Heather opened her eyes a sliver, awoken by the sound of something she didn't want to know about coming from Delia's room. Unfortunately through her veil of eyelashes the first sight her eyes fell on was the green blanket piled on the radiator across the room, which evoked feelings too incendiary for her to pretend she wasn't awake. This blanket represented to Heather either absolute proof or absolute disproof of divine justice. Several years ago, Heather and Delia's grandmother had given them blankets for Christmas. They weer suede on the outside and downy on the inside. She gave Delia the lily pad green one and Heather the brick red one. Blind to the utility and obvious beauty of the gifts, Heather was immediately enraged--engulfed in her rage--because her room, and all the things in it, were shades of pink, while Delia's things were so haphazard and eclectic that any color would do. She managed to bury her horror at this lapse in judgment and was able to behave civilly to the whole family, no less to Delia and Grandma herself, both of whom were completely oblivious of anything wrong. It became apparent to Heather in the ensuing celebration, as her mind raced uncontrollably through all the possible logistics that could have caused this nightmarishly minor faux pas, that one of two things was almost incontrovertibly true: either the universe really was spontaneously set into motion by an exponentially unlikely chain of events, beginning with stars and reaching up through Heather's hellish present, because this kind of sublime mistake of chance could only be manifested in the most random and detached of worlds; or, there exists an all powerful deity and he, she or it had maliciously and intentionally caused Grandma to accidentaly switch the nametags on the identical boxes, and then to forget whose was whose anyway (and probably wonder, how much could it matter?), thereby plunging Heather into the fires of contemptuous indignation and forcing her to ruminate, for several years now, almost obsessively on the possibility of a God bigger than the universe and Its coexistence with pointless suffering, infinitely more passionately than she ever had before the blanket incident.

And so began poor Heather's day; she shuffled out to the miniscule kitchen to distract herself from her morning depression by making tea.

Delia's multi-colored bush of hair seemed particularly alert today.

Yes, Delia and Heather are cousins, though they are as different as their reactions to the fraternal blankets. Heather is often mistaken for an anemic preteen while Delia, tall and generously endowed, looks as if she is trying to push her flowers to their pigmentations' limits by visual stimulation alone. After dinner, she had casually observed to Heather, "I already have something lily pad green. Want to trade?" Somehow, this reversal of fate contributed nothing to her breakneck existentialism.

"Can you work in the shop today?" asked Delia. Her voice generated overtones akin to an opera singer's, though she spoke without theatricality or pretension. In fact she had no idea at all she sounded like a mezzo soprano, which only added to her charm, to people who notice these things.

Heather made her wait until she had microwaved her tea, stirred in a ghastly amount of milk and used this concoction to clear the cocoon from her mouth before she answered.

"You need me to?"

Quite convinvingly: "I'd love you to. There about a half dozen weddings next week, and they all want the biggest arrangements we have. Are you free?"

Delia is an anomaly. She is remarkably bright, yet impossibly stable. She both thinks about and is at peace with the world. She enjoys tending to flowers and so she manages a florist shop. Vibrant colors lift her spirit so she surrounds herself with them. Large engines trouble her so she drives a compact car. In fact she is so stable and intelligent that she knows she is both, and tries to share her good fortune, primarily with Heather.

Heather instantly recognized a way to distract herself from her inevitable mid-afternoon depression. Something to do! Something necessary!

Delia turned toward her.

"Do you feel okay?"

Her eyes were fixed on the wall and her hands groped at her stomach. Lips moving soundlessly, she lurched forward as if dry heaving. She was standing in a puddle.

"Oh my gosh," muttered Delia and instinctively jumped forward to accompany her friend to a sitting position.

"Heather," she said, "did you even know you were pregnant?"

Disclaimed

Characters seem to be exempt from morality. Mariel Nicosovic--as a character, not a human being--has no obligation to notice or work to alleviate the poverty in her backyard, or to reflect on the absurdly inflated death rate around the corner from her mansion. It is her duty as a character, only existing from the outside, to tirelessly spend her efforts on the upkeep of her preposterously large house, hiring people to train the domestic help, ignoring her kids, buying new boots every season, and appearing at important social functions, all within the same universe--the same zip code--as young black men who are more likely to either murder or be murdered than learn long division.

