FICTIONS

Do not disturb

On my phone there is a button: do not disturb.

So I press it. 

Yet immediately my son comes to prod me and inform me of an immediate requirement of ice cream, then bursts into incredulous tears when I explain there is none left, that he himself ate the last morsel the previous evenings when we had resorted to luring him into the bath with said treat. He saw the empty punnet with his own tearful eyes.

I suppose there is a problem with my phone. Either that or my son, but he is more or less perfect. 

Perhaps a software update will fix it.

Vessel, Cargo, Atom, Planet

These words came in longships and in barques, they were dragged over logs, carted among wines, olives, and figs, bundled up and slung across the backs of soldiers and cradled by the hands of children. 

These words carry the atoms which fled Democritus’ lungs and the photons that lit the visions of Horace. Within their inflection, there is the curve of a bison’s flank, the curve of the walls of the earth.

These words were quarried in Istria, felled in Palearctic forests, picked from Lydian vines, and harvested from wheatfields that drink from the Elbe.

 Sometimes a sword is unearthed. Half consumed by the mud, its blade rusted away, of no use in any hand. Still, it is proudly displayed, its survival is seen as a thing of wonder.

Yet the words that traveled with that sword and spilled out of its scabbard retain the power to cut creation into the smallest pieces. 

To be carried, to carry, to dismantle, to compose.

Or, a sketch of a proof of the infinity of thought

No worries of rain. Only an idea, a notion, or even less, a word. The beginnings of a word. Something that is not yet, yet is, is a thing, but not a thing that is. This sort of thing. The sort of this that does not have a word, no name, there are words around it, but none of those words are its name. And without a name, we do not yet know its character, and a name will change its character. If we name it, we destroy it. We fill the space between the words, and that space is its body.

No worries of rain. No images of oceans or what is within oceans. Nothing that is liquid or solid or gas or plasma is what I am thinking of right now. Neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral. No real pattern. What I am thinking of is at an angle to all these things and to every item in every lexicon. Orthogonal, or — better — diagonal.

And if you should think of some new thing that is none of the things of which I am not thinking, I can tell you already, I am not thinking of that either, it is equally oblique to and untouched by that.

That’s what I’m thinking of right now. 

I trust that makes things clear.