Let's live suddenly without thinking

[Why do I look for signs? To be pointed in the right direction.

Why do I recognize some signs and not others? Because I already know where I want to go.]

One of the first recent signs was the souvenir pencil that rolled off my shelf to land at my feet. Emblazoned on its side: Exterminate all rational thought. Yes, I can do that with a pencil.

On impulse, I bought a magazine a couple of weeks ago: Adbusters #152, The Big Ideas of 2025 ("new ways to live, love, and think"). Because the crop of the future must be seeded now.

Standing in the shop, I open it randomly. A photo of a man on an old tubular-framed bed in what might be a war hospital or a communist-era tenement is set opposite a passage from Samuel Beckett's Endgame. I start to cry. (And if something makes you cry, you should hold it close.) [Downloading Endgame now to read later this week.]

The list of contents boasts love, hate, despair, betrayal. I flip past a quote from e.e. cummings ("let's live suddenly without thinking")

[whereby I (re)discover:

let's live like the light that kills
and let’s as silence,
because Whirl's after all:
(after me)love,and after you.
I occasionally feel vague how
vague idon't know tenuous Now-
spears and The Then-arrows making do
our mouths something red,something tall

(And I feel so vague these days and loving the now-and-then of things.)].

I am struck by an article on Mondrian's trees and Picasso's bulls, "how the evolution of Western aesthetics is one of creeping abstraction." I recognize that this is the philosophy I am attuned to. Strip away all superfluity. Leave only the essential. I want existence to be distilled to a single point in time and space, from which all the rest — from the texture of the sweater dress I wore the day he first kissed me to the hum of the insect gripping the underbelly of a tank rolling across a city I never lived in, in a time before my world began — can be extrapolated, inferred, intuited. A speck that holds the genetic material to clone the details of my universe.

I consider that maybe I am wrong to abstract. That I should wallow more, in loud music, fast images, the stuff of consumerism. 

[We're in the midst of another circuit-breaker-style lockdown. The bookshop has temporarily shut down its webstore. Everyone needs a rest. I take inventory of provisions to restock and plan a schedule for forays into the wild. It's nearing 300 days since I last worked in an office. A streak of just over 300 days of Duolingo German lessons. Another mirror-in-the-bathroom pandemic-chic haircut. We acknowledge 2021 with the merest "Happy New Year!" barely interrupting our evening of champagne and videogames on the couch in pyjamas. These are, in fact, happy days replete with meaningful meaninglessness.]

Pages later, a cut-up graffiti collage of a megaphone yells at me to fuck modernity. I'm not sure what modernity is anymore.

There's a multipage riff on an exchange in Shakespeare's Tempest, in which Sebastian is "standing water" and Antonio tells him, "I'll teach you how to flow." [Teach me how to flow, Antonio.]

The signs are everywhere.

A final exhortation reminds me that it's time to be the person I was always meant to be. "Let's taste the revolutionary sweetness of being out of control. Shall we?"