It was good to wake up to a cloudy sky greeting me, as seen up above, at the end of this inner tenament shaft of mine, and to begin the day by re-reading this edited section from Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own".

Even though, Ms. Woolf talks about women making space, and claiming freedom in their lives to write, her diagnosis and prescriptions hold, I think, for anyone infected with this low grade fever of wanting to write. Some extracts:

"...for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in."

"...I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals - and have £500 a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come..."

Itzhak Perlam plays Bazzini's "La Ronde Des Lutins" (The Dance of Goblins). Meanwhile, this lutin, granted a rare day of freedom, is off to the MET for rituals and prayers.

Update: My MET plans were brutally quashed when work caught up with me as soon as I emerged from the subway tunnel, across the river in downtown Manhattan, on ze crackberry with a set of urget to-dos. All I could do was eat a Noo-Yook lunch and return to the work desk. Perhaps I shall return this Saturday, with (the very distract-worthy) N with tow, if only to see "Venice and The Islamic World, 828-1797".

I don't know what to make of this tapestry of tabla over flamenco guitar other than saying it is weirdly wonderful - yet it is this piece of exquisite flamenco dancing by Joaquin Cortes which is making my heart ache, ache. As Rilke put it in his great poem, "The Spanish Dancer":

As on all its sides a kitchen-match darts white flickering tongues before it bursts into flame: with the audience around her, quickened, hot, her dance begins to flicker in the dark room.

And all at once it is completely fire.

One upward glance and she ignites her hair and, whirling faster and faster, fans her dress into passionate flames, till it becomes a furnace from which, like startled rattlesnakes, the long naked arms uncoil, aroused and clicking.

And then: as if the fire were too tight around her body, she takes and flings it out haughtily, with an imperious gesture, and watches: it lies raging on the floor, still blazing up, and the flames refuse to die - Till, moving with total confidence and a sweet exultant smile, she looks up finally and stamps it out with powerful small feet.

Ole!