No Answers

The Thirteen Notes

In time, such is the nature of time, all that we have chosen proves inadequate, and our own hearts turn against us. The faithful phrases that represented us are battered out of shape, so dependably and so long have they risen to each occasion. And we their followers have also lost our shape, refashioning ourselves out of comfort in their decaying image. In time then we come, of necessity, to the repetition of the thirteen notes. And when we do so, there are those who listening will say that that repetition of thirteen notes, that is not enough, that does not describe its subject. And there are others who will say those thirteen notes, yes. And there are others still who will say those thirteen notes, they go somewhat beyond what is required; they reach their zenith too soon; they leave no place left to go.

My Mother's Daughter

Sometimes, at school, the other children ask around about their families, and some say that they have two brothers and a sister, and others that they have two sisters and a brother; and so it goes on, until they come to me, and I have to say that my mother has just the one, single daughter, and that's all there is to us, at which point a general hush descends, and they make a way for me, as if I had just delivered a rousing speech, and they need time alone to reflect upon it. What I don't add, though, is that this daughter of hers doesn't please her so well, on which account I myself often wish she could have been somebody else. Her features are soft and delicate, yet there is something not altogether right about them; their softness is somehow impersonal, as though they had developed at the expense of individuality, rather than in response to it, leaving you with the overall impression of a child completely lost within the world. Yet, even if she perceives this, it does little to subdue her spirit, since she is also as every bit lost within herself; perhaps she even takes a kind of solace from her state. Who can say who lost her way first, she in the world or she in herself, or even if the two are reciprocal, and what is left, in her, is some kind of answer to that lack, some kind of perturbed reflection of the conflict between the two? Her calmness inspires me, and yet I would not want to live long inside her head. It would remind me too much of a room without furniture, which you can't escape because they forgot to put a handle on the door.

How slowly Evening comes

Every morning, on my way to work, I walk past the hospital and look at the long, graceful sweep of its various buildings. Within them there is no space for regret, and little space for any personal past, and instinctively I envy the hospital the unreflecting peace it has made with itself. On the other side of the road is the nurses' home, with its decayed windows and rusty walls. The nurses are mostly immigrants from a part of the world that no one ever visits, and to be true to what they feel themselves it is best to introduce them in this way, only adding parenthetically that they are also my compatriots. For when I see them sitting at the windows watching the traffic on the road beneath them, I know that their hearts do not belong here either; and when they huddle together in their tight little groups, I can almost feel the spiritual warmth they are trying to kindle among themselves. Even now, there they are, standing about the overgrown gardens near the archway, the corners of their mouths sucking away at their smoky lives, as if trying to comprehend some unfamiliar scent. Sometimes I think they have been here forever, without moving on, in their own minds, from the idea that they have only just arrived. Perhaps it is the lack of things the nurses’ home offers them in compensation for the memories it takes away that makes the exchange a poor one; perhaps, on the contrary, their past is too bright for the present here to seem anything but shadowy and dim and difficult to decipher. My father and I used to sound the horn as we rode past them in the car when I was young; I liked the way they instinctively moved aside and looked back at me guiltily, as though I had caught them doing something they shouldn't. But of my father, I remember little more than that hand - a hand at the tiller, a hand at the wheel, a hand to fashion me and pick me up and admonish me for crimes I never really understood. Perhaps this versatile hand was attached somewhere to a body of sorts, but the possibility neither concerned nor interested me. Looking over my shoulder, I see that childhood again stretched calmly behind me, like a soft, blank field upon which all the flowers have been painted black.

