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Hello darling, this is an unusual planisphere we're in, isn't it - I agree with you. All these lines paralleling, occasionally crossing, just for a moment, at a point, and then the lines rush off again. I don't know, perhaps that's not right, perhaps I don't have "planisphere" conceptually exactly right. But when I saw that page hit this morning, it did make me reflect on my blog, the strange narrative that I've been telling, that's been unfolding for so long. Bit by tiny bit every day, and it seems as though nothing is happening, and yet things are, sometimes behind the scenes, unbeknownst to me. Or there'll be a letter in Salon - for example - now what are the odds, honestly, that I might have had even the slightest tangential connection to it, for real, I mean? Because I'm sure many thousands if not more women all over the world could relate to it. Or what are the odds that you, for so so long a background figure to me (except that at Stair that night someone was there who reminded me of you - and I noted so - and then I veered off onto another subject! I wish I had dwelled on that observation a little longer in that post.) Or what are the odds that I lived for so many years in ego-chafing proximity to "the guy across the street" -- I describe the acute discomfort and psychic torturings I put myself through pretty much whenever I heard the creak of his garden gate around 6:30 weekday mornings when he'd set off for work -- our bedroom faced the street, which is why I could hear such distinctive street noises. I had always had literary aspirations, or longings... but had not ever really done anything about them... they were unrequited -- and here I was across the street from a pre-eminent figure. So that was an odd "parallel line never meeting" all those years, and now all these years later, that I'd be thinking of him again because suddenly he's in the news, and then I find a poem of his about peacocks that speaks to me exactly as to what's been troubling me...

All these convergences! "Full of sound and fury, signifying..." -- no, not nothing, I don't believe. Or maybe I'm not going to look for the "ultimate meaning" or significance -- and simply absolutely marvel at all the parallels and coincidences and convergences. Honestly, I could never ever have invented these myself - as the cliche goes, "truth is stranger than fiction." As a potential novelist, I might have been reticent to draw such overarching, improbable leaps & connections and reversals and obsessions. It simply isn't my talent. Though I suppose I have heaploads of raw material now, in the pages of this blog - but - oy - the work of trying to shape & whittle it down into some sort of fictional account. No, I don't think that project is for me. I'm simply here, the "strict recorder," to borrow from Nabokov - half-blind though, setting down notes accurately enough in the form of evening love letters to you, in the sense of knowing where I've been, what the day brought -- but having no sense at all, really, of where I'm going.