Building the Tower

Work has begun already, a great deal of work has gone into the project, no-one can reckon as of yet how many man-hours have gone into it (though I expect a reckoning will come at the end of time), and we are all as busy here in the Office of Planning and Development, which is located in our corporate headquarters some two hundred and sixteen tambules away from the work site itself. Although in the evenings we workers are absolutely free to pursue whatever hobbies or interests we may have made for ourselves (of course, said hobbies and interests cannot be outside standard organizational permissions), most of us‑‑a good 90% of us‑‑find it altogether too difficult to entirely switch away from the project towards which we've devoted so much energy and time. Consequently, when the metaphorical whistle blows, we're forced to leave, sadly and reluctantly; it's not that we can hear the thunderous hammering on the mountain from down here in the valley (although we sometimes can, if the wind is going the right way); rather, it's because all hobbies and interests pale in comparison to the project; we hardly ever look at clocks the whole day through, as people in other lines of work might, and we only remember to eat when we get prompted by physical pangs of hunger. Naturally, by the middle of the night everyone has left the Office of Planning and Development, and all is quiet (save for the hammering noise if the wind is right), but the action and bustle begin again a few hours later, when we are all drawn back to the immensity of it all, perhaps with one or two new ideas that have been drawn out of sleepy idle dreams, and eager to examine cursorily or minutely the accomplished activities of the group, as a whole and as individuals. At such times, in such early mornings, before the morning team meetings, we circle the room without making a sound, trying to glean such information as might be gleaned from creased blueprints, pen-and-ink flowcharts, and always-undated memos of a vintage that may be, for all we know, weeks, months, or years old; and note here that all these documents are not, strictly speaking, 'undated,' but rather that all documents in the Office of Planning and Development come to be assigned a key-code, perhaps from their inceptions, and that there exists, so we all believe, a Great Book, somewhere, that keys each and every official production to a particular date. One might think that a bureaucracy such as ours would require something of a transparency in which we could all work more closely and collaboratively, but it has been decided that a happy balance between collaboration and individualism had to be set somewhere, since too much of one to the negligence of the other would necessarily cause problems, and all the philosophers have agreed on this fact since the watery time of Thales of Miletus and his idea, or so I've read, that a liquid can neither be individuated nor collectivized. Thus, in those times when we are not absorbed with our own some-or-other structural problems of material fact or economic cost, we are able to come together (albeit through media) to expand our minds through other people's problems, and thus to perhaps solve their problems or to receive a solution to some problem of our own, and this, I say, is the productive balance we have verily stumbled upon, as if by chance, or as if by some transcendent principle that is totally beyond any single person's comprehension. We rarely speak to one another during these our investigations‑‑not that that's not allowed by our bosses, heavens no; rather, it's as through a kind of immaterial inertia that's meant to keep us focussed on our problems-at-hand‑‑and yet we have the ability, or so we're told in our monthly pep booster sessions, to see the bigger‑‑indeed the biggest‑‑picture: what we are doing here, in our massive organization in which really everyone takes a part, is, in this our silent (when not hostile) universe, ipso facto the single most important project for the entire universe (though sometimes they get modest and only say: galaxy). (I recall here parenthetically that some time ago I was wandering from table to table in search of signs when I spotted a colleague's yellow pad upon which were drawn perfect and interlocking circles of an ochre hue; four circles in all, with two overlapping, another almost overlapping with one of those, and another circle entirely outside the ambit of the other three; I made a quick sketch of their configuration before their creator returned, and when their creator returned he blithely put his coffee cup down on the yellow pad without so much as a by-your-leave, and thereby created a fifth ochre circle.) In any case, regardless of the scope of the magnificence of the project in which we are engaged, our lives as planners and developers runs around a rather routine hamster wheel, what with each problem adjuncting every other problem, which is somewhat funny, if you think about it: that this the greatest project ever is getting accomplished by an unknown number of individuals who appear perpetually to be as if walking through a dimly-lit cave, touching walls every two minutes, uncertain which way to turn, uncertain of the cave's size even, listening with all ears for anything like a word of guidance: that though we are embarked on this endeavour we have neither sextant nor compass (nor can we be assumed to even know the very meanings of the words 'sextant' and 'compass'). I work from nine to five, officially, though I have to admit to you, since you're my confessors, that we keep those hours; we're never in the office an hour or so before nine, and we never stay an hour or two after five, SUCH is our interest in the project of this building, up and up, into the sky, for we know that if we work, and work, we will get there even if we're just nine-to-fivers. I mean: how far away is the sky after all? We can all see it, and if we can see it, it seems natural and normal that we can get to it, and if we can get to it, with all its promises, why shouldn't we try to get to it, and won't all that happen without bothering with overtime? There it is, the sky, and the sky changes from day to day, but we can get to it; there's theoretical documents to prove what I'm saying here, but I guess you know about all of them, they're all published in the journals, you know of them, cit, On the Proven Lack of Philosophical and Technical Limitations, Journal of Theoretical Knowledge, volume IV issue 2, Technical Review of Hard Structures, Hard Science Studies, volume II issue 4, How Much Can a Load Bear?, Commonplace Book of New England Knowledge, issue 19. I myself seem to be most interested (because I'm told to be, har) and specialized in the logs of the x and the y axes that are oh-so-important to the keeping of it from falling down before it is finished, and I have to say that the work I do is vitally important to the entire project, since if I make a mistake some million or so people will be crushed to death when it falls; but hey isn't there a risk in everything? This morning, coming to the office, I nearly stepped out into the traffic of what I wrongly thought to be a one-way street; I don't want you to think it was an especially close shave, because it wasn't: I, for a single dark moment, had confused one street with another, no more no less, and I caught myself from stepping out with plenty of time to spare. Nonetheless, what I mean to say is that there could come a particular day when you forget where you are, perhaps even who you are, and your life will then be in bloody peril at that particular moment; so when we are building what we are building, we know there are risks involved, and, yes, it could tumble to the ground at some moment, because it is a very complicated structure and you can't plan for everything, you know; that said, we take a great many precautions, almost to an unnecessary excess, since we really do want to succeed. In any case, and in furtherance of the idea, certain poets who shall remain nameless take a kind of glee in the possibilities of failure, bringing one pessimist so far as to say any action is a hopeless action, since the whole cosmos will come to a grinding halt one day, and this project can't ever overcome the gravitational forces that will analogously bring down also, given enough time, the tallest mountains in the whole world. I know these people are poets and all, taken to exaggeration and hyperbole‑‑I've even dabbled in verse myself many years ago‑‑but still I believe they are doing a great disservice to the very principle of progress with their clever rhymes and newly-discovered metrical patternings; however, there's little to be done about them, live and let live is what I always say, and I make no bones about it and I don't apologize either, neither. I liked the older poetry better, the kind that kind of meandered without rhyming or having a proper metre, before everything got to being boringly so formal again, back when they where they were more