The premise is: M.N. does not care about the cycle of violence. But that's okay, because she has such a distinct personality.

To tell a story--a made-up one--about a world of people whom the plot depends on to be ridiculous and nonsensical is to detach oneself from the events and to wash one's hands clean of moral responsibility. In other words, a plot that derives from its characters' inability to act humanely condones immorality by immortalizing it.

Is it necessary to be a solipsist for your life to be a good story?

For instance, the novel Trainspotting is about a bunch of heroin addicts. If they all made the right decision (to stop using heroin), there would be no Trainspotting. Trainspotting, arguably, is a good thing--first, if only because it is a book, and books are objectively and inherently good; and second, because it is a good book, well-written, innovative, imaginative, highly enjoyable, insightful. Why is it acceptable to suspend morality for the higher cause of a good book? It only encourages suspending morality in one's own life. Either: it is necessary to have an outlet, a way of exploring the path, the results of immorality, so that people do not suppress their wandering thoughts; or, it is an atrocity to invent evil and bring it so close to daily life that it is at times hardly separable. Or, people who are most susceptible to the invented immorality of novels are the least likely to read them, so it doesn't matter.

thoughts on the isolate

Today I came to a realization so startling that it can only be described as blog-worthy, I suppose (I mean that tongue-in-cheek, but it's true that this is my first time using The Hour as a journal). Anyway, at training this afternoon we had to say something about ourselves that people wouldn't know by looking at us, so I said I was born deaf, because it was the most interesting thing I could think of that didn't sound like I was bragging. It occurred to me (hours later) that people might have taken that to mean I was deaf for several years, or something, because I neglected to explain that it was due to an ear infection, not deafness as a curse itself, and only lasted a couple weeks. For those same reasons, of course, I almost never think about it. But while playing the piano and silently cursing my ringing ear I suddenly saw it from a different perspective: "I got my hearing back. It's not perfect, but I don't know what I did to get it back at all."

What black thing should I wear today? wondered Jessi, coming dangerously close to wry self-awareness before being distracted by her reflection. She was painfully close yet still acutely far from realizing that she could fulfill the dual roles of spectator and star simply by talking, and listening, to someone.

You might wonder, what was Joel doing in Ghana that whole time? Why, he was writing a poem. He scribbled it from start to finish in one sitting, then spent the next two months tirelessly revising it; then he copied it for his own records on the back of a pay stub and put it in a hardcover Zadie Smith novel for safekeeping.


I was right: I broke the chains
(or stretched them) and reached the edge--clearly I saw
not the sun but the inside of yet a larger cave. With larger shadows

Like kittens raised in darkness I have only ever seen the cave wall. For one thousand years I have only seen a cave wall. Did my eyes develop only to the contours of a cave wall? Can
I see anything else? I can imagine something else--

The kittens, at least, are unafraid of darkness. I myself am quite accustomed. In fact, the darkness even takes shape for me and my eyes see light around it--

Who's hallucinating? I don't see anything that's not here. I think.

I reattach the chains, return to my place, content (deny)
having something to want.

The important thing is not to get arrogant. (How did I know what a sun was?)

What bothered Heather about the unfortunate situation of giving birth was not so much that the child had no eyes, but that he was blind, and what nauseated her about his blindness was that there was no hope for the reinstatement of his sight, and what was most unstomachable about that was that her body had failed to create for its fetus an integral body part that would so concretely and irretrievably dictate the baby's life. How could she have failed so miserably at something that was so completely beyond her control? How could she be expected to make any right decisions on an overtly conscious level when her own uterus, without any input from her, had so tragically and unspeakably failed her?

Furthermore, it was her own physiology that had betrayed her, first by refusing to honor the cardinal rule of pregnancy--that its afflicted gain weight--and then by neglecting to form, without explanation or apology, two organs which are so terribly relevant to a person's upbringing. Heather was now sublimely afraid of her own body, which she now knew had the power to unleash untold suffering on an innocent being, and it was only a matter of time before it turned such unharnessed aggression against her.


