I lifted the glass to my cracked lips and calmly, slowly, took a tiny sip. In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and the spider crabs moving between weeds.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crimes, you cannot do so without injustices. What counts is to determine the proper proportion of the former and the latter, and to commit both only by fits and starts. For them to be forgiven, they must appear to be the consequences of rage or madness, and the tyrant must give the impression of being bloodthirsty by inadvertence, pursuing hideous schemes under the mildest appearance. Absolute power is not a comfortable matter: only ham actors and assassins on a grand scale distinguish themselves in its possession. There is nothing more admirable humanly, and more lamentable historically, than a tyrant demoralized by his scruples.

Imagine a blood orange, torn open, and a highly polished mahogany desk. Smear one over the other and add a wash of light blue: dawn over Ireland; rich, unearthly colours that reached past my eyes and stole part of my soul. People were not designed to see such things. I felt the cellular hum of four hundred people as they dreamed or worried or rehearsed speeches in their head in this steel and aluminium shell thirty-three thousand feet over the sea, hurtling through air that is just that, thin air, and knew we were remote from the world, separate, aloof, supported by nothing but speed and physical laws I could recite but have never really believed.

Autumn, like grief, changes everything.

I have been a foolish casualty, a bitten fruit.

When one suffers from alienation, it means that one experiences parts of one's self as alien to one's self.

I love the bright jars, golden peaches, buff pears, dark berries, the quarts of tomato juice, the half-pints of strawberry and raspberry jam, although I hate the season when I help Mother put them up. Superimposed images. September is my season for canning peaches. I like putting up the fruit I grow. I become my mother in joy. After thirty her strengths and virtues began to bloom in me, her dislike of waste, her witch’s way with plants and birds and furry animals, her respect for sunlight and clean water and soil built well with compost.

When one suffers from alienation, it means that one experiences parts of one's self as alien to one's self.

One of the oldest living beings on the planet is a creosote bush. After a few decades, the individual branches of any given creosote begin to lose their leaves and die, but new stems, clones of the original, sprout from the roots that extend around the plant in a circle underground. What appears to be a ring of separate bushes is hence a single organism and though any of its visible branches may only be ten or fifty or eighty years old, the plant may have been alive for millennia. The wider the circle, the older the creosote. The one that is believed to be the oldest on earth, which is here in the Mojave, in Lucerne Valley about forty-five miles to the northwest of my house, has been around for nearly twelve thousand years. They are hardier than the Joshua trees, and thrive in the heat. Whatever happens to us, they will almost certainly be here for a while.

The Arendt– Bachelard vector is another antagonistic and asymmetrical pair that makes up home. This pair spreads out along a political–poetic axis. On the one edge is a home of natural necessity, an opposite of freedom, though with its maternal relation to invention that may break this vector, and on another is a home of daydreaming, an enabler of freedom. One is a home that represses; the other is the one that enables. The reason remains the same: the home acts as a space reserved for the genesis of the body in the absence of sociality; what one finds a hindrance is a reserve for the other. It all depends on the kind of action to arise from this freedom, as an end goal as well as the precondition. A household may exist, or a place of residence, but it may not coincide with home: poetic memory is distinct from a social one. Or is it? The political– poetic axis of home begs for feminist and postcolonial questioning. Home is momentary, in its sustenance of needs, and enduring, as the site of the history of relations of humankind. It becomes a web enabling the established violence of the past to sustain itself into the openness of the future and the conditioning of whatever happens to be the current outside to mutilate the long germination of the inside. Arendt– Bachelard set up this axis, but they are both at another tangent to the woman, to the migrant, to the person of color. Bachelard’s thinking, daydreaming, belongs to the cellar, to the attic, to the terrace, to the edges and insides of spheres constructed there. What if one does not have any, will never have any of those? Whose knees, hands, and thoughts sustain the cradle of the house of the daydreamer? A home to be constructed, to work on ceaselessly, to be renewed, sustained, and imagined, is a site of colonization and employment. In Arendt, the women of the house, that is, the women of the premodern period and early modernity, are delegated to the domain of the body, the private domain, and therefore excluded from politics of the public space as well as from reason and, logically, from daydreaming. When the individual transforms into a Foucauldian citizen and the privatepublic transforms into the social, this elasticity of the same space of personalcommunal remains and is emphasized. A woman who has to respond to every squeak of a newborn: Can she not ever think, daydream, or make things up? Can she only ever sustain the other’s daydreaming? Do the maternal features of the home Bachelard commends— in that it shelters, protects, and allows— suck the woman dry? Cleaning and daydreaming, serving and acquiring a political voice— what kind of home could these thrive in? Daydreaming selfvalorizes: how do we reconcile commanding to be clean and commanding to be free, or to be free from commanding?