interested in the symbols that could be conjured up out of ink on paper; we even ban certain poets, at least informally, here in the Department of Planning and Development, as far as I know, and it's only three particular poets, as far as I know, and I know you'd recognize their names if I told you, but I don't dare tell you. The structural engineers, with whom we have daily contact, don't know a thing about our informal bans, so closely do we keep the bans secret; the structural engineers are the stars of the show, as you can well believe, or do I have to tell you that the structural design is at the centre of everything we're doing here? I don't think I have to tell you that; anyway, these structural engineers are really quite bright, not just in the engineering department but about most everything else too, which intimidates a lot of people in the Department of Planning and Development, since technically we're above them and able to tell them what to do and what to design, not quite brick-by-brick but something quite close to it: we make sketches, imperfect and suggestive by design, and we hand it over to them and say: "Something like this is what's wanted, it's what we're passing on, this has gone through who-knows-how-many committees, and we have supreme confidence in your abilities to build pretty much anything anyone would ever want." The engineers look over the plans, ask about this-or-that mark of measurement, go away with a look of deep understanding, phone us up for some details a couple hours later, consult with us again the next morning, and finally we're going places, and it's only a matter of time before the finished plans are sent off to a different department, which I think is called the eventuation office, and we consider that a job well done. Once, I recall, I was called, along with three others, to the engineering department to have one of our meetings (but only called there because they had built a prototype of a component which was, ironically or not, too fragile to make it down the stairs in one piece); we'd never been there before, and I don't know if my fellow planning-and-developers thought the same as me‑‑I never asked‑‑but I was of the opinion that their office was only slightly, only slightly, better than our own, only because they had an extra coffee-maker. The engineers, who may or may not have been the same engineers as the ones who had met with us earlier, proudly presented us with their prototype, asking us to keep our distance from it and not breathe too heavily in its presence, which we quietly and breathlessly circled, trying to judge if it was what we had written and drawn up in the earlier days; finally, one of us braved enough to say that it didn't look at all like what we'd drawn, and the engineers were puzzled enough to produce for us the drawings, and one look at the drawings brought us all to a enjoy a good laugh, since they weren't our plans at all, they belonged to some other department though no-one knew which. In any case, we went away, chuckling mostly to ourselves, but still the sight of the extra coffee-maker disturbed me, not because our two departments may have the same number of workers‑‑it would take more than a couple triplicate forms to find out for sure‑‑and thus should have the same number of perks available, but rather that I did not know how exactly they'd come about to have one more than we did. Was is a special requisition, were there extraordinary circumstances, was it grandfathered in, was it a temporary replacement that never got returned, did they borrow it from another department and forget to return it, was it the personal property (unauthorized in itself) of one of their team members, did we have another coffee-maker hidden away in some cupboard, had we failed to get ours from the requisitions department, or had a notice not arrived at some point in the past informing us that we were being given another coffee-maker? I thought that day about finding out how this unexpected turn of events had come to pass, perhaps by notifying the department superior to our department (and possibly also reigning over the structural engineering department) about this conundrum, and though I knew for a certainly that I would receive a prompt and clear reply as to why things were as they were, I knew that the department superior to our department (the name of which escapes me at the moment) was an incredibly busy department with plenty of pressing matters to deal with in a project of such an unprecedented scale as ours, and that to reply to every little mewl from every little subordinate could not be done, despite their massive intellectual power and their dedication to perfection in all matters no matter their smallness. I imaginarily foresaw my query passing from desk to desk in that department, each position honing a little my question‑‑sometimes cutting out some language, at other times expanding my phraseology (perhaps by adding adjectives or adverbs), or, to be novel, adding and removing letters here and there, until what I had queried had become a bundle of paragraphs far removed from what I had written‑‑now, don't get me wrong, for this process was the process that had to be followed from desk-to-desk and department-to-department, since, not only would it be the case that my memo had been badly written‑‑I'm not a good enough writer to not be edited‑‑but also each of these desks and departments would have a purpose far beyond mere notices about coffee-makers. In fact, with each one of those edits, the desks would be slightly improving their skills in their usage, even concerning something as insignificant as a kitchen appliance, and, let's not kid ourselves here, any large organization is dependent on insignificant tasks and procedures in order to arrive at 'the big picture' in its most important measure; as it has been wisely noted by someone-or-other, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and that goes triple-fold for a giant international endeavour such as the one that we're attempting in the vast and measureless, horizon-stretching even, nature of the work of myself and my department-mates and my parallel-department-mates and the higher-ups and the lower-downs who draw their paycheques from the Grand Exchequer (whose office is I-know-not-where). The problem of the coffee-maker, I knew, paled in comparison to the deeds of my department, which are, in case I haven't mentioned it already, the development and the implementation and the organization and the brainstorming and the feedback processing and the measuring and the reporting of pretty much any task given to us through memos and pneumatic tubes and even computers with their shiny lights that blink on and off, though offering no-one any clue as to whether their blinks are meaningful or ornamental; the messages we receive (which come every second day sometime before ten in the morning) aren't always signed and aren't always addressed, but they come to us, and we must act on them ASAP. We'd pass the messages around the office, from team member to team member, and read the messages, but‑‑and this is something quite curious‑‑I've often found that the message, once it had gone through everyone's hands and had been returned to me, read differently from the first time I'd read it, as if in the process of reading the text it had changed to suit someone's suitability, either the suitability of my colleagues who certainly hold views different from mine, or because I myself have gone through a slight change in perspective whilst the note was circulating; in any case, I've only noticed this effect on a handful of occasions: most of the time, maybe two-thirds of the time, the message remains stable and fidelious and these messages we have no difficulty bringing into a process of definitive action; however, the messages that change during circulation always pose the greatest difficulty, and they seem the most pressing, seeing as the two-thirds that are most easily understandable and lacking in all ambiguity present little problem to our intellects and abilities. Furthermore, the mysterious every-third-message that comes from departments so high above ours that in almost every case we've never even heard of said department, and in a third of the cases the departments are identified only by ciphers or abbreviations or acronyms which no reference book can satisfactorily resolve, and in a third of those cases it's almost impossible to tell if action is necessary or if thanks is being given for the solution to some problem that had been solved months or years back; in those latter cases, if it's true that gratitude is being given or if seems likely that gratitude is being given, we have ourselves a little party, with coffee and cake, and these coffee-and-cake parties happen, oh, requests come every second day, and every third request is unstable, and in a third of those we don't know where they come from, and in a third of those the name of the department is hidden from us, and in a third of those it seems