Daydream 11.17

Daydream 11.17

When you enter the storyteller’s mind you find an abundance of curiosity fed by a desire to replace what is with what is possible.

Empathy, says writer Rebecca Solnit, is “then a way of traveling from here to there.” “What is it like,” she asks by way of demonstration, “to be the old man silenced by a stroke, the young man facing the executioner, the woman walking across the border, the child on the roller coaster, the person you have only read about, or the one next to you?”

What is it like, I continued on, to be the woman in the painting whose draped body hints at seduction

but whose half averted and blank face suggests she has gone someplace else

a place I can only imagine, a memory or a daydream, where she leaves behind, if only for a few moments, the weight of the day to day?

Wanting to know, I went to meet her there.