L.—


Time is briefer than I speak of it. For that I owe you thanks—I have been drawing again this morning, so I use the reminder. Thunder broke over the city in the early hours and I woke (‘dreams with…?’) to a feeling of floating downward, rather than the hovering above the sheets the chairs the floor as has been occurring in recent days. Sleep, intoxicating. I take a drink.

Your letter reminded me . . . the dark walls, little round tables, the beakers of wine and water. That time it was daylight, the mirror and empty seats; elsewhere, the aches of farming labour. This betrays that I used to know you. You won’t recall but our messages do, stored somewhere out there under the rocks in the desert, humming as we spelled out talking:

                . . . School buses gutted, the farm up north, rubber bullets in the city, the body that held a lamb, squeezed-tight eyes to the sky—“we have misgivings. . .”—

Damn! You cannot look me in the eye. It’s kind of funny. Go on, try me—let me co-opt you mockingly into my control! —paint those animals with your brush! In one of the buses—

                in the image, in the desert, is a shape that could be a figure (a sign of life in the spectacle and the truth!) And you’re hungry!
                Detritus—the ground of objects, objects broken into a thousand pieces—
                "Cue the saxophone!”—

I’m being spiteful. It’s my image. But I am telling you about fragmentation and magnification. Keep up. There should be no automatic understanding (“resist your resistance!”). This is why I’m drawing it.

A downpour here. Wake up. Slap of wet cotton, wet tyres, abandoned streets. Don’t forget, rubber bullet, I’m still in the city.


                Gesturally, A.