In a Lonely Place

Today I’m drawn immediately to the shadow on the chair behind the man, yesterday’s discovery. The shadow pulls me out of the scene and into the world around it, so that now I’m standing with the crew behind a low spotlight flooding in from the left, making that phantom man on the chair, although we can’t see the shadow from where we stand behind the light, because only at the source of shadows do the shadows entirely disappear.

Are there still cocktail bars with walls made of curtains? If I ever found a cocktail bar with walls made of curtains, I would never leave it. Something’s hidden. Eavesdroppers to be stabbed as if you were Hamlet, or girls with painted cheeks whispering things you don’t want to understand. Beyond the curtain are what we call dreams, and I would like to sit there sipping a martini as it moved almost imperceptibly behind me.

Put the angled piano straight up on the wall, and it would be another fold in the curtain. Nothing more to say than that today, but it was satisfying, as if I’d found Waldo (who I recently learned is called Charlie in French, for no apparent reason). Our tendency towards pattern recognition has undoubtedly created whole religions, and when putting pianos on the wall I understand the primal satisfaction of even irrational synthesis. I build a house in the woods to keep the monsters at bay. Bienvenue.

Today I’m only seeing necklaces hanging in parallel. His bowtie seems insufficient, impotent between those shining rocks. Diamonds and pearls, forged in the depths of earth and sea. Granted, it’s a tuxedo, but a floppy silk bowtie? How does he even stand a chance?

The singer is beautiful. I hadn’t mentioned that yet, which is how it often is with very beautiful women: because their beauty is so obvious, nobody ever thinks to mention it, like an embarrassing secret we politely keep to ourselves, a philandering husband or an insufferable kid. She’s been lost in this note with her eyes closed for a while, left dress strap lightly indenting the muscle of her shoulder. But of course you’d seen that too.

I could say something about the Civil Rights movement, Nina Simone, “A Change is Going to Come”…. This movie was shot in 1950. At the pace of this experiment, King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech would come in the year 449,280, more or less.

Her martini, or whatever it is, is so fixed that it’s beginning to seem unreal. It’s one of the first things I notice every day (draw your own conclusions), but now I’m even starting to doubt there’s alcohol in the glass, and I’ve also become convinced she’ll never pick it up. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this movie, so I can’t remember the actual fate of the drink (assuming I even noticed it, which is unlikely), but I’m absolutely convinced she’ll never touch that glass. Is that the definition of pessimism, or depression? Lack of faith in change? Also, a cocktail should never be mere decoration. Obviously.

I was in Amsterdam yesterday. Today I’m in Paris. I change. The Lonely Place stays almost the same. Really I don’t change.

Twelve days into this experiment, each of these words seems to matter a lot, but a thousand days in, they won’t so much. A moment means almost nothing in a film that goes on forever. There must be a mathematical formula, irrelevance increasing over time on a curve towards infinity. Thank God we’re spared eternal life.

I used to wear pocket squares, even in my uncompromising form-follows-function days. I don’t wear them anymore, even though decoration, digression, as a style, now interests me more than simplicity. Too much of everything else now is only exactly what it is.

Her eyes are like a lizard’s today, vertical slits. I’ve moved into the metaphors now, apparently, slathering on a layer of fiction to help me get through the day.

I’m tempted to flip back to yesterday and see why I thought her eyes were like a lizard’s, but I’m trying to keep this experiment as close to life as possible, and you can never flip back to yesterday, despite your repeated attempts.

The song must have turned. Her eyes are widening quickly (quickly in her world), her teeth have bitten off a lyric. In front of the blonde woman’s hands, there appears to be a miniature woman lying on her side, head to the right, just beside the lamp. Where did she come from? In a Lonely Place, directed by David Lynch.

I’ve been so distracted by the singer’s face (approaching pure beauty today) and then by the miniature woman (still lying on that back left table, or not), that I’ve been completely ignoring the man, whose eyes are suddenly cast down to what may be a fly in his glass. Even at this speed you miss things, and I grow uneasy at the thought of everything else I’ve missed since yesterday.

Fly still in man’s glass. Just went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water to see if one actually looks down into a glass when drinking from it. No. I raise my head with the glass. So there’s a fly in there. But even if there’s a fly, the fly has no relevance to the scene, so we’re witnessing some terrible acting. I’m going to call him Gilles. I realize I’m being hard on Gilles, and have been since the beginning.

Major happenings with Gilles’s glass. He’s lowered it to the one spot where it catches the light. Yes, he’s scene-hogging today, Gilles. Though to be fair, for him it was just 1/24th of a second to hog. At another speed, I wouldn’t have reproached him for it. Velocity changes feeling. There’s probably a formula in that too. I don’t think Gilles loves his wife.

Gilles’s glass still catches the light, but less. The singer’s lips are opening, her teeth have parted. Her untouched glass casts a shadow I hadn’t previously noticed, and the shadow appears to be cast in opposite directions, towards her and away. Am I repeating myself? I can’t remember.⠀

Yesterday I read that Georges Perec wrote a little book called An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. He spent three days on the Place Saint-Sulpice writing down whatever he noticed. I went out and bought the book and read it at the Café de la Mairie on the Place Saint-Sulpice. Later I read that that book was eventually adapted for the cinema.⠀

Rose is being polite. Her mind is making bright lists (even her mental penmanship is impeccable) and wondering what she missed. The woman on the right, however, exotic under palm shadows, is really listening to the song. She’s in the Lonely Place. I used to think that self-assurance was the most attractive quality in a person, but now I only find it attractive when accompanied by a lack of self-assurance.⠀

Gilles has noticed the shadow himself. He was playing racquetball the other day at the club, and Riggs, his partner in the agency, had commented on it. The shadow hadn’t been too obvious under the lights of the court, but then he hadn’t been able to wash it off in the shower.⠀

The woman on the right is listening, but not seeing. The music accompanies some private obsession. There was a phonecall, a bottle of perfume hurled to the floor, but no tears, because she’s disdainful of tears. Life is a series of situations through which she must infallibly maneuver. I’m calling her Lana. Every moment feels like a mistake. Lana is becoming a woman I knew.⠀

In the indistinct spot on Lana’ s table, I think I can see her hand clasped around a half dozen pencils. So with those pencils did Lana draw the miniature woman who reclines on the table in front Gilles’s wife, the languid banana-sized courtesan? “I’m sorry.” Yes, of course, that’s what she should have said over the telephone, but it would have pleased him too much.⠀

The gleam of Gilles’s glass seems to have stayed on his lip, like a cold sore. Am I seeing things that don’t exist? His partner, Riggs, has disappeared, but no one can know. Their clients – his clients – would leave for other agencies. He hasn’t found the moment to mention this to Rose.⠀

Look at something, even something beautiful, long enough, and it does not become more beautiful. It becomes unsettling. I do not trust these people. Hadda, maybe, but her arms haven’t moved in days, or at all, which makes me think she’s faking it, so really I don’t trust her anymore either, even if I find myself inclined to.⠀

Yesterday I claimed that observation doesn’t increase beauty, but corrodes it, so of course today, for the first time I’ve noticed, a beauty spot appeared on Hadda’s cheek. What I wrote yesterday was obviously nonsense, but somehow we have to fill the time with conviction.⠀

Hadda closes her eyes to find a feeling to attach to a phrase. And perhaps Gilles closes his eyes to take the feeling she sings inside. But no, mere thoughts obsess Gilles. Nobody has found Riggs’s body yet, and Rose cooked meatloaf for dinner. She’s probably making mental shopping lists right now. So long as she doesn’t forget his marmalade.⠀

Or maybe a singer should never especially try to convey feelings. Maybe the attempt is enough to counterfeit everything. Maybe hitting the note is enough. Maybe if you’ve got the talent and the patience to do that perfectly, the feelings convey themselves. ⠀

Gilles is still looking at his glass. He shouldn’t have another drink, but he knows he will. He had wanted to make Rose happy, taking her here. It’s so easy to make Rose happy, but this was a mistake. He had told her there was a new singer whom he and Riggs might sign. But Hadda Brooks, Queen of the Boogie, does not know Gilles exists. Possibly unrelated, but at this point who knows: I looked at the dates, and her husband the Harlem Globetrotter is already dead.⠀

Why do the folds of the curtain behind Gilles’s head look like two vertical antelope devil’s horns today? For some reason the fictional names I pick off the top of my head tend to end in s, so there’s always the dilemma of the apostrophe, or the full apostrophe s, that second s like the shadow behind Gilles.⠀

“I don’t care, I don’t care,” Lana, in the corner, had told him over the telephone. “Obviously you do,” he’d replied, “or you wouldn’t be saying you didn’t.” Face to face, she would have killed him. Of course he doesn’t care either, doesn’t know how. Their indifference just uses different vocabulary. But really it’s not indifference, or they wouldn’t have been on the telephone. So what now? ⠀

An old friend, in town and looking for fun, sits across from me as I write this, so there’s no concentration for (quick glance, first detail I see): Hadda’s lips. Beer or wine? Red or white? More or more or more or more: those are your options in life, really, even if you imagine you might streamline yourself. ⠀

Stop thinking about it, Gilles, and take that sip. And for your sake I hope that on set in the ’50s they used real alcohol. Rose is an unremarkable statue, and I’m beginning to sympathize. Your wife arises every morning in a black dress and pearls, a sweet smile on her face that may, after years, finally signify nothing. And maybe as you look into that drink, you long for the crooked-grinned catastrophes.

Consistency is an overrated virtue. What we may appreciate most in others is change. Surprise me, especially when one day looks like the next. Of course I probably just say that because I’m in the Lonely Place. Don’t go.⠀

Sunshine in Paris this afternoon, slightly chilly. I’m talking about the weather. We talked about it last night. There are dinners where everything could be predicted with meteorological accuracy, dinners that might as well have been lived at the speed of the Lonely Place. I wonder what the stage hands are doing out of frame.⠀

Life is elsewhere. Yes, I realize that life is where you place your attention, but I’m still focusing on the stagehands out of frame: stained blue jeans, maybe, a murmured joke, a cigarette butt, the camaraderie of work, where the song’s always changing, whistled maybe by Chas in the props department, who drives a red DeSoto.⠀

So we make stories in order to tolerate time, or to put it a bit more aspirationally, to make something of it. Gilles’s partner Riggs has been murdered, but he didn’t do it, but he knows who did. At least that’s the story he’s telling himself. ⠀

There is the sense I’ve gotten something wrong, that there’s some glitch in the technology, a bug in the system, a frozen screen. Messages should be getting through to me that I’m not receiving.⠀

No discernable change. If we’d attempted this gastropodic experiment in 1950, when this movie was made, impatience for transformation would have had us screaming into each other’s mouths and birthing rock & roll years before its time. Disco would have been over before I was conceived. We would have torn down the Iron Curtain with our bare hands in 1951.⠀

I sat on a cafe terrace this morning staring at the Lonely Place. Hadda hasn’t opened her eyes for days – weeks? – and so I attempted the eyes-closed experiment at her speed. Did I last a minute? Twenty seconds? It seemed like an eternity, like every 1/24th of a second was a day. You start to hear the world turn. People must think you’re crazy. You start to feel crazy, too, and alive.⠀

If the Lonely Place moves at 1/24th of a second per day, then our brains must move closer to a day per 1/24th of a second, a thousand scattered thoughts in an instant. I wonder how many times in his mind Gilles has brought that glass to his lips in this 1/24th of a second. You’ll notice that I’m obsessed with Gilles’s glass and will draw your own conclusions.⠀

“She hasn’t changed a bit,” people sometimes say of old friends, which is understood as a compliment, but also hints at some unnatural bargain, as if at a certain point these friends chose to stop living lives of any consequence.

It should come as no surprise that the more I optimize my life, the more I secretly fetishize inefficiencies. I thought today that I might start praying again, down beside the bed with my palms clasped together, as I did as a boy. How could a minute of that not bring me more than a scroll through my newsfeed, curated and pre-culled, or a set of thirty crunches?

You won’t believe what just happened to me.

Oh man. Where to start? I could spend a lifetime here. Stendhal wrote that beauty is the promise of happiness. That last shot ran for 53 days. I’d be happy if this beauty lasted for 533. At least that’s how I feel today.⠀

He is Humphrey Bogart, she is Gloria Grahame. I love him in this movie, but it made her my number one. Slow gestures, stoned talk, reluctantly charmed with a twist of the lip, so tough but so obviously doomed. No, let me be scientific: I think her eyelashes have moved, up or down, since yesterday.⠀

Her hand on the table like some beautiful claw (she’s nervous), a smile so faint that I may have put it there myself (she likes him), an empty ashtray (they’ve just arrived), the lemon in his glass, masculine, squared and horizontal, and in hers, feminine, curving down into her drink. Gin and tonic, I’m guessing.⠀

Have her eyes shifted? I thought she was looking at him, but now she’s looking past her drink. You can’t pin her down, Gloria Grahame. She’s got her own ideas. I’m riveted. There’s not enough time in the day, not to mention in 1/24th of a second.⠀

Recently at a Ukrainian wedding I learned that there the wedding band is worn on the right hand, not the left. Bogart had married Lauren Bacall in 1945, but he’s not married in the movie, so you’d assume he removed his, but maybe he compromised and made it Ukrainian.⠀

Bogart’s fist, her beautiful claw. Oh boy. This relationship is not going to be a cakewalk. Not that you’d want it to be a cakewalk. Not that you know what a cakewalk is.

