Dear ———,
… I can see how you are sensitive, open, and perceptive to your environment, and, like me, are chameleonic with your surroundings. I find my mind taking on the characteristics of the atmosphere, frantic if it’s that, or tranquil, or precise, or vague. But I relish tranquility more than anything, when I can finally manage to keep track of my own thoughts, when I don’t have to abandon an idea merely because I arrived at the platform too late to board it. I can sit with it, follow it, transfer where I need to, and create a journey out of the links, and end up in wonderful places that the first idea didn’t even suggest, or predict, or hint at.
When I visited —- at the ————- campus, I had initial moments of panic - so quiet! so open! the air so fresh and clean! - which were really just me reacquainting myself with myself. I’d forgotten what my own inner accoustics were like, the reverberations of my thoughts which are normally drowned out by metropolitan din. Sensations arrive clean and intact, you have the time and the desire to categorize them, discarding labels that would have been chosen for expediency in the city, but which, if you were at your leisure and could examine them with due attention, you’d find were comically, sometimes tragically inaccurate. I guess that’s what I like most - the accuracy of both thought and feeling. (To me, they are the same - a lack of vocabulary or interest in emotional taxonomy means you feel things, or are affected by feelings, but you don’t own them. So says the writer).
You hear water splashing in the fountain, and fancy you can discern each individual drop, and if you sit there paying attention to your breathing, to your lungs expanding and collapsing inside your chest, you start to feel your own blood moving through your body, its individual cells racing through your veins, and you’re shown the relation of this blood to the water in the fountain, its gentle plashing, its constant renewal through invisible pipes, its life-sound which we take for granted and eventually cease to hear, but which, if it were to stop, would create a deafening, disruptive silence.
Or birds off in the woods. First you become aware of one, the individual throat of one individual bird tracing thin aural patterns in the air, then all of a sudden you hear a whole chorus, it seems impossible that you didn’t hear it or weren’t aware of it before, and you convince yourself that it only now just started up, it’s so pervasive and dominating a sound. It’s crazy - you feel crazy with them! You search inside yourself for something that corresponds, anything, anything that bears relation to that perfect riot happening out there in the trees.
And so by shades and degrees you lose that false city self, or a whole slew of them, as we’re usually forced to collect, and put on and take off like outfits. You find yourself stripped down to your easy, comfortable you. You become divisible only by yourself and by one, you become a prime, utterly unique number, and begin to look at other people differently, as if there is now a greater distance between you, as if some new or forgotten formalities are required to communicate with them, and it just doesn’t seem worth it. Except, of course, for a select few, the prime numbers that are naturally related, that can intermingle but remain individual, separate, unique.
Davi