Then one day, apropos our persecutions during the war, I came across the intimate yet ambiguous assessment: "They were an insular, religious, self-destructive people, filled with superstition and pride, dreams and old horrors, rooted to a past they revered and despised and never could regain,” and, described this way, I suddenly felt a bitter love for my race, and the strange tongue that sustains it, and the fact that everything about us seems always to have settled about or stood between, but never quite touched upon or been secured by anything. Indeed, it sounded so romantic I felt jealous of the ones who had remained, and wanted to leave right then, if only because the past tense that recalled them also extinguished their lives forever, and I wondered how it must feel to live with them beyond the void. It was then that my personal past, as if in collusion with its more collective parent, started to sidle away from me; I caught at it absently, but it would not wait, though ultimately neither one of us had the strength to drag the other back completely. I was a young man and this was not the only provocation, of course, but it was the first, and once a chink had become visible, then I could see clearly the outline of the door, and the rest of it was easy and involuntary. Suffice to say, beyond the door there was a great house; there was light in every corridor as uniform and undiluted as the greyness of the gardens about it; there was a furious bustling and clinking of glasses, and, in the exhileration of the thing, I hardly noticed I had spent all evening loitering in the entranceway listening to an effusive, overbearing divorcee, while the bakelite switch panel dug in my back, and the only initiative I undertook was to find out ever-changing routes among the spaces of carpet where people had chosen for a moment not to stand, in the many quests for wine that I undertook on her behalf. Returning on the last of these, I met with more opposition than I had anticipated, for a sizeable group had chosen that moment to depart, and whether she had forgotten me, or misunderstood and thought that I had forgotten her, or whether she was simply swept along by that general exodus, having lost her bearings among the many suits and tables and rooms and wine, there was now only an empty sweets trolley where she had been standing. And then I saw that the dishes, too, had been cleared away, and the piano closed up at the end of the dance hall, and people with unkempt hair and dirty overalls were starting to move about behind the scenes, and sometimes crossed quickly in the shadows between two rooms, like rats that lived in the walls. I do not have a word for that gulf, that prelingual gasp that is the shape of that evening in a calendar, and the bright windows of the house hanging on the night. At the same time, if I could have my life again, I would do things in exactly the same way, for it is not so much the sense of misspent opportunity that causes my past to seem separated so starkly from my present, but rather the fact that my story is the story of our race; my people are their own inheritance, sown by their own fingers, and garnered by their own hands; we have no guides or advocates, yet we have always been too proud to ask the way or turn aside when we are spoken to.

On the wall where the pigeon spikes end, one of the nurses is sitting, swinging her legs and watching me.

“You wish you had a different life; you wish you could go home,” she says suddenly. Then she asks me for the price of a bus fare, and I know, if I see her again, she will probably make exactly the same observation, followed by exactly the same request, with the same admixture of sincerity and dissimulation. If I knew for sure she were thinking only of me when she spoke, then perhaps it would be different, even as if I knew for sure she were thinking only of herself or her family. But we do not understand one another; we do not understand generally in this place, and what concerns us is usually at odds with anything we can change.

Later, somewhere between night and day, I suddenly find myself awake, as if the thin, irresolute drone of the present had abruptly ceased. Then, once again, I hear my daughter crying in her sleep, like a lost, grey ghost at the end of a long, lightless path; and, hearing her like that, I remember again the black flowers governing the field, and do not envy her the way ahead. For at such times, when there is nothing to distract you except the darkness about you, it is very hard to accept that everything your children will learn and love and achieve will die with them, and yet their lives will need to be lived and believed in, all the same.

The Hand

My cousin is a surgeon. I do not understand what it is about surgeons. But not just surgeons - doctors too, anyone associated with medicine. I don't know what it is about him and his brother either, who is also a doctor. They were like that ever since they were children. It wasn't that you guessed what they were going to be; it's that they were already doctors, from birth. They took on more, and so there would be less to give those around them. The moment of their attention would be constantly divided, shared out among the many. And they didn't see this; even if they had seen it, they wouldn't really have understood what I am getting at. It would be as if I were asking for something selfish.

"You'd better have one of these," he said in that abstracted way of his. I knew really he was thinking about something else that had to be done, some arrangement which even now he had to get underway, though he was instead taking his time entertaining me, pretending - but not doing a very good job of it - that I was the only thing on his mind. I realised that perhaps some of his professional practice came into play here - to be involved with his patients, without seeming to promise the needy ones too much attention.

