A bald man with loose white robes and a gold watch just walked south by the window. Zack has his hand around Marina’s shaven head, and Roya is asleep just in front of them under a sleeping bag that pretends to be the color of her hair. Nick went grudgingly off to bed, and Mitchell is reading the things on the walls.

I’ve been afraid lately of recording. I must have been too much for it. Records are useful, but they are not the thing, and to do something only to record it is probably dishonest. Right now I’m annoying Zack, at least, with the noise of typing, and I’m not talking to Mitchell: should I be ignoring them to talk about them? I thought earlier today that I should write a eulogy-for-elegy of Grace, but then that I should instead talk to her. If you like something, buy it, don’t sell it.

Nick and I have been too quiet for Roya & Marina. When we don’t say anything for longer than about ten seconds (it seems to depend on the time of day), they pick out of nowhere conversations about people I’ve never met, and do not get bored. It seems almost as though everything is only a reminder of some other thing. Clearly I’m missing something, but it looks as though the immediate, ephemeral, material world is for them a foreshadowing or prologue; a set-up and background for social drama; an atmospheric condition; something to be remembered and rehashed in some other place and time. They seem to get satisfaction out of every person and thing far thing distant: x-ray emotions.

Even as I respect their plans and memories, I’m proud of my lack of them. By and large, I feel uncomfortable with photos of moments and live bulletins; I’d rather hear the memories of someone who was concentrating on being there. It’s hard for me to imagine people staying sane around a camera — it makes everyone a performer. If you’re playing with a camera, great, but if you’re doing something fun and someone says say cheese, I fear that the ruined beauty of the moment is proportional to the beauty of the developed photo.

I’ve argued before that ideas don’t die in dissection, and I’ve gone on many camera-walks — but social constucts do die in dissection, and plants don’t get self-conscious in front of a lens. Consciousness of the self is not something I’d like to cure people of, either. When we laugh with each other, we’re fooling ourselves that we aren’t gobs of atoms forming desires, but the reductionism of film and prose won't record the feeling of being in our selves, only the atoms. Really great photography, art, will sometimes do what prose does in poetry and mention the self in the photons, but — well, I think my problem is that I just don’t identify enough with people in books and photos.