gratitude is being given, and in half of those gratitude is truly being given, so that's 2 by 3 by 3 by 3 by 3 by 2, which means we have coffee-and-cake every 324 days, which, absenting weekends, means it could very well be an annual event. Isn't that a co-incidence.... We're organized into teams, as I've hinted, our department is, teams of four, as it works out, and each team gets tasked to work on a particular aspect of a problem; now understand we have two days, more or less, to solve each problem that gets presented to us, so we really have to be organized in our little quartets; and meanwhile it's somewhat miraculous that when one person is unexpectedly absent through illness or childbirth we manage to self-organize into quartets all the time and seldom is there any odd-man-out to whom we have to task minor tasks such as cleaning the kitchen or the coffee-maker, those damn coffee-makers, or sometimes we make the odd-man-out run personal errands to the laundry or the grocery or the liquor store, depending on the day of the week. We go into what's called a 'huddle', and we swear ourselves to molecule-level secrecy such that each quartet cannot communicate, i.e., pollute with information, any other quartet regardless of whether they are in the next room, on the same floor, or (perhaps [though unlikely]) a million miles away; there we huddle, puzzling over and brainstorming the portion apported, via pure reason and analysis, us, of the mysterious communique we had received at some point in the past, sketching on whiteboards and blackboards with chalk and sharpies mysterious and arcane triangles, pentangles, and septangles meant to represent loci and foci acting upon the central problem: and this is only the first step in the solution of the problem! Look: there's Chuck, wearing his blue shirt and his jeans, with the glasses he bought at a second-hand shop and had re-lensed, with his red ballpoint pen touching his chin, ready to point out that a particular angle is a little too obtuse; and there's Trudë, in a faux-camel-skin blouse and dressy pale green slacks, reaching for her foam cup of foam coffee which is looking out the window at nothing at all; and there's Angela, light o' me life, leaning back with her eyes on the ceiling tiles whose composition is of some kind of drywall with large and small holes all over them and divided by what I believe to be aluminum plathes (if that's even a word), and she's wearing clothes that suit her to a T; and me, with my eyes roaming absent-mindedly over the creases and wrinkles of Angela's blouse, noting how they bunch up beneath her lovely breasts yet are entirely absent in the areas above her... nipples...; and the problem has gone unapproached for something like twenty minutes already, each of us has a different idea of what the problem is exactly, but we know we're making progress, because we're always making progress. It's built into the pie, this certainty of progress, and when the team of which I am a member finishes up a project, regardless of how plain or complex it is, we sign our large names to it, then one of us, chosen by lot, leaves the room to deposit the finished product in the outgoing slot, then returns to our room whereupon we immediately give one another gold stars. Now you may want to know what happens to the solutions we so proudly send off, for I'm sure you want to have some evidence to back up your opinion that we are doing such a wonderful job in the Planning and Development Department, and the evidence is as follows: months or years or decades later, we will receive, in a new batch of assignable problems, the same problem again, but the second time around it can be seen and is plainly evident that whatever solutions we provided in the last round had been taken into consideration in a major way or a minor way, which signifies quite obviously that we're moving things ahead and they wouldn't be moving ahead were it not for us and our small manageable teams. It's not all high-fives and cakes, of course, even though our great effectiveness is plain to anyone who can add numbers together; when we leave for the day at five o'clock on the dot to go home to our personal lives (leaving our personnel lives behind), when the last one out turns off the lights, as we go through the vast building of which we know only selected bits, meeting also at the same time people we've never seen before, we (I assume the others too) are dwarfed and awed sublimely by the beauty of the whole enterprise and once we are actually outside we en masse turn back wistfully to look at the magnificence of it all; and we all go home, and nothing important happens there; and we return to the workplace with gratitude bursting our hearts to overflowing. Back in the building once again, first one in turns on the lights and though we make small-talk about the events of last night we know we're talking about matters of no significance whatsoever, knowing that is rather here in this Department of Planning and Development that our real lives and our authentic purposes lie; we blow at our desks to blow away whatever little bits of the wasted overnight time have managed to settle upon them, and it's time to catch up on the mail (for the mail-bot has already arrived for the first time of the day, in our department at precisely this time and then in the next department [I think it's accounts payable] at precisely the next time and so on throughout this quarter-or-so section of our floor), and it's time to have some little contact with the departments parallel to ours in the organizational structure. O, and we also gossip about who is in and who is out, and sometimes we say words of regret for those who have been fired or who have retired or who have died, for there's a certain amount of turn-over that happens in the building, and even if we're only faintly familiar with the he in question or the she in question, we feel sad for them knowing they've lost out big-time, no longer having any connection to this the greatest endeavour in the history of the planet which is known as Earth. We prepare our notes and queries in preparation for the morning team meetings (which, though they have been known to stretch into late afternoon or on occasion into the next day, we still call 'morning team meetings', the phrase being, grammatically speaking, something of a redundancy twice-told, since there are no afternoon meetings, and the meetings are always team meetings), happily and joyfully we prepare our notes and queries until it is ten o'clock, and time to assemble in our morning team meeting rooms; and we go into the room with smiles on our faces, knowing that over the next indeterminate period we will be exercising our minds as never before, or at least not in the last eighteen-or-so hours, puzzling over some problem that had been sent to our department from places unknown that though unknown knew we were the right people for the job. Copies would be handed around: Chuck, again in his blue shirt and jeans, leans back in his ergonomic chair (all our chairs are ergonomic) to scan the text; Trudë, in her ladies' lunch outfit, is scratching her knee and patting her hair, all the time reading with a knit brow; and, of course, Angela, whose eyes are clear and blemish-free, and her mouth is twitching enchantingly as she precociously is already coming up with unspoken suggestions and unvoiced ideas; and I am there too, as you can well imagine; and outside across the campus plaza the sun is shining down obliquely (for the room's window faces south-by-southwest), and the problem concerns the routing of building materials meant to be used in the construction of somewhat larger assemblages in a place or a state or a province none of us have ever heard of: though that's never stopped us before, and it certainly isn't going to stop us now. We take out the white- and black-board erasers and make a clean sweep of the remains of our last project (which none of us can recall the first thing about anyway), and we're drawing imaginary maps with ideal lines connecting several points to several other points, not to scale in the least because that matter of measures, of tambules, is completely unknown to us (though the problem may be revised to include tambule measurements in days to come in order to perfect the solution we are going to eventually arrive at), and I come to see that these drawings or sketches or whatever are in fact also describing something else, something I can't quite put my finger on, and if in a state of divine inspiration I go to the board, saying: "This is a more elegant way of putting the problem," whereupon I clean off one particularly knotty bit of representation and replace it with a slightly less knotty bit of representation, whereupon Chuck and Trudë and Angela are silent for a moment as if taking it all in then and there, whereupon Trudë says: "That makes everything a whole lot clearer now, doesn't it?, whereupon they start writing notes, notes on the notes, in the margins, whereupon Angela says

