So I picked up a book I had once only half-read, a prescient gift from brother Andrew who knew I had been interested in Schizophrenia and the like, by the inestimable Foucault - Madness and Civilization. Trying to pick it up at the midpoint was disconcerting ... I do remember the gist of the first half, but I couldn't focus on the particulars, so I flipped back to the beginning and began again.

But this post has little to do with the book itself- rather, within it, I found a bookmark (picked up with my mother from Half Moon Books in Northampton, MA) where I had written a series of words- words I either didn't know, or sort-of knew but wanted to find the exact definition (Note: I have a tendency to know words only contextually, know them in their neighborhoods and typical sentences, and that's usually enough to get away with. However, I sometimes Iryna will ask me what a word means, and I have to admit- sheepishly, as you can imagine- that my knowledge is quite superficial, or a loose coupling at best).

So a thought occurred to me today, something interesting and unprecedented. I was standing in the bathroom, sort of half awed at the tile and silver aura of the place, and truth be told I think I had just weighed myself. If the scratched postcard of my memory is correct, the scale said 211.5 today.

In any case, it was one of those moments that you can see yourself, from outside, and I became conscious of the fact that I was looking at myself, and had just started to wonder if my self-awareness was contributing to my pose, the angles of my arms and crook of my head, as if I were posing for a scene in a book (that's what it almost felt like) and then - I sort of fell, rushing, through the veins of my own history, my own art, and the ideas I had burned through in years past. Maybe it was just all those mirrors, but thinking back on it now, I see ripples through quicksilver. Or maybe that's from the book in which I posed. And the thought was basically this: words.