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MC Escher and the Hunt for the Infinite
None of us are better than the Work
The train, passing, startles the flamingos in the lagoon.
Bands of black feathers show against pink as they spread their wings. Long legs flail at the surface of the briny water, a K-pop girl band fleeing a crowd of too-enthusiastic fans.
This is the best of the South.
These are what I think of as my Italo Calvino days, the author-as-character caught in a self-referential jeweled net. Le travail ou le vie, says graffiti I haven’t seen yet, stenciled on a wall near Nobel’s old dynamite works. Work or life. Not both.
But what if your work is your life? Life at some higher, deeper, richer level, the view from the cliffs I’m taking the train to, the raging sea I hadn’t yet seen when I started writing, but I’m looking at now, writing between waves that take a breath before crashing to shore.
In the south of France where I live, the trains cost one euro on the first weekend of the month. That’s when I travel and work and live, between the steel rails that promise more than anything can deliver. Life times infinity. Absence birthing light. The rumbling sea and the silent mountains, and somewhere between the two, the held breath of God.