She’s looking away from him now, clearly. He’s not paying her enough attention, which he’s concluded is the most efficient way to kindle her desire. I imagine she’s listening to Hadda on the piano, because Gloria Grahame is one who, in the Lonely Place, would listen to the song, self-sufficient.⠀

The face of Bogart’s watch is again telling faint time. Maybe the minutes have been stirred back into existence by the apparent imminence of the lighting of his cigarette. Momentous occasions. The handkerchief in his pocket looks like an iceberg on a moonlit night.⠀

Cigarette lit – I may be developing a gift for premonitions. For several days I’ve noticed the woman hidden behind Bogart’s shoulder. She’s lit even more brightly than Gloria Grahame. Above her is what looks like the shadow of a man in a fedora. Maybe it’s the man who killed Gilles’s partner Riggs. Now I regret that I didn’t have more time with Gilles and his wife. You start thinking you’ll have forever.⠀

That look. Gloria Grahame may surpass me here. Words seem like kid’s stuff. She was married to Nicholas Ray, the director. Then she was married to Nicholas Ray’s son.⠀

How long does one continue looking at the tip of a cigarette once it’s been lit? Humphrey Bogart knows. Man and cigarette. And creeping awareness of all the heartbreaking moments to come. You and your cigarette alone in a room, even if you’re not alone, technically, taking the time it takes, because all the demons with all their fires are coming for you.⠀

I thought I might leave this blank today. Travelling and distracted. I thought I might say something about the blankness of some days. But the days are never really blank, and I’m always having this conversation, even when I think I’m not.⠀

Exciting discovery: I had noticed the lemons, hers curving and feminine, his horizontal and masculine, and I had noticed her hand, beautiful and claw-like. But what I had not noticed is that her fingers and his fingers precisely follow the forms of their respective lemons. Could this be intentional, or is it perfect only because nobody ever saw it but us in this instant?⠀

I assume he’s beginning to flick his lighter shut. One make assumptions of physical trajectories even at this speed, even if he’ll have weeks to change his mind. In other words, the speed of an action doesn’t alter our expectations for it. Not sure how that insight could possibly enrichen your life, but there you have it. Put it to good use.⠀

The ring on his finger has come more into the light, the wedding band on the wrong hand, or the Ukrainian hand. But it’s not a wedding band. It’s more like a signet ring, a coat of arms to be pressed into a wax seal. I look it up: his mother was an heiress, he grew up in a vast apartment on the Upper West Side, so there could have been a family coat of arms. His father’s name: Belmont DeForest Bogart.⠀

A man like Bogart gets you thinking about how things should or shouldn’t be done – the etiquette of lighters and watches and cigarettes and rings – but I’m not convinced of the boutonniere worn with the pocket square. Yes, I’m pretending to write an article for a men’s magazine in order to put off confronting that look on Miss Grahame’s face. She’s got a thousand ways to gut you. This is one. ⠀

I hadn’t noticed the gap between his arm and his body. Will he light a cigarette for Miss Grahame and reveal more of the blonde under spotlights in the background? Could that possibly be the head and ear of a horse over his left shoulder? Is this story something other than we had assumed it to be? ⠀

The faint white slivers of moons at the top of the black of Gloria Grahame’s décolleté. Bring on the night. ⠀

When it becomes difficult to find meaning in life (i.e. this 1/24th of a second), we remove ourselves and read about life. I’ve started the original book: In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes. Here’s the epigraph, by J.M. Synge: “It’s in a lonesome place you do have to be talking with someone, and looking for someone, in the evening of the day.” Pretty obvious, if you ask me, evening of the day or not.

At this point we have to assume that the shadow off Bogart’s right shoulder looking like a man in a fedora is either the man who killed Riggs, the partner of Gilles (from the shot 3 weeks ago), or the ghost of Riggs himself. I’m going with the ghost. And then you really have to deduce that the hidden woman under bright spotlights is even more significant than previously assumed. Elementary, my dears.⠀

The shadow of the man in the fedora over Bogart’s own right shoulder is the ghost of Gilles’s partner Riggs, who had fallen in love with the hidden woman under the spotlight here, but then so had Gilles. The plot thickens. And this was their mistake: you can fall in love with a woman who seems to live perpetually in sunshine, but never, ever one drawn like a moth to a spotlight.⠀

Smoke appears. Bogart’s still staring down that lighter. The success of any gesture is in the follow through. There also appears to be a tuft of smoke at the top of Bogart’s head, although it could be a few stray hairs. And then the curtain, so perfectly vertical and rigid here that it could have been carved of wood.⠀

Landscape with handkerchief, boutonniere, and smoke. Japanese mountain, moon obscured by fog, wisp of clouds above. I don’t know what the bowtie could be. A bat.⠀

Should we talk about the horse over Bogart’s left shoulder? The one showing a top of an eye and an ear? To quote Shakespeare, who is beloved by this horse (especially the late tragedies), “Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends.”

The woman under the spotlight behind Bogart’s right shoulder, whom I have begun to imagine in great detail, is often mistaken for beautiful, but the truth is that her obvious vitality is amassed by extinguishing others. She casts shadows of the men she passed through to get to the spotlight. Riggs is dead now, hovering above her shadow in his fedora. And Gilles? Gilles is now hardly more than a shadow himself.⠀

Message received today: “Your posts are hilarious. And quite touching, actually. More than Miss Grahame, she’d want you to call her Gloria. G-L-O-R-I-A, Gloria. More like Van Morrison, less like Patti Smith. And he’d definitely want you to call him Bogie. I just have a hunch.”⠀

And so I return to the horse over Bogart’s left shoulder and over his right, in the fedora, the shadow ghost of Riggs, so unwise in love. If David Lynch had made this movie, he would have us assume the horse was real, and that Riggs was not dead in any definitive sense, merely relegated to a parallel dimension. Everything is real. So here we go… ⠀

She moves slower than smoke, and with more mystery. Every day I find some new emotion in Gloria Grahame’s face. Love, boredom, anxiety, desire. Today, in this 1/24th of a second, she’s thinking about a man she loved, but doesn’t anymore. It’s that simple. Now she isn’t thinking about him anymore.⠀

I’m trying to read the time off Bogart’s watch. 3:00? 3:15? Could it really be that late at night? Or has the speed of the Lonely Place thrown everything off? Probably we’ve entered another dimension detached from time. Probably.⠀

Bogart’s fingertips are floating off his hands in trails of smoke. When time moves this slowly, fingers may as well dissipate for a moment or two. Faces may as well become briefly unrecognizable. Hair could be lit on fire. You could be a tiger padding softly through the forest. Just for a moment or two. No one would notice.

Today she looks so innocent, girlish. She looks as if she’s borrowed her mother’s fancy earrings to play dress-up. Was she really so different yesterday? No, but I saw her that way, so what is it about me that makes her more innocent today? ⠀

Today it seems Bogart’s looking down at his iPhone. I don’t like typing the word “iPhone” here, much less with the word “Bogart” in the same sentence. I just looked down to check my messages, but Gloria Grahame hadn’t texted, because Gloria Grahame never texts. She just thinks distant thoughts you’ll never capture. Retweet her thoughts and instantly you’ll have no followers.⠀

We haven’t seen his eyes. We’ve only seen hers. I think they’re in love, because I’ve decided to continue to believe in that magic, but the eyes of new lovers indicate better than anything how the love affair will end.⠀

The tip of Bogart’s cigarette is now burning, a white spot. The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but can only change forms. So what was lost in the lighting? Miss Grahame looks almost angry today, so maybe the flame was ripped from her, and little by little, as the careless cigarettes are lit, you become colder.⠀

I miss the languid smoking of cigarettes in black and white movies, but then you watch the movie at one frame per day, the way his eyes now seem so aware of his hand moving towards the cigarette for a puff, and the ritual seems interminable, an absurdly long-term addiction distracting him from the life he’s meant to be living. Look up, Bogie! Take the puff and be released.⠀

Now Bogart’s hand, like Gloria Grahame’s, is claw-like. Surely these details could never be directed. Unless there was a director for the movie as a whole, and then practically infinite other directors for each 1/24th of a second, a parallel world of obsessive lunatics unacknowledged by the Academy.⠀

Just take the cigarette between your fingers, Bogie. You’ve got our attention. I’m begging you.⠀

The woman in the spotlight is moving slightly out from behind Bogart’s right shoulder. I hadn’t noticed her earring before, if that’s the glint at her cheek. Her dress appears low-cut, because of course it would be. Talk about dramatic tension.⠀

So maybe I cheated, by zooming in today, imagining I’d discover something else (and yes: the embroidered smaller square on the cocktail napkins, which are cloth). You utilise the technology. But you’ve already lost. You failed at the moment, which is gone. And this one. And this one. And this one. Gone.⠀

Scientifically speaking, I think that if Bogart put his fingers almost to Gloria Grahame’s cheek, almost touching her skin, just as his fingers all in a line appear to be just almost touching his cigarette, molecules would align to make up the distance, and these two would birth constellations.⠀

We’re ignoring you, Bogart, until you figure out what it is, exactly, that you want. So: Gloria Grahame was born Gloria Hallward. “She particularly felt her upper lip was too thin and had ridges that were too deep. She began stuffing cotton or tissue under it, which she felt gave her a sexier look. Several co-stars discovered this during kissing scenes.” (Wikipedia)⠀

Gloria Grahame’s marriage with director Nicholas Ray ended the year after this movie (1951) when he caught her in bed with Anthony, his 13-year-old son. She was married to a writer named Cy Howard from 1954-1957, and then married Anthony in 1960. One son with Nicholas, a daughter with Cy, two sons with Anthony.⠀

Bogart’s fingers, finally, are indisputably on his cigarette. Now we can anticipate the moment, in days or weeks, when he moves the cigarette from his mouth and maybe looks up at us. Life goals: essential, but sometimes better left unexamined. At some point everything – friendship, coffee, exercise – is a leap of faith.⠀

Why am I increasingly annoyed with Bogart here? I love the man. Is it just chemicals or hormones or whatever else streaming through my blood? My gut biology? My pH balance?

The horse behind Bogart’s left shoulder (I’ve decided to be convinced that’s what it is) cannot talk, but it is extraordinarily sensitive to human speech and seems to understand a wide range of vocabulary. He accompanies the woman behind Bogart’s right shoulder – Britt, I’m calling her, a name that seems to me as overlit as she (not to mention her brittle little heart!) – to most of her important social functions, such as they are.⠀

Britt, the woman behind Bogart’s right shoulder, calls her horse, which is seated beside her, Thumper. She thinks that’s cute. It is Thumper who, in his devotion, on what had been meant to be a riding picnic in Topanga Canyon, trampled Britt’s sometime lover, the agent Riggs, to death. Riggs, in his signature fedora, still haunts them both in the folds of the curtain. Britt is as yet unaware of this, but Thumper sees, and is feeling skittish. Of course there’s more to the story.⠀

I woke up this morning still terrified by a nightmare in which I’d slept for a week, then woke up in a panic, at which point I actually woke up in a panic. But the dream panic wasn’t over missed appointments or lost time. It was because absolutely everything around me, even after sleeping for a week, was exactly the same. It didn’t matter whether I slept or not, whether I existed or not. Oh wait…⠀

Britt called up Riggs on the telephone one night. She told him she’d been out riding in the hills. She didn’t need to say she’d been riding Thumper. Riggs already knew that. She’d taken him out to the stables one day, and Thumper had refused Riggs’ carrot. Britt had laughed like a horse, and Riggs had wondered what he was doing with his life, but really, at this point, all of this was beyond his control. It was as if he’d become someone else.⠀

Riggs thought it would be over when he was dead. He didn’t know he was going to die, of course, but he knew he was headed towards some definitive disaster. But it just keeps going, even after the disaster. His shadow haunts Britt just as closely as he actually did, shadow-like, in life. He’s still looking for answers, even if he now understands that there are no answers, only stories, and unfortunately this is his story as it currently stands.⠀

I once knew a man who smoked with all five fingers. Elegant in every other way, his five-fingered smoking seemed to indicate a whole-bodied need, and I decided then that need is the opposite of elegance. Yes, it must be trivial to spend time thinking about elegance, but it’s generally a more reliable indicator of character than kindness, bravery, or beauty, if you ask me.⠀

Bogart is trying to erase Riggs and his fedora with his smoke. Any chance he was in on the murder? Also, he’s still checking his iPhone. I don’t know why he doesn’t just turn to Gloria Grahame and say something devastating. Hell, even a dumb joke. But maybe, like me, he’s coming to terms with the fact that about extreme beauty there is really absolutely nothing to say. The proof: I notice her every day, but words become syllables, then letters, then nothing. Silence. There she is.

I don’t yet see any ash at the tip of Bogart’s cigarette, so I’m wondering how long it will take a cigarette to disappear into smoke at this speed. Four minutes to smoke a cigarette in the world? So, in the Lonely Place, just under sixteen years per cigarette. Imagine that nicotine high. The high would just become who you were. And even chain smoking, you could live till 400 with little risk of lung cancer, never having smoked more than a mildly rebellious 12-year-old.⠀

The cigarette has left Bogart’s mouth.

