The double-doors are open: back of the house: darkness, lit by thy light.

Monsieur Proust's Du Cote de chez Swann plays on Youtube as I write: thrumming, a strange voice, an arid voice from the strange afar of the Macbook's speakers. Lit by the light of thy MacBook. I must hear it in French, the native tongue, in order to even begin to get a taste for the genius therefound. Lobbying under the frontispiece of truth. I know a handful of French words. I will learn it someday, the language, proper. For now, though Deutsche makes for a stacked platter, I am reading the Scott Moncreiff translation of Proust's entire line. Well enough. The prose, chewy and rough. So, Proust. So, French linguistics.

Prose is guiding me somewhere. Not Proust, prose. Prose itself. The practice of prose. Angle of prose. Some more of the prose. Prose unchained. I've learned a few things from it. For one, you are what you eat; but, secondly, and more importantly, religiosity is sincerity.

Onto Swann In Love. I have whole the collection laid out on the table, paperback and beautiful, and, in fact, a German copy of The Guermantes Way, Die Welt der Guermantes. I guess the Germans saw it fit to make it a world and not a way. Or not a le cote. I do enjoy my German copies- a Faustlike nostalgia. Welt, translated into English, is world. The original French title of the third volume in Proust's grand line is Le cote de Guermantes.

The woman's voice is so soothing. Pour des Livres Audios Gratuit Chaque Semaine.

Grazie. Merci.

I have, also, a broad-spined English translation of Proust's critical biography, PROUST: A Life, by Jean-Yves Tadie, sitting here right next to my MacBook. I deeply enjoyed reading the very first sentence of its preface just a minute ago: "Why a new biography of Proust? As well ask an artist the reason for yet another still life, another portrait." In it, on the first title page, is a drawing of Proust, a caricature copying the face he is making in the daguerreotype on the front cover, which I drew with a blue pen, under which I scribbled a quote, "Proust, old Teahead of Time." -Jack Kerouac, an act and confessional of graffiti and defiance which caused me, admittedly, in that moment, to feel small pangs of guilt upon its execution, Proust's eyes flickering there on the cover, chalk full of disdain and disgust, I remember, full of horror at the haphazard act of me smilingly desecrating his art with a quick little beat cartoon, even though it was, it is true, only the secular biography by Jean-Yves Tadie, and even though it was, it is true, a cartoon of his dear own face. Oh well. Deary me.

I am teaching P., the love of my life, English. I am teaching my native tongue to the tongue of my beloved, and she is teaching me French and German and Italian, speaking all these languages herself, even English well enough, and Spanish, she knows six in all, just about six or whereabouts. She told me, one afternoon, as we were walking along the coast of the Mediterranean, stepping around pebbles and thousands of little colorful flowers, that I am truly, truly of the Moon. I was born during a solar eclipse, in the dead of night, during a full moon. She tells me this leads to my true self only coming out at night. In the deep of night. Beauty: beautiful night.

Here I sit, past midnight, my study of Proust scattered about the kitchen table, 1:14 showing on the stoveclock, and I am becoming more and more aware of the stark fact that I feel at home in these other languages. Warlich.

Merci.

Bitte: viene da me, amato.

Merci.

Proust plays in the background. Ah, yes, it is late, past one in the morning: I roll over my surprised, satorilike frontispieces of my mangled and slideabout mind: I try not to rush myself.

On almost every laptop I've ever owned I've used a certain painting of the Hindu Goddess Sarasvati, the Goddess of Literature and Music, of Writing, as my background image. She is all beauty. She, golden miraculous. One of the first things I did on this MacBook, as you may well guess, is open Safari, and find the image. It differs from the other various fine art representations of Sarasvati in only a few subtle and stylistic ways. I love it. She waits silently and pregnant with creative purity behind the Word template which I'm currently using here, waits in her quiet, patient sainthood for me to close it- to close anything I happen to be spending my time perusing or working on- and look upon her and behold her sacred pixelface. She is something, yes. And she does wait behind every window, like a dog waits at home while his master is away at work for the day, waits for that door to open, and that face to shine. Ah, glory. Glory and guts. What was it Walt Whitman said, in the beginning somewhere in his Leaves of Grass? Something along the lines of: The Muses favor warriors. Well, I'll fight for a few things. For my beloved, my love. For Art. And for the Moon. Yes, and for the kids.

In the background, from the MacBook speakers, loosely, mechanically:

"Puis renaissait le souvenir

d'une nouvelle attitude; le mur

filait dans une autre direction:

j'étais dans ma chambre chez de

Saint-Loup, à la campagne; mon

Dieu! Il est au moins dix heures,

on doit avoir fini de dîner!

J'aurai trop prolongé la sieste

que je fais tous les soirs en

rentrant de ma promenade

avec de Saint-Loup, avant d'endosser

mon habit. Car bien des années

ont passé depuis Combray, où,

dans nos retours les plus tardifs,

c'était les reflets rouges du couchant

que je voyais sur le vitrage de ma

fenêtre. C'est un autre genre de vie

qu'on mène à Tansonville, chez de

Saint-Loup, un autre genre de plaisir

que je trouve à ne sortir qu'à la nuit,

à suivre au clair de lune ces chemins

où je jouais jadis au soleil; et la chambre

où je me serai endormi au lieu de

m'habiller pour le dîner, de loin

je l'aperçois, quand nous rentrons,

traversée par les feux de la lampe, seul

phare dans la nuit..."

...the spirit enters, and begins to wander about the floorboards. A chill is felt: not invasive or mean, but like the feeling of water to the skin: like coolwater on the handpalms.

I speak to it: Please, sit down.

Aside, to the dear reader: Proust's here.

To the spirit, nodding my head: I don't speak French yet, no, no I don't understand.

Aside, again, to the reader: no, don't be alarmed, dear reader. He is here. He seems curious, looking about the house, at the objects. Yes, it's the objects he is enjoying. No, no gentle reader, I don't do weird things with spirits. This type of thing very rarely happens. I'm experienced enough and have lived enough on this plane and others to know how to set up certain boundaries, to control these types of things, rather mundanely and succinctly. It's a strange feeling, having him here like this. I don't speak a bit of French, but he seems friendly, boyish, in an elegant way, and it is as if, though he is a ghost, he carries around a certain vaselike glimmer of sunlight- truly he does!- and how beautiful that swiftness is which his ghostlike essence carries itself around with, no doubt with a certain Frenchness about it.

To the spirit, bidding it farewell: grand writer, dear friend, spirit, here I must decline from further friendly contact, no, no, really. That must be all, au revoir, Monsieur Proust. Au revoir, beauty of time passed. Thank you. Grazie for your beautiful presence. Merci.

Well, I do suppose being an artist and a Moonkid has its perks. I'll be tackling the French and Italian languages next. As my beloved's native tongue is of the langue Italiano, I have a feeling I'll become quite fluent in their lovely babeltalk sulla via di casa (que band: Portuguese and Portugal, Der Kind).