"You'd better have one of these," he had said, and handed me a full-size human hand, made out of black plastic. Almost immediately though I realised that there was something wrong with it - and then I saw that it had six fingers.

He emitted a vague sound which could have been interpreted as anything; I held the hand in my palm and turned it over, trying to look at it approvingly, utterly incapable of understanding why I had been given this thing or what I was supposed to say about it. I assumed it must have been some early experiment of his, the consequence of some anatomical workshop. I even imagined that the grotesque thing might first have seen the light of day in a joke shop somewhere, purchased by a friend for his stag-night.

During the festivities I was to stay in his own bedroom, since I was family. He had tidied away a few things, just enough to make space for me. But it was the neat curtains, inconspicuous against the walls, that seemed to characterise the room. Unassertive, utilitarian, they were part and parcel of the kinds of places he worked on a daily basis. It was as if, in some way, he always carried the hospital about with him, - as if this house itself, in which he had grown up, were always the potential hospital, waiting to find its home through him.

Now he raised his voice. There were people in the hallway; they seemed to stream endlessly through the front door, like distracted beams of light, half in, half out of the house.

"I summoned you admirable gentlemen and no less admirable spouses, partners, hangers on, or what you will, as one’s audience dictates, to witness my formal wedding ties to a very wonderful young lady," he was saying with a voice that instinctively I appreciated as "genial." He endowed the voice with a sense of affectionate irony, so that, even if there were nothing ironic in what he said, it seemed that he was reaching carefully for each word, disregarding other words that might have done just as well.

"All of us have some claim to fame. Well, my young lady's claim to fame is this - she has eleven fingers," he added matter of factedly. Evidently the admission was important; it was clear this was something he would presently build upon; nevertheless, its indecorous objectivity sat uneasily with the somewhat grandiose adddress which had preceded it.

"This may sound a little ghoulish to some of you," he went on in explanation, "but those who don't want to hear it don't have to.” The briefest pause that followed brooked no dissent: “The fact is, she was born with a birth defect; her left hand had five fingers, but two of them were thumbs. Well, three weeks ago, all that was to change. After a few - very painful and tense - " (he laughed, to show that he, too, was human) - "very painful and tense hours with me in the operating theatre, I should like to present you with my wife."

I realised that a good part of this was the intimacy he clearly felt that he owed us, and that we, in turn, owed him, in being here and sharing something personal with a man who seldom has anything of the personal to impart. This must be why he was telling us things which, anywhere else, should have been private between the two of them. Admittedly, it seemed possible his wife might have been unable to conceal her deformity, but, all the same, I found it odd that he was talking about it quite so openly. Instinctively I wondered why he could not just have left things alone. Somehow, I was convinced, he would just have given an awkward laugh, clearly offended, and retorted drily "So the world will choose magnanimously to overlook what my wife must have before her every day. May I ask why?"

Now the crowd of people in the hallway had subsided a little; it was like a flood of sunlight becoming covered in dust. Then, near the doorway to the library, he was bobbing up and down, handing out the little black hands again, like prayer books at a church. As if unconsciously recalling similar ceremonies, the guests in turn bowed formally, respectfully receiving their hand, and perhaps slipping it into a pocket or a bag. Each one shiny, each one too heavy for itself, it was as if it were really an actual human hand that had been painted.

At last I saw what it was that he had been getting at - that strange mixture of horror and tenderness, which we all seemed to have accepted with an equanimity that astonished me. At last I realised the awful logic of the thing he had done. The fourth member of that hand was a grotesque appendage with no skeletal continuity, inserted next to the second thumb, and bizarrely swollen toward its base. Then I realised that what I was holding was an actual cast of his wife's hand, and there, on the newly added fourth finger, was the wedding ring.

But touching that hand’s original, beyond the fact we carried away its likenesses as unquestioningly as our clothes, there seemed nothing further to be said. Indeed, I vaguely felt there was something too terrible about its bearer to endure the light of day.

