The Morning After

Saturday night and a combination of workable car, perfect music, fine company, the dark river, super novae sky and OK, just a few Cote de Beaune (sorry there never really was any embargo on the wine front), I had a sort of libertarian epiphany, when all the loose ends seem to crystalise around the central heart of the wisdoms that remain only tentatively in the world of doubt. It seemed perfectly conceivable that the whole universe should be overlaid with this skein of wisdom and that Popper must be wrong! This solution posed no further problems.

Then we went on to another pub and I completely forgot what on earth I was going on about, (which was, I now realise, a great relief for several people.)

But actually I wish I could remember since, Sunday am, I found myself on a hill top with no space between it and rampant emptiness. The momento mori of hills. I suppose, as an atheist, I shouldn't be in the least surprised to find a place god-forsaken, but even so, this spot took took the biscuit for terrible, desolate nothingness. Even the other mother there, who it turns out, is a card-carrying church-goer, was spooked. Two leafless giant trees rustled and ghost houses scattered over the other hills, stared blankly back. It was actually a relief when a kestrel landed on a pole and stared predaciously at us. Life affirming in a way, since in wanting us dead, he at least was serious about the business of living.

My sister can create the most extraordinary paintings about this boundary, the stepping over into existential crisis. These pictures do not flatter and are not easy to sit next to during dinner. I don't mean all that "Scream" type stuff. There's no hysteria. Rather they can take you, through the counterpoint of intimate detail and space, the whole journey to total terror and mercifully beyond. Equipoise of terror and wonder, serious beauty and attainable peace! Quite a subject eh! And I love her. She's seriously gorgeous.