Unimportant Details

Car Sickness. Vertigo when looking down even momentarily while in an accelerated frame. His love of popular science, astronomy facts. He recorded them in his calendar notebook while riding the bus. Trying furiously to fit one in in the brief amount of time the bus stopped to pick up one here one there. Then an intermission of fragments: what the facts were and waiting at each red light for the next one and the philologists asked the writers to stop writing so they could catch a break or they went off into endless theories about method and forgot they had a subject only too many stop lights and too much [x] came out. So Samuel wrote, and here and there inserted the symbol ‘[x]’ which he had lifted from somewhere and forgot where, but he remembered this part: that its use was different in the original. By inserting an ‘[x]’ here and there S had saved some of his claims from being obviously false—but they were still not true, or if true then an empty sort of true, so he couldn’t be too satisfied. Broken skin, lost bicycle, found penny, vertigo in spite of his care to only write while the bus was stopped, the white hot ring he’d left on the bench waiting for the bus, the white hot ‘[x]’s he’d littered the pages with. Off the bus now and it was raining—first soft then hard. The force of the drops shot muddy clumps onto his legs, and the mud ran with the red from his shin wounds. S couldn’t feel it—the red. It was color. Something to look at. Though he was tempted to infuse it with a meaning it didn’t have—he resisted. It wasn’t worth it he thought, and besides probably it made the moment cheaper. So he walked around a nearly v shaped row of houses, small, white, with that perfectly unremarkable white siding, flimsy looking metal railings leading up the sides of concrete steps to blue, brown, and red doors. From there he crossed the busy road where the traffic was so consistent and swift that crossing was a real task, and crossing limp was out of the question. He crossed, timed it neatly, and began to climb the hill on the opposite side. It was steep and covered in thick grass, which now was a sleek green waterfall. He slipped, knee in the grass, finding a pocket of mud in a thick, densely coated patch of blades. It was rinsed clean in moments by the downpour. Again: same knee, all grass this time. Now he felt his shin wound. “Fuck!” he winced and clutched the sides of his leg. He made the top of the hill and was now protected by a long overhang, which grew from the roof of a squat department store. It was closed, had been for some time—tape on the windows, dark inside. He sat back against the wall, waiting for his friend—cold, but in spite of this he almost fell asleep. His calendar notebook, the one he’d been using as a journal, was kept mostly dry throughout his trip from the bus stop to the overhang, as he’d rolled it up in the front of his jacket. It now rested open on the concrete next to his dripping legs. Cleaned though they were by the rain they were still bleeding, and the one he’d twice fallen on was slightly stinging.

Samuel saw Madimaken’s work boots in the lower eighth of his visual field. He looked up. M was wearing a white dress shirt and a tie, black slacks—all of which looked absurd because of the boots, or the boots because of the shirt and pants. “You writin’ somethin’?” M indicated the calendar notebook. “Yeah. It’s a short story. I’ll read it to you later. You want to get something to eat?” “Sure my interview’s at 1:00, so I don’t got much time. How about pizza? There’s this little place by the university café?” S said ok and they walked under the overhang as far as they could before making their way through the open air between them and the pizza place. S was anxious to impress M, who wrote beautifully and was honest enough to tell him if his story was crap or maybe something worth working on. M asked S if he’d heard about [x]; S said he’d heard about it but didn’t know all the details. So M went about telling S what he’d found out just this morning digging around in his office. S said it reminded him of this paper he’d read, about the theory of [y]. M said he hadn’t heard of it but was in general not interested in [y].