2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2↑2 Sides to Every Story

Inside is Outside's Outside

 

"People shouldn't make fun of me, even if they think they're being wittily cruel. They think I make mistakes when I leave a building because I always go in the wrong direction. They don't know what they're taking about.

"You're walking down the street, and you go into a shop. Let's say the shop is on your right, and so, to go in, you have to turn right. Now you're on the inside of the building, and space has been pulled inside out. It's like you've passed through a mirror, and you're inside it. But what people don't get is that when you were outside, you were inside, albeit in the inside of the outside. When you turn right, and passed into the inside, through the mirror, you have to still be inside of the outside. How could the nature of space change just because you're in a different context? So, naturally, when I leave the inside of the inside to go to the inside of the outside, I go in the right direction, which, to others is the wrong direction.

"But they don't get it. I always go the right way. Pull it out yourself."

 

*

 

Here comes the boy, the boy wonder, the one all the girls are talking about, the next big thing, the trainee trained by the finest baseball minds of our generation, said to be shy, said to be diffident, said to be innocent, said to be arrogant; he's clean as a whistle, straight from the showers, in a fresh uniform tailored to his form, blindingly white fabric here on this sunny spring morning, and his leather shoes are shining too, his cap on properly, not like some people we know; he's choosing his bat from out the bat-bin, careful his is to get the right weight and line, doesn't have to spend any time rolling it on the ground, for such is his pure eye to see what is true and what is false; he's walking to the plate, not a sense of swagger, not even of determination, rather doing what he was meant to do in this his life, not for nothing is he called The Future; he's standing at the plate, looking co-operatively at the pitcher, as if to say we're all in this together, we're her for a show, give me what you've got today.

Strike. Strike. Strike.

 

*

 

In a dark and confused mood, the statesman paces his Holiday Inn room. It's morning, and bright, which just goes to show how little God cares about us individually.

His servants, called secretaries, come into the room.

The statesman says: "I can't start my speech without a land recognition statement, and I don't know who to recognize."

The servants pull out their phones and start looking for Glaswegian history articles. The statesman paces continuously.

The first servant says: "It says here the Celts and the Picts had a presence."

The second servant says: "Wait, here's something. Caledonia. Fought against the Romans."

The statesman says: "Good, that's good. Anti-imperialists and all that. Caledonia. I've heard the word somewhere before."

"It's a well-known word, sir."

"So, the Caledonians. Who are their councillors?"

"They're entirely gone, sir. We're talking two thousand years ago."

"Two thousand! Goodness! It's good to know none will criticize me. So we're on the traditional land of the Caledonians, are we? Thank you very much for this information."

"No problem, sir."