Joel's living room had hardwood floors. In his bedroom the carpet was red with cloud-like shapes carved into the threads. The cupboards were smooth and white and the ceiling was white too. The kitchen floor was the same hardwood as the living room but had been covered with a pattern of metallic blue and purple to look like a calming ocean at sunset. Sometimes Jessi claimed she had an artist's temperament, as if her painting ability was not an end but justification of her atrocious behavior. The painting was very convincing and for longer than Joel realized, Jack did not think that water had to be wet. The soft, round pools of light on the kitchen floor, where Jack spent a great deal of time, mirrored the amorphous, unlabeled images floating in his mind, and they gave him a sense of profound agreement between the worlds within and outside him. Thus he grew up, thanks to Jessi's artistic caprice, with both an unshakable spiritual tranquility and a fundamental misunderstanding, neither of which were known to Joel.

The Chimney

Poor Jessi! Her personality was so contradictory that she often found herself in tears without knowing why. She naturally tended to be quiet and observant, to seek to understand the nuances of those around her, so that she could acquire the most equitable ones and in turn be observed with maximum favor, by someone as keen as she. It was her misfortune to be forever caught between speculator and star, two positions always in need of the other, and she could not be both. Her simultaneous and opposite needs for attention and anonymity created in her a knot of anxiety and utter bewilderedness.



Jessi had an underdeveloped concept of time and only thought about it when she was waiting for her next break--from anything. She was crying prettily the day she saw Joel, when she came back to the apartment under the contrived guise of returning some misplaced possessions.

"I didn't know what you would think about these," she told him, indicating a box of shiny plates with rabbits on them. "I took them because I used them most, but later I realized they were yours."

Joel was trying to clear the counter in front of her of all the infant paraphernalia that had accumulated on it for weeks. "I got them at a garage sale. You can have them."

She sniffed. "Well, okay," she agreed tentatively, unconvinced. "And then there was the coat rack. You can just have it." She gestured at the coat rack, which stood tall-ly and redundantly close to the counter, and noted vaguely that she had imagined this transaction lasting longer.

"Thank you," said Joel as he deposited the last armful of bottles, bowls and napkins into the sink. Returning to his place across the counter from her, he realized his hands were empty and hastened to busy himself. He made coffee.

Jessi followed him around the counter and positioned herself in her old usual spot, arms crossed, leaning against the third drawer from the right.

"Joel--I also came to tell you--I need some of the other stuff too."

"What stuff?"

"Well, your stuff." Gaining momentum, she uncrossed her arms and went on, "See, I've found a new place, about a half hour from here, and I'm moving in soon. And it's much farther from my work than I'm accustomed, so I'll be spending inordinate amounts on gas. So I think you should let me take the furniture to offset the cost."

Lost, Joel replied: "But it's my furniture."

Patiently: "Yes, but it's my commute, and it will be very expensive."

"So don't move that far. Find a place closer."

"I like this place, Joel, it's bigger. And it has a chimney. Which is another reason I need the furniture from here."

Joel stopped thinking of Heather.

"Why, because there's a fireplace?"

"No, there's not a fireplace, please listen. There's a chimney, and it's bigger."

"The chim--the apartment's bigger? Jess, get a closer, smaller apartment. Why do you need--what's a chimney doing without a fireplace?"

"Joely, you know how I've always wanted a chimney, and now I find one, just when I need a place to live, and you're trying to take it away from me. Personally I think you owe it to me to let me take the furniture, which had become 'ours' anyway, in the last six months. I have a right to it too, and I need it more."

"But it's not ours. It's mine. And I'm raising a child."

"It wasn't a month ago, and you should have thought of that when--earlier. And this place is so cramped."

"Not anymore."

"That isn't the point, Joel!" Her voice wavered and he heard the threat of more tears. "The point is, you kicked me out, and now I'm living out of my car, and I understand why, but you need to understand that I have the chance for something I've always wanted and I think you owe it to me to make one sacrifice to help me. This is all happening so quickly..." She allowed her voice to degenerate to a whimper.