Sitting over the remainder of a bland slice of pizza, S began to read to M from his calendar notebook. M, finished with his own slice by the end, replied: “You’ve got a shy sense of humor—it’s really quite funny. The part where the tortoise says, ‘when god moved the stone, all the mass made him imperceptibly small’, or, what was it?” S gave him the line. “Right: ‘god only moved and is the stone, in existing beings and men, imperceptibly small’. Was that your line? It sounds so familiar.” “Oh, no,” S said, “the tortoise is quoting [z]. I just thought, because of the way the story begins /” Here M cut S off. “No no. I don’t want to know. Frankly, it’s beautiful, the way some things can get to you when they remain mysterious. Fill in the gap and it’s a smooth ride, all the way to the end. Nobody remembers a smooth ride. Nobody writes about the time he caught the bus, had lunch with a friend before work, slept soundly. It’s the hang ups make the story—your bleeding shins, broken bike, my fuckin’ shoes! For Christ’s sake do you want to ask why I’m wearing my work boots to an interview?!” “Why are you…” S went for the bait, realized it was rhetorical, too late, and felt like an ass. Of course M didn’t want him to know why—that was an illustration of his point about odd little details. And, now, in a markedly different tone: “I moved here…when I moved to the city…I packed a large black suitcase with my clothes. I put my dress clothes on top but didn’t want my dirty shoes in the bag. So I wedged them into a box of VHS tapes, my collection of French TV. The box got lost in baggage handling—unimportant detail. When I finally got it, I’d forgotten about the shoes and put it in storage with the rest of the things I didn’t think I’d need anytime soon. Woke up this morning, going crazy looking for the shoes when I remembered: they’re with the French TV tapes.” “I’m sorry,” S said, “I get your point—about detail.” “I know you do,” M said reassuringly, “but I don’t mind telling you about my shoes.” And they sat there in silence as S finished his slice. “Ready to go?” M asked.

Van Orman

'Lo! a rabbit.'--Quine

Willard in the offseason was an amateur gardener v barber—trimmer of beards and bushes. His garden was populated by the most sensuous topiaries, this or that bush pegasizing.

M Heid

What few people know about Heidegger is that for most of his life he owned and operated his own cheese shop. He would tell his customers: “The question is not ‘Is this cheese or not?’ but ‘How is this cheese?’.” Then he’d say, after a brief pause during which he’d furrow his brow and give the air of contemplation, “It’s wonderful…the cheese in its skin is not the cheese on the cracker. Just try it, and you’ll see that it’s true.”

natural disasters

cyclonic columns topped with cyclopic torsos
the same axe
which chopped down this/that tree
now situated against-the-barn doorly

some gnarly root shot through with tumors
trembling raw under the salt lick

some dog rolled init
or that’s how it smelled

Prolepsis

Sloughing off, shedding by rubbing beak and mane against the bark of a fallen tree, undoing months of extreme narrowness and the paucity of otherworldly thoughts: let them pollute this page, so it is no longer usable, blazing lines of wild undergrowth through the empty expanse.

Good natured clear headedness: how sense can be purple or meaning—how anything can—or can fail to feel lachrymose-wise at the sensing of a hamster or hedgehog nudging an apple, red off the edge of a blue, softly shifting, blanket. Was he already bloody before the eagle came to feed on his midsection? Or was he yet bleeding proleptically—how anything can—or can fail to bleed squeezing turniply—you can’t—that’s the long and short of it.

Promise

From what I’ve seen so far I can’t believe my eyes, and what a nice surprise.—David Bazan

A simple matter of ordering, one lace over another, over the other and pull. This was to be a symbol of his affection in the absence of his devotion, which he knew not how to give. That would come later if it came at all; this was a gift, a handmade bracelet. He had chosen the colors, black, red, light and dark blue. When he tied it around her wrist he could see that it was too big. Her wrists were skinny—far skinnier than his, so he untied it and went to put it on a second time. “Uh, you know,” she said, “that’s ok. I’ve already got one, and I never wear it.” He was thinking of what to say, stunned. She was already gone. She had ducked into her class late—it was in Moss Hall, which looked nothing like a hall and everything like a hut. A large professor was well under way with her heavy intoning: “…that God would have no pity on those who could not work up the will to save their very own souls…that the exigencies of the state after the fall were patently clear to anyone who could see…was enough to motivate all and only those who could discern the value of being…and that those who undervalued their existence should not serve as objects of sympathy…”

That was the kind of nonsense he couldn’t listen to much of, though the mass of the door cut off the rest of her speech and freed his mind to work on more worldly things, so his patience wasn’t much tested. He began to unravel the bracelet; he felt he had to. There was no sense in dwelling on it. It was made and could be unmade—a kind of happy symmetry not in everything. If he were younger he might lose sleep over the event of his rejection. But he would see her again and try a different tack. Perhaps he would work on a symbol of his [x]—now that he knew how to give it, the matter was not a great deal more taxing.