"And no-one will laugh at me?"

"Certainly not!"

"It makes perfect sense when seen from the proper angle."

"No-one's going to mock you."

"Never."

"Never!"

"Perish the thought."

 

*

 

Well I was hangin' in the 'brary

On a sunny day in June

When along came a girlie

As pretty as the moon.

"What is that you're readin'

Looks a pretty thickly book."

She sat down right beside me

With a sweet angelic look.

"Have you ever read Jane Austen?"

The vixen said to me

I replied: "Just Pride and Prejudice,

but everything else, you see."

 

'Cause I read everything, girl,

All that you could bring, girl,

The shelves and all the stacks, girl,

None follow in my tracks, girl,

I've read everything.

 

I've read Euripides, Sophocles, Thucydides, Homer,

Aristophanes, Cicero, Ovid, Lucretius,

Mahabharata, Ramayana, Harivamsha, all the parvas,

Brothers Grimm, the thousand-one, the Mabinogi, Malory,

Ghost stories, folk stories, terror stories, true stories,

All with ease

 

[chorus]

 

I've read Ariosto's Furioso, Machiavelli and Cellini

Cervantes, Sir Thomas More, Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser,

William Shakespeare, Beaumont-Fletcher, Burton, Bacon, Bunyan,

Aubrey, Dryden, Walton, Marston, Campion, Johnson,

Pope, Burke, Smart, Ford, Hobbes, Kyd, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John,

I'm not done

 

[chorus]

 

And there's Milton, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, Richardson,

Rabelais, Montagne, Voltaire, Moliere and Jean Racine,

Goethe, Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo, Baudelaire,

Maupassant and Zola, Paul Verlaine and Rimbaud,

Ibsen, Strindberg, Robert Burns and Wordsworth,

From my birth

 

[chorus]

 

I've read everything.

 

"I get the point, you've read everything, except for your fate."

 

*

 

On the second-last day of your vacation, you are suddenly struck by the conclusion that you haven't committed at all enough violence yet/ You've broken no lamps, screamed at zero hotel staff, and since you haven't bought a newspaper in eleven days you haven't read of any gross stupidity/ You look out the window at the sea of a cloudless day, at the dots of children splashing in water, the ovals of a hundred umbrellas/ and nothing is making you upset and you're hungry to get upset, upset about anything at all, but it's all so beautiful/ you'd have to have a better imagination to invent something out of whole cloth, and you simply don't have the imagination to conjure it up/ You open the sliding door. Maybe someone's playing loud music. No-one's playing any music at all, just the surf and the gulls and tree-wind/ Your spouse comes in from the washroom after a long hot bath, comes to you, puts arms around you, then lets you go (you're still looking out the window)/ Then your spouse says: "Gee, this is our second-last day here," and you turn and scream: "Jesus fucking Christ, did you have to remind me?"

 

*

 

"She asked me to sing a song she wrote."

"Did she write it all by herself? Words and music?"

"Said she so. I told her I sang my own only."

"What was her reaction to your dismissal?"

"Why, she said I could look it over first. Then decide."

"All written down, on staves and so on?"

"Yes, all in ink; carefully spotted, carefully barred."

"I guess by that you gave it the once-over."

"I did. In my head I read it. It was odd altogether."

"You know enough about real music to judge that?"

"I know my notes, I can modulate key signatures."

"Did you reconsider singing the girl's song?"

"Considered, considered, considered, and considered."

"I guess you came to some sort of a decision, then."

"The song was beyond my scope. What could I say?"

"I'd like to know what you said to the poor girl."

"I told her it was all beyond my capabilities, her song."

"Was she crushed and destroyed and decimated etcetera?"

"On the contrary, she beamed like the happiest lass alive."

"...."

"She wanted to write a song beyond the earth and stars."

"...."

"Her song was of God, and hence almost incomprehensible."

"...."

"...."

 

*

 

I imagine, with my eyes lifted upwards and to the left, I am back in a school that has elaborate grounds and many buildings, all looking barely worn and with promises of satisfaction within, and by elaborate grounds I am speaking of rolling lawns with youngsters lounging, having conversations, and reading books, (and the girls look pretty), and it is the first day of my second year, the first year being the first year an individual is actually allowed to choose his or her own curriculum, and I have last year's schedule to consult but I go on again off again thinking last year's schedule must or must not have the same pattern as last year's schedule, frankly I don't know as I consult last year's schedule which may or may not be the same as this year's schedule, for I don't recall filling in any forms in the last couple months, so I'm not entirely sure where I should be going, or even if I have what you might call a destination, so, taking all for all, I decide to go to the room in which my first class last year was held, and let things work themselves out.

 

*

 

Oh Raymond Chandler.

What's the trick?

Did you use colour?

Inks in other colours?

Did a great map

With action lines

And spots of climax

Like a boy's sheet

Let you progress

Around the action

Without ever once

Landing upon the secret?

Was L.A. pretty 2 U?

A lovely town indeed

Like a whole world

With many countries

And borders crossed

Only by the brave

Or the ones soon 2 B

Victimized, murdered,

By murderers already met

Or about to be met.

The loveliest city

I've ever seen, aye,

But with a darkness

I never noticed there,

And in response you'd

Say: "The tourists

Are safe, of course;

They're not worth

A bullet; no past,

No history, superficial,

Grudgeless, innocent,

At least as far as

This town is concerned."

So I didn't see the rot

That washed down the blvds

But never managed to get

Into the ocean to dilute;

Rather, pace you,

It settled into places

That looked haunted

Though how come haunted

None could say;

The city is a body,

Like Agrippa might've said,

With its diseases, abscesses,

Neglected members and lusts,

Held together by nothing

More than straight will,

And the odd detective

To bathe it occasionally.

