Red Thread(s)

4:50 a.m. and the sky bruised with light. It gets dark too late, and the night - endless, the memory of a glance - fails to endure. I get up, finally, and the day has already fully arrived. A labor to catch up with it. (What was the Kieslowski movie, the man running after the train, & he catches it / misses it, three different outcomes - Blind Chance?)
& the phrase "white nights" takes on new meaning.
& phrases are what we're left with.

I move my hand, fingers slightly spread to hold down the page; in the margin, a series of small indentations. "Presence of absence" comes to mind. The phrase "presence of absence" comes to mind.
A memory reveals what you've lost, names or denotes the thing you're outside of; that's how you know that it's there. & I write this line and the church bell tolls to punctuate the phrase, circles of sound radiating outward. And that's not a metaphor; it's simply Sunday morning and there's a church down the street. That and nothing more.

Withdrawn. Jean-Luc Nancy notes that a withdrawing is a re-drawing. I haven't written here much because I don't know quite what to say in this space, or what this space is for. It all started out as a sort of experiment. What is the "red thread"? Conversation with a friend the other day, one who does book appraisals for a living, who said that what you look for in a collection is a "red thread" that runs through it. I am not a collector; but I have particular interests. What red thread runs me through? It all started with Woolf, I think. & I remember sitting on a sandy bluff with S. some years ago, looking out at the ocean, and the wind blew sand across my copy of To the Lighthouse, wch seemed an appropriate thing to take to the beach. And that sounds like a metaphor, but it isn't, because it happened, and I later wrote it down. Now that I write it, describe and re-inscribe it again, I'm not entirely sure it really was To the Lighthouse. & I have no recollection of what S. was reading. It wasn't Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, though I'd like to think it was. That day, talk of politics, praxis and disappointment. We watched the sun go down behind a bank of clouds in a thoroughly undramatic way.
This morning, thinking about Jackson MacLow's The Virginia Woolf Poems - a book generated by chance operations, using Woolf as source text. Chance. Operations. That I thought of event n because of object y.
It's been ages since I re-read The Waves, I think. Where re-reading is a kind of re-inscribing, as reading is a withdrawal from and a drawing to.