By the time Joel climbed the stairs for the thirteenth time an hour later, he had put his foot down at the coffee table, falsing claiming it had been his grandparents'. Jessi was too involved with her play-acting to recall the amount of abuse it had taken, or his pleasure at having found it roadside fairly recently. He also had salvaged two lamps, a bookcase she didn't know about, and several bean bag chairs, which she had relinquished in return for most of the kitchen appliances. Toasterless and feeling duly robbed, Joel faced his now spacious apartment and was able to catch his breath before he was filled with the energizing fear that Jack had uncharacteristically rolled up over the bars and out of his crib (which had, strangely, only barely escaped Jessi's all-consuming grasp).

"Jackie!" Joel burst into Jack's room to find his son crying pitifully, newly awoken. Perhaps he had felt the confounded, self-hating stupor that Jessi usually left in her wake. Vowing to never leave him again, and to really never expose him to Jessi's logic again, Joel cradled Jack and gave him hushing sounds until he stopped crying.

Joel was not thinking of Heather in a romantic way or because he felt any social or familial obligation to her. Instead he wondered blithely as he dangled one of Jack's toys for him whether she, having incubated and given birth to such a joyous human being, must have some latent but blinding beauty within her, and whether he should try to find out. He hummed Jack's favorite song as he waltzed with him around the kitchen, gathering the objects necessary for a baby dinner.

A train had gone right through our basement.

This was very odd.

For weeks we'd been hearing its aggressive call, its dissonant, distinctive horn sometimes in the distance, sometimes loud, as if it were right across the street. With the lake on the north side and the forest bisected by the parkway on the south, either was quite impossible. But we all heard it, including the neighbors.

"Did you hear that?" one of us would say, somewhat redundantly.

"Television," someone usually answered, but eventually it became clear that the TV could not possibly be to blame.

"The Polar Express," joked someone. It seemed just as likely.

But no matter. Now we had direct evidence that somehow, it had warned us in the only manner it was programmed how, and apparently now we were being punished for not heeding; our basement was ravaged, as if by a tsumani--a perfectly straight, ten-foot-wide tsunami.

It was all most unusual.

It became evident that we would have to move. "The foundation of the house has been compromised," explained Dad, meaning either the actual structure of the house or our belief that we had collectively, formerly held that we were safe from trains. "We'll have to move." Strangely, the neighbors had not endured the same wreckage. They had heard the horn, but their houses remained intact, as were the yards at the train's entrance and exit. It was as if the train simply appeared at one wall, wrought havoc in its determined path, and crashed through the opposite wall.

Then where did it go?

"I'm just so thankful no one was sleeping down there last night," said Mom tearfully. This was because the nights, though June, had been getting increasingly colder, and the train night had even dropped below freezing. Someone suggested that that was what allowed us to hear the train at all, because sound travels faster through stagnant air. It was true that we only ever heard it at night, and the days were seasonably warm.

Unfortunately, we could not move immediately because our insurance company refused to pay for the damage, citing our failure to have purchased train insurance prior to the incident. When the town hall heard, someone came to assess the situation, got mad at us for allowing property values to fall, and tried valiantly to find some way to blame us or the house. When that failed, it seemed they would be forced to deal with the fact that a train inexplicably rent our house in two, but even then they merely sniffed and said our shed was build too close to the property line and would have to be removed or "taken in" seven inches, and that it was impossible for a train to go through a house that was not built on tracks, so why in heaven's name did we live in a house built on train tracks?

Her name was Eva, inexplicably. And she existed, for our purposes, entirely within her immediate consciousness, which was bordered on two sides by the horizon, and she had her back, when we find her, to the other two. One horizon was the ocean, and one horizon was land.

It was true, now, she could see the vanishing point, and if she concentrated she could catch things in the act of vanishing; not moving but simply being less clear the farther they were from her.

And the sky seemed like a big blue dome, like a huge bowl flipped upside down, blocking out the real sky. And under that bowl Eva stood, facing west, the sea to her left, watching things vanish.