 

*

 

From my diary, 31 August 1997

 

Last night, we set up our brand-new VCR, connecting it to an old colour television set in the bedroom. (We'll put together a real living room in a couple days, I think.) From the video store we got a couple things, but what I wanted to see was David Cronenberg's Crash. We watched it, and I was impressed, mostly. It somehow fell short of Ballard's book, but whatever. The cars were great, and the crashes were great.

M fiddled about with the TV after that, and she got onto the news. Apparently, and it turned out to be true, Diana had been in an accident in Paris and she was in a hospital. And then, you know, she died.

And really I was shocked. The girl was crazy and all that, but still, she had some history and heritage to her.

But what I really got from the shock of it was something about Crash. Sure, you can go on and on about the aestheticization of violence, abstractly-like, but outside of fiction, it's a terrible thing. She was mangled, lacerated, and all because of photographers.

I give the film four stars out of five.

 

*

 

That It Ends

 

Sometimes, I think it's merely the light in this room. It's not very bright; it's even been remarked upon by a 3rd party. I thought it was between me and the light; rather, I am forced to take some solace. Maybe I'm not going blind after all.

Walking up slopes, I have a painful hip. Is that so every time? It seems pretty tolerable, or even non-existent, if I'm going up slopes with someone. Mostly it's only when I'm alone that it hurts. It's probably because I rush up slopes when I'm alone. Maybe I'm not going lame after all.

I completely forgot someone else purchased razors for me, and I went out and bought another bag of them. Then I saw the bag on the shelf, and I said: "I forgot!" However, no-one's ever bought me razors before; it's all just a question of non-routine. Maybe I'm not going senile after all.

At times, I think there's something deeply wrong with my guts. Digestion is sometimes awry. On occasion, after a night of drinking, I have to rush to the bathroom. But that issue goes away after a couple days. Maybe I'm not dying after all.

 

*

 

In the days going dark, light becomes precious. We store it away in closets to keep it ready for whenever we want to use a little of it. It's all in twelve-ounce cans, and we've got a can opener hanging on a hook for quick access. You pop open a couple triangles on the top of the can and pour it over yourself. The stuff is so well-packaged that nothing has ever leaked out of a single one.

They're arranged in chronological order. The highest shelf holds the earliest hours of the day; sunrise, early morning, mid-morning. These are quite popular, and we have a lot of those times up there. Late morning, noon, and early afternoon are on the middle shelf, ranged from left to right, of course. Then on the bottom shelf we keep late afternoon and sunset and dusk. We keep very little of late afternoon, however. I don't have a theory for why.

If we were bats or raccoons, I suppose we would keep cans of darkness handy. But no we're not bats or raccoons. I hear we're what's called diurnal. It has something to do with our eyes. Oh, canned light, canned light: Me encanta.

 

*

 

Campus Novel

 

Scenario: Don goes back to school to finally finish getting his M.A., some thirty years after he left. A couple days in, he gets spotted by a fellow with headbanger hair.

"Are you a transfer student? I ain't seen you here before."

Don explains his situation.

"Ah! So, you left! And now you've come back?"

Don agrees.

"There's a few of us here our age; you should join our rock band. We do the new music. We've almost got Purple Rain down pat!"

 

Don is in a math class, getting back a little test. He got seven out of nine, but only one answer is marked with an X.

Headbanger and another show up and surround him. Don shows him, says: "I should have gotten eight out of nine."

The new other says: "That's, like, a nine percent difference!"

As Don and headbanger talk, the new other goes to a brick wall, climbs it several feet, removes some bricks, and pulls out a large kielbasa, and knife and a cutting board. Starts cutting.

Headbanger says to other: "Oi, Nick: You ever taken this math class?"

Between chews, other says: "Eleven times, I think."

These two never left college.

 

I might as well go on about this. Why not?

In the vision, I thought I recognized the other guys; somehow, I took them from The Young Ones, that old British comedy show. I can't say I've ever seen an episode, but I think I've seen some clips somewhere, sometime.

I have no idea how these guys could be in school for so long; you're usually given a certain limit to finish any degree. I figure I could come up with three different ways: one of them has secret means: he's the bastard child of the school's president or something; another one slaloms between 'auditing' classes and 'attending' classes, and nöone has caught on; and I don't know the third is charming enough that nöone wants him to leave.

I would have to certainly limit it to a single year, i.e. from fall to spring. Weather could come into it.

There'd have to be a love interest. "The audience‑God love 'em‑demands a pretty face."

There's a whopping heap of opportunity for the grotesque. These three boy-children, sheltered, not very aware of the outside world, constantly moving between ignorance and sophistication....

Who knows? Maybe some day, maybe years from now, maybe.

 

*

 

Look at that woman walking along the high street, now, about noon. She's wearing a maroon skirt and a white blouse, and she's looking into shop windows. She's looking for an accessory that will make her feel pretty tonight.

However, before tonight comes, she will have WON $72,000,000!

It's not that she's insecure; rather, it's that she wants some little token to signify she has herself to care about, and care about herself she does. The world she's in is so small, sometimes, it's important to be careful.

Later today, she will have WON $72,000,000!

Matters of some or much importance, the details small or large, how near an object is or how far it is, the colours of things, and their textures, how they smell, matter to her;

that is to say, until later, when she will have WON $72,000,000!

There's some jewelry on sale in a shop window. She judges it from the other side of the glass, imagining the sensation and the colour coordination. If she spends a little less on lunch, she can afford the pink one. The world matters, and her place in it.

But all this will change, later, she will have WON $72,000,000!

 

*

 

Fantasia

 

The cats get into their walnut brains the idea that they really have to do the same thing every three hours: eat, run around for ten minutes, then sleep for two hours and a half.

