The parameters of a visit, sketched here for approval or reflection over the past several years, the many-headed hydra of perpendicular living. Late nights in the kitchen, afternoons on the couch. Then listening back days later, looking out of the bus window or crossing gravel paths in the damp evening light after a day at the library tables. Closing the book and setting hands to plastic tasks: chopping an onion or playing the guitar. Saturnine urban pastoral, harp-style, finishing the bottle from the day before. Late-night panic dissolves into a dull ringing: gling-gling. But also truly out to pasture, plucking away cross-legged under chestnut, plane, pine. Pollen and pixie dust across the fretboard, cicadas reporting from the sound hole. But mostly with my feet on the parquet, hands touching rosewood and steel. These are the results and I kept them largely to myself for some time. Now I share them with you, a chronicle or souvenir from my armchair navigations of the twenty-first century’s harmonic divides. N.D. (A Visitor), Paris, 2017
