First Tuesday of August. Today I strolled around the city, had Himbeere ice cream, and lay on the trampoline net bed at MuseumsQuartier, looking up at the clouds forming into afterimages of what I had seen in the Nicola L. exhibition at Kunsthalle. I am happy to have given myself this half day of meandering here and there, simply to enjoy and exist outside my brain and inside my body.
A few days ago, something really amazing found me, and I could only think, what on earth was that? Why had I not come to read it sooner? It was a short story called A Tree of Night by Truman Capote. It was so psychologically disturbing that I felt trapped in that train coach myself, with no way out, because it was fucking freezing outside and the train seemed to carry on through an endless night, along some endless track, with those two deeply, disturbingly weird people. I do not quite know how else to put it, except to say that I had the strange sense that, at some point in my life, I must have brushed against this exact atmosphere, or at least the emotional logic of it, the sort Kai is moving through that night. And on top of that, it was Truman Capote, which was, frankly, not what I was expecting. I had only read Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A Tree of Night’ deserves to be studied seriously in literature curricula instead of The Drover’s Wife. Not because they have anything in common, they have non in common actually – but I am responding simultaneously to my professor’s question (in my head) in this debate about whether we should teach The Drover’s Wife or, if not, why not, and also whether we should banish all old literature and teach more recent work. That’s another topic hold on.
“His eyes, like a pair of clouded milky-blue marbles, were thickly lashed and oddly beautiful, and around his wrist was strapped a Mickey Mouse watch.”
How creepy, Godddd.
“Her voice faded before the sudden whooshing static noise of a second train, and for an instant the lights in the coach went off. In the darkness the passing train’s golden window winked: black, yellow, black, yellow, black, yellow… And apparently a bell pealed widely”, and I think it means a bell was ringing heavily.”
The story is so conscious of its surroundings that you think you are sitting there. I could imagine Truman Capote sitting in the same train coach, taking notes from the voices in those sleepy arguments, from the train’s distant hum, and from how the light changes inside the coach throughout the night. And the night that is painted pale by a malicious moonshine.
“A breeze snuffed out the candle, so she cupped her hands to protect the last match, and she whimpered… It was such a subtle, zero sensation.”
Wooh, what a day, and the hanger is starting to creep in. What a day today, I absolutely love it. Tomorrow, when I come back to my writing desk, there are things I want to say, and I will say them rapidly and ferally before another migraine attack catches me.