Voices from a foreign quarter

In the very teeth of winter, when your life drifts and billows about you, it is not unusual to hear voices from a foreign quarter as you make your way slowly in your suit toward the office through the ice – as you make your way slowly from the room in which you live across the frozen paving of the town – as you make your way slowly in your slowness, since everything is at the mercy of all things, and you must wrap your reasons fast about you.

Sometimes the voices are peppermint in their freshness, and you feel their brief warmth in condensation on a glass, as they crackle past the school gates; sometimes, again, they are drawn out from the early morning, like the clean rustling of silk against a sky – drawn out like cars passing softly in the snow. And sometimes they are no more than recollections from the night before that have slid a few inches from the roof, and now, as if to test themselves, heap up in their height and overhang the gutters.

It is against all this that a woman passes by and says: Good morning.

And suddenly you wonder how it would be if all we strangers started to say “Good morning.” Good morning, and also good night. And not only that, but to invite one another in for coffee, for example. And not just coffee, either, but many other things about which one can only speculate.

“You, in particular, would have asked if I wanted to go out for drinks, and I would have said: No. Because whoever disdains the small part wants the whole and I cannot forswear my ambitions toward you, my beloved, ungovernable world.”

Twenty Interpreters

Twenty interpreters were brought before the prophet. The prophet did not belong in the court, but the king was contrary - he had plucked him out of the wilderness. Maybe the two could learn from one another. The prophet enjoyed the king's patronage; the king enjoyed the prophet's reputation. But it was not entirely for formality's sake that he summoned the twenty interpreters - the wisest men of his kingdom - as the prophet had requested. He, too, wanted to know the truth of the prophet. He wanted to know what the prophet's story really meant.

"I will tell the story again," the prophet said to the king. "Then let them challenge me. You must warn them that if they are wrong they shall suffer the consequences. But I will do nothing to conceal the truth, and I am not a wise man. Therefore a wise man should see the truth as clearly as I do."

To this the king readily agreed. Why surround yourself with a court of wise men who are only pretenders to the name? And even if the prophet showed some guile, surely twenty wise men could rustle the truth out of him? He himself looked forward to seeing which of them deserved the title he had received, which of them, in common matters, could lay a genuine claim to his reputation.

Now they are all summoned to the state room. The twenty interpreters sit down, some nervous, some with equanimity. Alike, they wait in silence for the prophet to speak. As he does so, some take notes, some look at the ground; some look at his face, as if they could read the answer there.

Finally the interpreters separate and think long and hard. They know the importance of their endeavour. Their king is a precipitate king, unforgiving, cantankerous. More is at stake than just the words they say. At last, they settle their stories; they are summoned a second time to the state room. In turn, each offers his explanation of the prophet's story. Certainly their originality knows no bounds, nor their scholarship. They pin down every last nuance; they trace out every last theme.

"I was wrong," the prophet concludes, when, many hours later, the last of them has fallen silent. “Nothing can be hidden by words, when those words are only made out of more words, and the places from which those words have come."

Out of respect for them, he lowers his voice, and beckons the king aside.

"Take these fools away and put them to death," he says. "All they see is different forms of truth. Bring me someone who can see the lies."

Nathaniel

In a moment of poise, I found I was offering him, as though he alone contained the potential of the world, not only all the things I had already written, but all the ones I should some day write, as well.

"Except this," I added, with sudden inspiration: "Should you choose to change a word, then you lose the right to change a word."

"Should I change a word, I lose a right ..." he repeated neutrally; evidently the sentence itself was made up only of words, and conveyed no ideas of its own. There was a movement in the hallway.

"Nathaniel," he declared; the very world stood at his side now, while I was no more than a person in a room. "See, Nathaniel: the gentleman begrudges me even the things I refuse to take away from him ..."

Truth

"There is no truth," she said, "only different systems of truth. You want, of course, to press further, to be curtailed by nothing. But what exactly is it that you can feel, believe, or know, in such a place? Surely you must come running back to the language we have chosen to share. And how can we share, but by way of the constraints we impose upon ourselves? As though each bares his back, only so that he can show his neighbour: See, I have bared my back?"

