… is Mickey’s favourite pill. Benignly white like an aspirin, yet bringer of superlative ecstasy! The tabs well named, evoking as they do the poetry of rural existence.
i persuaded Mickey to swallow two, having done so myself. We then headed east, intending to call on Julia and tease her albino donkey.
Walt Whitman is the château’s honorary prophet, as appointed by Martha. It was of course Martha who introduced me to the poet’s treasury of wisdom:
‘I exist as I am, that is enough. I am the poet of the soul, earth of the slumbering & liquid trees, earth of departed sunset, of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river.’ Words that come close to expressing the ineffable. In reading Walt one may attain a state of mystical rapture. As Susan Sontag put it, Whitman ‘preached empathy, concord in discord and oneness in diversity.’ A poet with the imaginative potency of a peyote vision.
Reclining languidly on the river bank, reading Walt while on TWTA, well, that is too much, that is overdosing.
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Mickey and i splash about in the shallow stretches of the river. We float on our backs, bellies bulging to the sun, eyes beholding the big blueness. The swim cools the afternoon. We sit on the bank. Let the sun re-soak into our skin. Grateful for this simple pleasure. Bees buzz hello.
Later, we hunt. Well not so much hunt as gather; searching out shrivelled nuts (forsaken by squirrels) and dried up berries.
Kindling a fire… cooking freshly killed game, a Rover killed hare. Seemingly possible to sleep forever under the stars, the summer sky sufficiently sheltering. Days flit by, light as butterflies until news of Josef A’s electronic mega-condom.