A Sackful of Savings No. 7

The best models for a painter are those who anticipate your needs and seem riveted to the ground of your composition, but turn with the sun and the moods of your creativity. 

Literature and science stare at one another and see in the other a huge gap: this hiatus needs to be filled by the imagination.

Much of my life seems to have been spent standing in the rain, a wind buffeting my patience, waiting for an unknown contact to appear at an ambiguously described meeting point.  Eventually they tap me on the shoulder, asking why I am so late.  Luckily, I will probably never see them again.

Outdoors the harsh and barren landscape, rain and chilly winds.  Inside, culture and conversation, and a timeless series of anecdotes.

Young girls now open doors for me, offer me their seats on the tram, and smile knowing I am harmless and incapable of sudden moves.  Old age has its advantages!  How humiliating.

Great men are very busy.  They rush about the world.  Others make time for their friends.  They think God is patient with them.  I am too old and tired to find out.

Warning over the sink area in a hostel” “If you remove the dishes or utensils from the dining area, they lose their kosher status.”  What magic incantations would be needed to correct an egregious error? 

Four Common Errors

§  Dreyfus was a military man; therefore he was dull.

§  Dreyfus was an engineer; therefore he was dull.

§  Dreyfus was a bourgeois husband and father; therefore he was dull.

§  Dreyfus was a Jew: therefore he had no imagination.

Some  Chinese faces belong in ancient silk paintings.  Some shadows cry out for Gothic windows.  

No children, however, ever leave the comfort of their black-and-white photographs.

On the one hand, there are never enough colors to express my passions. Never enough crayons in the box, never enough little boxes to moisten with my brushes, never enough lenses to refract the rainbows in the sky after a twilight storm.  On the other hand, there are too many tones, textures and tints to capture on a miniature canvas or to splash on the wall before the plaster dries or to weave in the tapestry that spins out of control over the maddening world.

Without memory we collapse into oblivion.  Without history we can finally relax.

This old communists hawking Spartacus and those ancient veterans of the barricades with People’s Voice for sale show all the practical fervour of Jehovah’s Witnesses handing out The Watchtower.  They have the wax-caste visages of Lenin in his tomb on Red Square or the holiday photographs of Trotsky on his Mexican tour.  They believe they resemble the figures on the tee-shirts they wear.  The power of faith.

Leaves wriggle out of swaying branches, as wayward ideas hidden in languid synapses.  Before you know it, whole paragraphs of philosophy turn to mush.

Narrow winding streets where medieval cobblestones are gently lifted to lay cables for broadband.  I wonder what tweets are echoing through the towers and the turrets.

Give me some abstruse Talmudic puzzle—what makes a sack of flour pure, what makes a priestly wife unclean, when does the age of prophecy end—but ask me to cross the street in a crowded city, God knows how to do it.

On the windows of the shops along King Street, posters call for a boycott of a merchant selling Israeli goods.  I want to sail through this blockade.