Hi Janet

>I like this, Lawrence, especially that last line.

Thank you.

>"Pixeled". A very useful word.

Isn't it? ! I have also done pixelated, tho that's a bit different.

>After a couple of readings I get the impression you were looking
at a picture onscreen - but in my first reading I imagined various
real landscapes, and a message about the way we perceive the world.

I don't know about message, I was certainly trying to talk about perception
in my process of writing looking - though that in tranquility, you know. If
I managed one example of perception at all well then I'll settle for that

I had a grey landscape out the window. Today it has become more overcast but
colourful. Behind me, largely, is the landscape(s), different and the same
wherever you look, the greys are quite as various as greens in a lusher and
more springtime landscape; & of course all the greys are richer than that
really... I tried to say that too but settled for the sea (I was remembering
the mountain range remnants from some days back, confined now to the flat by
a bad enough cold

and I was thinking / writing about remembering it, and maybe dreaming it,
because I was generalising, I guess, rather than pretending to look at a
snap or a short video, saying what it is like without actually going to look
at it in the prescientific way most of us tend to

at one point I had stuff about refresh rates and memory! it got too
cluttered and full, and the greys were more everywhere than rabbits, so I
had to limit myself, and I finished up rewriting myself into saying
something about screens that I knew to be untrue technically although it
sounded good, I believe

And all that brought to my mind a poem by Fröding, a late 19th early 20th
century Swedish poet - he's rather interesting I think, though more than one
critical entry refers to his depression and schizophrenia apparently to
dismiss his last poems as symptomatic of his mental illness. Maybe they are,
but there's more to them than that. There's one where he really goes to town
on grey - grey grey grey - which I have been rather fond of

The lack of a colour vocabulary has hit me before. One can do blue-green etc
etc; and make combinations with grey-; but try to speak of the grey scale
and I at any rate have found problems. Even the combinations are limited /
limiting. sloe-black, slow, black is such a wonderful exception (even
without fishing boat bobbing) that it's not borrowable without reference -
one can refer to colours in nature, or say e.g. pillar box red (tho that's
hardly global in function), but oh for a few monosyllables. I need to find a
new path

I mentioned this to a painter and she just stared at me and said that's why
she paints!

There are paint names, but then one is talking about paint, or not not
talking about paint - I had a purge on _titanium white_ a while back - it
had bred like mice - or more rabbits. Poem by poem I hadnt noticed the
accumulation, but there was a potential reading through my recents that
would have had titanium white going off like car alarms, and I had to be
brutal

didnt quite intend all that. didnt know consciously i had it to say - before
too many people regret your having woken me up, I'll stop.

glad you liked the poem - but it may need work


L