am on my way to neuroscience meeting and having finished with my itinerary am sitting here listening to music in this strange suspended universe. on the earlier leg of the flight to Alberquerque it was Bach’s Passacalia and Fugue, an 18 minute piece of such splendor to be its own world. now the DJ kicks Kruder & Dorfmeister album, which is not so intricate but cohesive and distracting in its own way. essential fracture of dreams and music; that neither can exist in its own right, only in passing. must wake in order to remember, and yet by waking destroy the set of conditions in which the dream was valid. that sense of lingering beauty totally inexplicable. nothing in this world can bear that sort of unity of purpose.

on my second pass through Kundera’s lightness of being. still poignant, masterfully articulated, and yet now less unexpected, less light. cannot tell if I simply recall it from before or if what has happened after it has been filtered through it so that i have without thinking of it been seeing things in terms of lightness and weight for some time now, though I have found my own vocabulary for them.

i am still greatly affected by beauty. that deadly creature. what possible biological explanation is there for why the sight of something beautiful demands care, compassion, love. sitting in the plane where i can see the face of a woman who must be french: enormous eyes, colored like sea and earth. when she sleeps she becomes a different person, beautiful in a totally abstract way, lovely as a statue. she must be going to the meeting. she has that look, and if she plays an instrument it must be the clarinet.

what odd creatures we are all packed aboard this flying thing to go talk about something we have never seen at all. believe on the strength of learned truth which may not mean anything or have been passed on accurately. and in other planes bishops go to talk about god and beaurocrats go to talk about the state and the future.

i want to attend a conference for the inexplicable and unexpected. i want to give a poster on the strangeness of seeing you standing on your bed holding your hot water bottle. i want to talk for hours on the shapes in smoke, the sensations of travel, the dark goddess beauty, the image of johnny depp holding a dead deer in his hands in Dead Man.

how absurd I am. to feel anything at all for a woman whose face i have only just seen, whose soul (if there is such a thing) is hidden in a collection of gestures too infinite to be recounted, who has probably never touched a clarinet. to feed will on these tiny gestures, on a face that will disappear in sixty years or so. in less, if men’s eyes tell true tales.

out of the recesses of a memory i did not expect to possess I find again and again the evidence of being in love with you, of being happy and alive.