41 Still presence.

The relationship between memory and color constancy and humans depends not just on the alteration but on the initial hue of that experience. The blue of my mother’s eyes is not the blue of your mother’s eyes: one is glacial. But there is no simple way to express the tinny, meaning-filled discrepancies and distinctions in language.

Unlike the quotation, the bracket seems to designate an unspoken gesture, a way in which the subject occupies space.

I want to combine quotation with brackets: to position the directly-taken next to the motioned-towards.

[Spotlight. Woman staring at an empty beach along a coast where it is not warm, the sand is beige, the water crisp, and iced hue. The sky keeps changing colors, moving from sunset to sunrise slowly, gradually, repetitively, it sets again and again, while the woman speaks.]

This is my caption for a photo in a Romanian friend’s twitter feed. She marks time and the seasons by sharing photos at the beach, which must be located near her home. In her photos, the beach is always empty.

I look at the images but cannot find words to leave in the comments.

I am reading her books, and there are so many questions that the result is an implacable lack of casual things to say.

[Another woman sits in a chair. The sky behind her is covered in typescript, in words which continue moving. Sometimes it looks as if the words are dripping, or bleeding ink, or something black which begins to want to fall from them, but this is so brief and momentary that the audience feels it must have been an illusion. The two women speak directly to the audience. They do not see each other. At all. But they watch closely when other characters cross the stage.]

How many sunsets will pass before I find words to describe what this friend is doing in her books?