On the right horizon, far in front of her, she perceived something different, maybe mountains, but they were too far to see; she did not pause to consider them but if she had, she might have registered the vague feeling that they were accessible to her, if she chose to go that way. But it did not register so in effect she did not have the choice at all.

Stuck, then, as she was, on the beach, she found her feet planted solidly in the sand, until she decided to move them, in which case she found she was perfectly free to do so.

Thus Eva is isolated in her unexplained state on a beach, and no one else is near.



Then she was seated on a piano bench, positioned squarely in front of a grand piano, on the same beach and presumably in the same spot. Now she was facing the ocean, on which wave after wave rolled forward. While inspecting the keys, she was interrupted by the sound, first she thought of sea gulls crying, and then of a man calling. Immediately she began to play; her fingers swept over the keys effortlessly and almost soundlessly; the music was there, but only in the context of the waves and the man's cries for help. As she listened to her playing, she listened to his calls; while transfixed by her hands she could see his passive body being curled around, over and under the waves, far out to sea. She heard a gull's sorry shriek and froze; the sound of the waves continued to roar, urging her to play, but her thoughts broke free and she desperately searched for the drowning man. The waves instilled in her the desire (without a desire, really the command) to accompany this man's death, to make his last moments music. And when he was gone hers would become the performance, and she would learn that no one was watching or listening, but that one much become accustomed to a singular performance.

But he was not gone yet, and Eva struggled with herself to decide whether to go to him with the marginal chance of saving him, or to stay and improvise the soundtrack of his death, to relinquish, on his behalf, any hope of rescue, but to ensure that his last moments were filled with beauty, to decide for him the melody that would embody his passing.

The choice was made for her, by whom it is unsaid. She fought against the anxiety that he did not choose his own song. The thought plagued her and pushed all music out of her mind, so that the piano fell silent, as did his cries. Desperately she played the first thing she thought of, a melody that was already written, and she could not remember how it ended. Still ravaged by the tragedy that it was her song imposed on his death with no agency of his, the sound, the piano and the cries, faded into the ocean roar, which is contained in a sea shell.

Album Review: The Shape of "Feel Good Ghosts"

It has been said that Cloud Cult’s album Feel Good Ghosts (Tea Partying Through Tornados) does not build—that is, does not reach a climax—overall, but if one considers it a concept album and listens to the lyrics as a complement to the music from start to finish, there is a noticeable progression, complete with crests and troughs. Through this lens, one may find that the fourth track, “When Water Comes to Life,” is the primary climax, for several reasons.

First and foremost, this song builds. It builds the way a dancer acquires energy, in breadth of movement, in meaning, in intensity. From the violin’s first minor intervals, positively soaked in emotion, through their delicate plucking sounds, the song demands your focus; it drives forward with undeniable momentum. The minute mark bursts forth with a glorious melody that delivers a feeling of arrival, but the song keeps building. It seems that in just this first minute and a half—technically and blasphemously called an intro—a whole story has been told, a whole life has been lived. When the vocals finally come in, Craig Minowa’s tender voice mirrors the pattern the instruments just established: he starts softly and passionately, which the strings and percussion imitate underneath.

At the top of this song’s peak, it is clear that it is the center of the album. “No One Said It Would Be Easy” opens with the claim that you are the vastly complex conglomerate of countless unfathomable worlds; “I Love You All” closes, simply, with the way lives end, maybe, with an “I love you.” “Water” sits right in the middle of the thirteen tracks, conceptually if not literally. “All you need to know,” Minowa (et al) sings, “is you were made of water. You were made of water.” Now, one may speculate, that is clearly not all you should know. With a brilliant touch of irony, Cloud Cult is demanding that their listeners assume the fairy cake (cf. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)—they are depending on you, their faithful and astute listener, to understand that if you know this one very important and central thing, you can extrapolate everything else you will ever need to know. Based on that aspect of human life, you have it in your power to determine the rest of creation.

