TWENTY-SIX

From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly

[Late Summer, 2005]

– the persistence of her image after she’d gone, and the empty feeling it left, even before, even while she was still here, and how I’d known that I’d already lost her when I was only just then with her, when I’d only just then found her, how that was the saddest feeling, though the persistence of her body, the persistence of her self, was in itself a defiance, I don’t know of what, of the thing, the object, of myself, of the fact or the engagement of the object with myself. She was in some sense maybe not here to begin with, and that was how she could persist for as long as she did. She was here and she was not; though no one (were anyone still left to say) could argue that she was not here. She was entirely here. You could not miss her. I did not miss her. She was entirely here. It was perhaps the argument of her engagement with the here, the being here, while at the same time, I persist, she was somewhere significantly else too.

LAWS OF ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN THE OBJECT AND THE SELF.

HEAD TRAUMA.

THE BEING AND THE BODY.

I did not need to look to know I would not find her again when she’d gone.

There is a nucleus or yolk within the central sphere, and from the yolk radiate four arms or pseudopodia in four directions: sky, Earth, horizons. They are everywhere the same. The arms burn with fire; they are living arms; they radiate – [the eight lines which follow are so heavily scratched out as to be unreadable, as was no doubt the intention] – is solid, is still, is burnt and cold, is still living, is still living, the hundred-years fire a single thought from start to finish, is never finished, but alive, will touch us, will touch us with –