Natural

In the unexpected sun and the rain and the suddenness with which suburban streets give way, like their own seasons, to grass and water, and the tangles of hedgerow that press where the fences subside, and the cul de sacs T'd by a river, and the railway lines clumped with camomile - seeing the countryside sometimes, as it starts out on its own, uncertain among the backyards, uncertain of its destiny, uncertain how far forth it can hurl a future, I feel the urge, I don't know, to encompass myself by dint of sheer extinguishment within it, and wish I could curl myself up as soft and dry as the dust of the tow-path, and be nothing but the smell of all that is underfoot.

Nature, I reflect in those moments, has no conscience, no comprehension of perfection. There is no onus upon it to be perfect, and, failing therefore to understand its absolute inadequacy, it attains perfection without even trying. It understands innately that perfection cannot be reached by way of desire; it can only be reached by forgoing desire forever, by teaching itself how to *be* without the possibility for self-reflection.

How much that seems for us to take on trust, and yet how natural it also seems, to trust. As though trust came not from ourselves, and our own community, but were something intuited from the world about us, and then immediately forgotten, for fear it might yet put us to shame.

Wherever

"It's the same old decorations," he said, looking at them sadly, although they seemed without malice and intended nothing particular by their return: "the same old decorations, year after year ..."

"But there's the difference between us," I said. "You've already seen them before, but I won't be here next year; I'll never see them again."

"Where will you go?" he asked, faintly interested.

"I don't know. Wherever they aren’t, that’s all. Wherever they aren’t, precisely in order that they can be here, as they are, today.

From so far distant

From so far distant, it feels a long, long way back to faith, and you don’t know whether to renege, for the company you will find about your heels, or regress, for the potential of all that, some day, you might regain.

Indian

The last time I saw my father it was a little under eight months since he had died. I was walking along the corridor to the cafeteria the very moment I knew it would open. Then, just ahead of me, I recognised the short white beard and my father's back of head.

He seemed in good health; clearly he had recovered his spirits considerably since the funeral, and he walked at a similar pace to my own. I was rather hoping we might both end up in the cafeteria, where I could say hello, and perhaps we could get a table together. But at the last moment he turned instead into the Testers' room - a decision which surprised me for a moment, since all the testers were Indian.

Then I realised that most probably nothing was amiss; my father, evidently, was Indian now himself, and, as I carried my body onward alone, I began to adjuce reasons why my father, in fact, must always have been Indian all those years, and therefore why, assuming something else, it had been so hard for me to understand him.

The Cold Walk back

“No matter how far, in times of easy grace, you have thrown yourself ahead, nothing will ever prevent that last, cold walk back through a dark place, “ she said. “And no matter how beloved you find yourself to be, the time shall come when we can no longer take a stand to protect your faith from calumny.”

In an afternoon

On a fine day, he bows his head, as if by allowing the skies the chance not to be recognised and reasoned about, he can, in turn, escape the obligation to say anything - even to himself.

Games

An idle speculation: What is a game? I would suggest: A game is simply that within which one chooses to risk something personal. It needs no other paraphernalia, for the key epithets here are “choose”, “risk” and “personal.” A game, in other words, is about personal liberty. One is free to choose, and one is free to lose; that is what’s at stake, even if the stakes are intangible. Every game therefore is necessarily voluntary; there cannot be such a thing as an involuntary game.

Perhaps this is why, where personal liberty is in jeopardy, humour rather than polemic often seems the truest form of dissent. For humour invites confrontation, and risks identity itself. But polemic, in contrast, is only so powerful as the injustice that has been done.

The Composer

He wrote music. He wrote music for late middle-aged singers who had been singers all their lives. He wrote music in order to take advantage of their specific harmonies -- the fact that they hit each note spot on, in an ever decreasing range, the fact that their vibrato was regular, assured, and almost weary.

Not everyone was suited to such songs, and the ambition of these particular songs was subtle, since they belonged neither to the young, nor yet the old, but to something in its mastery, and just touching the end of its mastery. The songs therefore made no new challenges, but rather looked back toward all that had already been sung, so that their singers could sing them with the particular joy of their past, and their lifetime within it.

