A Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table

'I dream of writing a book made up only of quotations.'

- Walter Benjamin

Since you ask, the making of a thing occurs precisely in the holding together of some relatively disparate elements. Shaking and creaking, the thing will endure for a brief period, perhaps communicating something of its form as it describes a strange and wandering vector. Perhaps somebody will spot it, approach with a squint, furtively or boldly, and select a component to steal away. Hopefully they enter it into their own minor composition, replete with all sorts of curious dissonances. This part may be some form of idealism, I'm not too sure of the terminology. When it comes to stealing, I do not speak pejoratively - we bricoleurs do not hold to personal property. You should take what you need and leave the rest, I think. Don't cite me. I'm content to disappear, or rather, get a little more imperceptible. Recognised by a trace or an inflection, what is sometimes called style... No, I'm not entirely sure either. But that's the game of it, I imagine. That ludic principle, what happened to it?

'Plagiarism is necessary, progress demands it.'
- Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautreamont)

And where are we heading? The question is the same at each camp, and I'm tired of their evasive half-responses. It is late now, we've been gone a long time and following each night the day is slower in coming. Every time we rest it gets a little harder to start again, to rouse oneself. Packing bags by a creeping dawn light so thin I could not say what it is we are carrying any longer. I can hear the camels rustling, I don't know what, at night, and it wakes me. Please excuse my tiredness. If we might sit here for a while, see the land fading in a good twilight, not too long, just a minor indulgence for an old friend..? Carrying all these things is a great burden to me, you see; my back is sore and I don't move as well as I used to. I too wish to look on that unimagined foreign shore we spoke of in the early days, but I no longer expect promises. There was no contract, we didn't have time. We were young and had long, quick strides. Nevertheless we ought still to cherish some faint and outmoded hopes. Could I hope that we might come back below the snow line, hear those water mills maybe still beating in the darkness? What I'm trying to say (and old age is such a time for speaking clearly) is can we still believe in a destination? Not a homecoming of course, but I...

'...And now, if store of seeds there is
So great that not whole life-times of the living
Can count the tale...
And if their force and nature abide the same,
Able to throw the seeds of things together
Into their places, even as here are thrown
The seeds together in this world of ours,
'Tmust be confessed in other realms there are
Still other worlds, still other breeds of men,
And other generations of the wild.'
- Lucretius

When falling in space, things may collide. Their trajectories interact in some way, I don't understand, but one can see, plotting the points that... There's something here, anyway. A set of compossibilities, a little world in an encounter (I think I read this somewhere but the citation is smudged). Two plummeting objects, the ground rearing up at them - they won't avoid it of course, but they still push one another, enter into some mutual resonance, an exchange of energy. It seems futile, I suppose, but one shouldn't judge from the perspective of the embedding space, see? Or so I'm inclined to think anyway. What I mean is that (and here my colleagues tend to sigh, or place a long finger against an imperious nose), just because from the perspective of a coordinate system one can see that this pattern of mutual interference will inevitably dissipate, that's not to say that it doesn't have some obscure significance to it or that it doesn't escape the impact... When I say 'obscure' they say I mean 'arcane' and an argument ensues. I won't abide it much longer; still, we will see, I think there's something here... I once read a word I liked in an old book left out on the campus lawn. The rain had wet the pages and I admit it was difficult to understand, but it sounded quite beautiful: καιρός. When they ask me for the manuscript perhaps I will throw it in the grate. I would love to see their faces...

'In an age like ours, when people are assaulted daily by the most monstrous things without being able to keep account of their impressions, in such an age aesthetic production becomes a prescribed course. But all living art will be irrational, primitive, and complex; it will speak a secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox.'
- Hugo Ball

The first time I saw it, naturally I found it repugnant. I tried to find the conductor, make my dissatisfaction heard in the sharpest of terms. But I was told he'd been missing for some time, or at least nobody had seen him, so I returned to my seat. I began to compose increasingly vitriolic apostrophes to this absent figure, sometimes imagining a physical reprimand I would subject him to. Perhaps I dozed, and I think we had entered a tunnel; the lights in the carriage came up, and now it was even more excessively visible, impinging upon my ocular field in the most egregious manner. I felt an urge to vomit, and coughed a little phlegm into my handkerchief. The air is not so good in here... I wonder when we'll be on the other side, what skies... Of course the more I avoided responding to its gaze the more intense a fascination it obtained. I writhed a little at first, clasped my hands this way and that. My fellow passengers were somewhat alarmed, but we haven't spoken for some time. I imagine they tolerate my infelicities. Nevertheless they seem to get fewer, or is it farther away? And then when I closed my eyes it was dancing there behind the lids, with me even in my own private darkness. I cannot imagine how it got there. And though I must now confess to having acquired some form of love for the blasted thing, I still resent its stealing into me so... Time passes, and it feels more a part of me with every strike of the clock, each failing to bring us back into a light I only remember as it were in a fable, or a dream...

'And I, who felt my head surrounded by horrors,
Said: 'Master, what then is it that I am hearing?
And what people are these, so crushed by pain?

He answered: 'That is the manner of existence
Endured by the sad souls of those who lived
Without occasion for infamy or praise.'
- Dante Alighieri

When I woke up at first I thought I'd gone blind but it was just the bandages on my eyes. I tore at them, and two hands came forth to restrain me. They were gentle, I did not persist. I can't imagine a thing I wanted to see. There was a soothing voice attached to the hands somehow (or so I imagine) but I was already sinking back to wherever it is that I go and I didn't catch the words. Sometime later I came to and I was back in the cubicle. Nobody commented upon my absence, so naturally neither did I. I felt angry and went at my tasks with even greater disinterest than usual. I return smiles with not-quite-improper hint of resentment at each corner. Through the window to my right is some kind of a tree and then the face of the building opposite, and quite a bland face I must say. Down below is the street, somewhere. I can't really hear it often, the extractor fan makes this awful skreeskreeskreeskree sound at all hours, even the unsociable ones. It is easy to imagine it is not there at all, that it's buildings all the way down, as they say. Once I heard a voice, projected through a megaphone. There were colours in my eyes, as when you have a migraine. I went for a lie down. Was this then or now?

'BOREDOM IS COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY'
- May '68 graffito

I threw, you catch. Or drop it, turn away, take a drink, issue a thorough repudiation. But that's the game of it, isn't it?