I've finally started packing up my books. Eight boxes (sort of a useless unit, except with respect to the work involved in carting them down and then up three flights of stairs), and three bags set to go back to the bookstore. It's kind of a good feeling, blowing the dust off the pages of new and old friends and setting them carefully in stacks that never quite fit their boxes. The old friends are used to the ritual now, especially the ones that traveled from Oregon to Boston to Berkeley to Chicago, too much a part of my travels to let them go though I don't know the next time I'll ever crack their pages. Borges kept me company on a lot of lonely nights in Massachusetts, in days when I was a good deal more introspective and a lot more concerned with abstract form and principle. I see him in my photographs from those months, all black and white studies of abandoned factories under streetlamps and other curious shapes invisible and ignored in the life of the city. My life is almost entirely different now, though I still take a great pleasure biking down Milwaukee Avenue late at night where it runs into the meat-packing district. I've changed so much in those ten years I can hardly imagine a tenth of the things I must have been thinking, but holding these mute inanimate objects seems to bring it all back. As if they had a soul, but a different sort of soul from that of an animal, not an independent creation, but a bit of my own life. Memory, of course, but where does it reside? In my own synapses, but requiring a specific key to unlock them, which I placed in these things. They are a sort of home, taken together, a landscape where my mind can roam freely. The only home I've had for quite a while.