At the same time, taken in isolation, these new songs offered nothing to those just starting out, those who did not know these people for what they were, or the culture within which, over the years, they had finally carved out the shapes today familiar as themselves. The songs no longer explained; they *depended*, for they were written not to express, but to sustain, to consolidate, to make fast all that had gone before.

This was, though, a two-fold denial. For, however soberly the singers must have viewed the future, however self-conscious they must have felt within this place, it was also not their part in these songs to sign toward the place where singing stopped, the place where neither singer nor song any longer were free to sing.

The Letters

When challenged as to why he had not responded to the letters, he answered: "Because no one would ever send me mail."

It seemed he had lived in the house almost 20 years, and the other residents of the house had often received mail, but never him. As a result, he had ceased to look for mail, and, since no one in the house knew who he was, this was why those particular letters had remained there, in the little pile beneath the telephone, for so long.

Escape

The world may not appeal to you, yet the fact remains, there will always be a place within it to call your own. The place may not physically exist; it may not make sense, and it may not be explicable when your only desire is to make it clear. But it exists, all the same, and while you may have to travel to find it, the journey is not necessarily physical, mental or spiritual: the journey can be anything that takes you away from the place which you - and only you - feel yourself unable to escape.

Don't forget everything

"Don't forget everything," my brother used to say, seemingly a belt-and-braces appeal we complete, to the best of our abilities, the things we've agreed to complete without mishap. Is it not a reasonable request that nothing be overlooked, left out, forgotten?

And yet, even without forgetting or overlooking anything specific, how is it possible not to forget everything as he puts it? Doesn't this make us uneasy, for isn't this an impossible appeal?

What, then, is it that escapes? Which part are we unable to commit to remember, even in our certainty that we will not forget it?

The end of everything

“The day there are no more questions, my work here is complete.”

“You say work, but is it only work? Is it not joy, as well?”

“At their limit, work and joy are the same. They constitute the complete experience of that which must be done.”

Capacity

"I will not give you more than you can bear," he said.

"No, I must always have that which is at least equal to my strength, if not stronger. For bearing it is the measure of my humanity. Everything else is merely *accomplishment*."

The Windmills of your mind

Even where the body of work achieves a unity of effect, being an artist is divisive, and the canon of the artist, therefore is made up of many hesitations and stopping places. It is continually returning from the experience of new limits, denoting the places beyond which either it feels it unseemly to go, or because it lacks the capability (or, indeed, the imperative) to press further.

This is necessary, and things could never be otherwise, since doing so would be to deny the very operation of art. The fact that Hokusai painted a hundred water lilies does nothing to undermine the complexity of his art; his aesthetic simply plays between equally complete, but less immediately apparent, limits. Similarity represents the call to make distinct.

Indeed, it's apparent that repetition is an elementary structural principle in the experience of art -- a principle noteworthy for its absence. For art, whatever its form, there is no such thing as repetition; there is no such thing as two-ness; "da capo" does not mean a return, since music is always continuous; coincidence is texture rather than symmetry, because somewhere there must always arise something which *cannot* be mirrored. To reiterate: Two-ness is precisely the thing art turns away from in declaring itself a distinct form of experience.

And this is because, in essence, the artist's canon is a constant attempt at repetition, the ceaseless attempt to recapture (even to "recapture" the thing it has never captured, and maybe never will). Its bands, each with their own limits, and all intertwined, like a cord made up of multi-coloured threads, represent the inward play between the artist and his work, as though one had cupped ones hands about a very small bird.

Physical sadness

I feel physically sad when I see things I cannot encompass - tall buildings, perhaps. I say *physically sad*, because I realise that there are many forms of subjective experience, and they are felt in somewhat different ways. Physical sadness, for example, is distinct from emotional sadness; it is something imposed from without, and one experiences it in one's capacity as a vessel, the involuntary commitment one makes as one finds oneself believing that everything one can experience is only the shadow cast by something else beyond experience. Emotional sadness, on the other hand, originates internally and radiates outward; emotional sadness does not bring questions, but physical sadness is itself a question. This is why physical sadness must exist, even if it's impossible to believe that indeed it does exist.

