We paddled slowly. One seal popped up in the water. That was strange. We hadn’t seen any since the mainland. Suddenly Don pointed. “Is that a polar bear coming towards us?”

“I can’t see anything,” I said. “Maybe it’s foam.”

“No, it’s a polar bear. Get your camera out and get a picture,” Don said.

I yanked the spray skirt off and reached for the camera. “What am I doing? I’m getting out of here,” I yelled back. The polar bear was coming at us from an angle to cut us off from shore. All I could see was the tip of his nose, his beady eyes and the tip of his head with the little ears lying flat. He made no wake as he slid towards us. Spontaneously we veered away toward the open sea.

Don yelled, “Look back and see if he’s still coming.”

I’d glanced back. Yes, he’s still coming.” I kept checking. The bear raised himself to a normal swimming position and now there was a wake as the chase began. The bear wasn’t giving up. We paddled as hard as we could for an hour. Luckily the waves were moderate and the wind was in our favor. I couldn’t see the bear anymore.*

*Extract from Victoria Jason’s Kabloona in the Yellow Kayak.

I love it when it’s possible to (explore transitions between songs). That’s something that I am better at than I am at other things. That’s one of the things that I am good at. Eventually, like, if I have a place to go, eventually, I can get there and make it pretty seamless. Because for me, the relationship between one thing and the other is always obvious. You know what I mean?

Even if it’s completely invisible to everybody else, to me, it’s always really obvious, and all I need to do is know both halves and eventually I’ll find a place that works, the walk between the two. Like Weir sometimes does it, but has sort of a blockier notion, you know? Which is okay. But for me, I like that invisible thing. I like that sleight-of-hand approach. (Excerpt from Petter Conners’ Cornell ’77)

I tried to visualize the manner in which the evil spirits operated. The minds and souls of people were as open to these forces as a plowed field, and it was on these fields that the Evil Ones incessantly spread their evil seed. If their seed sprouted to life, if they felt welcomed, they offered all the help that might be needed, on the condition that it was used for selfish purposes and only to the detriment of others.

These creatures that inhabited the human soul observed keenly not only man’s every action but also his motives and emotions. What mattered was that a man should consciously promote evil, find pleasure in harming others, nurturing and using the diabolical powers granted to him by the Evil Ones in a manner calculated to cause as much misery and suffering around him as possible.

Only those with a sufficiently powerful passion for hatred, greed, revenge or torture to obtain some objective seemed to make a good bargain with the powers of Evil. Others, confused, uncertain of their aim, lost between curses and prayers, the tavern and the church, struggled through life alone, without help from either God or the Devil. (Exceprted from Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird)

Smart. Be smart. Meaning I should…what? Seek more? Strive? Find comfort? What any of that means. Being conscious of these things? To know where I come from? To love my origin story, my family and friends? Embrace those moments, revel in that existence. To be, as simple as that. That seems to be the credo. Intelligence. To look for a way beyond the inevitable, that good old death syndrome. Stay medicated in what I take. Is it just knowing that? That awareness? To reflect and smile, hitting the plot points, knowing the stage of life and sticking to that. In other words, if we are to leave the work of thinking in the corner and focus on the marketing, the rights be sold off, then what? Because it is just us, talking back and forth, saying something about intelligence but really just wanting to fuck. As intelligent as that can be. Meaning, in the end that this idea of intelligence might actually be something else, something not of us, not in our purview, given our limited attention.

Music and light is something we embrace. Music. And light. How could that be intelligent? Remembering we have the quantum observer issue clogging our way. Whatever I say, that’s me and not it. In other words me listening to music isn’t the music. It’s just me listening to music. A memory, an attempted sharing of an essential emotional response. Here and then not, that moment in the water, that breath like no other, that bubble in my head, keeping me moving forward without the lord, without the fan nation, without my beloved dreams, knowing it’s biology and chemical reactions, and thank god they invented the bar, even if that’s biology too, that zeal, that’s the thing, how we get into the darkness and find that it is just the same, things to be built, peace to be had. And so again, this intelligence thing and if we actually have that…

Joe found her standing by the bowl. She had taken her wet ruined suit off; she stood naked, supporting herself on one arm, leaning and resting. “Jesus Christ,” she said to him when she realized he was there. “I don’t know what to do. My jersey suit is ruined. It’s wool.” She pointed; he turned to see the heap of sodden clothing. (The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick)

Reading Philip K. Dick makes me scared, not by his dark alternate futures, but the prose, the prose that are so godawful that they could infect me. And make me write like that too.

She said, speaking slowly and painstakingly, “Hair creates bear who removes spots in nakedness. Hiding, no hide, to be hung by a hook. The hook from God. Hair, hear, Hur,” Pills eating. Probably turpentine acid. They all met, decided dangerous most corrosive solvent to me forever.

That. No. Not that.

Sam Peppiatt writes of the artist Francis Bacon: “We don’t really know why we’re here, that we invent our purposes, that we invent our drives and aims. And then, suddenly, we’re gone.” (Francis Bacon in Your Blood, Sam Peppiatt.)

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed. (From Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle)

Two things are certain: 1) people no longer care what happens to other people; and 2) nothing makes any real difference any longer.

We have made our decisions, our lives have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop. (From Raymond Carver’s So Much Water Close to Home)

Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderment of the eyes are of two kinds and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mid’s eye, quite as much as the bodily eye.

And he who remembers this when he sees anyone whose vision is perplexed and weak will not be too ready to laugh. He will first ask whether that the soul of man has come out of the brighter life and is unable to see because, unaccustomed to the dark or having turned from the darkness to the day, is dazzled by the excess of light.

And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other. Or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den. (From Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave)