Waiting For Water To Boil

 

 Cesare und Seine Freundin

As I wait for the water to boil for my coffee, I go around the place and sit in spots I had never sat in before. There is a very nice chair next to the laundry room door, and there is a wall telephone right next to it. I do not recall ever using that telephone.
The low light from the kitchen spills over the kitchen counter next to where I sit. If I ever used that phone, the light would come from the kitchen, enabling me to read the keypad. The treacly flow of light over the black marble counter top slices my body in half: the upper torso lit, the lower parts in the dark.

And I thought of the German Expressionism in The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, where shadows slice the towns at night when Caligari's minion, Cesare, haunts the streets.
And it is a perfect metaphor for the mediaeval view of reason and instinct: the light on my head and heart, the shadows covering the stomach and the organs of reproduction... cooling them, cooling them, keeping them quiescent lest both lash out like outraged lions in some recent news story, like a petting zoo, like an enclave of beasts where interns are slashed and eaten...

Oops! Water's boiling.
--