NSFW WARNING. The consolations of looking very, very (too) closely: with Bogart’s hand moving away from his mouth, I’ve just noticed that the black shadow on Gloria Grahame’s arm, melting into her dress directly above her clawed hand, was created by Bogart’s hand, and that’s their first physical contact. Boom. They’re sneaky, these two.⠀

Lots of research today, keeping busy, being strategic about this. These two paid with their bodies. Six years after this film, at age 56, Bogart had his esophagus, two lymph nodes, and a rib removed. He died of cancer a year later. Also: Bogart and Bacall both suffered from what is now called Bogart-Bacall syndrome (BBS), “an ongoing hoarseness that often afflicts actors, singers, or TV/radio voice workers who speak in a very low pitch.” Stick with me.⠀

Testing a theory, because I’ll need a few new theories to get through this (and possibly whole new philosophies and religions): love is motion. A few weeks ago, before she froze, I thought I might love Gloria Grahame. But now she’s only beautiful, something I glance at for a moment, then glance away…. I refuse to give up on her. I have faith.⠀

The cigarette is coming away quickly. Bogart’s shadow on Gloria Grahame’s arm has disappeared. Britt, in the spotlight behind Bogart, has said something meant to be charming which she has indicated with laughter that shatters in the air like a champagne glass tossed against the wall. Beside her Thumper does not laugh, because horses do not laugh. He is glad of this, since he remembers the feel of Riggs’s skull beneath his hooves and isn’t in the mood even if he could be in the mood.⠀

Down by the Seine tonight, stars shone in the black water and music floated on the horizon. Study your cigarette, Bogart. Take whatever time you need. Tonight I have cheated the Lonely Place.

Britt, behind Bogart’s right shoulder, imagines her life as a movie, and naturally she is its star. She has memorized all her lines so that each comes naturally. Riggs hadn’t even really been her agent, but he’d found her that first role. She’d slept with him for that, and then he fell in love, and wanted to manage her career. Now she’s about to star in a surf picture set in Hawaii. Riggs was against it, of course.⠀

At regular speed I’m sure it’s dashing, but in the Lonely Place, Bogart is looking at that cigarette as if it’s some unidentified object he doesn’t recall having just extracted from his mouth. You need to live at the right speed. Slow something down enough (or speed it up enough, presumably), and life loses its sense. Not that you, reading the 5th second of this experiment on its 114th day, needed me to spell that out.⠀

Britt, still mostly hidden to our eyes, is off to Honolulu next month, and will fall in love with a soulful guitar player onscreen (offscreen there will be beach photoshoots hinting at a romance). Her contract stipulates that Thumper, her horse, travels with her, and this is still a sticking point between her and the studio, given that she gets seasick, carsick, and trainsick, but not planesick, and they claim the airlines won’t accomodate, which is ludicrous, she feels, given that somebody’s bound to have a private jet. I’ve never in my life so much wanted to set eyes upon a woman I’ve decided is a nightmare.⠀

Is it me, or is that whole cigarette glowing radioactively today, like a slot of white fire on Bogart’s jacket? Is it me, or has that cigarette become a character of it own, entirely unlikable? And is boredom the mother of anthropomorphism?⠀

There are days in my life – this is one – where the tape could be played backwards or forwards without making the slightest difference. The cigarette could be moving down or up, and it wouldn’t matter at all.⠀

At his death in 1957, Bogart weighed 80 pounds. John Huston gave the eulogy: “In each of the fountains at Versailles, there is a pike which keeps all the carp active, otherwise they would grow overfat and die. Bogie took rare delight in performing a similar duty in the fountains of Hollywood.” Not sure I follow the metaphor, but tell me more about these fountains of Hollywood! Bring me Anita Ekberg in a black dress and a sturdy pair of water wings!⠀

Insanity (n) – the result of looking too closely at something. Coincidences become infallible signs. Systems become self-evident. What am I talking about? Just this: the smoke drifting up from Bogart’s cigarette has taken exactly the same form as the lemon in Gloria Grahame’s glass. Is that what chaos theory is? String theory? God?⠀

The Dancing Town. A Devil with Women. The Bad Sister. A Holy Terror. Women of All Nations. Marked Woman. Swing Your Lady. Men Are Such Fools. Racket Busters. Invisible Stripes. Two Guys From Milwaukee. These are a few of Humphrey Bogart’s films I’ve never heard of.⠀

Off in dreamland, musing to make the time pass, I’ve missed something. Today I entered the Lonely Place, and it was obvious: Bogie’s head has turned towards Gloria Grahame. And isn’t that how it always goes: suddenly, without warning, you notice she’s sitting right there, has been all this time? Decades from now, it will have become an essential feature of the story you both tell, your total cluelessness in the beginning. ⠀

Oh man. He’s going for her now, and I’m on tenterhooks, which at the speed of the Lonely Place I had time to look up (not that it helped: “hooks used to fasten cloth on a drying frame or tenter”). Action makes the heart grow fonder, and today there’s too much to take in: as he moves towards Gloria Grahame (Gloria? Do I dare?), he’s going to block out Britt completely and Britt is going to cease to exist. There will just be her horse, Thumper, finally revealed. Ecco equine. I can’t wait.⠀

Britt Langley stars in Hula Troop, an exotic romance set on the fun-filled beaches of Hawaii. A beautiful heiress travels to Honolulu to compete in the world swimming championships and falls in love with a naval lieutenant sailing off to war…. That’s what she’d been promised, but no, it’s this: Fabian Ridgely stars as a handsome sailor, who falls in love with a beautiful heiress/champion swimmer whose supportive friend, poor, is played by Britt Langley. She’s flying out next Thursday, coach, without Thumper.⠀

Riggs the semi-agent (before he died), haunting Britt in his fedora in the curtains over Bogart’s right shoulder, does not stick around because he hopes to save her from Hula Troop, which he knows will cripple her career, but because he wants to understand how she could have appeared to love him, but actually didn’t, not even slightly. In truth, he never really believed in actors or acting (which partially explains why he was never much more than a semi-agent). He believed that emotions can’t be played convincingly unless they’re truly felt.⠀

Good evening, Mr. Bogart. Took you a month, but thanks for joining us. May I present Miss Gloria Grahame. She doesn’t change. She just stays beautiful and inscrutable and perfect, so I imagine we’ll spend another month of you staring at her smooth cheek, but this, at least, will make some sense.⠀

His eyes go wide, his mouth drops open. Finally he comes alive. But she’s a beautiful statue. Will she come alive too? Is love just the improbable occurrence of two people coming alive in the same instant?⠀

Hey, blondie. I wondered what mattered, and then I looked up, and nothing else matters at all. Don’t even look at me. Just stay like that forever, and I’ll stay like this, and I won’t want to live any other way. I’ll give up cigarettes and other distractions. I’ll let the lemon in my glass droop and curl down into my glass like yours. It doesn’t matter in the slightest. It doesn’t. Just this.⠀

I take everything back and beg your forgiveness. Bogart’s timing was perfect. He needed to smoke that cigarette with total concentration for a good two to three weeks. Now so much is happening at once. There are weeks where nothing seems to happen, and weeks where it all seems to happen at once. Look up behind Bogart’s head, the new development of smoke. Thumper the horse is smoking a cigarette. He’s in a bad place, worse than I thought.⠀

I considered signing up for a neighborhood art class today so that I could learn to paint the shadowy lines on the sheer part of the top of her dress, then make a map of it, and set off wandering through it without a compass.⠀

You’ve spent a lifetime perfecting the art of smoking. Your technique has become iconic. It is one of your major contributions to society (take just one gesture to absolute perfection, and you will become immortal), although it will soon kill you. But turn to that woman in that bar, and a cigarette becomes a clumsy impediment between your senseless fingers.⠀

Gloria Grahame’s head has turned slightly, and her eyelids may have dropped, the first significant movement from her in weeks. Is she preparing to make him work a bit harder for it, after his weeks of smoking, or is she turning towards him too? Stay tuned. Love at 1/24th of a second.⠀

This cigarette was lit 72 days ago. Still it has not sloughed off any ash into that glass tray. That’s a miracle at our speed. Maybe every apparent miracle is something ordinary existing in parallel at a radically different speed.⠀

I don’t think I’ve even mentioned Bogart’s character’s name. It’s Dix (Dixon “Dix” Steele). Here’s how Dorothy B. Hughes, who wrote the novel, describes him: “A young fellow, just an average young fellow. Tanned, medium light hair with a little curl, medium tall and enough weight for height. Eyes, hazel; nose and mouth right for the face, a good-looking face but nothing to remember, nothing to set it apart from the usual.” Be grateful to the casting director for ignoring all that, though I do like “enough weight for height”.⠀

Everything’s happening in the foreground now. Bogart’s shifting to his right, making Britt vanish (towards her commercial flight, about to take off for Honolulu?), leaving Thumper to finish his drink before going off to roam the grassy fields alone, deep in horsey thought. Forgive me if I can’t catch you up on all that backstory in a frame, but then we never catch up with the backstory. All we know is the moment, and the occasional glimpses the moment gives of everything else in history.⠀

Look at her face. Look at him unguarded and in love. It’s a miracle he doesn’t melt into a puddle. his boutonniere soggy on the floor. On my lips I can already feel the cigarette on her lips.⠀

I wrote about love being a matter of timing, a rare occurrence of existing in the same moment as someone else, of having your speeds coincide, and here, look at them: each suddenly seems ten years younger. They’re dancing together across decades.⠀

And what I hadn’t noticed yesterday, if it was there yesterday (don’t look back), is the shadow of his cigarette and hand on the sheer silk of her dress, like the shadow of the ghost agent Riggs in his fedora in the background curtains, like a cigarette that belongs to someone else and will haunt the two of them, but you can’t go back.⠀

She will take a puff. I know it, and that is the dream, to eliminate relentless freewill and be infallibly directed to the next moment, and the next, and the next. To live a life like a movie written by a master. Until we scream.⠀

Just an outline of Britt’s hair remains in the background along Bogart’s right shoulder. Her plane is taxiing along the runway, set to take off for Hawaii, where it’s unlikely that any man will offer her a cigarette like that, his shadow hand moving up her dress, her beauty moving the man to coincide with his darker self.⠀

Tonight when she opened her closet and slid dresses along the rail, did she think, “Something that will match the shadow of his hand on my chest”?⠀

Smoking gave Bogart the cancer that killed him. Somebody, anybody, tell me it wasn’t worth it.⠀

She’s not flinching. He’s kept her waiting. She’s not about to giggle or bat eyelashes. No, she’ll see his poker face and double it. Here she is in the novel: “The girl didn’t move for a moment. She stood in his way and looked him over slowly, from crown to toe. The way a man looked over a woman, not the reverse…. After she’d finished looking him over, she gave him a small insolent smile. As if he were a dolt, not Dix Steele.”

“Gloria Grahame’s character is called Laurel (Gray), and this is how Laurel is described in the novel: “Her eyes were slant, her lashes curved long and golden dark. She had red-gold hair, flaming hair, flung back from her amber face, falling to her shoulders. Her mouth was too heavy with lipstick, a copper-red mouth, a sultry mouth painted to call attention to its premise.”Nicholas Ray must have read that and instantly known that the only woman who could play Laurel, and her premise, was his wife.”⠀

Even in the excitement of an approaching ecstasy, our minds still wander. I say this because today I’m perversely ignoring the foreground for the background, where Britt’s as good as gone to Hawaii, and Thumper her horse now stares despondently into his whisky.

Comedy exists in the instant, too – the quick slip on the banana peel, the twitch of an eyebrow, repartee. If we weren’t in the Lonely Place – if we were living at the speed of life – nobody would dream of suggesting that Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame appear ready to perform a trick where he sticks his cigarette up her nose.

She’s enchanted by the game, but for him, it seems to me, the moment is not a game. It’s a hope. Look at his face uncharacteristically open and pleading. When my shadow meets me again at your lips, please let it disappear forever. And then I think about how she hated her lips, stuffed them with cotton, then finally destroyed them through surgery.

Researching what I did yesterday, which is as prescient as I seem to get these days: “Grahame’s concern over the appearance of her upper lip led her to pursue plastic surgery and dental operations that caused visible scarring and ultimately rendered the lip largely immobile because of nerve damage, which affected her speech.”⠀

Actors have their angles, and we’re meant to look at them from the left or the right, so when she turns, and I notice a nose larger than expected, is that because I wasn’t meant to see it from this angle, or because I’ve noticed the nose and so it’s grown bigger in my mind?⠀

One of the greatest joys of childhood is the uncontainable excitement of waiting. Like cannonballing from a diving board or shouting gleefully at fireworks, we lose this capacity as we get older. But then, so rarely, we briefly remember how it felt. Maybe we even actually feel it. Looking today, I think I felt it.

I like her even better for her fingers. I’ve been watching her so closely that I know they’ve drawn up under her hand, even more claw-like, and I like her even better for her nerves. They won’t stop her. They’ll only give her the hint of shame everyone needs to keep going.⠀

“Reading in Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel today:’You won’t change your mind about a drink?’

