Would like to capture, in a series of signs that come one after another in time, e.g., writing, the following:
1. Morning light outside Smithfield Market, London, the slightly foggy way the light reflects off the plastic awnings, on a cloudy day in June. How cool that light is, how thoroughly unsaturated. Later, the sky turns clear blue. Perhaps call this: British Summer Time.
2. The few days I spent with my mother after she was diagnosed with Pick's disease. The evenings I sat outside, on the back step, after she fell asleep. The blackness of the trees in full leaf against the night sky, not quite so black, in the backyard of the house I grew up in. The leaves rustling. A different June.
3. A certain quality of my relationship with Jane. Things pass between us so fast, without words. How wonderful this is, how occasionally it is also useful, how it is also scary, to be so close. How she is not scared.
4. Falling into a painting. Finding oneself alive in it. Waking up in it. Smell of turpentine, linseed oil. Suspicion that this is a dream belonging to my mother. Explore relationship of this idea to painting as problem solving (Lee Krasner). Louise Bourgeois' journals.
5. The experience of being in thrall to an idea. The moral ambiguity of this. Compared to being in thrall to a person, perhaps. (Even more morally ambiguous.) Thomas Mann wrote a short story about this - "Mario und der Zauberer," I think. Also Iris Murdoch -- all her books are about this, in one way or another.