A letter, that would express what he felt without fail and in an intelligible script. Slowly he dragged out each letter, the words were empty, but the page was full, and that alone would signify. It was his [x], after all, that he was going for, a kind of sweat slick to where they buried the extra letters under an ‘…’.

It was finished. It said all it needed to say. But, and he’d guessed it from the start, he couldn’t hand it to her. Nor even could he simply let it drop at her feet for her to find it. No it wasn’t meant to be seen by her eyes or anyone else’s. It was his after all, his being in sum. How very little must he value it to give it away—how much must he value it to keep it, or, and here she interrupted: “What’s that?” “A letter,” he said, “for you.”

She stood there before him, reading it immediately. Not what he’d expected she’d do—don’t people take letters to read later?

“It’s very nice” she said at last and handed it back to him.

But he’d learned: “No. Keep it.”

And she did.

Structured by a startling and, from the exoteric point of view, unimaginable principle.

I know I can write my way out of this black hole back to all the things that I miss.--Blake Schwarzenbach

Notes on “The Statue and the Bust”: Browning paying a compliment to his wife “filled the fine empty” where the sheath is the body or soul and an allusion to Byron’s child—a moment of affine voraussetzung—a crime a literal crime—narrative representation of speech. Terza rima not so easy in Italian; desperate rhymes just out of arms reach; encolure: the neck and shoulder of a horse.

She was to be his guide from the airport to the hotel; he looked at her and held her in his vision a moment before she recognized his placard—it was a long moment. She was saying something in Italian, sounded like “terza rima,” her name maybe. He gave her a look like only a lover could, and he held it, and it almost stuck. Her dress was gaudy. This blood act ruins deeply, it made him think, in a poetic humor. Gladly he would stare at her all afternoon. She was charming.

What would “fill the fine empty” of that cab ride to the hotel? He with his broken Italian and only a sneeze of German: voraussetzung! He thought he saw the moon already, hiding behind some black dumpster, a blink betraying its pretense; it pretends to be awake.

He tried out his Italian on her—trying to find some consonance (her city after all rhymed with his, though it was a desperate rhyme)—but it was broken, his Italian that is.

And so they arrived at his hotel and without a word she accompanied him to his room and undressed. The hot evening spilling in from the balcony drew moisture from her thighs in arabesque conduits down her legs—they made the circuit while he muttered I love you through clenched teeth and in a language she was sure to fail to understand.

He traced a finger along her stomach to the purlieu of a dark thicket of exquisite nettles, shrouded about in the room’s heavy and darkening sadness. He enjoyed most of all the post-coital melancholy—what vulgarity he could summon in such a state. This blood act ruins deeply, gladly your gaudy dress; it leaves you charming with trash-heap grime and rot, behind a cramped apartment; the dumpster blocks out the setting moon—your makeup—your eyes.

I love you he uttered through sour lips. He crept out of the room and made his way down to the hotel bar—she pretended to not be awake.

Too jetlagged to feel his heart break, he drank, through clenched teeth. He’d live, he thought, tonight tomorrow.

Taken In

Now the loonies poured out into the sun, the better behaved left to their own devices, the others in herds in charge of warders. The whistle blew and the herd stopped; again, and it proceeded.--Beckett

Warm now. The stifling filth of a comfortable bed. I’d been taken in, underwing, hot soup spoon in my mouth. The same one I breathed out of, and in, for lack of etiquette. The nose, now that was for smelling, sniffing. The life breath came through that gaping, toothed hole. The life breath and pie, of course. Some things go without saying—pie, nearly always. So I’d found that someone had quite rudely plucked me out of my fantasy, on that endless hill of pedestrian happenings, and placed me squarely with a bed, blanket, three squares a day, and a fuck of a headache. Ok, so maybe I can’t blame them for the last, but the rest was bad enough. I looked down. What the hell had they dressed me in? A tuxedo? with long, wrinkled tails. I looked like a fucking muddy penguin. Sort of wished I was one. This whole disaster—these comforts seemed to grow on me, gradually, so that one day, today in fact, I was suddenly amazed at how they got there—how I got there. Was I so incurious as to let the world, no, time, work itself on me and my outfit? Could it be helped? I felt sick. The others, who had witnessed it all along, knowingly, they looked at me now, deeply concerned. Felix, for one, and Fingali, they were both good friends, just like my tux was a good fit. They helped me to my feet. My every need would be attended to. Felix said, “You ok?” “You gonna eat that,” I replied eying the unopened candy bar in his breast pocket. “Too early for candy.” And it was. But I’d come this far insensible of the rules; it seemed a grave solecism to stop now.