‘It’s food I want.’

She didn’t want food, she wanted what he wanted. ‘You’ll get it,’ he told her.”””

It’s better to use different ways of talking about the same thing than the same way of talking about different things.

I did some accounting today. 157 days, 157 frames, so we’ve watched only 6.5 seconds (at 24 frames per second). This moment with the cigarette, I remember now, is why I chose to write about this minute, although seeing it at this speed has diminished, or stretched, some of its charm (at least that’s how I feel today). In any case, the lesson is this: never do the math, because in life the math never adds up.⠀

I’ve been holding off on quoting the movie’s most famous line, but maybe now’s the time: “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”⠀

When his hand meets his hand (so close), will his head also move neatly into the shadow of Riggs’s fedora on the curtains in the background, and then will he become the ghost in the shadows, or was that the man he’s been all along, all the cigarette work nothing more than a brilliant disguise?⠀

This last moment before her lips touch the cigarette may take a week. It’s hard to maintain that excitement for a week. It’s hard to maintain that excitement for half an hour. Further complicating my satisfaction, it seems they may both be pausing here to savor the game, but at 1/24th of a second, pauses cease to exist, and what was punctuation becomes an impenetrable 2000-page tome of experimental fiction.⠀

A quick digression (yes, I’m confident we’ve got the time): this year, late 2018, is 1440 on the Islamic (Hijri) calendar (exactly the same as the number of frames in a movie minute!), but the Islamic year, made by the moon, has 354-355 days, so those moon years are slowly catching up to Gregorian years, which clock in at 364-365, and some quick research shows that in 20912 (a leap year, incidentally), we’ll all be able to wish each other a happy 20912 in perfect harmony. Should be fun.⠀

OK. This is the moment that made me fall in love with Gloria Grahame. No distractions. I shouldn’t forget what brought us here. This is the moment that made me want to spend almost four years of my life on a minute. I spent weeks wishing he’d stop smoking that cigarette. Now I’ve spent weeks wishing she’d smoke it. Here we are. That’s addiction.⠀

Shadows move across the land and into the bars of Los Angeles. They have slipped into her bloodstream and darken her from within. Look at her eyes, suddenly tired and smudged beneath. Now I’m watching, waiting with total concentration, for her fingers to come undone.⠀

Oh Gloria. I’m going to call you that now because I’ve gotten to know you a bit and have something important to say, something personal. You were a foolish, foolish woman for hating your own lips. Humphrey Bogart’s admiring eyes are upon them. This was your moment, but you must have been miserable.⠀

At the world’s speed, this was one of the most romantic in movies for me, but at the speed of the Lonely Place, the moment now looks to me like one of mutual exhaustion. They’re happy tonight, I recall, but even if you’ve never seen the movie, you have to wonder whether they have the reserves to make it out of the lonely place together.⠀

I feel as if I’m living in Miami. The days right now in the Lonely Place are beautiful and practically identical. Incidentally, it’s surprising that Miami hasn’t birthed dozens of influential philosophers, much more than Vienna, given that if there’s one thing this experiment has taught us, it’s that boredom is the mother of philosophy (among several other things, given that boredom is more or less the only mother here).

The shadow of his hand won’t completely meet his hand. The cigarette creates the slightest distance. The light comes from an unexpected place, higher than I’d thought. This is what goes wrong for Bogart in the movie: the light’s there, but he doesn’t know where to look for it. He can’t meet up with his shadows and work it out. She looks as if she’s going to bite off the tip of that cigarette.

Today got away from me. But then months have gotten away, years. So it’s not surprising that 1/24th of a second might get away, that this instant might be identical to the one before or after. And now that I just wrote this, I look again, and smoke suddenly trails up from that cigarette, as if every frame is secretly alive, secretly every other. I think that’s what they call Buddhism.⠀

The smoke curls higher, so she must be puffing, and I think of her hatred for her own lips again, because Gloria Grahame’s smoking without her lips.⠀

On Gloria Grahame, Nicholas Ray, and this movie, from the London Review of Books: “It was widely reported that Grahame’s contract contained a ‘Mr and Mrs’ clause, which allowed her husband to ‘direct, control, advise, instruct, and even command my actions during the hours of 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., every day except Sunday, during the filming’. She was forbidden to ‘nag, cajole, tease, or in any other feminine fashion seek to distract or influence him’. She agreed that ‘in every conceivable situation his will and judgment shall be considered superior to mine and shall prevail.’ Even so, Ray moved out of their home.”

I wonder whether stillness, perfect stillness, makes everything look like a sham, like death must be a sham, and whether it’s movement that makes us believe.”

I once boarded a gargantuan cruise ship in the Miami harbor. Even from the highway we could see the giant No Smoking symbol painted across its hull. Approaching by foot with our suitcases, loudspeakers everywhere blared the good news: this was a non-smoking boat. Better: the boat’s construction dock had been a non-smoking dock. I was young, but even then I understood the folly of virginal girders, and that soon enough people would want to make everything virginal again.

From In a Lonely Place, the novel: “He seldom left the apartment in those days. In the outside world there was time; in time, there was impatience. Better to remain within the dream.”

He’s leaning in and looking more vulnerable by the day, wanting more than she appears willing to give. Maybe every love story, in the end, is structured around whoever’s got what passes for the nicotine.

Studying Bogart intently today, making him the center of my universe in order to eliminate the universe, and an ear is a funny thing. I’d like someone to explain to me the fetish (artists who cut them off, lovers who long to lick them). A woman once said to me (while smoking a cigarette without hands): there are no explanations, only stories, and I guess this is the only way to understand an ear fetish.

I should be telling you about the shifting patterns of smoke, and your potential for self-transformation. I should be pulling you aside for epiphanies, ripping the scales from your eyes every 1/24th of a second. I should be seeing so much that the sun rises and sets in our bones, and we encompass time. I should be a visionary. But I’m not. And we’re exactly the same people we were yesterday, whatever we want to say or do about it.

Here’s what’s clear to me today: they hadn’t rehearsed this scene. She hadn’t thought through the mechanics of smoking a cigarette held by somebody else’s three fingers and thumb. And he, in the last couple years of his life, knew he had the chops. He was already Bogart, and didn’t need rehearsals, and this is why he had become an icon. So you just do it. When you reach that place, even the imperfections, especially the imperfections, become an essential aspect of your genius.

A quote by Sartre read today: “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” Thankfully we’re not alone.

On her second week of shooting in Honolulu, Britt, now just a speck of blonde the background, managed to roll a tear down her cheek while thinking of absolutely nothing. This was the cue for a surfer to die. The producer, with whom she is now sleeping, wants her to change her name to Britt Starr, and although the double-double-ending does seem kind of fabulous (even daring?), at the same time she feels it’s important to remain true to herself, which is what she’s thinking when the director calls for a second take and she rolls out another perfect tear.

On the table in front of them, their drinks sit squarely in the center of the shadows of their faces, which have been laid down like appetizers. Then the drinks lay down their shadows back to the left, flattened by another light, as if a sun has moved across a sky quicker than the earth can adjust, as if tomorrow is now, or yesterday.

Okay, here comes the night. It’s in her smile. His shadow up her neck. I am rejuvenated. It happens every time. Patience is the answer to absolutely everything.⠀

Charles Manson: The way out of the room is not through the door. Because then you just go into another room, which leads into another room, which leads into a bigger room. And you’re still inside your cage…. The way out is to be willing, man. ⠀

When people say they’re trying to live in the moment, I assume they mean trying to live without the ceaseless distancing of oneself from the world. In other words, without internal commentary. I am trying to live in the moment. The problem is that I won’t shut up.

Today I noticed the smoke rising up and up over the pile of her perfect hair and then – and here I can’t be sure – back along the top of her head until a wisp briefly rises and vanishes at her crown. And then as I wrote that sentence, it occured to me how strangely difficult it often is to describe something simple which you can surely see for yourself. So let’s just sit here together tonight and say nothing at all.

That shadowed cheekbone, that dress, those wakening smiles. But falling in love with this moment is like falling in love with a millimeter.

One half of his bowtie sullenly casts its shadow, the other, finding itself in the light, flashes two dimples. Neither half droops as Gilles’s bowtie once did. I reproached Gilles for it then, but surely it’s a fake, Bogie’s perfect bow. You begin to wonder if you got it all wrong, if there was truth in the drooping, but you can’t accommodate any further revisions right now, so you don’t.⠀

Two important developments to report (either they’re new developments, or my attention has wandered): through the top of Gloria Grahame’s glass, there appears to be something on her dress, like miniature lips turned sideways. A brooch? Or something on the glass itself? And then (and this is a shocker!), around Bogart’s right shoulder the outline of Britt’s head has clearly reappeared. Dying to know what happened in Hawaii.⠀

They’re listening to the same music. Hadda Brooks, from way back in the summer, is still playing the piano across the room. The same rhythm, the same song. That’s what’s giving them possibilities we can’t even see.⠀

They’re coming alive. Their smiles are moving up into their eyes. But in the background, Britt, with her spot of lit blonde hair, is not smiling. Back from the Honolulu shoot, she lost the part by sleeping with the man who, in retrospect, was the wrong producer. Story of her life. For once she just wishes they would be who they were supposed to be. Also, the producer has now been reported missing, circumstances suspicious. “Don’t talk to me about circumstances!” she thinks.⠀

More on Britt, just a speck of light over Bogart’s shoulder: Hula Troop, that whole catastrophe, had been meant to make her a star. Then last night, the ghost of Riggs, haunting the curtains in his fedora, came to her in a dream. “Britt,” he said, “I’m aware that you had your horse Thumper kill me. I warned you against Hawaii. Surf pictures are the Fat Man and Little Boy of movies…..” She frowned. “I mean like bombs,” he said. She snorted. Then she woke up, went into the kitchen, and scooped herself a rare bowl of ice cream just to get away from his dream words.⠀

Apparently Howard Hughes, owner of RKO Studios, who made In a Lonely Place, never saw the movie. He’d think this experiment was crazy, but then he was certifiably nuts. Afterwards, he wouldn’t let Gloria Grahame film with another studio, insisting she take a small part in Macao, which sounds more up Britt’s sleeve, especially now that she’s been kicked off the set of Hula Troop. Britt’s got a fresh start, so to speak, although of course there’s no such thing.⠀

What is that fern, or desert palm, at the top of Gloria’s right shoulder? Is it the shadow of tufts of her hair, dramatically sticking out in a way we can’t imagine in two dimensions? Her earring? Or is it the weekend she spent with a sweet boy, too sweet, last year in Palm Springs, back when she wasn’t sure she could keep doing this, the loneliness of Tuesday nights, the angry telephones, the whispering mirrors, and had wanted to believe in something good?⠀

The smoke has wandered down from Gloria Grahame’s hair to snake along Bogart’s right shoulder, as if Riggs, the ghost in the fedora shadowed in the curtains, is inhaling it, and I imagine armies of ghosts out there, purifying the world of its toxins, a spectral filter we fear only because it now contains the worst of us.⠀

The smoke at the cigarette’s tip has now risen very slightly and halos the hint of blonde hair belonging to Britt, whose career feels as if it’s in shambles. At night she cannot sleep. She drives out to the stables, and under the cold starlight she brushes Thumper’s hair in long, slow strokes that leave him shivering. When sleep finally feels possible, she weaves back to her bedroom down deserted country roads, and crashes into the pillows for nightmares of Riggs’s murder, of investigations narrowing like a noose around her neck, and the sweet thrill of killing again, like crushing a cool grape between her teeth. Tomorrow must be different. Every day that she can live correctly, in body and mind, is another alibi.⠀

Thinking of Britt’s alarming bloodlust, reading Emil Cioran: “Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing – between two fictions.”⠀

“You always see something. You never see nothing. If you don’t like what you’re wearing, change the channel.” – Frederick Seidel, “Song to the Moon”⠀

So Gloria’s gin-and-tonic just got up the nerve to turn to Bogie’s gin-and-tonic and ask what his percentages are, as in whether he thinks he’s principally gin or tonic, which is apparently a thing among G&Ts. Nonetheless, Bogie’s gin-and-tonic is annoyed by the question, believing that life in a glass is too short for small talk. When he was young, Bogart’s gin-and-tonic wanted to be a firework, and although he had the fizz, he lacked the height.⠀

For the first time in what feels like years, Bogie’s gin-and-tonic’s mood is hopeful. “Turning a new page,” he thinks, although he realizes that feasibly, there’s not much of a page to turn. Yet recently he’s had this idea that he might actually be climatic, like clouds or rain, not something merely poured. This glass only encapsulates his current form, but he has others, and someday the sun will call him up into a cloud over a river flowing to the sea. And then he’ll be his true self. Not like this.⠀

Gloria Grahame’s gin-and-tonic glances sidelong at Miss Grahame, desperate for feminine pointers. She presses an ice cube against her lemon peel, hoping to curve it ever more seductively. A bead of moisture rolls down the outside of her glass, and although that might be considered embarrassing, she feels a little lighter, a little lither. Now she’s staring at Bogart’s gin-and-tonic, staring so hard, but he’s just oblivious, apparently content to be nothing more than a measly gin-and-tonic. Why doesn’t he have bigger dreams? Why can’t he transport her? She stares even harder. ⠀

