Subjectivity

Such trouble with our server. This is today's equivalent of you-can't-get- good-help.

I am going to make columns of lists, a forest of lists, stalactites of lists, just for the fun of it. Headings will be prejudices, envy, smells, cooking, likes, words, stories, plants, worries, projects and anything else which occurs to me.

I was tired last night after my day-on-a-ladder, so to help me sleep I looked through the Bartholemew Mini-Atlas I keep by the bed. Over and over I am surprised by the difference in looking at pictures or maps rather than reading, completely separate area of the brain, holiday for the chattering mind. The curious thing is that I haven't been to most of these places, but I have images of them, phantom smell and weather and atmosphere, phantom feeling. I shall never-never-never sail to 'Frisco but I am part of this earth and have links, however tenuous and subjective, with the whole world and every detail of it. As I get older my sense of self is more diffuse, more melting and changing, and it is a lovely feeling, I melt like buttah.

This is me:

Looking up the curious places
In his tattered atlas, too
Lands of jungle and of sun,
Ivory tusks and dusky faces,
Whence his latest treasure flew
Like a tropic moth, he thought,
To flutter round his dying lamp. . . .

It is better than it sounds.