unbolt the door (push past small obstacles)

'yesterday, after a long time, made a great deal of progress; today again virtually nothing; the two weeks since my holiday have been almost a complete loss - I see the task and the way to do it, I simply have to push past small obstacles but cannot do it...' - franz kafka, diary, 1st november 1914. 

montreal writer mavis gallant described the motivation for writing as 'a jolt that unbolts the door between perception and imagination'  in the preface to her collected stories. here it is dramatised at the  start of her memory and invention.

'once, it must have been around 1992, when I happened to be working all day, everyday, on a story set in the paris of 1953, I was stunned and bewildered to step outside and discover the shape of cars, the casual clothing, and clean facades of the nineteen nineties.

the shock - a true shock because it brought me to a standstill - lasted no more than a couple of seconds. had it gone on I might have believed that part of my mind had been severed and sent adrift. as it was I accepted it as a fragment of the power if memory to influence time.' 

of course this is the danger of this time of year (it is samhain when horsemouth is writing this) but by the time you read this we will be safely into november (one of the embers remember) and kafka's quote about the work of writing will come more into connection. 

horsemouth has had the belated realisation that the two halves of the year are not equal. 

jan-feb-march has 90 days, april-may-june has 91 but july-august-sept and oct-nov-dec both have 92 days, so 181 days in the first half of the year, 184 in the second. (standard year rather than a leap year). a leap year is slightly more even. if the year were taken starting with april that would be more even still for a standard year (and exactly equal for a leap year). 

in the day he went for a walk on the common  and then watched some of the UK covid 19 inquiry livestream. 'useless fuckpigs... morons... cunts' - said dominic cummings of some of his colleagues (or ok he'd called them that in whatsApp messages). just in case anyone thought we were dealing with a plandemic. 

'if this is the plan, then we don't have a plan...' - lee cain

bonus points for the person with the persistent cough (this is kind of the point of it/ a measure of how far we have come).

they have got dominic in and punished him for his bad language. they have punished him for his temerity for attempting to replace the original plan (nothing can be done. let it rip. stack up the bodies) with a better one ('build our way out of it' or some such bollocks). of course everything would have gone more smoothly if he'd just known his place. 

horsemouth tends to argue dominic deserves a medal for covid (and then to be taken out and shot for brexit). 

friday a meeting of the consortium (now that the consortium is over) and another kafka quote.