I don’t have much talent1 in looking at the ocean. “Much” as if “talents” were a substance one could collect in quantity, or a film that accretes on one’s surfaces like dew. Exposed to different air new things will grow, one hopes. As for the ocean, it has been storming, and now light unfolds gradually and across the fidgeting grey mass lays out blinding platters of white. A repository of glow that accumulates far offshore, in shreds that grow together.
Choosing scenes: this is the majority of the trouble. In the whole landscape of whatever-could-happen, where to settle, where to draw the eye? There is a story about Turner returning to some done canvas of his to place a dot of red that snaps the dream wash morass into focus, making an unremarkable painting extraordinary.2 It’s easier to explain these things with little stories, anecdata, than it is to give instructions. Anecdata stores well. Like a shell library one might make after a beach visit: collecting all the charming fragments, whorls, ends, and arraying them neatly on flotsam, rather than make the car reek of low tide. This is a way to safely capture the impulse to accumulate. This habit also trains the instinct to gather the flash immediately and wash it later, evaluate it later.
I think it was Brandon Taylor who called Stanislavski a writing craft book. When I can’t find the stage I know I’m on it, have been on it for some time. There is always too much interruption. In remaining elusive from attachment to most things that happen at work I have made myself a calm field to be used for various battles, ridden across as a shortcut. Or a tidy palimpsest that takes and doesn’t keep. Of course the pens gouge holes now & then.
We go to [redacted]. I am hoping to see the cat who lives there, a long sweet creature moving in a cloud of fluffy black. I am informed he was eaten six months ago.
[Redacted] and I sit with others. They are talking about painting dragons together, in an upcoming fair. One invites the other. They discuss one another’s art. Phrases move back and forth in stoned imitation. They are nearly identical versions of one another, and their girlfriends are likewise alike. I turn away. Later [Redacted] says, “You know, they’re happy. They feel like they have enough.”
Talent derived from the Latin talentum, in turn from the ancient Greek τάλαντον (“scale, balance”)— a one-foot cube, or the amount of liquid that fits within an amphora.