this she says deleteriously and without any tenacious immodesty wouldn’t be the form of thought it is if it
didn’t lack a certain ubiquity of absence and if this lack itself didn’t
present itself almost substantively and elusively across all things
curious he responds but not too nephologically and with arcane allusions to a
certain vituperation which she catches, but fleetingly, as if she were a
leftfielder for a defunct mlb team and made the out then didn’t i’ve been thinking along similar lines
myself or rather – as these things are – similar lines have been waiting by the
platforms at various stations in my mind’s metro for trains that never seem to
come
a common problem she muses as if the viscerality of her
consciousness were so exposed as to place her in a situation not disanalogous
to those times the time escapes us and we’re floating like emblematic beavers
on kidneyshaped artificial ponds, those kinds some sometimes pay to go
troutfishing in and not one without a
touch of saudade, not the type you find in south america but that transplanted
into language environments where some consider it an invasive plant and devote
almost unreasonable volumes of time, energy and money to developing
laboratories to manufacture synthetic mores to eradicate it
i know what you mean he says almost lugubriously although the weed
of the saturnine rarely breaks through the asphalt of his articulations which
are renowned – though this is far too forceful – in varied circles (though this
may suggest a diversity not truly manifest) for their evenhandedness, one
wouldn’t really say an enthusiasm or exuberance but some quality as difficult
to define and perhaps unnamed as those liminal emotive states we enter when we’re
granted by the gods or nature or society (depending on one’s beliefs) a
temporary visa for a sort of murky tourism into the unmapped regions, but no
one yet has spoken quite clearly of these tendencies in him just yesterday i think though time has been awkward recently, even
extending its anxieties into spaces it usually isn’t entitled to, i was
boarding a tram at aksaray when – strangely, epiphanously, rudely – a
consortium of cantaloupe merchants egressed and not only prevented my
travelling but necessitated a costly stay in a nearby hospice
this is fascinating she barely murmurs, and it sounds to him as
though she might be faintly satirizing his fourth wife though he can’t figure
out how this would be possible considering his knowledge of their networks and
more particularly her temperament which would under such conditions – all the
tests and indicators point to this – disallow much beyond a memory of a thought
of distant mockery and he speculates it could be one of those simulating
emotional aspects that refuses – through intent or whimsy, who knows? – to coincide
except through those unavailable realities we sometimes glimpse when reading
about a mass suicide, for example, of a minor siffleux cult in lower ghana our experiences of transit are so similar
yet – since identification is difficult – in their divergence they become a
misplaced reminiscence, one of those you find in a corner of a garret of
someone else’s grandmother who has recently passed away not through neglect or
disease or accident or even geriatricism but a tendency of those who maintain
such pieces to transfer their entire will and being into objects
i could only disagree if i were one of the
types capable of disagreeing with statements that appear to belong to the sorts
of ones that you’ve been making he gesticulates with suburban overtures of lunacy that conjure in her
mind, whose synaptic grid if it were laid out in two dimensions would deceive
most accountants (regardless of their experience or perspicacity or origins)
into thinking it was an electrical schematic for a future utopia designed by a
scientific-engineering conglomerate so vast, illuminated and esoteric only two
or three homeless hadoti gurus have dreamt its shadow, a stuffed rabbit of her
childhood she had loved to such extremes her mother flushed the worn remnants
down the toilet one drunken afternoon and
i have to thank you – this necessity neither born from any formality or caprice
– for introducing, even forcing, though i hesitate to use such diction but am
compelled by an image rupturing violently in some obscure wardrobes of what few
might call thinking, a train engulfed in such steam and smoke one would hardly
call it a train or thought of thought and this i speculate – and i sincerely
hope you’ll join me though i doubt with equal authenticity much camaraderie, not
from any dislike, uncertainty or animosity but from an impulse our present
space doesn’t give sufficient time to identify – is like a fuschia in some
alternative dominican in a cloister’s balneary where pious penguins go to pray
and she and i
continue talking in that way lacking termini and we would be chatting still (and
maybe i think mostly are) if it hadn’t been for the trolley that arrived
finally at the platform and she, oblivious and wise, climbed the steps and i (though
the reason has never become apparent) stood motionless and waited as i had been
doing for as long as i remember, waiting for another stranger to converse with,
waiting for the tram i’d finally board