Meeting Place

Tire scraps on the federal roads look like crashlanded crows from the dial-a-view.—Jason Lytle

Akerlund lifted his torso out of bed and into his chair; his ghost legs all cramped, bloodless, and he couldn’t rub the sleep out of his eyes, though he tried with beet red fists. He rolled himself over to his window. It was a large double paned portal with dark brown brows and leaden lashes. Outside it was raining; students were just beginning to get out of their classes on politics and law, and the clouds cast an old-fashioned black and white movie on the quad.

A girl stood by a soggy tree. Akerlund thought he knew her, had slept with her, met her parents. She seemed to be waiting for something, looked now and then at the clocktower, lifted toe then heel in the attendant’s fidget. Her hair was thick, blonde, and hardly touched by the rain, which dotted her blue t-shirt. She looked up at Akerlund’s room, almost made eye contact—he didn’t know her, probably hadn’t slept with her (but now he wanted to), almost certainly hadn’t met her parents—they lived in Chicago; he’d never been. Her face showed her an almost imperturbably patient waiter. Her friend and expectant boyfriend wasn’t coming, or was but wouldn’t arrive until an hour after she gave up.

Akerlund saw him panicked and rushing towards the tree, now sheltering a few squirrels but nothing else. He stood nearly dazed and cast an incredulous stare at the clocktower; it moved a hand and reset his calculations. Now he looked sad. Akerlund felt nothing but watched. Their paths had crossed in space but not time. She may as well have been in Chicago—he’d never been.

Indirect Representations of Thought: An Exercise in Narrative Ambiguity

I committed Akerlund to the asylum of the Corry Public Library; I even got him something not too demanding to read. It was of course a book on mythology—with a great many sensuous pictures of the gods in all their complete lack of concern for what was going on below. They were the gods humans wanted to be, the gods humans would be, with every base human nature and all of the divine. No contradiction just a kind of anti-climactic joining of the weak and the strong.

* * *

A discovered poet who writes simply of what he sees is taken to be a master of irony and allegory:

There were long curtains of a brownish grey which made the passing motorists seem covered in gauze or a gauzy haze.

a. freq. attrib. The view made popular by [x] that all truth is obscured, veiled, and everything out of reach, gauzelike (read here: godlike); the ineffable world beyond the perceptual.

* * *

There could be no saving the miserable pennies now, for the long or the short hours—all hours alike—were for the road. He’d gone far down along it, no reason why. With not so much as a goodbye Akerlund left his 11th story apt not intending to return. It was wet, and just of that morning chilly, on the walkway outside. Can there be a moment of decision? Can I decide? was in fact what he was thinking, without thinking the words that he knew followed and would force an immediate answer. What he wanted to know was whether he would continue along the walkway and to the airport, and so on until he was more or less comfortably settled into a new life abroad, without so much as a postcard sent to me, his shadow and constant tormentor. Or, on the other hand, and already this thought led to what it seemed to lead to, with automatic discursive facility: had this thought set a chain of events in motion that would lead him to turn back, to abort his plans? Was it enough—and this was a third question—just to think of a question, and, before the mind (Akerlund, that is) had even a second to consider its answer, the decision based on that very answer…no…that could be made clearer. He tried again: had he already decided pennies, pity, and the lot, to turn back? Not consciously—he hadn’t even finished posing the question to himself when he felt with a certain degree of certainty that he’d already begun to act on its answer. The answer, the question, these were formalities, diversions, redundancies. Was it just this one particularly wet moment on a newly chilled day that was unique? The cats darting behind the green trash cans seemed to know even this titanic puzzler. The answer wasn’t so much in their dashing, or their cork-screwed tails, as in their pig-like squealing. South America, Akerlund thought, warm weather. The easy life. He opened the door to his apartment, quickly; no one had noticed he’d left. It was eight minutes past the hour, the long one.

