[b]Ali Smith
It’s about the connecting force from form to form. It’s the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It’s the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.[/b]
Inherently so?
Want is quite a complicated word there, because there’s volo, which means I want, but it’s not usually used with people. Desidero? I feel the want of, I desire. Amabo? I will love. But what if I will never love? What if I will never desire? What if I will never want?
Hell, you may not even want to. Or do you actually need to?
It is like everything in layers. Things happen right at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind, and behind that, and again behind that, like you can see, in perspective, for miles. Then there are the separate details, like that man with the duck. They’re all also happening on their own terms. The picture makes you look at both–the close-up happenings and the bigger picture. Looking at the man with the duck is like seeing how everyday and how almost comic cruelty is. The cruelty happens in among everything else happening. It is an amazing way to show how ordinary cruelty really is.
Tell that to the man with the duck.
Somehow this wasn’t the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren’t relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.
She means [at least I think she does] in an essentially absurd and meaningless world.
… because I can read you like a book and because the thing about a beloved book, if it’s a good one, is that it shifts like music; you think you know it, you’ve read it so many times, of course you know it, of course the pleasure of it is in how well you know it, but then you hear, in the background, the thing you never heard in it before, and with the turn of a page you see a combination of words you know you’ve never seen before, you thought you knew this book but it dazzles you with the different book it is, yet again, and not just that but the different person you have become, the different person you are now, reading it again, and you, my love, are an excellent book for me, and then us both together, which takes some talent with rhythm, but luckily we are quite talented at reading each other.
It goes without saying: you can count them on one hand. If not one finger.
You’re not the first person who was ever wounded by love. You’re not the first person who ever knocked on my door. You’re not the first person I ever chanced my arm with. You’re not the first person I ever tried to impress with my brilliant performance of not really being impressed with anything. You’re not the first person to make me laugh. You’re not the first person I ever made laugh. You’re not the first person full stop. But you’re the one right now. I’m the one right now. That’s enough, yes?
We’ll see. And I’m not the first person to say that.