of trash, animating garbage bags into bag ladies, paper cups into skittering cats, caution tape into flailing arms. everywhere scraps hail you, alive only to be anxious. still, shadows must envy them.



10:08 Pickpocket by Robert Bresson is some preachy-ass scriptural shit with a plot and acting as ponderous as bible quotations. the gymnastics of their pickpocketing are truly marvelous but the weight of their emotions would make a messiah cringe. what's most terrible is the unflinching faith in the establishment, in the god-like wisdom of the police chief and everyone's bottomless kindness to the pickpocket-sinner. what a fucking farce. ponderous-ass farce.

10:30 or so s and i went for a walk down to hudson river park. it was misty with a 6th rate wind, it was a suggestion of weather, a spritzer. there were dog walkers and a bit of rowdy water, higher than usual, which looked today like a hungry animal too small to reach you. we're so unobservant that it's little wonder the sky is suddenly full of malice and strangeness or the sea frothing with metaphors when there's a big to do like there is right now. we should realize that sky and sea are pretty much ALWAYS full of goddamn malice and danger we just don't care to pay them any mind. all anyone needs to die a horrible, cruel death is to be left in a 10 foot sink filled 7 feet with water. water'd swallow you, sink you, grab you till you're dead. water's a 5th column; it's lain in wait for its master. for so long it lapped the shores, idly supping, and now it'll rise up and swallow us whole.

there WERE a couple of fallen trees in the park by bleecker street which was some consolation. i took a piece of brick as a souvenir. they had actually fallen over! it was terrific! though as s noted they'd doubtless been transplanted and were only supported by gravity rather than the typical tentacles of a tree that size. after all, in turning over they'd brought with them that dense square with which new trees get planted, like a a pastry for a Sauropod, but hardly any roots. s and i both slept with the window open and heard/felt nothing

11:47 also, the tragedies of hurricane irene continue to not have to do with wind or extraordinary amounts of rain -- houses burned down by candles, people falling off ladders preparing for 2nd rate tropical storm, heart attacks from anxiety at the fear people'd been made to feel. some idiot died hydroplaning, etc. better safe than sorry except for all the ordinary tragedies of safety, and of telling people to be a good deal more terrified than they need to be.

1:02 watching Solaris but am terribly tired, s is napping and i think ill have one too. this movie's weird. am watching commentaries to make sense of it. no one says much more than "tarkovsky didn't like space, science fiction, he liked the earth." great. also, this was all new stuff. id appreciate it more if i hadnt seen these ideas about memories and imaginations in blade runner already (though after, of course). and yeah the set is super dooper and there's a lot of stuff i flatly fail to understand. i just learned that apparently the rain, the highly isolated drizzles that happen now and then, are symbolic of the holy spirit. did not know that. been thinking since then about mutant memories back to haunt us. tarkovsky loves the earth and that's straightforward enough; what's interesting are these visions of the past gone rogue, without an anchor to reality (for our nostalgia would build people as good as faces we sketch as we sleep. i wouldn't want the nose i'd draught) would be monsters.

6:18, s went home, all is peaceful, trees get flustered now and then but i think they're hamming it up. trees are effectively sails after all, they couldn't be better designed to get terribly excited over little breezes. really, there could be nothing easier to topple than a tree in bloom, all set up to catch the wind but stuck to a trunk. on a windy day they're contradictions, a house divided.

i was also thinking earlier about how i was probably unreasonable about the wind, how i expected to be able to be anywhere and feel the brunt of it and how i got all in a huff when i went in front of my house and failed to fly away like mary poppins. but wind is a rather pathetic thing in a city, it can't blanket it like snow falling from the sky or make itself known like an earthquake beneath every foot, it has to navigate the streets like any pedestrian, finding street corners good for hailing cabs (those corners are always the windiest, especially 13th and 8th avenue) and avoiding blind alleys. it's little wonder if the wind got tired and lost on the doorsteps of my neighbors in greenwhich village and failed to get to me.