I wake up in my bed at home and know the time without looking at my watch. Thick fog is blanketing the city below, which seems a potent metaphor. I walk in my sleep up the stairs to the kitchen and almost reflexively get out some tea bags, heat some water. I shower and shave […]

It begins as a shock. A hooded figure is seated in the dark, so close to us that he seems to be made of wood. The camera pulls back to disclose a single form kneeling against a bare wall. There’s no patter, no background music, very little movement: you’ve entered another country, in this silent, […]

Once every three or four months, or five, for much of my adult life now, I’ve got in my car in my mother’s house in the dry hills of California, above the sea, and driven up our road, around some switchback turns, past the White Lotus yoga foundation, past the community of Sixties refugees, hiding […]

This is the place where all selves and words burn up, I say defiantly, triumphantly, as I settle into the silent Catholic hermitage where I spend much of my life. Names fall away, and with them all the divisions that names enforce. I look out on an ocean become a blue plate extending below me, […]