Someone in the Lonely Place with us writes: “…her big earrings, his handkerchief looking like a shrimp beignet in a Chinese restaurant, his reclining hair, her perfectly shaped eyebrows, his ring, her absence of rings…[this goes on and on and on, and is humbling].” Sometimes you need to have it pointed out, the reclining hair. A friend who sees only what we see in the mirror is no friend. ⠀

We have learned that Bogie’s gin-and-tonic once dreamed of being a firework, but Gloria’s gin-and-tonic, if she were aware of this, would surely find it pretentious. They are liquid in a glass only as wide as a mouth, nothing more, but nothing less. They are united by low places, flowing always to the bottom, and then if they can, flowing even lower. If he could simply accept this, he’d be a whole lot happier. But of course that’s just her two cents.⠀

As the two gin-and-tonics fizz, while lamenting the uncompromising distance between them, while dreaming of cracks in the glass and ecstatic flow, Bogart delicately holds the cigarette now as if it’s a flower, black gap between his teeth.⠀

“There are new entrances to my body, their edges outlined in blacks and grays and reds like the entrances to the face of a young girl.” – Monica Youn⠀

(In the background, the shadow of the ghost of Riggs in his fedora covers the body of Britt, his former lover and murderer, like a heavy blanket. She shudders and makes another New Year’s resolution, three months late. No – make it a forever resolution: always have an alibi, at every instant, now and now. Never let yourself slip, because you know what will happen. Perspiration moistens her forehead, and she wonders how long it will take to be not like this.)⠀

Bogart’s gin-and-tonic is wondering what would happen to time if Bogart’s wrist moved just a touch and his watch were reflected through the gin-and-tonic’s own hazy cylinder. For a gin-and-tonic time is the principal preoccupation, given that anybody’s thirst means immediate death. So to be in the Lonely Place for a gin-and-tonic, where time moves almost imperceptibly, is paradise. As it would be for us if we were so wise. ⠀

Hooded eyes. The girl was all surface, but now she’s all charm. Love requires change, like a curl of the lips and two hooded eyes. Only what is different will survive.⠀

I wish I could go back and check the past few days (but time only moves on), because I think the cigarette’s actually getting longer, as if the plume of white smoke at Bogart’s cheek (making him into some ghoulish Sabta Claus) will next be sucked back into the tip, and tomorrow the cigarette will be even longer.⠀

Has the darker shadow of Gloria’s earring moved? Regardless, it now sits on her shoulder like an upside-down alien with two upright antennae. The alien whispers commands into her ear. This can’t turn out well, although who knows. Maybe, for once, these are not malevolent aliens, and their shadow UFOs have landed in our shadows to communicate transformation to the earthbound versions of ourselves. Maybe? ⠀

“William James, wondering more than a century ago what is ‘the minimum amount of duration which we can distinctly feel,’ had it pegged around 50 milliseconds [which is 1/20th of a second, or about the duration of this frame]. James cited the seminal work of Austrian physiologist Sigmund Exner, who observed that people shown sets of flashing sparks stopped being able to recognize them as distinct entities around 0.044 seconds.” So now you know. ⠀

Hold on. The miniature upside-down shadow alien on Gloria’s shoulder has an announcement: “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” These days I walk through the streets of Paris looking intently at strangers for some light of a messiah, but the danger with a willingness to believe is that it occasionally makes an idol of an earring, unleashing alien invasions. So keep that in mind. ⠀

⠀

Today’s wonderful discovery: the shadow of her cigarette jutting down from her neckline, as solid as some avant-garde accessory. Related: we would never discover anything if we weren’t blind most the rest of the time.⠀

Of all the skills that look good on film, smoking without hands looks the best. Better even than leaping tall buildings in a single bound.⠀

Well well, Britt, murderess and B-movie actress. You’re starting to let yourself show behind Bogart’s right arm. You’re coming out of that dark tunnel, stepping out to meet the world again. And though I’m always inclined to think the background matters more than the obvious shapes we pretend are the real story, in this case I’m genuinely worried for Bogie.⠀

“Dilemma is the key word. It is always a dilemma, not a situation.” – Neil Simon⠀

“It is an illusion that we were ever alive, Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves, By our own motions in a freedom of air.” – Wallace Stevens⠀

Gloria Grahame’s crustacean claw has finally come unclenched to follow, like a dove, her rising cigarette, and this is all the proof I’ll ever need of evolution. Or God.⠀

On days when what compels you most are the parallel curves of a woman’s fingers and a lemon peel, you’re forced to consider how we decide what’s significant. Stare at a pebble for five minutes or so. Odds are good that it becomes a threat to America. A baguette becomes my soulmate. ⠀

Months ago (seconds ago), I mentioned the San Francisco glass cutter named Lucchini who made that ashtray. What I didn’t mention is that Lucchini’s ashtrays were notoriously difficult to work with, especially those that somehow made it down the Pacific Coast Highway from home to the bright lights of Hollywood, where they lounged in the foreground of motion pictures, armed with contracts with clauses ensuring they could never be made to accept ashes.⠀

“You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street without changing.” – Carolyn Kizer⠀

Every love story is one of shifting power dynamics, and here’s a theory: watch a couple’s fingers closely, and they will tell you everything about those dynamics. Gloria Grahame’s were tensed into claws, and Bogart was bored, but now that she’s holding a cigarette with such relaxed confidence, his pinky is unsure of itself. So, according to this theory, which may be revolutionary: I fear for Bogie’s heart.⠀

Wait, where did that second cigarette come from? How did I miss this? Is there a miniature pack in his left hand? Or were there always two cigarettes being prepared? How could I have missed something so important when I’ve spent a month observing the previous second? He’s a magician, Bogie, and while I had once thought that if I applied this ludicrous frame-by-frame technique to a famous magician’s most famous magic trick, I would understand his secrets, now I’m forced to admit that some secrets are burrowed even deeper into the universe than time, and that magic exists. ⠀

I wonder if that’s a bright earring on Britt, in the background behind Bogie’s right shoulder, or a gleaming earlobe. And if it’s an earring, then is there a miniature shadow alien on Britt’s shoulder too, like the upside-down alien on Gloria Grahame’s? Should I be concerned? Is this how the invasion begins?⠀

This has become an action movie! Bogart’s cigarette just flew up a few inches from where it was yesterday. Here in the Lonely Place, that kind of movement feels violent. I fear he’ll impale the cigarette deep into his skull.⠀

A lot of us out here in the Lonely Place are clutching our popcorn buckets hoping Bogart will light his cigarette from Miss Grahame’s, as much as we suspect it’s probably not going to happen. You’ve got a silver lighter like that, prepped and ready for months, you’re going to flick it. You’re independent, and won’t ask a woman for anything except what she can’t give. So yeah, you’ll flick it, and we’ll groan into our popcorn.⠀

Vaping would have been inconceivable. You smoked for the harm, because you needed a bit of self-destruction to give color to your contentment. The notion that it was good for you to do only the things that were good for you had not yet become the only acceptable point-of-view. Danger had more to say.⠀

I am finding myself, my one true self. Today after watching Bogie and Gloria and their cigarettes for a while, after days of giving the powers of speech and thought to most of the objects around them, I decided that of all the objects, I’d most like to be the curved table with its raised edge, which I’d never, ever before noticed. Talk to me tomorrow.⠀

Today I marveled that Bogart’s boutonniere was still fresh after all this time, then half-consciously decided it must be fake, which gave me a sort of nihilistic satisfaction (everything equals zero in the end), before I remembered that this was the Lonely Place, that the flower was still fresh, that everything must be looked at within its own context.⠀

I have a confession to make. This morning I cheated. I glanced forward through the next month, and having been briefly granted the power of prophecy, I realized this: nothing will really change unless you start writing the story yourself. So maybe, after all, this is about a ghost named Riggs who haunts the back curtains of this bar in his fedora.⠀

“This conversation is dynastic,” Britt (behind Bogart’s hand) had murmured as Riggs (the ghost in the fedora in the curtains behind her) had continued the career lecture, even daring to call her B-list. This was the night before she killed him, principally because he was like some joyless junior high teacher who didn’t believe in grade inflation, but also because she wanted to know how murder felt, so she could put that in her actor’s toolbox.⠀

It’s so clear to Riggs now. Even before Britt murdered him (there was a time when he blamed the horse, but he’s past that now; she guided the horse; those two were practically a single organism, such that the hooves crumpling his skull might as well have been Britt’s heels), he was already a ghost. When two people come together, they create something else. Like any chemical reaction, the change in the world cannot be reversed. So choose your lovers carefully, choose your handshakes and your families. Unfortunately with Riggs, when he met Britt, the chemistry turned him into a ghost. And then for good measure she murdered him afterwards.⠀

The night before Riggs died, there had been drinks at Britt’s house in the Canyons. Riggs couldn’t see how she could afford it, but he didn’t want to know the answer, so he didn’t ask questions. In his more vulnerable moments, however, when he was alone and sober, he suspected other men. Abandoning her third Manhattan, she stood, walked over to the mirror, and asked if he was coming to Gino’s. “Of course!” he cried. She frowned at her reflection, causing Riggs to chuckle: she was too beautiful to be so critical of her looks. “You’re sweet,” she said, “but you don’t have to do it for me.”⠀

Here at the bar tonight, Britt was meant to meet a new man, a new producer interested in her talent and specialized in glamour roles – not like that distinctly unglamorous Hawaii dud Riggs had roped her into. And because ghosts pass through everything, living in a realm without matter where thoughts also reside, Riggs hears this and thinks: “You wanted Hawaii. You put that rope around your own neck, sweetheart, but I’m the one who croaked. Also, your new producer won’t be showing up, tonight or any other night, ever.” Because Riggs has taken action. He has resolved that for once in his frickin’ existence he will finally haunt someone.⠀

It’s not enough for ghostly Riggs to haunt Britt from the shadows of bar curtains. It’s not enough to deny her the glamour roles. He wants to make her a ghost too, touching nothing, passing through everything, insubstantial. Thumper, her horse, whose ear we can see over Bogart’s left shoulder, can live, but in death Riggs will deny Britt the horse too. He will saddle Thumper and ride him across the deserts of Nevada like the last horseman of the apocalypse. That should have an effect on her. Then he’ll see what he does next.⠀

Gloria Grahame has turned her head slightly, and the antennae of the little shadow alien who sits upside-down on her shoulder have retracted further into its head. It occurs to me now that maybe the alien invasion, and the end of the human race, is not imminent, but rather this alien has escaped his brutal homeland planet and longs only to assimilate, to be as much like Gloria as possible, which is what he’s always felt he should have been – the best of him.⠀

Watching Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 last night, when Tony Leung started talking about “2046”, I knew that what he meant to say was “the Lonely Place”: “Everyone who goes to 2046 has the same intention: they want to recapture lost memories. Because in 2046 nothing ever changes. But nobody knows if that’s true or not because no one has ever come back.” Oh. You didn’t know? Sorry. Nothing to do now but make the best of it.⠀

Yesterday I had mis-typed destroyed, then caught it just before posting: destoryed.⠀

You may be lost if you’ve landed here today. You may have no idea what’s going on, where you should be, or how the story makes any sense. You can leave, of course, but really you can’t.⠀

The bottomlit socket of Britt’s right eye off the edge of Bogart’s right hand. A smile that’s crept onto his face again today, which I didn’t notice yesterday. Gloria Grahame’s fingers, now so long. I understand now why they curled together claw-like for all those months. They say the continents were once one – Pangaea, the supercontinent, containing everything – and parted over millennia into seven.⠀

Here’s the thing: even when he was alive, Riggs dreamed so fruitlessly of Britt (now so tantalizingly close to being revealed beyond Bogart’s right hand) that after a while she could hardly exist in reality. He made her into his own ghost before he became the ghost himself. She sensed this too, and naturally loathed it, because Britt’s least adaptable firm belief is in the inevitability of her own substance.⠀

She’s looking at his smile, still smiling slightly herself, similar smiles, almost as if her smile is his, and you have to wonder (you don’t, but I do) whether every smile is born from another’s, and there’s only ever been one big smile.⠀

Right now I live in a room with these moments taped to the walls. Each day I write about another moment, and my life changes incrementally. But the other day I used another printer, and on this wall the cracked-glass lines at the top of Gloria Grahame’s dress have become deep and black. Imagine everything you felt today, produced by that printer. Maybe you would experience a pleasing undeniability, but probably you’d just be a jerk.⠀

Time speeds up, making machines of us all. Love dies by a thousand clicks. So smash the machines and silently stare, noticing that freckle for maybe the first time. The hours will again be endless.⠀

In the first version shot of the movie, Gloria Grahame was killed, but then director Nicolas Ray (her husband) changed his mind: “Shit, I can’t do it, I just can’t do it! Romances don’t have to end that way. Marriages don’t have to end that way, they don’t have to end in violence.” This was before the night she pulled a handgun on him, ordering him to “fuck or die”. Also before she slept with his 13-year-old son. So: trust your instincts? ⠀

