John Flattery is finally painting his kitchen. In Aisle 6 of the big box store, the machine mixing the paint makes three sounds at once, each a thought. One sound sounds like that of a mechanical tide, geologic, steady and underground. Another sounds like someone’s teeth rattling in a jar—that’s the sound that bothers him. Then there’s the banging, intermittent, metal inside of metal, a hammering followed by random strikes, unpredictably, like when he was a boy hammering to be a man. 

Aristotle writes, “the soul never thinks without an image.” Maybe John Flattery’s soul thinks more because of the news he’s watching all of the time. He feels that to be true. The world was in lockdown, and now the world’s on fire. John Flattery is watching and feeling—and so, is his soul thinking? So many people suffering; so much injustice. He should stop reading Aristotle.

Maybe the soul and the self are the man, most of him, anyway, and the face he wears is his personality.

What he wants rolls in his mind, a swirling amalgamation. He can feel the mixing of something. It’s amazing how the three simultaneous desires can be there, what the human ear and mind can process, or turn into a thought.

He has no image for his soul. His soul cannot think by itself or imagine itself. But there is a soul.

Home through the fly-buzz of an Ottawa summer, windows down: the best part of shopping is driving. When John Flattery gets home, the work will be what he has imagined: outlets taped and ceiling rolled, the sheen of the clean surface, the leftover stink, the room wet and new. Just the idea that he can imagine means he has an image of something, right? He can imagine his kitchen, for example.

But first there’s a moment to be expected, when he pops open the big can of paint, and the swirls on the top have separated into different viscosities, colors floating, needing to be stirred together, and that’s like the soul of John Flattery, a different idea of a soul. 

John Flattery in the Paint Department of the big box store, choosing colors, the most important decision, living with what he imagines. Right. He’ll do the ceiling in “Amazing Gray,” and apply an accent to the trim, “Glamour.”