I sleep so badly that the night has become a poorly cropped field with tangled patches of woodland where, if the gods are good and the leaf-fall honest, I might enter a glade of a dream with a cabin in it and maybe a stream and a semblance of lightly-gardened order. The reading I do during the day is a diurnal version of that field, those tangles and glades and maybe a cabin if I turn the page. I can't stay long with any book; the cabin is elusive and maybe the door is locked and the garden grown over. The pages of Books of Jacob, back in 18th century central europe in the murky jewish soul; and Entangled Life, the study of mycelium by the wonderfully-named Merlin Sheldrake, who maybe should be writing about dragons—or maybe is—intermingle and coalesce into a cracky exhaustion.
In the afternoon I lie down on the floor and look at random pages of The Red Shoes by Karen Elizabeth Gordon, a series of fragments from putative tales, an unbuttoned lexicon, as tattered as my consciousness. None of it takes. I do not sleep. The pages are the undergrowth. Already brambles are poking out and rooting anew.
For all this fragmentation there is a strange, tight identity to these days, the push of an emotional mycelium that, on encountering an obstacle, simply bifurcates and continues on its way. Even the new shoot of a bramble splits into two before seizing the next bit of ground.
It’s lovely to read your writing here about your own experiences too, as well as about your reading as usual. (The way you write about your ‘self’ experience is even more interesting than what you say about others’ books, to be honest. Maybe we can hear a little more, intermingled with your readings?)
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