Best actor at this point in the proceedings has to go to Gloria Grahame’s smoke, which is really extending itself in its own action-packed death scene (it’s always a death scene with smoke, but this one has got some amplitude). Bravo.⠀

Paying radical attention like this makes one into a sort of criminal. After committing a crime, everything matters. Every face is a dangerous possibility, every new day an alibi. We’re on the run. ⠀

Gloria Grahame’s smoke is like the weather. Every day we pay it close attention, checking percentages and degrees, as if this might lead to some fundamental understanding, when what we should really be noticing is Gloria Grahame, who makes the weather.⠀

The shadow of his cigarette, a black line drawn down his chin. Hers, shadowless from this angle. His fingers shadowed on the palm of his same hand. If all we knew were the shadows, we’d know just as much, and potentially more.⠀

Oh man. I was about to make a crack about Bogie, of all people, needing a Zippo instruction manual, but then today the flash of what I first thought was a reflection must be a flame. Exciting stuff. Genesis.⠀

And Bogie said, Let there be light: and there was light. And Bogie saw the light, that it was good: and Bogie divided the light from the darkness. And Bogie called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.⠀

I’m beginning to doubt my grip on reality, or reality’s grip on me. Is everything interpretation? Today Bogart seemed to have a sort of folded paper origami in his cramped right hand. I’d never seen it before. I flipped back to yesterday, the day before. There it was. How had I missed it? I kept flipping back through the days, until the folded paper became nothing more than light on his palm. Yet what might have happened next with that origami if I hadn’t looked back?⠀

​I once knew a man who believed that his every thought, his every feeling, his every instinct was truth ​worthy of total attention. ​Soon everyone else seemed afflicted by the same thoughts, feelings, and instincts, and he had become the loneliest man ​in the world. Nobody’s seen him in years. ⠀

She’s inhaling. The tip of her cigarette gleams white, or red in the real world. I think of her lungs, her ribs slightly tighter against silk.⠀

Either that’s the black shadow of his lighter newly appeared on his chest, or his heart bleeding out in advance of what she’ll do to him, because she’s Gloria Grahame and can’t be bothered to care and will die ravaged by loneliness. One or the other.⠀

The white gash between fingers in the shadow of her hand on her chest, and the block of his shadowed hand moving up her left arm as the shadow of her gin-and-tonic strains to touch her elbow.⠀

Most would move their whole heads back away from the coming flame, but Bogie suffises with a practiced tilt up of the cigarette, a pursing of the lips and a smoothing of the cheek. Elegance is acting with the minimum gestures required. By that definition this experiment is the apex of inelegance. Hmm. I want to be like Bogie. ⠀

Yes, I see the flame is lit. I’m trying not to get excited. Maintaining equilibrium. I’ve been here before. I’ve learned my lesson. Patience may be a virtue, I don’t know, but in the Lonely Place it’s a necessity.⠀

I’m not looking at the flame. I swear I’m not. It’ll be there tomorrow. So, self-sufficiency. Equanimous observation. No cravings or aversions. Hold the line. When you slow life down to the pace at which it’s actually happening, you automatically become a buddhist adept.⠀

What has particularly excited me today, apart from an unknown song I heard from the neighbor’s radio, is the way the shadow of the lighter is perfectly aligned with its width and cuts all the way across Bogart’s palm, several times longer than the lighter itself.⠀

More reflections on Riggs’s movements in the background: first, given that every ghost only eternally haunts the one he loved in life, we can be certain he’s not transferring his affections to Gloria (that might have seemed like a good idea, given the catastrophe of Britt, but then this is Gloria Grahame we’re talking about, catastrophe’s masterpiece). So is he trying to make Britt jealous? Showing her his better angle, or attempting to come at her from her worst? Poor Riggs. He’s got an eternity of bad options in front of him.⠀

Look at her eyes. She’s wondering who he is. She’ll never know. She’ll study the signs, as we do here each day, and place her faith in who she thinks he is. And that will make all the difference.⠀

Left shoulder, right shoulder. His right, on our left. To describe the frame, I’m always turning myself around and into the frame, then looking back out at myself. Every day, every 1/24th of a second, I steel myself to meet my eyes. Hey. ⠀

It’s a truism that the opposite of love isn’t hatred, but indifference. But the opposite of love is fear. And Gloria Grahame despises fear.⠀

Occasionally, for no reason we can anticipate, everything gloriously coincides. So light ‘em up, the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, head craned to the smoky heavens, acknowledging transcendence wherever it finds you. That’s what he’s got to be thinking, Bogie.⠀

The white rim of light along Bogie’s bowtie was previously undiscovered, like Antarctica, so give us dog sleds and fur and let’s charge for the horizon.⠀

If you accept that time moves at this speed (which it does), then to remain sane you can either parcel yourself out into distractions, or somehow maintain faith in each unpromising moment, until you look back across a vast era that you alone lived. And then there’s the next moment. ⠀

I’m going to go out on a limb here. Hot take: what was once the dark rectangular shadow of Bogie’s lighter over his heart is now animated by a flame larger than the one with which he lights his cigarette.⠀

Ooh. Bam! Talk about breaking the fourth wall. Go easy on us, Gloria. The shadow of your hand and fingers on your dress above your right arm now looks like the head of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and its slit gleaming eye. But you knew that, didn’t you.⠀

Reading Albee, Zoo Story, and that iconic line, how sometimes one must “go a very long distance out of [the] way to come back a short distance correctly.” Which if it isn’t the definition of the Lonely Place, must be the definition of romance.⠀

The tip of the nail of her index finger gleams just like the tip of her cigarette, making six fingers, tips aflame, a shapeshifting goddess with supernatural powers if only you look closely enough.⠀

Reading Iris Murdoch, who argues for “a new vocabulary of attention”, defining attention as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” Only by lovingly attending to something can we see it as it really is. It takes time.⠀

Smoke lingers on her tongue, making a single bottom tooth, a mouth ravaged by decay. I feel worse for it, so I find the number 6 in the smoke already exhaled and turn it into a sacred sign. Six. ⠀

The darkness of her mouth today has caused me to notice the dark shadow of her nose, and the lighter rim of shadow just beneath her nostril, making the nose look as it if could be peeled up off her face.⠀

Or maybe she’s watching a baseball game on television, and the outfielder just dropped a fly ball. Maybe when your lover looked at you with that face, they were only watching television.⠀

Often as I sit here observing, I’ll attempt to let my brain be what it is, just another organ, like a kidney or a spleen. Sometimes I succeed. Somet…

​Sometimes it’s only by paying close and patient attention to the wrong things that we learn to pay attention to the right things. ⠀

Today, this 1/24th of a second, Gloria is either catatonic, an obvious candidate for institutionalization, or the most beautiful creature ever to inhabit the planet, hand draped over oxygen as if she can pet the molecules we breathe. Sometimes it’s extremely hard to tell the difference.⠀

PO? P8? Pe? re? Or are the letters made by smoke in her exhalation, which I attempt to decipher before they disappear (certain I’m being told something crucial), nothing more than a fantasy her hair is having of itself, one of lightness and endless transformation. I hope so.⠀

As her mouth closes, a double curve returns to her upper lip, a line of teeth appear above the bottom, and smoke is released from her cigarette again to write messages in the air that will seem to matter as much as if they were carved into stone, but won’t matter in the slightest.⠀

His left hand moves towards the lighter, and if to take it from his right. If I were to light a cigarette with my right hand, I would also pocket the lighter with my right. So was he left-handed? But why light it with the right? I could look it up, but increasingly I find myself at war with mere information.⠀

The shadow of her hand today is a rabbit sitting on a white bench contemplating its tail. There is a slight possibility that we tend to find metaphors (and the shadows) most applicable to ourselves. ⠀

These days she’s about as beautiful, as feminine, as it gets, but even standing before beauty, we’re constantly distracted by the stories we tell ourselves, narratively fixing problems that never needing fixing, and won’t be fixed, and so today, despite stunning Gloria (I’m an idiot, and so are you), I’m back to the ghost Riggs in the background, now a big ghost Riggs in his fedora directly over blonde Britt, who killed him, and the recently remarked mini-Riggs in the mini fedora over Gloria’s left shoulder. Riggs went out to Hollywood wanting to be a big agent, but with eternity to reflect, he realizes he would have been better off small, and though I don’t know if there are therapists in purgatory, or if God does the trick, clearly it’s all coming out, and that includes mini-Riggs. ⠀

Death begins the moment anyone fills in this blank: I am a ______. Even “I am an astronaut” or “I am a professional football player”, spoken plainly, implies you have become only that, for eternity, resigning everything else you might become. Yet Riggs was desperate to abandon himself to a blank, anything, as long as it wasn’t his father’s “mechanic”, and so down at the diner where he ate twice a day, he started telling the waitress “I am an agent”. At night he drank bottles of cheap beer to dull the panic. He stared blankly at the frayed carpet, and he was an agent.⠀

Back to Riggs, the ghost in the fedora haunting Britt from the background curtains. After her horse Thumper (his ear visible to the right of Bogie’s head) kicked him in the head and killed him, Riggs went blank for a few days. He can’t remember his own funeral, which is annoying. He wonders if he got a crowd, but tries not to think about it too much. And then suddenly he was haunting Britt, following her everywhere. And then one day mini-Riggs appeared in his mini-fedora and started haunting Riggs. Mini-Riggs doesn’t talk, or at least Riggs can’t hear him. He just haunts, hard and inscrutable. Is he Riggs as a boy? The core of Riggs, whatever that means? Riggs wonders, and wishes he could talk to someone about it, but nobody can hear him either. Sometimes he wonders whether mini-Riggs is the real Riggs, and he’s just the ghost of a ghost, a bloated reflection. Those are the bad days. He hasn’t gotten accustomed to the fact that from here on out, it’s all one long day. ⠀

Bogie’s hand is a blur of movement and smoke. She is a statue. Everything changes, but as soon as we’re aware of the change, we cease to see it clearly, while pretending we’re still looking at statues.⠀

Now he is entirely focused on his cigarette, and she is impeccably bored. But from boredom come all great ideas, and so I resolve to be bored today, at least after I’ve dealt with Britt in the background, whose right eye seems to have made a complete appearance, roving the crowd (surely there’s a crowd?), scanning for new career angles to be considered.⠀

We have been in the Lonely Place for 15.2 seconds. In other words, exactly one year. I used to do the math of how many days remain. I don’t do the math anymore. Happy birthday. ⠀

Reading Paracelsus today, in my own time, as I watch the proceedings in the Lonely Place: “He who knows nothing loves nothing. He who can do nothing understands nothing. He who understands nothing is worthless. But he who understands also loves, notices, sees…. The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love…. Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries knows nothing about grapes.”⠀

Thank God again for the smoke and the shadows, practically nothing, but everything at this speed: the flower that’s now bloomed over her cigarette, the shadow of his lighter, like a tin ashtray cleaved in two.⠀

Man. Especially impatient today for these two to get on with it, and as much as I’ve romanticized their smoking, at some point you’ve got to admit the obvious: never fall in love with a smoker. At best, you’ll always be the backup plan. ⠀

Today I noticed, after zooming in, that the eye of Britt in the background has fully revealed itself, and that she’s covetously watching Gloria. Even the dark corner of her mouth has appeared, and her nose may be bigger than expected. She seems more serious and hardened than I could have imagined, and you begin to wonder whether I’ve gotten the wrong woman. Is it possible her name is actually Suzanne?

The tip of Gloria’s cigarette now looks as if she’s repeatedly bashed it into a flat, hard surface, desperate for something to happen. While the world continues coinciding almost exactly with itself, we rage and rejoice, love and lament. We editorialize ourselves as actors at history’s epicenter. And then another fraction of a second passes, and again there we are.⠀

What is my purpose? You have to wonder how that ashtray’s feeling right about now. You’d like to think it maintains a calm confidence that it has been perfectly made for its purpose, and that its time will eventually come, but I’m guessing that everything, even ashtrays built for eternity, sometimes struggles to keep faith in its eventual utility.⠀

​We’re all the universe pretending to be humans, or smoke, or earrings, or napkins for a little while.

Bogie now has an additional smaller dimple (or at least one I hadn’t noticed) just off the corner of his mouth, and his two dimples mirror the ghost Riggs in his fedora back in the curtains and mini-Riggs down to his Riggs’ left. Symmetry’s that old trap, but I’m a sucker for it, so did the dimples make the two Riggs, or did the two Riggs make the dimples? The eternal question. ⠀

Britt’s really coming out in the background, a ferny plume of Gloria’s smoke off her right shoulder. Look at her eyes: she’s a spectator, desperate to be Gloria. Yet each 1/24th of a second for all of eternity, she’ll only be nothing more or less than herself.⠀

Maybe Riggs isn’t a fedoraed ghost in the curtains, but just a goofy shadow, and maybe Britt in the background is a struggling poet with a valiant heart, and maybe Gloria and Bogie will never fall in love, I thought today as I was reading reliable Roberto Bolaño: “Life is a succession of misunderstandings, leading us on to the final truth, the only truth.”

