Good morning darling. Gray, cool morning. I'm a little out of sorts. I woke up too early, before 6, got up, and now it's after nine and I feel tired again. Also a bit anxious. Also just a bit unhinged, a feeling of having been turned inside out. Things are not as they appear. Yesterday I weeded the little woodland garden. It's situated in the west- and north-facing ell of the house. Penelope (the cat) kept me company and the radio was playing inside the house. I could hear it through the open windows - from the living room, one of whose windows faces west, music spilling into the garden where I worked, and also from the solarium, in which D installed a second set of speakers, whose open window faces north - also spilling forth the music. I am unable to see in stereo, but realized as I crouched and weeded that within the ell I could hear in stereo, and that here, suddenly, the living room and the solarium were very proximate whereas, if I'm in the house, it's a bit of a walk to go from the living room to the solarium - I must go through the dining room, pass through a doorway, walk through the kitchen to the doorway of the solarium, and cross through the long room - its northfacing window is at the far end. So as I weeded I felt a sense of space having telescoped, inverted, compressed - windows, portals - and wondered, not for the first time, if that's how the universe is structured, that other worlds are extremely proximate, a matter of perception.

I'm glad you're back - but since you've returned "United States" with the iPhone has disappeared. True, it's only been a day - but I got accustomed to his visits. Very strange. Back in June I decided it was you - based in part, I kid you not, on a couple of songs KZE played one night (when "United States" first appeared), entitled Alaska and Satellite Sky. I decided (tongue-in-cheek - I'm not entirely crazy) to take them to be signals or clues that it was you. I didn't literally believe it - but absent other input - why not? As far as I know, KZE has never played either of those songs before or since (now, it's possible that they have - but not that I've happened to notice anyway, and I often look at their playlists).

(On this morning's playlist - Planes and Satellites.)

So now I am feeling the weirdest sense of divided loyalties - love as always for ever-removed you, and a sudden retroactive fondness for Mr. iPhone - who is now, as revealed, a separate entity. I feel certain it's a Mister, and I have an inkling of who it might be, though my track record for correctly guessing is abysmal - best leave it to pleasant ambiguity.

D's at work now but will be back soon and I'll go for my walk. I'm sure it will do me good, clear my head. Clear my head of cobwebs I wanted to write - and indeed I noticed at the conservation area yesterday morning (I was there early, around 8), that the spiderwebs are back, galleries of them. A teflon-coated fly could I suppose go the long way, step along the circumference of a web. Or take a shortcut to the opposite side - traverse the windows.

I'm glad I gave you Borges' Labyrinths. Did you ever read it? I read this apposite bit from the introduction, on someone's blog yesterday:

We are transported into a realm where fact and fiction, the real and the unreal, the whole and the part, the highest and the lowest, are complementary aspects of the same continuous being: a realm where ‘any man is all men’, where ‘all men who repeat a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare’. The world is a book and the book is a world, and both are labyrinthine and enclose enigmas designed to be understood and participated in by man. We should note that this all-comprising intellectual unity is achieved precisely by the sharpest and most scandalous confrontation of opposites.

All who repeat a line of Dickinson are Emily Dickinson.

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--

Kisses, dearest. Have a wonderful day.