Adjutants Day

Once a year - on Adjutants Day - my father's profile would move along the level of the hedge, invariably resembling his portrait, which hung above the fire. Having passed the window, it would turn in at the gate, and a moment later my father would be sitting at the table with us.

Sometimes my mother sighed. Most of the time, though, she paid no attention, moving the things about on the table. My father took out his pipe and lit it. When it was finished, he put it back in his pocket. Then he got up and walked out the door once more, past the window, along the hedge, and I knew it would be another year before I saw him again.

The River Walk

Sometimes you like to walk beside the river. Of course, it starts off as nothing special; you go down by the church, past the sports centre and the barred gates of the car park, and then, as you reach the river, you realise the area immediately to your right has been boarded off, and they are building houses behind it. So sometimes you go this way, sometimes that; there is more than one way to walk along a river, and pink down – yes, down – descends from the skies like candy floss, a sure sign you are doing something remarkable.

Then you come back past the building site, past the car park, past the sports centre, past the church. You climb back up the steps onto the street; you cross a busy road; you eat a sandwich, drink some beer, and, periodically, you die.

Spring days

What are we to do with these blue, blue days that the sky now seems to scoop up and throw in our face, as if to exhaust itself in us?

Even the shadow of the brickwork was rendered by a master, its edges at once certain and soft, as if the chalks were too old and cross-eyed to draw without a second shadow, and that softness, that gentleness about the edges, seems proof that a heart beats beyond it.

As if the world were its own study, the canvas of today's world has been hoisted up for inspection; great folds of it cascade through the gallery out of sight and just the reflex of a window guides my room between the curtains. And all of it, I feel convinced without knowing why, is true to its subject; the world today has been depicted as it truly is, and not a crease, mote or pot hole is out of place.

Even the half-fallen traffic cone behind the tree seems a kind of cosmological joke, if I knew quite which book -- and it doesn't matter -- to reach down from the Index of Indices, in order to translate the politics of the absolute Other, and thereby easily account to myself without actually learning anything-- as though in taking it down I were only satisfying a whim, and really my thoughts were elsewhere -- why all these things must be so.

The Call across Caervallen

Somewhere I believe there is a man who, having ascended to that height, stands still a moment in the gathering darkness to make a call across Caervallen. When he does so I feel strangely comforted, because his cry does not demand an audience, and therefore loses nothing if no one harkens to return it. The cry does not need to be heard for it to be understood; it assents within itself, a context wrapped up as a message; everything else, when you look inside, is just the shape of sound. Perhaps this is the only way to reach across Caervallen, if there is anything there to reach, and this is the only way the other side of Caervallen could answer back, though even by day it is too cold to wait long for that answer.

A Road somewhere

I was driving along a road somewhere, and silently, in the passenger seat, the product of my thirty years was listening to me. First I reminded her of all the ways that we had failed to meet, then of the things I had not liked that I would some day cherish in her against my will, like the day I went in the shop which had long since closed, and she was standing there at the counter smiling as if to say that everything - the entire world - is impossible.

Sometimes she said nothing; other times she said only what I wanted to hear, which is less than nothing when you are driving by yourself and do not know where you are going, or even if it is possible to arrive.

At the Bus stop

Have you never waited at the bus stop, and a particular moment has passed you by, or happened to you, or done whatever it is that moments are supposed to do in order to express themselves?

In that moment, there's no one there, and the road is, for that instant, serenely clear and silent. And you ask, for a second: What is it, again, that I am waiting for?

And the answer has nothing to do with the shape of any particular bus, or even all of them together - the routine of standing here, stacked day after day, like a hefty, self-infatuated set of weights. It's as if, the harder one strains to hear, the closer one feels to one's ... longevity. So that it's a disappointment when the next stray car tops a nearby hill, and, like a strange kind of prayer, you half wish that no one will pass by here to take you up after all, that no bus will ever pass by this place again.