Practice what you preach. While I’ve been off philosophizing about attention, rapt with pertinent ideas, a notion of Britt’s other eye has appeared in the background as her head leans longingly towards Gloria. I’d like to crop this photo along Bogie’s arm and post it to Instagram, because that image, which we never would have noticed at any other speed, would kill.⠀

And today Gloria’s smoke off Britt’s right shoulder is the graying head of a man facing the curtains, as if waiting for a movie to be projected into its folds, whereas life and everything that matters is all in another direction if only he knew.⠀

The head of the man off Britt’s left shoulder has disappeared. We have to come to terms with the fact that he was only smoke. Or he was bored, and left. Just as I’m bored today (coincidentally?), but none of us can ever leave.⠀

Major movement in Bogie’s hand today. The blur is the proof. But maybe we’ve become too quickly distracted by movement, when our attention would be better spent in maintenance of what should stay the same.⠀

The devil now on Bogie’s shoulder came from smoke he inhaled into his own lungs and then exhaled, feeling briefly exalted. We produced the devils and the gods while searching haphazardly for feelings we couldn’t explain.⠀

When occasionally boredom blurs the days, and you respond by again pretending you might finally become yourself (whatever that could possibly mean) if only you were better optimized, perhaps a line of Saint-Exupéry’s read decades ago will pop into your brain like an easy miracle: “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”⠀

You’ll be long dead before they ever kiss, but death is only the end if you assume the story’s about you.⠀

Bogie’s fat tongue has appeared, like third lip. I wonder what he’s up to. Not to mention that one, two, three, four, he’s about to declare a thumb war with himself. Maybe our insignificant gestures mean nothing, but I prefer to believe that taken together, they reveal everything, all our thoughts and feelings translated into an unconscious language, even if nobody else speaks it.⠀

Gloria Grahame’s cigarette is trying to speak to us. It’s sending up two parallel threads of smoke, as separate as Gloria and Bogie, but be patient, because the threads become one, before they knot together, becoming chaos and confusion, yet ever more beautiful. At least I think that’s what the cigarette is saying.⠀

We’re not moved in any real way by abstract things. We mourn the death of one with more feeling than we can ever mourn the death of a million. Better to draw a frame, making a world containing specifics, which are no less infinite than abstractions.⠀

That smoke must be swirling, but we so quickly forget so much of yesterday that it’s difficult to see how today is any different. Total recall would paralyze us in endless miniature upheavals.⠀

You may be bored with me today. I may be bored with you. We may be bored with smoke and gin, movie stars, murderous blondes in the background, and the head of the horse named Thumper off Bogie’s left shoulder. We may be bored with it all, but if we keep our eyes open, chances are we won’t be bored tomorrow, or maybe the next day.⠀

Today Bogie looks as if he’s finally about to say something, revealing perhaps the shadowy back streets of his mind, because although he hardly knows her, Gloria looks like a woman made for shadows, one who’s walked those back streets alone. Yet there’s always the risk that her mind is a junior high cafeteria. Speak, Bogie. Don’t wait. Better the back streets, even alone.⠀

So here we are, trapped in this frame for another eternal fraction of a second, obliged to negotiate these complex, seemingly nonsensical rules which have been established, but as Borges writes, “The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.” ⠀

Time sees all things, everything we’ve missed. Time knows which thumb has won Bogie’s thumb war. Time is clear inside Gloria’s jumbled mind. Time knows better than you exactly who you are.⠀

Bogie now appears to be turning his head towards Gloria. Watching these slow weather patterns, day after day, I understand the quiet desperation of the TV meteorologist, daily cataloging incremental shifts in Fahrenheit, who when storms are finally forecast, blares the news in big red letters, then runs out into the flooding streets, shouting incomprehensibly, umbrella flapping, until he’s swept away by the wind, out of the frame.⠀

Has her right eyebrow risen further, or is that just my imagination? Does it matter? At this point she’s nothing more and nothing less than what I imagine her to be. So yes, the eyebrow has risen, saying everything you imagine it might.⠀

What if obsession is just boredom moving at a much slower speed?⠀

She’s not even looking at him, but now that his eyes are on her, her eyes are instinctively closing so that she can concentrate on imagining what he must be feeling as he looks at her, so that she can feel it too. He looks so that she can have visions.⠀

It was only today, as Bogart turns his head, that I noticed his pronounced widow’s peak, then Googled “widow’s peak”, information being the ultimate form of procrastination, and found that the term comes from the pointed mourning hoods worn by widows in the 1500s, and is also supposedly an omen of early widowhood. You’re welcome. Self improvement. Carry on.⠀

Oh man. She’s only just beginning to target him with her eyes, and he already looks as if he’s been punched in the lip. Pucker up, tough guy. There’s more of that coming.⠀

There was once, maybe many months ago, an upside-down alien with antennae on Gloria’s shoulder, a shadow of her dangling earring. But now that she’s turned her head, the alien has whisked supersonically back to its planet. And yet if you’d moved your head differently, or adjusted your hand, your leg, ever-so-slightly, aliens would have moved among us like spirits, shadows on our skin, bringing wisdom, or destruction.⠀

A black hole, apparently, is a region in space whose gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can ever escape, unless perhaps it can be transported into other universes. The obvious candidate here is the black slit of Gloria’s slightly parted mouth. But what if astronomists told us that the black hole was really the black ear of Thumper the horse over Bogart’s left shoulder?⠀

Here we go. Her eyes fearlessly lock onto his, lashes immaculately parallel. If you don’t know how the story ends, don’t look it up. The other day I heard a writer say, “Once we have accepted the story, we cannot escape the story’s fate.” In other words, stories are a trap, my beautiful enemy, whose fates the living must outwit with ever more thoughtful revisions if we have any hope of transcending the inevitable. ⠀

Reading in Flannery O’Connor’s journals today: “It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming.” The good news is that at this speed, in the Lonely Place, we’ve got a chance of figuring it out in the smoking of a single cigarette.⠀

Bogart was 49 in this shot, Grahame 26. You wouldn’t have quite guessed the difference from the way she’s staring him down. They would both die at 57, he in 1957, she in 1981 – too early, perhaps, but you’d like to think this glance was all it took to align them forever in time.

In his bowtie today, there’s a smaller bowtie, gleaming white. They say that if one goes small enough under the microscope, everything is the same thing, and so to make too definitive a distinction between ourselves and the world is folly. I’m the bowtie, bigger and smaller, and so are you.⠀

I see no change today. I’m convinced that everyone could benefit from a daily routine of doing at least one thing likely to make them look like a fool. ⠀

Almost every day my eye goes first to Britt in the background, whom we know killed her poor lover, the agent Riggs (the ghostly shadow in a fedora haunting the curtains behind her), with the help of her horse Thumper off Bogie’s left shoulder. Clear cut case. I never liked her. Frivolous and self-obsessed. Then a couple of weeks ago, when her eye appeared, enviously eyeing Gloria, she seemed harder, perhaps even malevolent, yet self-possessed. Almost impressive. But now I wonder if Britt might be a reincarnation of the Buddha, eternally calm, without cravings or aversions. So I thought of her today while flipping through some Nietzsche to this: “The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”⠀

His smoke hovers close to his hands today, as if constrained by his centripetal gravity, Bogie holding tightly to himself, knowing that if he relaxed beneath her growing smile he would scatter instantly into a thousand planets.⠀

“Dying is a wild night and a new road.” I keep thinking of that strange, haunting line of Emily Dickinson’s, from her correspondence. And then I look at the shadow of fedoraed Riggs, merely haunting the back curtains, just as he did in life. I think that by reading poets, you subconsciously change the way you live, and die, and Riggs clearly should have read more poetry.⠀

Her lips continue spreading into a smile, more captivating by the day, and I’m faced by the awful realization that the longer a smile continues, the less it means. A permanent smile means nothing more or less than a permanent frown. Change gives everything its meaning.⠀

Smoke obscures his lips today, like a landscape covered in dawn mist. Seen through a haze, the world always feels as if it’s beginning rather than ending. ⠀

Her teeth appear. I remember writing about her teeth appearing before. Or was that someone else’s teeth? In any case, remembering the noticing reconfigured my neurons to notice quicker this time, and next time I’ll know the teeth are appearing before they do. Like a superhero, my superpower will be noticing Gloria Grahame’s teeth. Yeah. Just try and stop that.⠀

These last few days I’m unwittingly inventorying parts of the head, like a meditative scanning of Gloria and Bogie. Today it’s noses, Bogie snorting smoke from his nostrils like a cartoon bull, and a shadow of the tip of Gloria’s imprinted neatly beneath hers, which I’d never noticed, and only did today because I was first attracted by her smile. I wonder if Bogie noticed the shadow, or missed it as I did for days (weeks? months?), infinitely captivated by the rest of her. Or maybe he wasn’t paying much attention at all, just doing his job.⠀

But if changes are always happening, whether we notice them or not, it’s also true that simply by directing our attention and noticing, another change has already begun.

Is he moving towards her, looking older in the effort, the effort feeding her vitality so that she looks younger by the day? Is that Newton on thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed? ⠀

Although significant developments almost never feel as significant as we’d hope, for several days now Bogie has indisputably been moving towards Gloria at rapid speed, blocking out Britt’s face in the background, eliminating possibilities, drawing narrower the frame. He looks at Gloria now as if he were seeing her anew in each 1/24th of a second.⠀

And her eyes, her mouth, turn towards mirroring his. The Greeks had it right: always, in everything, even a glance, we at our best are forever seeking more perfect symmetries.⠀

Oh boy. The set of his mouth has changed slightly, but significantly, from bracing for a punch to: “Come on now. Stop with the endless smiling and let’s get serious.” My money’s been on Gloria, but you’re a fool if you don’t hedge here and put a bit on Bogie.⠀

Sometimes I think I can’t keep doing this every day. Sometimes I think that the only way I could keep doing this is if everything became something else. And then I try to convince myself that everything is already something else.⠀

Ursula K. Le Guin today: “In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.” OK, so here we go, here is what is: Bogie’s head lightly blurred by smoke and his quickening approach; Gloria’s smile warming, lips fuller; the smoke from her stubbed cigarette against a black shadow in the background: tiny Death wearing a white hoodie; the smoke from his, over thumbs now linked to form a heart when seen from above: a side-turned eye, its pupil constricted to a pinprick. These are just a few of the facts that are…. Keep going….⠀

Impatient to find change each day, I tend to look to the smoke, where I’m more likely to find some new and potentially amusing symbol to put into words, but it should be pointed out that in craving progress I place my faith in smoke.⠀

Shifting the balance as his lips move into a spot of light, the smoke from his cigarette a doubled ghost handkerchief. Ghosts upon ghosts, everywhere in the shadows, but the point of it all, I think today, is to enjoy things that are, rather than spending time with things that could be. ⠀

Maybe the mirrored smoke handkerchief beside Bogie’s handkerchief is merely the handkerchief’s desperate dream of himself in the future, once Bogie has moved even closer to Gloria Grahame. If that’s the case, then my advice to the handkerchief would be to remember that right now, in this 1/24th of a second, he’s an actual handkerchief, an actual handkerchief in Humphrey Bogart’s breast pocket.⠀

Today I zoomed into her hair until it became a weather pattern on the evening news, a dense, swirling hurricane moving up the Eastern seaboard. Then I zoomed in further and found what appeared to be the head of Che Guevara in a black beret, and then it was 1956 and I was out on the rolling Caribbean puttering towards Cuba through the night. We all have our techniques.⠀

As Bogie leans forward, he has revealed more of Thumper the horse in the background, who seems less horse-like now, even if an ear remains, but I’m at a loss to explain the new squirm of white off Bogie’s arm. Occasionally something emerges which you cannot immediately turn into something you’ve seen before, and maybe the next truth hides only in these initially unidentifiable things.⠀

Smoke again draws my attention today, and Thanksgiving is approaching at my grandparents’ house in a West Texas oil town, Gloria’s own left shoulder now like one of their living room lampshades with the pompom tassels, me a boy dreaming of the mermaid who’s stretched herself out along Bogie’s own left thumb, flipping up her tail, hair unfastened by the sea. Time falls apart, and we’re free. ⠀

The shadow of her head touches his, surely altering something within him, thoughts or particles, a cool spot on the forehead conjuring new words to come from his mouth. I went out into the streets wanting to walk through the shadows of others, and make an experiment of myself, but today Paris is a shadowless grey, and I only encountered myself.⠀

Sometimes you forget that only seeing is enough, only seeing. So: with Bogie’s left arm lifting as he leans into a shut-eyed dream of Gloria, I see his four jacket buttons, cousins of the three brass tacks beneath his elbow now revealed up the side of his chair.⠀

As she politely remains among the waking, he closes his eyes and plunges into the shadow of her mind, which envelopes him like a dream.⠀

Today they finally touch in two dimensions, and his nose seems to flow into her, expanding its limits as a drop of water does beside another drop, boundaries stretched until the drops leap to become one. Cohesion, it’s called, the attraction of molecules for other molecules of the same kind.⠀

In this 1/24th of a second, as Bogie releases himself into the dream of Gloria Grahame, his borders dissolve, and his nose becomes her nose, another nose, set just above her eye, facing back outward in solidarity with the other nose beneath it. My nose is your nose.⠀

