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Saturday 15 August 2009

Aporia


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File:Dunkler Cb mammatus.jpg





"I am at no loss for information about you and your family," said Demosthenes, "but I am at a loss where to begin. Shall I relate how your father Tromes was a slave in the house of Elpias, who kept an elementary school near the Temple of Theseus, and how he wore shackles on his legs and a timber collar round his neck? or how your mother practised daylight nuptials in an outhouse next door to Heros the bone-setter, and so brought you up to act in tableaux vivants and to excel in minor parts on the stage?"

There had never been any need to be unkind.

And so the days went by, and then the nights, and the wig bubbles drifted.

Doubtful coves with a heavy plundered cargo but only an empty heart to hold it in, not copper stripped, and subject to the worm.

Bewilderment and embarrassment make poor allies in a storm.

The sounds of the old argument come out of the past to haunt, and then like a briefly recollected passage of music are lost again, released into the grey slipstream of unretrieved memories, to flow back to wherever it is that everything that's ever been forgotten is stored.

We tuned in then to the Shipping Forecast. From Finisterre, intermittent rain, visibility one mile, and rising slowly. Dover, visibility ten meters, and falling rapidly. Spindrift vision, a minute twitch of the imagination. A state of puzzlement, as the Captain felt looking into the fog.







File:UK shipping forecast zones.png






Dark Cumulonimbus mammatus
: photo by Simon Eugster, 2006
UK Shipping Forecast Zones (Fitzroy formerly Finisterre): image by Emoscopes, 2007

4 comments:

TC said...

A mouse kiss on the mammatus will bring forth the full frame.

Anonymous said...

That state of puzzlement while sailing could not be dressed in any other gown than fog itself.

Wonderful lines, Tom.

TC said...

Gracias, Lucy. Yo soy en las nieblas, siempre... cómo los barcas derivé. Tal vez estamos en el mismo barco, no?

Para mi, a veces, es cómo uno traje de noche... sobre el cerebro.

(En español tiene una expresión que creo que equivale perfectamente a "brain fog" y es "mente espesa"-- o simplemente "estar espeso"?)

TC said...

Ay, caramba!--perdoname--my abysmal brainfogged Spanish strikes again!

Should have said las barcas a la deriva (why anyone in their right mind would want a masculine boat at this point in history is a mystery...obviously I must not be in my right mind).

On the other hand and in any tongue: shipwrecked boats adrift oceans apart but maybe in the same fog--la niebla ambiente del raza humana?

A pesar de los faros y las sirenas la densa niebla nos impidió llegar... perdidos en la mente inquieta (o el inconsciente?) antes de las inundaciones...

El mundo nebulosa de Aporia.