Status Updates From The Season of Migration

The spider crawls, eight legs working in tandem with ease, a strange creeping magic show. It is a marvel, he thinks, that such a creature exists. With a quick movement, he covers the spider with his hand. He feels the insect crawl onto his fingers, and thinks of how it must be startled, the world suddenly changed, the new surface of these warm fleshy things. The spider is moving, unperturbed, exploring. He brings his

All those beautiful pictures, I see them in my mind, all those gilded frames, squares of life in color and fine line hanging on the wall. I was thinking today of Millet's picture The Evening Angelus, the one we spoke about back when I was living in London. I remember wren I first saw a print of it-one of the Germans I stayed with before I moved to the Loyers' brought a copy of it to a cafe where we were all having lu

The scene is so different from anything he has seen in the Borinage, so wild with color and movement and vibrancy, he stands before it in awe. Event shimmers, glittering with life and peace; his body is erased as he stands there, his self folded into what he sees. There is always more life. No matter how you feel, no matter how you reach it, if you stand and look at a scene for long enough, you will always find more

It occurs to him that he hasn't seen the sky like this in a good many months-in the Borniage, there is too thick a layer of soot between the ground and the sky for the firmament to reveal itself. Is that why it is so hard to dream in that land? He watches the stars and a feeling of peace comes over him. His body aches, his muscles tense and tingling; he brings his mind to each part of him and wills it to quiet. Shoul

I move between my room in Cuesmes at the evangelist Frank's house-with a bed and a desk and a worn carpet on the floor-and the room where I write from now, the abandoned salon in Petit Wasmes, a few miles away, where the floor is dirty and the few chairs are strewn across the space. I prefer the salon to the furnished room; it suits me better, and I appreciate the notion that no one can see me. I walk the landscape,