The frazzled tip of her cigarette can’t hold it together anymore. Gloria no longer seems to need it, so it’s abandoning any remaining shreds of self-belief to fall completely, spectacularly apart. That’ll show her.⠀

Look at anything long enough, and it begins to fall apart. Particles exchange. The object becomes infinite, no longer only itself. Einstein thought that space and time are not conditions in which we live, but modes in which we think. Right now I am sitting beside you about to murmur this into your ear. ⠀

Their faces now come together in a way that surely couldn’t be perfected, his cheekbone flush with her forehead, her eye to his nose, her nose to his jaw, creating another shadowy face that seems to appear on his cheek, facing Gloria from a slightly different angle than Bogie himself, eyes closed as if dreaming. ⠀

Today her nose seems longer, her chin too, as if she’s wanting to meld into Bogie, whose smoke drifts respectfully aside to give them some space. It’s been a theme these past days: the closer I look at things, the more they fall apart, and the more they fall apart, the more they become one unified thing.⠀

I have done all the research on the movie. I have assimilated every possible bit of information and presented much of it here. But the more words you accrue, the less they seem to mean, and increasingly I find myself wanting to live in the place beyond words. So today I considered continuing this experiment only in emojis. 🤢😘🚬💨. Which means whatever you feel it means. Or: her queasy heart leaves her mouth for a cigarette break and exhales tornadoes. Or: in the midst of an existential crisis, he takes her heart into his mouth, and his displaced cigarette flies off in a fit of jealousy. Probably it means both and more. ⠀

We see the cufflinks at his right wrist now as his whole body turns round, as if he intends to swap places with her, and she now with him – as if they’re dancing, as if the unconscious desire of any dance is to swap places with another, becoming them as they become you, finding only pleasure in the exchange.⠀

Rocco, the man in the background, is a blind prophet with no followers. The napkin in front of Gloria is about to take flight like a magic carpet, carrying its gin-and-tonic off to foreign lands. I’ve always loved that line of Nietzsche’s: “Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted.” I used to identify with some unsentimental rebellion in that “nothing”, but now I realize the “nothing” could just as well be an affirmative “everything” without any change in meaning. So I fly on magic carpets, sipping gin, to the top of distant holy mountains and present myself as the first ever acolyte to a blind prophet named Rocco. That was today. True story.⠀

Every day her cheek approaches his a little more. The design of an ear is such that to hear one another in a noisy room, our faces must approach as if to kiss. Noise as an aphrodisiac, surely no accident, with silence as the dream. ⠀

Maybe tomorrow we’ll cut to another scene. Maybe someone new will walk into the frame. Maybe I’ll discover something important I’d never noticed. Like it or not, tomorrow I will think the same thing, and the next day, and the next. But as Ursula K. Le Guin puts it: “The unknown, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.” OK then. Here we go again.⠀

Last night I walked through the drizzle along quiet Parisian streets. An old woman in a bathrobe reached out of a ground floor window holding a live little cage, a mousetrap, which she handed to a young man in exchange for an identical trap, but empty. Alongside me a friend spoke about black holes, and binary stars, which orbit one another in a recognizable pattern, such that if you see a single star moving similarly, you know it’s orbiting a dead star. Celestial longing. I don’t entirely know why, but I thought of the Lonely Place. ⠀

The head of a black panther has appeared at her neck, looking off to the left. A gray shark has appeared at my right elbow, nodding towards depths I can’t fathom. And you? Everything that matters is never only itself. Everything that matters is a superimposition.⠀

The other day I met somebody for a drink. Research had been done, and this person was concerned about what had driven me into the Lonely Place. I laughed. “But that’s not it at all!” I said. Because look at Gloria’s smile today, at her delight as the secret message fills her ear. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.⠀

Reading some Borges stories today, I came across this: “We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.” I thought about that for a while, during which time it meant several different things. Then I was sitting here conversing with Bogie and Gloria, who are dead, and was forced to draw the same conclusion about me. But then as I conversed with them, they were also alive. So go figure.⠀

This morning I walked through the quiet Paris streets, metros and trains shut for a strike, pedestrians complaining but secretly exalted. Because today didn’t feel like yesterday, or the day before. Frustrated logistics seemed to present new possibilities. I talked to strangers. A few quoted impressive statistics, having dutifully tuned-in, while on a corner a bum in yoga pants channeled Frank Sinatra, and beside a blinking Christmas tree a pretty North African cried her makeup off while talking into a cellphone sporting rubber bunny ears. Everybody knew what really mattered, but nobody could articulate it. So we moved on.⠀

In speaking into Gloria’s ear, and telling you about it, I’m obviously not actually speaking to Gloria or to you, but neither am I speaking only to myself, which can only suggest the possibility, at least, that I am not only me, she not only she, you not only you.⠀

Bogie’s smoke today, down his left arm, is sending us a message. 919 is what I read. So I Googled: 919 code. Turns out that’s the area code for Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home of the UNC men’s basketball team, currently ranked 3rd in the country. It also turns out that at 9 is Texas Tech, and at 19 is Wofford, of which I’d never heard, but it turns out that Wofford is in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which I can find no record of Bogart visiting. But he wanted to? More research is required. Because I am absolutely certain that if one sufficiently devotes oneself to a trail of clues, one eventually reaches a conclusion that makes total sense. ⠀

She’s really smiling now. I’m smiling just watching her smile, warming to words he may not even be speaking. That’s enough for today.⠀

What would make us satisfied? If he moved around for a kiss? Although at this speed, the kiss would take months, and after a day or two, a kiss would be no more or less interesting than unheard words spoken into an ear. If aliens landed on the table? Same conundrum. The aliens would soon become overfamiliar, domestic companions. So what would make us satisfied? The answer seems clear. ⠀

Today Bogie’s smoke seems jealous of his handkerchief again, its silky white solidity, its place nestled next to Bogie’s heart, so the smoke tries to blur the handkerchief, and somehow compromise its many qualities, foolishly forgetting the many inimitable advantages of being only smoke. ⠀

I look at Bogie’s hands and think of the first great magic trick I ever saw, my father seeming to take off his thumb with his other hand. I was flabbergasted and wouldn’t be content until I learned the trick myself. Then, my first unpublished novel, written sometime in my early twenties, was called Separation. And now this.⠀

Maybe the revolution has already come and gone. And maybe we won. Maybe all that is required of us now is to realize it, and then celebrate, right here in this 1/24th of a second.⠀

Reading Sebald’s Austerlitz: “We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.” It’s possible the Lonely Place is a barely conscious attempt to slow down existence until those inner adjustments are made clear.⠀

Only today have I noticed the gravity-defying forward reach of Gloria’s spectacular bouffant hair, seeming to extend out even further now, making Bogie’s ear a part of it, claiming more territory.⠀

For at least a month now, he’s been speaking into her ear, a tale of love and philosophy, novels flowing into novels, whole sacred texts, Alexandrine sonnets and free poetry dreamed up on the fly. In the Lonely Place, there is no small talk.⠀

Sometimes I turn to Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, a randomly generated series of constraints designed to invite one to think differently. Inevitably every Oblique Strategy seems to have something to say about the Lonely Place. A quick, random glance today: “What are the sections sections of? Imagine a caterpillar moving.” And: “Towards the insignificant.” And: “Repetition is a form of change.”⠀

The days have now become almost indistinguishable. Bogie’s smoke lets itself dance and swirl, as if it’s alone and free past midnight, and the rest of the scene is sleeping. The rest of the scene never sleeps, of course, but just this smallest shift in perception allows the smoke to dance.⠀

I only noticed today that the ashtray had laid down a window beneath it on the table, to look out and contemplate another world and forget itself.⠀

I keep feeling that maybe I should be paying more attention to the man in the background, and figuring out his purpose. Or listening intently to hear what Bogie’s saying. But then I read a haiku by Ryokan, which was reassuring:⠀

The ideal is to take unpredictable actions, which more effectively reveal the truth. If a woman like Gloria, instead of speaking into my ear, spoke into my bowtie, I’d know that either she was the most wonderfully original creature ever to grace the earth, or a nutcase to be avoided at all costs, too cute by half. Either way, the strangeness would reveal more of what we both were required to know.⠀

I’m convinced that eventually every dimension coincides, and always coincided. By that logic, it may well also be Christmas in the Lonely Place. So: Merry Christmas.⠀

As he leans into her, tensing the tendon at his neck, the tendon also must shift the muscles and tendons of his shoulders and chest, then his belly, his legs, his feet, which consequently touch the floor slightly differently, affecting the kinetic balance in the room, one connection to another, on and on, until surely his leaning into Gloria is felt in Minneapolis. Or here. Now. ⠀

I keep finding haikus about the Lonely Place. In truth, just about every haiku could be about the Lonely Place. Here’s one from Basho: “There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.” It’s all right here, one day after another.⠀

If a beautiful woman were to smile at you for a month straight, the smile would lose all its charm, becoming a sure sign of madness. Which is an argument, like it or not, for also appreciating the frowns.⠀

A look back at the year: on January 1, Bogie was lifting that cigarette to her lips, having already lit it with his lips. Wow. That seems like a lifetime ago. So much has happened since. ⠀

Finding that the Marriage of Heaven and Hell by Blake, my old favorite, is a good way to start the New Year, and a good way to conceive of the Lonely Place. A few disconnected lines:⠀

Today I stared for quite a while at Thumper the horse, off to the right in the curtains, wondering if he might be something else entirely – a flower bud, maybe, unblossomed? – but then I made a firm decision: no, he is a horse.⠀

Endless reflections on their wandering smoke over the past months, as the days have become increasingly similar, until I come to this: without our vices, nothing would ever change.⠀

Open your bibles to the Gospel of John, and you’ll find this: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” But if you should find yourself constrained to a narrow frame, ruminating for months on the smile of a beautiful woman, the advisability of various fashion accessories, mysterious strangers, words you can’t hear, and the climactic patterns of smoke presumably once exhaled – with no escape to freedom in sight – perhaps Flannery O’Connor’s paraphrase will be some small solace: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”⠀

She will never go away. The words he spoke into her ear will always be spoken. The cigarettes will be infinite. The night will go on and on, and music will still play. Everything will always be right here.⠀

Nothing’s moving. Bogart speaks, and I realize that in speaking them, listening to them, or reading them, words slow time down. And the more interested we are in the words, the slower time goes, such that the perfect words, communicated at the perfect moment, would surely stop time altogether.⠀

The upside-down shadow alien who has taken up residence on Gloria’s own right shoulder is trying to hide himself in the darkness of her collar, but his antennae, which are required to stick out of the darkness in order to receive any signals, betray him. Let’s just humor him by pretending he’s not there.⠀

If every day I instead posted every third 1/24th of a second, or every tenth, or every twentieth, nothing of any significance would be lost, which makes makes me wonder about this 1/24th of a second, and the next, in my own life. The inevitable conclusion is that right now has no utility, and that I’m free. Now and now and now.⠀

There is the sense that, for weeks now, what’s been bothering me are the separate planes of Bogie’s and Gloria’s heads, that they’re meant to come together in the same plane, a united brain, a single organism made of separate people. Get on with it, I think. But then that’s always the problem with separate heads.⠀

It’s been said countless times, most often by Eastern philosophers, that reality is such that nothing exists but now, this moment. Past and future are only imagined, helpfully or not. And yet then I start running mathematical calculations. What is a moment? 1 second? 1/24th of a second? Surely you must go on chopping up moments infinitely, until there’s no perceptible moment left, and nothing exists at all. So where are you then? Still right here. Forever?⠀

I’d been rooting for a kiss as their heads came together a couple of months ago, but I’m so thankful it wasn’t a kiss, because a kiss would have seemed to demand something to be said about it every day, which would have driven us all crazy, simultaneously ruining kisses forever. Kisses aren’t like symphonies or books. They need to end comparatively quickly to retain their best qualities. And then you can always start again.⠀

Here’s something else I’ve learned from the Lonely Place: spend long enough looking at one thing, and you can be absolutely certain that it will become something else.⠀

If Bogart were to write about today in the Lonely Place, and these three people in this 1/24th of a second, this is what he might say: “I’ve got a job to do too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. …I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that. Now, now…. Here’s looking at you, kid.”⠀

Reading some of James Wood’s essays on literature here in the Lonely Place: “I like the idea that heaven might reward us for what we have lost by paying attention to detail, that heaven must perforce be a place of serious noticing. But perhaps we can bring back life, or extend life, here on earth, by doing the same: by applying what Walter Benjamin once called “the natural prayer of the soul: attentiveness.” We can bring the dead back by applying the same attentiveness to their shades as we apply to the world around us—by looking harder: by transfiguring the object.”⠀

Today I noticed the three angled flying saucers in the back-right curtains, hurtling down towards the earth. I was reading Jung, who proposed that flying saucers exist, except that they’re not from outer space, but inner space, shared hallucinations generated by the collective unconscious, which knows infinitely more than we do alone. So if you see the flying saucers too, maybe Jung was right, and our consciousness is uniting in the curtains with a message from inner space meant to teach us everything we knew, but had somehow forgotten.⠀

Gloria’s cigarette needs some help. It looks as if it was desperately trying to become a finger, and thereby transcend itself, then blew its own head open in the process.⠀

I have left this place. 22 seconds seemed like a year and a half.