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chapter one point oh two five

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it was sweat. I recognized it because I had sweated before. there were arms and legs asking to be let through to be moved past and not knowing the etiquette I let them. the question of who is indulgent of whom is not clear when it is also not clear just where on the spectrum between rival and trick the requesting party might stand. I noticed that if I stared too long at for instance that one muscular waist in the plunging evening dress they would stare back and I not being ready to commit looked away.

having spent so many decades learning to negotiate the social requirements of those completely unlike me I had no idea how to behave around these strangers with whom I had almost everything in common except that I did not either and I do not say this to be self-consciously postmodern but to indicate that the everything and the nothing are not mutually exclusive as we in what is sometimes called the West seem to believe.

commonality among the uncommon: arms and legs slipped past and kept slipping past as there was no end to the wanting to go here or there or back again and when the show was over they all rushed for the door hoping I suppose to let the sweat dry a little. then it was a matter of not getting carried away.
but before that before the release of have a good night set loose their joyful quest for air one by one a kind hand or a discreet knee would make its acquaintance and then press on leaving that mark to smolder in its wake a note of a wish so casual it vanished into the crowd with the moment which called it out.

once standing in a line I let her put her hand on my chest. I didn’t know who she was and she was dirty and she was drunk but she was only looking to make friends and asked liquid manners stirring crinkled rimshot eyes palm up can I touch you. ok. lightly her hand on the thin cold layer of my summertime shirt one beat two from far away a rumbling stampede I stepped back her fingers floated alone for a moment she swaying just beneath her own notice. I will never forget her and she will never remember me. either way nothing can come between us or nothing can interpose itself at that one point when nothing came between us.

in the zoo they all sleep in a heap.

it is true that I am a rank novice.

later on or that is sometime before but later on than some other time—and there is no way to explain this fully although something about the explaining is exactly it—but later on there was this one song and although I remembered it a certain way and it showed up years later as a slightly different way I knew it was the one I originally knew but in its temporary reincarnation I could not quite place it or reconstruct the stature it had assumed in that part of my memory that had stopped at precisely the point when the song drew me away from the chaotic cruelty of roller-skating middle school children casually tormenting one another and into a soft and insulated trance gliding without effort around the wooden rink which is not to say I skated well—most manifestly I did not—only that at the time skating was a private ritual undertaken in public and in which I was aware of music and of velocity but not much else. or at least not when this one song played.

as though the memory and the thing remembered were not particularly related and yet the thing remembered carried a ghostly reminder of the memory. how to outline the disjunction that was the closest of relations to the extent that I could not place the exact difference between the two except that this one note did not quite fall where I remembered it falling but I knew that this note was the very one which had sunk into memory and come out just enough different as to make me unsure or unable to recognize the note that had engendered the memory.

it is as though spelunking showed up details completely different from the ones on the charts but the details as they showed up presented themselves lethally and with occult powers and that only these could account for what the charts had become in their absence.

although that is not entirely the case. the account for what the charts had become in their absence proceeds at least partially from the charts themselves motivated by who knows what other than the charting and that is exactly what remains of the empirical in the end.

I was playing pinball one evening at the skating rink quite unaware of how pinball was scored but knowing that keeping the ball in play was a good thing when a boy I had never seen before rolled up to me and asked if anyone had ever told me I was ugly. no one ever had. I informed him of this fact. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant—did he really want to know if anyone else had been so disturbed by my appearance that they chose to alert me to their discomfort rather than just stop looking? my answer left neither of us with anything to say. I did not scream or cry or curse him or even look at him so he left and I continued to flip the ball around trying to make sense of what had just happened. no one has asked me that question since or that is no one who lives outside of my head has asked it.

as far as I remember I never met up with friends at the skating rink but was always avid to go alone just so that I could for instance skate to this song or another song because to me the point of going was to skate and not to talk. occasionally someone would push me or poke me or giggle at me or mouth some incomprehensible joke at me and then laugh presumably at my expense but none of this registered beyond the bewilderment I still feel when people I do not know approach me in the street to ask me something.

