The 17th century French diplomat and cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère published a treatise on fire and salt. The title is literal — Traicté du Feu et du Sel — and the premise acts as alchemy at its most reductive, where the whole of transformation is compressed into a simple binary: two principles, two substances. Vigenère’s text, however, is actually stranger than its title suggests. It is not really about fire or salt. It is about the impossibility of speaking about anything for the first time. And the implication that an idea, once spoken, cannot be controlled or contained and may perpetuate beyond its source in ways its speaker never intended.
I believe people often talk too much and say very little. I see it in the small, subtle things. The constant circling without connecting. Answers orphaned of questions. Meaning divorced from cause. Motivations kept hidden like bandaged scars.
I had a vision in the small hours before dawn, somewhere far from home. Not a dream. I know the difference. I’ve known the difference for a very long time. Dreams are random nonsense. Incoherent. Flat. Fleeting. Visions are vivid. Visceral. Profound. The five senses are all active and engaged. I’m conscious though unconscious. I control my mind, speech, and actions despite sleep.
I write, as all others have done who have taken pen in hand, because there are things within me that compel release. Consigning them to paper as one commits dream to memory — or love to marrow and soul. I do this despite knowing the inadequacies of my words and that their failure is in itself ceremony.
I have lived my life surrounded by a series of synchronistic experiences nearly always focused on music as a means of conveying the quality of certain relationships, events, and their meanings. I never paid them any mind until this year, having chalked up such experiences to nostalgia, trauma, and other such joys and sorrows one collects as evidence of living.
There are different kinds of places we call home. The one the nomad calls wherever they may roam. The one the exile calls when there’s nowhere else to go. The kind I remember from childhood and can never return to. No place now to truly call home.
It's a quarter past eight and I am seated in an airport lounge, not by habit but by happenstance. To my right a man has spread his possessions across the table as though it were his home office. His bag stands open. His laptop — new, and expensive by the look of it — rests on the tabletop among a pair of headphones, an iPad, and other practical things arranged in plain sight. Then he rises, without ceremony, and casually walks away.
My father had a love of carpentry. Cabinets, bookshelves, tables, chests — it didn’t matter. If it involved woodworking, he was interested. He was very keen on getting quality cuts of wood and the best finishing he could afford. He often said, “No amount of varnish ever fixed a rotten board.” And his Depression-era truth still stands today.
A few months ago, I was walking down 7th Street near the arena when a young woman approached me and asked if she could pray with me. Skeptical and curious, I agreed. As I listened to her prayer, I followed the meaning of her words: a plea that I might obtain salvation through her conception of the divine, the supreme, the ordered heaven she envisioned above. I thanked her, declined her invitation to join her religion, and walked on to breakfast another block away.