They get into their brains the idea they might now be fed after all; perhaps there's no food left in the cupboard, perhaps they've eaten their last meal, and perhaps now they're going to starve to death.

Into their brains goes the idea that, after all that work getting to be fed at the proper three-hour interval, they're relieved once again that it worked; and they're so happy-happy-happy they have to shove the rugs all over the place.

The cats get into their walnut brains that golly that was exciting all right. There's got to be some places to curl up in a self-congratulatory fashion, stretch, and pass out in positions most remindful of moulded Jello.

They use their brains to know when two hours have passed, and that it's time to lick fur to generate an appetite. They stick out their enormous tongues and give themselves the fiftieth-over. And they get the notion the whole routine has to start again.

Meow! Meow! Meow!

 

*

 

The train station was painted a brilliant blue in the morning light. My colleague brought the four visitors in his car. On the platform he told me: "Good luck with these guys. I'll see you here in the evening."

They didn't have money for the train fare, so I paid it. On the train they looked out the windows at the south scene and made lively comments, none of which I understood.

Detraining at Union Station, I led them to our head office. I showed them around, introduced them to my fellows, then we went to the presentation presented by the Vice President for Globalization.

After lunch, which I had to pay for, I showed them how we control traffic between our two countries. They took notes constantly even though I had given them bound dossiers (which I was, in effect, reading from).

Then it was time to get them back to Guelph. We went to Union Station, I paid for four one-way tickets and one return. Going in the other direction, they looked upon the north scene and continued to make comments.

We got to Guelph Station. The train station was painted a brilliant red in the evening light.

 

*

 

Because the theatres were closed due to plague, in 1593, Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis. Then he wrote The Rape of Lucrece.

Please, God, let this current plague, phony or not, end.

I so want to get onto a streetcar to go to work. I want to look out its windows to see the King Street shops, closed or shuttered or anything whatsoever. I very much want to have some twenty-five minutes to uninterruptedly read The Rape of Lucrece or something similar. I so want to have some lunatic on the Dundas streetcar, if that's what I decide to take to work (via a transfer at Dundas subway station to circle down to St. Andrew), singing 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer', in snatches. I very much want to go into that abomination of a building to struggle up four flights of stairs to go through stinking halls to where loud people say things they think are clever. Please, I so want to buy, beforehand, a pumpernickel bagel, with cream cheese. I so want to see, perhaps to latterly mock, the pretentions of 'journalists' who don't even read Shakespeare in their spare time. I want to be in the world's foul mess.

 

*

 

As far as glass houses go, mine is one of the most beautiful. You can see right through it! The furniture is all made of glass, and I have glass curtains and upholstery. Every day, from morning to night, people can look right in to see exactly what I'm up to. I don't even have electricity because the wires could obstruct just one person's vision. (I have a toilet, though, all of glass, pipes made of glass.) I only let transparent people come in to visit, because sight is everything. From the outside you can see me at all times. You can see me dress in the morning into my transparent clothes, and in the evening you can see me take them off‑in a way‑and get into my see-through bed with the see-through blankets. And you know what? I'm perfectly happy in my see-through house. What could I possibly have to hide? I'm a decidedly average guy, with average vices and not a single murder to my name. I've seen other people with their transparent houses, but they didn't make the effort I did. This house cost me a fortune. One day you'll see my corpse decay.... You'll like it.

 

*

 

"We had no choice that night but to spend it in a big YMCA dormitory. A giant grid greeted us, of oblong mats tucked under the tables we were to use in the morning for our gruelish breakfast. We couldn't find any adjacent mats, so Gris had to bunker down some three mats away from me. I read for a bit, fell asleep, and was awakened to some commotion. I looked over; a large man was begging for Gris's attention in a dirty way. I went over and intervened. The large man went away, and I looked around for an option. Saints befall us, there was a small separate room, unoccupied. We dragged our mats into it‑this was around 3AM‑and arranged ourselves. Some talk ensued; she'd forgotten some things out in the bigger room; her laptop etc.; I went looking for it. It wasn't there, but I found an attendant who'd been tidying up and she had the laptop. Back in our little room we slept peacefully for a couple hours until we were awakened by the manager, who told us the room had been available all the time, but that an unauthorized occupancy would cost us three more dollars."

 

*

 

I woke up earlier than I really needed to, it was a wonderful thing.

I toasted a bagel, and put cream cheese on it, it was a wonderful thing.

I listened to Beethoven's 9th and wrote along, a wonderful thing.

I went for a walk around the block, and that was a wonderful thing.

I sat down to do some work in the daylight hours, and got paid for it, and o, it was a wonderful thing.

I cooked some pork for us, in our wonderful cast iron pan, and that was a wonderful thing.

We watched The Night of the Hunter for like the ninth time, which was a wonderful thing.

I did the dishes, and I did them swell, and that was certainly a wonderful thing.

I went for an evening walk around the block, and that was indeed a wonderful thing.

Now I'm listening to Beethoven's violin concerto, which is truly a wonderful thing.

In a while, I'll mess around with Civilization V, and that's a wonderful thing.

And in a while, I'll go up to bed for beddy-bye, and that's a wonderful thing.

And I'll sleep, forgetting my few troubles, and that's a very wonderful thing.

 

*

 

The Rituals

 

When Patriarch Rev died, his four sects came to me to demand new rituals to be obeyed unto eternity. I held a great ecumenical council during which each sect had their say as I took careful notes. As a sign that our community was blessed by God himself, each sect agreed three times with all the other sects, three times with two other sects, three times with only one other sect, and only once did they want a ritual in which no other sect participated. Thus, I had to design four rituals to be participated in by all four sects, four rituals in which a single sect did not participate, six rituals in which one two sects participated, and four rituals to be enacted by a single sect, for a grand total of eighteen rituals.

