Bits of the mind's string | 01

A friend recently reminded me of the joy of the drafts folder: that unintentional accumulation of Didion-esque bits of string you were too shy/embarrassed/tired/lacking in internet connection to share.

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from the summer:

There was music from her neighbour’s flat that night, bluesy notes billowing under the door frames and beating about the windows. Voices mingled with the bass notes in one steady hum. A square of yellow light hung suspended out across the street, so still and solid she felt she could take hold of it and pull it inside.

standing at a bus stop thinking about minimalism and the decluttering trend and Marie Kondo:

I threw out more and more things, clothes and ornaments and books and jewellery and photographs, until I realised I’d made the same mistake my dad did, the winter he pruned the forsythia. ‘It’s just a stump!’ my mum wailed. ‘It won’t flower!’ He’d cut the branches back too far; overpruned them of their precious buds, the things that made the plant alive. In the same way, I’d pruned too much of myself. Not just the things that kept me clothed and occupied, but the things that made me me. I’d clipped my mind’s string too short: I had no extraneous thought to lead me to new, interesting places. I’d furiously scrubbed my brain with whitewash until it was a tabula rasa in the unhappiest sense. I was an empty shell, a husk.  

from Bruce Springsteen's recent Chicago show:

'Independence Day was the first song I wrote about fathers and sons. It’s the kind of song you write when you’re young, and you’re first startled by your parents’ humanity. You’re shocked to realise that they had their own dreams and their own desires, because all you could see was the adult compromises they’ve had to make, and when you’re young you haven’t had to do that yet. I remember the idea of it frightened me, the idea of how they seem locked into a certain world... and all you could feel was the desire to escape that world.'

(side note: slight possibility I might be over-obsessed with Springsteen, ha ha, but had a seminar today on Joyce and Beckett, and how Joyce might've fulfilled a father role for Beckett, which led on to the topic of fathers in general, and how when we're young we behave in opposition to our fathers to escape them... and all I could think about was this quote)

walking through Tavistock Square on a particularly Februaryish day:
Bone cold. The kind that is mirrored in the sky and on people’s faces. Air a purplish white-grey, like a bruise or a gloveless hand. 

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