There was wind in the damp blossom like a thousand blankets being dropped off a cliff. And a flock of blackbirds took off all at once with
the sound of the opening of a watch-case.

It seems that sometimes the most surprising adventures and changes in perspective can occur when instead of booking a ticket to Timbuktu, unavoidable, pre-set or mundane experiences are approached with an attitude of openness. That is the hypothesis.

And, the most important thing for this post - the ideal thing would be for
the challenges to be set by other people. So, dear blogophiles… if you
feel like helping me out, please email or post me here a challenge! these should be fairly non-specific and open to interpretation, but could be concrete (like eat lunch in a castle, have tea with a stranger, spend two hours based around the market place, help someone do something they couldn't otherwise do); abstract (do something that scares you, go on a pilgrimage, rest, put your pride at risk); difficult to interpret; exciting; boring; scary …

More anon.

***

In other news, yesterday the moon was as fine as a nail clipping, and the  evening sky like an upside-down turquoise planet with its head resting on parker's piece. And i got offered another job which sounds interesting so if anyone wants one, tell me.

Yesterday when I got home I was so tired that when I couldn’t
find my contact lens case I nearly just put my lenses in the pot with
the peppercorns. (But I didn’t. This is a *bad* idea). You know when it
rains at night sometimes the colours swim together on the road so brightly under the lamplight it’s like the world is painted and the colours are beginning to run together. I half expect to see a giant paintbrush
reaching down over my shoulder down onto the street. Also, another thing on rain, if you cycle for long enough in it with no coat your clothes turn into a second skin and its not wet any more. That is, of course there is still water falling on you from the sky but it can’t make you wetter so its just nice. Birds don’t get ‘wet’, do they – they just get washed. Why do we have this thing about rain being bad? I think it is such an unbelievable thing; this is WATER falling out of the sky in small pieces, how incredible is that?

All my other clothes have been on the washing line for two days now, they are going to smell like clouds when they eventually get dry.

Some people came to the house and we went wandering towards
the river… the air was pink instead of lemon-yellow because now it’s may and the dropped blossom whirled around in the road like eddies of giant dust. And there we found Hannah’s new art studio hidden away in the abandoned warehouse precinct with its big heavy padlocked gates and neon searchlights. We climbed up the wooden stairs marvelling at the ancient brass presses, dusty looms and stretched blank canvases; the heaps of mysterious tools and lumps of unformed clay and sheaves of textured paper; and the thousands of colours in tubes, powder pots, inkpots, splashed on paper as if ‘I’m going to just try this one out’ *sweeps brush.*

The low warm wind before the storm was rolling in the long grasses: we waded through, up to our waists. On the horizon there was an irridescent ribbon; like leaked mother of pearl gleaming between a
band of land and a band of heavy mauve. In the air there was gorse-coconut and fresh cut grass and evening spice. One of the fields
had a wide path of gold through it; we followed it into the long-stemmed
buttercups and lay in them like we were making snow angels, watching
the sky and listening – turning sideways to see a curtain of thousands on thousands of closing yellow flowers swaying drowsily in the dimming light.

‘Have you forgotten?’someone whispered, I turned my head and saw the old woman hold out her hand to me and fade away. ‘Where are you?’ I asked, and then they were all around me, watching; not accusing, but
waiting, waiting still.

So - I think all sorts of people would enjoy this book. It’s made up of lots
of quirky word-pictures and games and lists all playing around the idea of space and spaces. Every sort of space. If you know Emma, ask her to show you… It is a lot about how we organize spaces the way we do; how we codify our living spaces (like naming rooms according to their function – why not according to a day of the week, according to different senses, why not have a ‘useless’ room with no function…?); how we
inhabit spaces (from bed to room to house to street to city to nation to continent to world to universe); how we position ourselves within them and make rules to give ourselves a sense of orientation within it. And how we make pretend walls to protect ourselves from all that we are afraid of.

He asks why ordinarily we don't...

 
"Take account of, question,
describe what happens every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious,
the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the
habitual? [...] What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass,
our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time,
our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to
astonish us. We live, true, we breath, true; we walk, we open doors, we
go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a
bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why? (1997: 210).

staircases&rsquo, asides (‘I write in the margin’, he writes in the margin); unconventional anecdotes with question marks attached

And so Monsieur Perec pushes back and back until you can begin to see into what he’s talking about, a bigger picture. He doesn’t tell you what to see, he just lists it off and zooms in and in, until it appearsbefore you obliquely, the Everyday World. The limits and walls of everything we experience, and the Strangeness of it all.

And there it is. The strange, extraordinary world we inhabit, with us trying to keep all of the fear away with our clever walls and missing all of the Wonder in the process.

**********

Read the book. (If you want)
Disclaimer: I don't actually know what the english translations are like. (It's french)