but so if I never was able to make sense of the social mores of the skating rink it is because they had nothing to do with why I was there. I don’t remember anyone else at all; only a mass of kids interacting in ways that were quite beyond my inward-facing imagination.

the rink was variously orange and gray and natural wood tone. who knows who decided the finish at any particular time. who knows if I even have the orange right by now given that the song was not quite what I thought I remembered either but then again it could be argued that what is important is just what both the orange and the song touched off in the way of obscure motivating forces which then went to work inscribing their obscurity into my nervous system.

the real irony lies in that skating was done mostly on Tuesday nights as these were Ladies’ Night. girls of twelve also got in for free and in fact there were very few actual ladies there on Tuesdays just girls and boys as traditionally reckoned.

it was a badly-engineered pair of skates that spurred me to my initial empirical research into the basics of force, acceleration, and fall. this first pair was assembled such that the rear wheels sat some inch and a half forward of the heel of your foot which caused them to spill you over backwards almost constantly because if you leaned back at all your center of gravity would no longer be over the wheels. I remember getting a better pair of skates and learning that I was not nearly as bad a skater as I thought. I knew it was the skates and not that I had improved overnight so I compared the new ones to the old ones and the reason for my new-found stability—on skates that is—was suddenly quite clear. I was about nine years old I think, and the principles of gravity, mass, and support seemed more or less obvious.

so you see there was that then. all I have to offer is all you see here except that all you see here is neither representative nor recollective of any given signal moment. curiously although I do hold that I am nobody in particular or rather that between you and me there is only an infinitely small shift that passes for difference this infinitely small shift is insurmountably orthogonal to all that you know or in other words we could not just switch names and none be the wiser even though neither of us are remarkable. it is not only that there is no such thing as repetition but also that there is no such thing as originality. no matter how many times you say a word that you think is the same as the one that came before there is no way to get them to match up precisely and yet all the information needed to generate an infinite variety of words is already extant.

language being in this case an analog for a number of other things but not only that, given what you and I are doing here I on my side having happened upon some turns of phrase I found interesting enough to use as a kind of semaphore in which to act out strings of neurological impressions gathered not entirely at random and you possibly reading although for reasons at which I can only guess. I imagine that you might come to feel as though you knew me which would be remarkable if only because I understand already at this early pass that trying to lend these dim recollections coherent shape as though I could work them up towards a literary purpose or even just a moral tale would not only be quite beyond my enfeebled means but would also constitute a vain effort to impose myself or interpose myself into the mythos of some age or another when the fact of the matter is all I can do is suggest that someone who called themselves “I” and “me” passed through somewhere between you and me leaving broken traces of that famous metonym for divinity as I can feel breathing and moving there where sits a cat across my feet keeping us both warm.

by that I do not mean to be cloyingly romantic but to note what it is to face death together with a close relation and loving claw and bone for the short time that we are differentiated from iron and water and although headed for the same destination once arrived we both will disperse unevenly across the roiling expanse into which we are afforded a glimpse given a clear night sky his eyes on the skittering bodies of nocturnal cousins mine on the brilliant violence that unthinkingly cast us as its own auditors. out of this host of suns emerge friable sheets of living tissue to be struck by the light that forged us to behold light. as though we fragile and thirsty were the only possible mirrors to the stars we who huddle under our transient atmospheric buffer for protection from the indifferent forces that spat us out but who cannot help but look up.

just that difference between a cloud and an ant or between my left and right feet then. what I mean is not that on a cosmic scale difference diminishes but that at the level of elemental variety—which is considerable—those distinctions that we believe fundamental disappear into that variety and become themselves varietal instead of iconic.

this may be because that which we consider essentially different can only be realized as monotonously the same and that which we consider exclusively different—that is, objects made distinct through negating their own backgrounds—remains an entangled array of hazardous accidents among which no essential difference can be recognized and therefore nothing that is the same.

see this chair? it’s just a chair. but by that I do not mean to say that it is just a chair.

 
 
 
 
 

Chapter One continues

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