My room faces the Hudson and some nights the wind comes across hard and cuts in and through my windows and howls at a pitch you can’t imagine until you’ve heard it for yourself, seems like hell’s own machinery, and its cold rubbing up against the kind hiss plus drip-drip-drip heat of my old steam radiator. Kind of ominous and it re-inspires brooding thoughts from earlier today that people are all characters, types, prearranged narratives…old news, which I guess Shakespeare covered centuries ago and Foucault decades ago, but still the consistency and predictability of said characters is stunning. We are stereotypes. We are cliches. We’re not, despite what has been suggested to us, very unique at all.

Honest to God this disappointments me as much as it does anyone. Inspiring contempt and compassion at the same moment, the thought is surprisingly remorse, and rightfully so, but there’s more to it b/c then after all I think there’s the capability of one, even while understanding that their entire being is completely obvious, to at some point muster some authentic action, to create some new thing, to manage out of their fragmented self an entirely distinctive new fragment…something new to add to the pool of fragments – ad infinitum. And, this, I suspect can happen on large and small scales, like little tremors or like fundamental alteration of the paradigm.

The thing of it is, the point is, at the end of the day, history or gawd or some memory of reckoning, these forces will only remember acts, not intentions.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008