I put it all in a balanced spreadsheet. It all worked out. I mailed the four sects hard copies of my proposal, and everyone groused. I tried again and again to convince them of the beauty of my solution, but it's like I was on mute and I couldn't unmute. They couldn't see elegance; frankly, I don't know what they were really after.

 

*

 

I'm not about to look it up in the Britannica (being as I am far too Romantic for any such endeavor); The End of the Affair (which I viewed earlier this week), by Graham Greene, and made into a 1955 film starring Deborah Kerr (in again one of her religiously-tinted roles), contains, as its turning point, the Jerries bombing London with an unknown weapon which, since it travels faster than the speed of sound, can't be heard by its target. It's a new type of bomb, afterwards called the V2, developed by (among others) Werner von Braun, and put into use in the last few months before V-E. (This are things I remember, remember, so I've probably made one mistake so far.)

James Lovelock, in a recent article, recalled how, in his Quaker family, his mother (or perhaps his grandmother) was relieved to find out that these terrorist weapons of mass destruction (which, for her, meant the slower V1) weren't planes but instead 'flying bombs'. Since they were merely machines, and thus relatively without control, culpability diminished.

Kerr, because of a flying bomb (felt rather than heard), receives a religious experience. (And don't forget: Gravity's Rainbow is about re-manning V2s.)

 

*

 

Afternoon, friends. Is it that time once again? Are you feeling worn down, listless? Do you want some step, do you need some pep? Shucks, don't be so gloomy, we all get that way sometimes. My wife and kids died in a fire I caused. Let me tell you, I was depressed for a whole year! But I'm here to tell you: I got over it, and you can get over whatever little pestering you're in right now. However, maybe you need some help, some tonic, some elixir. Maybe you think common street drugs are the answer, or maybe even some store-bought pharmaceuticals. But let me tell you, they don't work as advertised. However: look: here's something you've never seen before, something that'll cure whatever ails you. Yes, I admit it: the bottles look very small, but you know what? It's concentrated. Yes, each bottle is packed to its cork with powerful molecules and atoms carefully organized into a liquid matrix of God's own design! (I'm just the middle-man, har.) You want to know what it is? Do you really want to know what it is? It's called WATER. That's right: it's WATER. It's mere WATER. It's nothing but WATER.

 

*

 

It wasn't much of a river to speak of, as I found out in the morning. (When I'd arrived, with my tent of smallness and my blankets from the mill of blankets, it had been too dark to get much of a sense of it.) As I was saying, it wasn't much of a river; it was mostly rocks and stones, though there was a part of diminutivity that could be called a pool of smallness. As I was sorting my things in the tent, I considered bathing in it, but, by the time I emerged, there were people who in numbers exceeded more than a few in the area. So I decided to sit and look with simplicity at the pool, and there I espied a woman of greatness of beauty, bathing placidly. She waved to me, climbed out, and walked toward me. She was naked in totality. "You gonna come join me?" she asked. "Water's fine; clean, too." "No, thank you," I said. "I am occupied to fulness." "Really?" She looked around. "It's not that," I said. "Well then, what?" "It's a problem we could call linguistic that I am occupied with. I am trying to distort language."

 

*

 

Everything's a could. Let's slide down that slide and watch how tomorrow begins. Why not see what that tree-fort is like, even though it's trespassing? Let's be wicked, let's be pirates, let me hold you captive, and then I'll show you. We have time, plenty of time, let's plan a party and plan to invite all our favourite dolls.

Everything's a could. I can make up for it in the mid-terms. It was well worth it, what's a weekend between friends and classes? Maybe I'll fall in love, should I fall in love with him? Let's mess around with the tarot deck, I've got a book about how to read the cards. Can you imagine it, in 2030, if I'm idiotic enough to live so long, I'll be sixty-five. God! Don't tell me about it!

Everything's a could. We'll go away for that weekend. Where should we go? We could spend some time talking about when we were children. Yes, Christmas at my grandmother's house, and now half the table's dead. I spend too much time doing this, I wasted too much time doing that. Who said there's a great deal of waste in a civilization? He means life too?

 

*

 

Do you sense you've gotten immured in some place not of your choosing? Can you feel a voice high overhead‑is it your father's voice?‑it sounds like your father's voice‑demanding your attention even though you haven't seen him in so long? What's the voice want? And what's that other voice, coming from that room over there? You were in it just a couple minutes ago, no more than a half-hour ago, talking with some dozen people lying down on cots and ready to sleep, so which one of them is talking now? Is it you they're after? How did you get here in the first place? Where's your bags, your luggage, your toothbrush, your pills? There's got to be a bus or train station or an airport around here somewhere, but do you think you'll ever be able to find the right door? Still the voices are talking, maybe or maybe not to you, but still don't you feel they're directed at you? Put your problems in sequence, from A to B to C to D, and can you ever hope to get the sequence perfectly right? How do you expect to know which is important, and which to let follow?

 

*

 

Outside is Inside's Inside

 

"The problem with what you say is that we all start out inside; that is to say, in the womb."

"I've thought about that," I replied. I was lying on the bed on my tummy with my back arched and my arm under my breasts so he could get a good look. We were in an inn.

He stubbed out his cigarette. "So, you have to go outside before you go inside."

"Nope! Very few people are born outside, al fresco. Most are in rooms like this one. Right there, see? that outside is an inside too. You can go into the same inside, deeper and deeper, inside after inside; conversely, you can go outside forever, further and further out. I simply choose to be consistent about it. Unambiguous. Outside, inside: I go one way, or the other. Only I know for sure."

"I still don't see how that affects your behaviour."

"It's just that I know it's new spaces forever, like each hour is differently made. This time with you is like no other."

Hands moved. I continued: "Right now."

And, that said, I climbed onto him and enclosed his prick deeply with my pussy.