Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, Steven Moore Page B

was to bring back kerosene, which was difficult to ride with.
    I say was difficult, instead of is difficult, since I no longer carry kerosene, no longer making use of those lamps.
    When I stopped making use of them was after I knocked over the one that set fire to the other house, although doubtless I have mentioned this.
    One moment I was adjusting the wick, and a moment afterthat the entire bedroom was ablaze.
    These beach houses are all wood, of course. All I could do was sit at the dunes and watch it burn.
    For most of the night the entire sky was Homeric.
    It was on that same night that my rowboat disappeared, as it happened, although that is perhaps beside the point.
    One hardly pays attention to a missing rowboat when one's house is burning to the ground.
    Still, there it was, no longer on the beach.
    Sometimes I like to believe that it has been carried all of the way across the ocean by now, to tell the truth.
    As far as to the island of Lesbos, say. Or to Ithaca, even.
    Frequently, certain objects wash up onto the shore here that could well have been carried just as far in the opposite direction, as a matter of fact.
    Such as my stick, for instance, which I sometimes take with me when I walk.
    Doubtless the stick served some other purpose than simply being taken along on walks, at one time. One can no longer guess at what other purpose, however, because of the way it has been worn smooth by waves.
    Now and again I have also made use of the stick to write in the sand with, actually.
    In fact I have even written in Greek.
    Well, or in what looked like Greek, although I was actually only inventing that.
    What I would write were messages, to tell the truth, like the ones I sometimes used to write in the street.
    Somebody is living on this beach, the messages would say.
    Obviously it did not matter by then that the messages were only in an invented writing that nobody could read.
    Actually, nothing that I wrote was ever still there when I went back in any case, always being washed away.
    Still, if I have concluded that there is nothing in the painting except shapes, am I also concluding that there was not eveninvented writing in the sand, but only grooves from my stick?
    Doubtless the stick was originally nothing more interesting than the handle of a carpet sweeper.
    Once, when I had set it aside to drag a piece of driftwood along the beach, I worried that I might have lost it.
    When I looked back it was standing upright, however, where I had had the foresight to place it without really paying attention.
    Then again it is quite possible that the question of loss had not entered my mind until I was already in the process of looking back, which is to say that the stick was already not lost before I had worried that it might be.
    I am not particularly happy over this new habit of saying things that I have very little idea what I mean by saying, to tell the truth.
    It was somebody named Ralph Hodgson, who wrote the poem about the birds being sold in the shops for people to eat.
    I do not remember that I ever read any other poem by Ralph Hodgson.
    I do remember that Leonardo da Vinci used to buy such birds, however, in Florence, and then let them out of their cages.
    And that Helen of Troy did have at least one daughter, named Hermione.
    And that Leonardo also thought up a method to prevent the Arno from overflowing its banks, to which nobody obviously paid any attention.
    For that matter Leonardo at least once put snow into one of his paintings too, even if I cannot remember whether Andrea del Sarto or Taddeo Gaddi ever did.
    In addition to which, Rembrandt's pupils used to paint gold coins on the floor of his studio and make them look so real that Rembrandt would stoop to pick them up, although I am uncertain as to why this reminds me of Robert Rauschenberg again.
    I have always harbored sincere doubts that Helen was the cause of that war, by the way.
    A single Spartan girl, after all.
    As a matter of fact the whole thing was