A metronome regularity. The only one. The rest — no. Quite irregular. Erratic, maybe. As if it were extracted, that regularity, like metal from a hill. Not gold. Let’s not get carried away. Something duller. Tin, at best.
That regularity, thank God, clips his wings. Or tries to. If you want it medical : the only thing in him that isn’t soft. That doesn’t give way. He writes. Every day. From four to eight. Writes. What ? God knows. He won’t say. Shows nothing. Better that way, perhaps. If he’d been a genius, someone would’ve noticed by now.
Slept badly. Woke up early. Right away, the word mesh pressed in. Then to mesh. Then mallet. Three words. No sense. Stuck from the dream maybe.
Drank lukewarm coffee. Watched the table catch the morning light. Thought of articles. Linking them. How ? Take disappearance. Only one match. Not a hundred and eighty. And what for ? What sense in linking a hundred and eighty texts to that ? None. It wouldn’t read. It would collapse.
Best reduce. Boil down. Just a few. A handful around disappearance. The rest — let it vanish.
Ran a query for body. Three hundred forty-seven. Could make a file, yes. Markdown. ID. Title. A sentence. But who cares. Cold work. Not fun. Not even useful. Just... worth thinking about.
Then mallet again. Back again. Wouldn’t leave. As if hitting mesh. A blow. Word on word.
The more the absurd closes in, the more he digs in. Is it out there, though ? That absurd ? One wonders. Might just be a show. A match. Boxing or wrestling. Makes no difference. Outside like inside. Just as absurd.
Sometimes it brushes him. The solution. A flicker. Tear down the wall. Between in and out. Fall into immanence.
But how do you breathe there. In immanence. Air’s got to go in. Carbon out. The living are subject to it. Contingency. Even that’s absurd.
What hides in disappearance ? A last desire ? A whisper of hope ? Return, perhaps. Resurrection. Catholic, that. A remnant. Formatting that never took. He’s thought of reformatting his brain. More than once, these past days. Better : no brain at all. Just sensation. The body alive. Everything erased to make room for the little self. That petty I. Always talking. Yapping.
The body wouldn’t say I. It would say the body. Third person. A third again. Always a third. One, two, three. Always three. Until no more sound. Nothing comes out the mouth.
It’s already far along. He hardly speaks now. The body’s terse. The gesture — minimal.
Yesterday. The short walk to the bakery. The body and the pavement, one. Step after step. That was it.
Up there, the martins screamed. Sliced what was left of thought. It was okay. Not good. Not bad. It was.
The body, if it can be said, became aware. Of itself. Too late. No celebration. No need. No musicians called. No speeches made.
The wind flicked the glasses cord. A whisper. Sounded like tinnitus, at first. Then you knew. Outside. Then the body became a thing. A slow mountain. Moving.
What was felt came from far. From stillness. From crystal. From flint.
