Excerpt from a letter to Isabel, written in August

Nostalgia, nostalgia, what a disease we are glad there aren't any vaccinations against. […]

I like how you questioned it, 'Where has all that time gone?!'
It reminded me of an idea inspired by a close friend's passing remark, few years back, about some 'little guys' committing time-theft or something. Some little fuckers stealing our time unknowingly, tuning clocks around us faster and faster. When I was younger things were really slower. My mom and uncle also said so. People like to say how time flies, I absolutely disagree. It didn't fly away. To me, it went missing. It must be stolen, I don't think I misplaced any of my time – stolen, when I wasted my time staring blankly, staring at the clock, at the second hand’s impatient rotation in contrast to the apparently inert hour hand.

Stolen, but time itself often behaves like a thief or burglar at night, slithered thru' the thin, tall gaps between the closed door and its frame. (the two of them – the door and its frame, no, the door and the door frame, I mean – they would never get close enough to close the gap between them, to touch each other).

Stealing our youth, using atom-sized knives to add wrinkles on our faces, a simplified replica of the blueprint for another subway system, but we blame it on the number of times we smile and frown...

pulling our skin, and we wrongly blamed it on gravity...

plucking our hair, a better explanation for our hair loss than our diet or our genes?...

drilling our memories, to add screws and hang only the few significant scenes framed with faint borders overlapping each other, destroying the rest of the impressions we could have remembered... (isn't photographing or painting a replicate of this last laborious act of selective memory?) the images are vague but they aren’t vignettes, the wooden picture frames interlocked like rings of an old rusty chain, twenty-nine years long, pulled out of a poorly imagined chest where memories are haphazardly stacked and badly wrapped, see how the wrappers are creased.

Our melancholia, with unknown causes, these guys seep through our skin pores to hang tiny weights and dumbbells on our heart. Dancers, they always manage to shake off these body builder’s paraphernalia. Dancers, definitely, are happier beings than those who chose to sit down, to write or draw – to write or draw… nothing but another tall building with another high ceiling where another pendulum is hung… swinging, swinging, I am not sure if the oscillation would eventually cease… gravity and melancholy.

Nostalgia and Melancholia, they aren’t just the different states that one could be in, but also countries, nations, kingdoms, territories and lands some are dwelling in. Just because they were named to rhyme with the word ‘Russia’; just because the word ‘state’ reminds me of its synonyms (just in case you need to know how the relations were drawn). I am not making sense here, I know.

Sorry for digressing, let’s return to time-theft. Therefore, according to such an untenable logic, fuelled by an imagination some would love to diss, Isabel XXXXX should be 21 and I could be 19, and Junie, er... 6, I guess.

To Surfian’s remarkable taste

I crave, I long for Abstinence from Images, for every image is bad. – Roland Barthes

If I have the ability, in the near future, I would write for you and those who left an art exhibition opening with distaste. Writing in praise of your reaction, the bad aftertaste lingering in, not just your mouth but around your respiratory system, the noise from their laughter, the sight of them posing, and flashes from the cameras. You overheard their conversation. You told me you are sure now, ‘Maybe, I try to be an average art student, but never a fucking artist!’ I smiled and repeated how I prefer to know someone from what they hate than what they like. Their embraces and handshakes put you off. Therefore let us get drunk on their free wine and puke into their mouths when they are about to utter more shit about ideas, issues, beauties, feelings, or B-grade philosophy. But you told me your wish to remain as a Muslim who does not drink. I might be able to understand why ‘the artist standing next his/her work for a photograph puts you off as much those photographed in front of landmarks or next to a posh car parked outside a hotel.’

We have mentioned, ‘Publication is Prostitution.’ But we did not say how an exhibition could be as well. Walking pass any red light districts, it would often be disturbing, disturbed by either the field of temptation or field of repulsion. Girls sell their flesh, and they admit it – except to the anti-vice squad, perhaps. Exhibitions to trade or circulate images, but of course, of supposed cultured and artistic geniuses… It is the difference of admitting and denying, being aware and unaware. If I am confident enough, my thoughts coherent enough, my grasps of grammar and vocabulary strong enough, I would write about how ridiculous they socialised, forming little circles, how you told me the artworks, reduced to decorations for these social events, piss you off, how the assortment of accents had raped your ears. Then you forgot you are telling this to an aspiring ‘pimp’. It is nothing at all. You are too serious. They are merely things if not commodities. Save your reverence for other moments and objects. So what if they have reduced it to decorations? No big deal.

Mr Crouch - Philip Larkin

Get into the habit of forgetting everything except the page in front of you. Sit for a moment, concentrating, and pretend you're wiping an ice-cold sponge across your mind, leaving everything quite clear and free. Forget yesterday, forget tomorrow, forget who you are and what you are going to do next. Then start.'

Grace and Miss Patridge - George Friel

'He came at last to a dark deserted side street still north of the river lit by old fashioned gas lamps where the brackets holding the mantles were shaped question marks asking him where he was going. He had no idea.'

...

Here in our Earth hotel
the cream of society lodged
with an elegant carefree gesture
they bore the burden of life
Walter Mehring

Time shades

Let time shade our shelves with dust.