artifact

Every object is a relic, a plume of meaning. Time is no arrow.

Four is my favorite, luckiest number, but the number two is a close second. Salt & pepper shakers, turtle doves, mittens, a pair of bing cherries still dangling from the tree. Natural artifacts seem to look most beautiful in pairs, or at best, in nicely arranged piles of themselves. There is something especially pure and robust about things in twos. Nabokov exercised his gift of synesthesia by assigning a color, often a spectrum of colors, to each letter of the alphabet (in both English and Russian). I have often felt the same towards numbers. I obsessively engage myself with doubles.

Right now there are two cats, Moe (short for Mohawk) and Walter. Walter is new. A guest cat who looks a little like a rattlesnake when he hisses will be roosting here for the next six months. He and Moe have been having a staring contest lock-down for the past two days, but now they are bundled up next to the space heater (we ran out of oil in our house), at least tolerating the other. There are two candles burning, two pillows, two fingerless gloves woven from alpaca wool, two books splayed open on the bed, two chocolate cakes in the oven (so Martha!).

I went to sleep way too early last night. Heard fireworks powdering the sky in a still, dark room.