Infernal sleeplessness, causing my eyelids to shutter and shift in the darkness, preparing me for hours of dark despondency, the likes of which are unparalleled in the midrifts of romantic novels. An aching behind my eyes awakens in me the curious notion to defend myself, and any others like me, who may find themselves knotted up tight in conditions similar to my own, which I will presently describe. There is an art to forgetfulness, which was revered by many ancient theologians and scribes, who posited the Lethe as the initial outpost of the afterlife, which seems an underworld to so many. My art is in forgetting to remember at crucial moments that which I had catalogued in my mind, deposited for future reference and usage, and aimed to recollect, such as now, when I can not seem to reconnect the bolt of these statements with the nut of my conception. My art is in retrieving, as if at random, the nuances and innuendos which I have misunderstood at different intervals of my life, which has proceded like a feather caught in a storm...in no particular manner. Thus I confuse that which I read yesterday with a motion picture I viewed in Seattle in 1978. Or I will mistake a magazine article I read in high school with a few moments of a television talk show that I saw once while in college, waiting in a dormitory lobby for a young woman to retrieve her coat from her closet, three flights up.Traces of ideology have clung to my consciousness, as latex paint clings to the skin after a particularly messy job of painting the side of a building; I think therefore I hesitate, Do unto others as they have done unto you, take a job big or small -- do it right or don't do it at all! God's condition being Love, or Life, or Death. A frenzied blurr of inclinations decorates the eight-cornered space of my room, the world. Wash, rinse, spin, adore, crouch, yearn, trace, imagine...how can my closet be this cluttered? Bringing myself up to the front edge of a mumbling crowd, into the closest circle of observers of some malicious incident, the purpetrator standing -- his chest heaving with disbelief and loss of cohesion. His mind melts apart as the heaviness of whatever weapon he may be holding in his hand causes him to realize the weight of the situation. The victim lays on his or her back, cursing, feeling the warm gurgling of their own blood with their fingers, which probe the slash or hole with the same variety of disbelief; their fingers red, raising to point. The noise of the crowd increases as the perplexity of the principal parties increases, a simple example of ratios conforming to ratios, a man raises a gun in the air and calls for silence.
Coughing and crawling beneath a building that is an element of higher education, my friend and I near the mouth of the tunnel where we can stand erect, to run unhindered by the low ceiling, dragging pillow cases behind us, the aluminum cans popping on the rough cement, like the palms of our hands. Its almost not worth the trouble, except for the pound and a half of silver that I'm carrying in my pocket, laundry money for months, maybe years. We reach the intersection of tunnel and tube, and we crawl out into a faded yellow light, and notice a man walking in our direction whistling. When he sees us emerge from the unlit tube, he whistles a sour falsetto sound and spins around diligently upon his left heel. Uh, did you see that guy? Sure, but there's a ladder only fifty yards away that we can take up to the basement of Jester, I think, no problem. I've lost a can of coke, which has leaked out a brownish funk all over the bottom seam of my blue pillowcase, but I am nonplussed...there at least a hundred other cans of soda pop. The moral compulsion not to spray saltwater into the coke machines and retrieve incredible amounts of free sodas and sometimes some of the change that those machines hid in their congested bellies was somehow lost on me during the boredom of my first year of college.
Discovering the transom that connected my thoughts with my dreams was a simple enough operation, one that required only a minimum amount of consideration and much experimentation. The clock indicating that it is half past four in the morning and I am wide awake and reconsidering all that has come to pass...ruminating on my joblessness, exorcizing a few scaly thoughts from my head as if they actually stank of sulphur, manifesting my most insane inclinations upon this captive page, making moot matters of mince meat and mores. I exercise the right to remain silent on certain subjects, because I know that I need not intentionally villify myself for having read too much. Dissecting myself could never have been as interesting as, say, feeding alka-seltzer to a seagull, or holding a little kitty-cat's head under the cold water faucet. Of course she scratched me...and I bled.
I espouse the virtue of consideration, and reconsideration. It is always better to give yourself at least to the count of ten before reacting to anything, including a gun trained on your torso. If there is something to be regarded, walk around it a few times before you give your estimation; get down on your belly to see what it looks like from a dachsund's perspective...then climb a tree and see how it looks from up there. When I was seven, and I had constructed a ramp made of plywood and cinder blocks to jump over in the sidewalk in front of our house. You remember the yellow bicycle with the elongated banana seat, and as I hit the jump I realized I was going too fast. From a height that actually enabled me to look my father straight in the eyes -- I could tell the bicycle wasn't cooperating with me -- it was, in fact, tabletopping, tilting entirely too much to a side. I could see in my father's expression that I was about to feel a tremendous pang. I thudded onto the sidewalk, and bounced, my bicycle broken, and I think I lost a tooth or two to the hot cement. But, while at that elevation, I could have counted to ten, maybe twenty, in flight for the first time.
Formulas came and went throughout my adolescence, which I strained to memorize but was eventually forced to inscribe them in the calculator's case. The teachers did not notice, or they were not too concerned, knowing that they themselves were able to have any and all formulas at their disposal in need of reference..."So why should the children memorize them by rote?" The wonderful properties of the Pythagorean formula were not made apparent to me until I was a senior in college, taking a philosophy class which dealth with the pre-Socratic philosophers; the relationship between the number ten, the form of harmony in music, and the hypoteneuse of right triangles is one of an elegant intrigue, reminding me of Guinnivere and Arthur, and Lancelot Du Lac, that achetypal triangle. Threes seem relatively insignificant in any physiological way. We have one brain, two hands, three?, four chambers to our heart, but what the number lacks in importance to our bodies, how it makes up for it in our souls...well, I need not recount all the varieties with which the supernatural has been expressed in groups and catagories of threes throughout the ages.
Gravity should not be thought of as objects falling away from or towards anything, but as the movement of objects across the shortest and therefore most efficient distances they can invent for themselves. Planets travel in an ellipse around the sun because they move around the shortest distance from where they are at any moment to any other time on top of the 'fabric' that is space, and the depression in this fabric created by the mass of the sun. If planets did not orbit, than any other movements they made would not be the most direct movement from point A back to point A. Of course, if they don't happen to find themselves in one of these grooves then they are pulverized into asteroids and meteors and other shimmering dusts. when I was levitating above that summer sidewalk, my body followed the shortest and most efficient distance path from where I had been to where I would land, regardless of whether I was bruised or toothless after the transaction. When I toss that book of poetry onto the barbecue, it follows a similar, streamlined path.
Amazing how water in a plastic cup can remind a person of Fruit Loops cereal when it is nearing breakfast time. I am tired, this was stooped, stupid, stew.
Document Title: In Defense of Post-Literate Idiots Description: From 1992 Date Created: May 22, 1996 by: http://www.megalith.com/cgi-bin/newdoc For More Information See: index.html © May 22, 1996 Robert Turk
