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photo taken by Endless SuburbsI hear songs of homecoming and hope, but I am weary.-The Colour of Pomegranates (1969, Armenia)The starving winter night consumes everything here. As soon as it's gone, it returns, biting upon the day light bit by bit.Shockingly clear constellations as the village sleeps. I hover around them with the last of the fireflies of Italy, but I do not stay. My attention is that of a squirrel. My, my... what a tail you have, just darling, where did you buy such a thing? Well, it's natural, I reply, insulted, biting down on my finger that I had thought was a nut.It's the end of November. It's the longest time that I've passed on this island in five years. It's taken this long to reach restlessness, surfacing like an oil spill over everything that has been here. Whole, determined hope had been omnipresent in the last months. Now the bicycle no longer works and so the beach is quite unreachable through the lungs of open sparse fen land. To walk here is to be confronted with the barren parts of you that you push further down when you can, the hardened fields speak of bleak days and thoughts that can't be let go. Some days I can do it but most leave me with the feeling that they will never end, these fields. Only the birds passing overhead to forage for food at dusk by the sea bring relief but hibernation is here, and I find the road once more next week, at last, at last! Yet, when all is met by the song of nesting, what can a man do when faced with long travels into the night? Work is over but with it the focus and nourishment of pushing oneself to a limit that is so easily defined in this kind of work at least. It's an escape, I know, from the real task of what to do, at last, with my writing. A mask, a cabaret, a brass band to take away the real life of what it is to search, to dig, to transform. Become obsolete. A focus only whispered in sacred literature. And loneliness. My rides, as of late, must have thought I was a hermit who needed to talk to anyone more than anything else there could be. Just words, the sound of them, laughter, emotions. I've wanted to speak to everyone I see on the street, almost everyone have passed their heydays, their peaks and settle in front of the television screen while the house is on fire. Just pour some more tea on it will you, dear?I run into the woods and return with the head of a field mouse. I run on squeaking and bewildered. I don't run any more, these days. It's cold too and I must keep my toes for Paris.