(Swell)

Why must we endure it take the high road.
Slick sweat to where they
buried your dad.

Why not endure another day?
Under the milk
of a street lamp
the homeless swell
shifts.

Weight is weight is on the wet.
Take your life
back to when you
enjoyed your atoms.

Where scant behind a hedge hide.
Working those cataracts
into your eyes let him live.

Will you cross it out won’t you?

--the homeless (swell) shifts

under the rag mourners
the boots and breaths beat
subterraneously

Why not endure another…

Reading Fanon in the Med School Library

“Are these nymphomaniacs virgins?” (105)

The drunks are all dry and the can’t get is all lead out. So I thought almost every day about the new attitude I was trying on; there was the success I was still having treading water and walking that thin line: if my lead would stop breaking I might actually complete one of these ill formed sentences. Blake said he could write his way out of anything—even a wet paperback. Well, he sort of implied as much anyway. No I’m trying to write my way into something even softer and easier to penetrate. What of the nymphomaniacal virgins—what of the squeamish surgeons—or just the way the med school students all wave to me not realizing that I’m an outsider? I somehow managed to find my way to the library—in spite of the fact that all the signs had been changed—it was me they had in mind when they changed them. There is often a nauseating quality to mushfaking, that is, trying to fit in and succeeding, or just imagining success. It is bittersweet and, forgive the plural pronoun, “so vertiginous it unhinges us” (ibid.). There we are—it is only me really—but there we are in and unhinged. Ready and giddy for a pat on the back or a wink or a helping hand. I sat there for hours nibbling on my chocolate chips—bittersweet—and reading Fanon. So sweet and bitter, to linger long with my fingers on the hardwood desks and my ass in the cushioned seats not made for me.

--Quotations from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox.

Short Story: Part 8

Overcast all day until about 4:45 when the clouds rolled away and the occluded light shot in through the thick and beaded window of my office. I was fighting off the ill effects of the day’s monotony—and not doing too poorly—I thought opening the window would help—letting some of the wet air in with the light—hearing the outside sounds unstifled—and it did. The window had no remaining paint strips to peel or drop off, but I stared a few moments at the grey and fibrous patches that the peeling left behind.

The light lasted only an hour or so, and the wind from outside began to chill the room. In that time I filled a few more boxes and watched the clock every now and then, looking up between letters. I stayed late again until the sky outside was black, and I left the window open so the cooling air would keep me awake. The marble stamp roller ran out of water frequently, but I didn’t mind so much having to refill it—it was a reason to take a break from the repetition of the letter work.

In the 9:00 hour the clock began its usual amplification of its clicking—again just by a moment preempting the movement of its minute hand. 9:14 echoed off the wall behind me and into the back of my lolling head. I looked up with time to spare to see the hand lunge forward.

I’d told myself I’d stay until 11:00, and I did. On my way out I took the stairs—it was becoming a new habit—but this time on the way down, midway between the 4th and 5th floor, I ran into a man in a long grey coat. My heart leapt at the surprise, and I completely forgot what it was that strangers did, upon meeting in the same office building. He didn’t see me, which gave me a second chance: “Evening!” I said. He didn’t see me because he was staring out the window into the parking lot with singular intensity. Such was the degree of his observations that he didn’t reply for several moments—such was the vision I imagined in which he was caught that he couldn’t tear his eyes away. And this was confirmed in my mind when he replied, “Oh, good evening,” without looking away. I passed behind him in desperation to see what it was he was looking at, but his body, motionless, blocked the view. I walked down the stairs slowly at first, then I ran hoping to catch the scene in the parking-lot from outside.

The doors locked behind me—it was cold outside. I put my hands in my pockets, drew in a deep breath, and walked home.

Short Story: Part 7

Called a friend while I was sitting in the park waiting for the bus. No answer. Some gray-haired man sat next to me on the bench and began sneezing his head off, his whole body paroxysmally erupting. I closed my eyes and tried to bury my face in my shirt without him noticing. I wanted badly to get up and make some distance between us. He should have stayed home, I thought. But I guess one doesn’t always choose.