Seeing What Is Only Suggested

[Image: “#storypix 2018-08-19,” by John E. Simpson (shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page here at RAMH). This is one of a nightly series posted on Instagram, in which each caption represents a fragment of an imagined narrative which the corresponding picture no more than hints at — a separate story for each picture. The caption for this one says, “The guy claimed to have X-ray vision. Maybe that should’ve explained how he managed to just walk out of jail, but the Agency didn’t seem to think so.”]

From whiskey river:

My house here is painted the yellow colour of fresh butter on the outside, with glaringly green shutters; it stands in full sunlight in a square that has a green garden with plain trees, oleanders and acacias. It is completely whitewashed inside, with a floor made of red bricks. And over it there is the intensely blue sky. In this house I can love and breathe, meditate and paint.

(Vincent van Gogh [source])

…and:

When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. When I suddenly see myself in the mirror, I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful. I discover, in fact, that I possess another quality. When I haven’t looked at myself for some time, I almost forget that I am human, I tend to forget my past, and I find myself with the same deliverance from purpose and conscience as something that is barely alive. I am also surprised to find as I gaze into the pale mirror with open eyes that there is so much in me beyond what is known, so much that remains ever silent.

(Clarice Lispector [source])

…and:

“Sketch” Sunday Afternoon NY
(excerpt)

—awright so we’re all
gonna die but now is the
time to sing & see, to be
humble, sacrificed, late,
crazy, talkative, fool-
ish…

Time, rather, to be proud,
indispensable, early
sane, silent, serious…

(Jack Kerouac [source])

Not from whiskey river:

On Seeing Charlotte Brontë’s Underwear with my Daughter in Haworth

“Are they real?” We have pages of kitchen utensils and books
and candlesticks and nibs, but the charcoal pencil and new sketchpad
are squat as aubergines in her hands in front of this display.

With bad weather forecast and light silting up in cramped windows,
we are the only visitors. The year settles in a corner of the room,
has removed its white gloves, tip by tip, and set to one side

its summer purse of bibelots and sheen. Half-term of her final year,
we are sightseers intent on moors. In the morning, her windcheater
and red wellies will bestow the dust of summer festivals upon

sullen, wind-soaked sheep. We will park, and walk ourselves
into the final, cutting rain between pages of her favorite book.
She wants to go all the way to Top Withens, or the house they say

must have been Top Withens, given its loneliness and set. But now
is artifacts and souvenirs: a perfume with too much musk in it,
a jar of damson jam which we probably won’t open until past

its sell-by date. We are buying the word “damson.” And we are buying
time. “Are they real?” she asks me, and I watch her reckon the distance
between what should and should never be seen. We have fallen short.

She draws, and what she draws is rain falling slant inside the bedroom;
the bed as a box of leaves and stones and, within the display case,
she hangs from the clothes rail, little moons. On the mannequin,

water lilies stand in for morning dress, and the backdrop is marbled
in what looks to me like veins and arteries. But when I flick through
the sketchpad in the B&B, all the pages, what is left of them, are clean.

Next day, she leaves it in the car. When she moves away, she will leave
it again, a sketchpad with no name on it and only the faintest traces
of where she made skies of darned linen, and unfastened every stitch.

(Vona Groarke [source])

…and:

#11: “Eyewitness misidentification,” they call it: finding, in a remembered scene, the faces and forms of people not actually present. Such imagined observations convict the innocent, exonerate the guilty — a tragedy of the criminal justice system. Don’t kid yourself, though. You’re there, too: a vague, shadowy figure crouched behind the drugstore display case; a pedestrian walking by the bank; one of tens of thousands seated in the stadium before the explosion. We now know you’re the only one whose presence we can absolutely count on — and yet you, too, are misidentified: you wear a different shirt than you actually wore then; the last sentence you utter just, before The Critical Moment, begins with the word heaven and not the word just; you are proud, wise, sensible, and brave instead of merely distracted by noise or silence, by sudden movement, an inspiration.

That’s what happened, you say, and by the gods you know it. You’ll go to your grave knowing it.

But the you who knows it is not the you who knows you know it, and so on — an infinity of slightly altered selves, each mirror flawed in ways different from the others, the self frozen in your mind’s moment no more than one plucked (at random, in vanity, thanks merely to misfiring neurons) from among all the options. I first conceived of this maxim last night while brushing my teeth… or while sitting on the bed, sipping from a glass of water… or just after turning out the kitchen light… or while The Missus was telling me of her day…

Any one of these may be true, or none — and no more than one. Only after multiple repetitions will I decide, that is, will I remember. My most often witnessed and most often misidentified perpetrator is I myself.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)