Fanfiction: the Matrix

A dream where I was trying to solve death. How the cliches chase us even unto sleep. Scranleting the breakfast dishes again, remembering the years when sex and ideology seemed everything I thought about. Could it be that social control was the biggest takeaway from twenty-one years of education? I never saw The Matrix but have the impression it was about fish in an aquarium, huge, like the one at Monterey. Whether they know they’re behind glass, whether any of them have a sense of the sea. If I made an aquarium film, the key scene would be when the camera looks down into the vast tank from above—how radically different those fish, without magnification in the magic glass—nothing between the camera’s eye and the water. Now, how easy to meet the hammerhead head on, to touch the ray’s rail. Like the urge to jump off, the urge to jump in’s apparently a lifelong predilection. Does reading all that Marxian critique give us a wedge against the internet, or has the algorithm already drowned us, alive, in a manner of speaking.

Paris in the Tweens

This is the type of very hot night when you have to stick one foot out of the sheets like a fin. Farmers set up their gigantic white-noise machines below in the vineyards so when you wake in the middle of the night at first you can’t remember which factory you work in. All the real estate contracts in the valley have ag clauses mentioning such matters but no one reads them till the first summer after they buy their little houses, as though at an old-fashioned June wedding the groom were to murmur to the bride at the altar in May I often loudly snore. After decades of aluminum we ordered casement windows clad in oak which will cost about what we paid for the house and take five months to deliver but A Pattern Language advises casement over double-hung or sliders which I wish I’d known five years ago when we replaced the others. A black and white photo that illustrates Pattern 236 Windows Which Open Wide is an uncredited shot of Picasso’s Paris studio in the tweens with what looks like a 2 x 3 meter casement framing the cityscape of brick and stucco chimneys flattened to abstraction by monochrome so that it makes another painting above hexagonal terracotta tiles. No artist is shown though one sees an easel brushes paints and parts of two paintings but what gives away the location is his emaciated Afghan hound stretching out under the window like a thick rug with a potted fern for the head. These were the days in which you probably didn’t have electricity but could often eat a soufflé and if you were even a little rich you never prepared your own but were known by the skill of your servants Your cook is very good No your cook is very good and if the cooking was consistently fine a cook’s employer would record the one or two bad dinners she ever made in classic literature. At this time you might buy a small Cézanne from Vollard and a tiny Renoir and still have cash for Alice’s hat. Side-hung casements are simple to open or close and easy to climb in and out of so while standing in one filling up the frame nearly outside smelling weather trees and flowers, you can drink the warm air.