There’s a feeling that I now have access to regularly that was first illuminated in roadside restaurants in Morocco. It’s the feeling of being in a place with sun, shaded, with the availability of refreshing beverages, and a dryness (though I have accessed this feeling in humid places since). Having open shoes helps make this feeling happen, and green plants help as well. The feeling of afternooning. To be outside, shaded from the intensity of the sun, and not quite napping in one’s relaxedness. It’s a feeling that calls me to the desert. To umbrellas in a way I didn’t imagine possible To metal chairs to lounge chairs. To laying on a blanked, though being partly upright accelerates the feeling of Moroccan afternooning. A wide brimmed hat. The smell of damp things becoming dry rapidly, almost a humidity rushing into the air from things that were once wet and are about to be toasted. To feel toasted, burned just the right amount. To feel that breathing deep is the most effort one might want to expend, into a future that only goes as far as the feeling of the sun on the toes making its way to the brain. To stop along the roadside and nap. To snack on fruit and bread. To salivate at the taste of the earth coming through one’s nose.
When one is afternooning, one eats, because one can feel the stationary metabolism, the use of nutrition-energy to process the things one at recently and certainly all the water. One wants mostly hot coffee, ideally in a tiny cup and grainy. One might write, but only lazily and fairly slowly. Off the accelerator, only leaning into the roll that already existed. If there are animals playing nearby, as there often are, they take the role of fellow relaxing afternooners, articulating their mutual love of the time of day by rolling around in the dirt, greedily drinking any nearby water, and hunting whatever their prey might be with no expectation of success. That is as I am today. Lazily hunting, no success possible or expected. Considering the shimmering trees. Considering tropes. Considering electricity. But not thinking hard about any of these things. I am as in a nap, dreaming of the multitudes of the flocks of geese, flanked by pelicans, and feasting on whatever the lake bed has to offer. I do no business. I am not busy. I am in Spain, at 3:45pm, on a hot day. I am a fellow, in afternoon fellowship with the blowing seeds attached to fluffynesses. I overhear words in conversations that are more concerned with being understood than I could ever imagine being again. I am understood by the sun, what could possibly overtake Ra’s comprehension? What would overtaking be for? What is being for for? And yet I’m not about to write a book about being (insofar as this book is or is not about being). And maybe in other sections I’m hastily looking for the answer to the question of being, but today, in this chapter, on this page, I am not concerned. I seem to be, and I can see that. I could acquire a hot coffee, but I will not be bothered. I could remove the spider from my arm, but I will let the 8-legged fellow play, in fellowship. And if this fellow sees their labor as work, we will be in union, though this union will only have one worker. For I do not know what work is. I am napping. I am shirking. I am an afternoon, stopped, in amber, frozen in dry ice. I shift in my chair, seeking greater comfort, and impossibly find it. My digestive tract is now aligned in such a way that the bacteria cheer, they have re-elected me. My populism is that of hot and cold, of silent gestures, and of fiery speeches. This democracy is direct, not a representative chaos. We learned everything we ever needed to know about government on the afternoon, under the sun, in the shade, with a liquid mango. We’re organized, the afternoon and I. We have an understanding, a contract. We see to the important bits. We’ve entered into an arrangement. And all we had to do was breathe in the sun-heated air. And accept the laziness as the one true thing (the flat utility curve, or vertical – who remembers).
Roman Ryan 