My Name Is Mina

1

Wandering and wondering are almost the same word. And wandering through space is very like wondering inside the head. I am a wonderer and a wanderer!

2

Extraordinary Fact! There are as many people alive in the world today as there have been in the whole of human history!

3

This makes me think about how some people say that “modern” art can’t be much good because it doesn’t much look like anything in the world. But maybe it’s not trying to look like the world. Maybe it’s trying to be like the world. Or maybe trying to do a kind of impossible thing – to look like something that’s in the world but can’t really be seen at all.

4

Extraordinary fact! Dust in houses (and in offices and schools and other places where humans live and work) consists mainly of tiny fragments of human skin. So when we see dust dancing and whirling and sparkling in a shaft of sunlight the thing that is dancing and whirling and sparkling is dead human skin! There’s other stuff in there as well – like pollen and fibers of paper and cloth and flakes of the skin and hair of animals like cats, but the bulk of it is human skin! And lots of people’s skin mingles together and dances in the light, and the skin of the living and the skin of the dead mingle together and dance in the light! And the skin of animals and the skin of humans mingle together and dance in the light! And this mingling is all around us, and is very ordinary and is very extraordinary and very strange!

EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY

Stare at Dust that Dances in the Light

5

And incidentally VERBS ARE NOT “DOING WORDS.” “Stop” is a verb. And if I say “I stop,” I have stopped doing anything. I am doing absolutely nothing whatsoever at all! I would have told Mrs. Scullery that, but by this time she was getting totally fed up with me. She would have said, “That is just playing with words,” and I would have answered, “And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!” Which she wouldn’t have understood at all and which would have made her even more and more fed up.

6

Do not look into the sun, of course. (Health & Safety Warning!)

7

Do not look into the moon, of course. (Health & Sanity Warning!)

8

A strange thought. Maybe trying to remember when you are young is very like trying to remember when you are old. When he looked out into the street, Ernie Myers probably felt like I did when I was trying to look back into the past. So the young and the old are in some ways very alike.

9

Thoughts about swearing. Yes, I know that swearing is very bad, and that swearwords are very very bad bad things. But there are times when nothing else will work – otherwise why have swearwords at all? And I know that you are not supposed to say this, but there are times when swearwords just sound very nice and feel nice on your tongue and are simply very nice to say. (I don’t think Mrs. Scullery would agree with any of this, despite her performance in the Bloody Disgrace scene.)