What an epic statement to make! And with characteristic Cloud Cult-ian understatement, too. Also, what a sharp contrast from track one’s “You were sewn together with a tapestry of molecules, a billion baby galaxies and wide open spaces.” From that starting point, it would almost seem the “Water” is the nadir; having begun as the most complex creature imaginable, now we have been simplified to being the combination of two elements, with the inculcated insistence that that is all we need to know. But understanding the irony of such a statement—understanding that any comment on the nature of things from the human perspective is necessarily an understatement—inverts the trough, and thus “Water” is the summit of Feel Good Ghosts.

That is not to say, by any means, that the album declines after track four. Suffice it to say, though, as a parting thought from this brief overview, that taking the last song as the end of a progression implies that Cloud Cult has shifted their focus from the constitution of the human body to the essence of human life: love of family. It seems that Feel Good Ghosts has not “built” in the linear fashion we are used to. Instead, it has traced a speculation of our own existence, and at the end of it all, has decided that the rub is not what we are made of, but what we do.

Sometimes when I read before I go to sleep I dream the end or the events of the book and then the next day I don't remember what happened in the book.

Magnifying Glass

Heather was skinny when she had her baby, irreconcilably skinny for the fact that she was pregnant and reasonably healthy. The nine months leading up to the birthday were a time of very little growth, physically or emotionally--for her anyway. Obviously Jack did more growing in that time than he ever would again, except the year he turned 14 and had to pretend he was 18 in order to prove--well, his name wasn't really Jack, either, it was Stanley, a name as skinny as his mother, but no one knew it because she gave him away when he was 5 minutes old, after holding him once and bursting into tears because he was deformed.

In fact, he was not deformed, but no one would ever tell him that. Somehow Heather, in her post-labor hysteria, managed to hallucinate that her baby had no eyes. What a nightmare! She passed him off as quickly as she could without throwing him to the nurse, who cleaned him up and lay him to rest in an incubator, doctor's orders.

Maybe Heather's faux pas was a result of some kind of drug (although Jack seemed fine). Or maybe she was just not cut out to be a mother. She could easily have passed for his ten-year-old sister.

In later years she would increasingly wonder what happened to her little eyeless baby, and sometimes even wonder if hers was the right reaction. As reactions go, it was arguably not the most caring, or well-grounded. Sometimes it's best to go with your first impulse.
And so baby Jack was left as soon as he got here, which perhaps brought his expectations down to a reasonable level as soon as possible.

In fact, he had very large eyes, very large blue eyes indeed, how Heather missed them--
Jack's eyes were a beautiful baby blue, the color only a baby's could be, and they were wide and solemn. Soon they changed to brown but their large wideness remained, as if he could see and comprehend exceptionally well for a 2-week-old. At that age the brown eyed boy had reached his projected birthday and the nurses celebrated by sending him home with a family whose son had passed before meeting his brother, born two minutes earlier. The stillborn's name was Aidan.

Given Jack's (and Heather's) shaky medical records, it is unclear how Jack ended up in Aidan's place at the Simons' house, suddenly endowed with a twin brother and parents who loved him simply because he was alive.

Before he had time to acclimate to his new home, where he spent the first night under a black and white mobile with the letters AIDAN hanging from it, waiting to be batted and learned, Jack was whisked away again. This time it was because, as he might learn later, his poor father had shown up at the hospital not two hours after the Simons had left. Really! Exhausted, sweaty, caked with dust, Joel Samson collapsed upon hearing the news, in a dramatic exclamation point to his impromptu journey across several continents. Because after hearing, much too late, that his seed had indeed brought forth a tiny life from a slip named Heather, he had immediately bought a plane ticket and then alternately sat and stood up on a second-by-second basis, legs shaking, hand massaging face, for the several days until his flight left from Accra, capital city of Ghana, West Africa. Joel had decided in a previous life (not Jack's) that the jubilee-celebrating country of Ghana, having been liberated in 1958, was a good place to sort out all his problems. Ironically, it was another woman who had sent him there in the first place, several months earlier, when she told him she was pregnant with his twins. (Not pregnant--Jessi was a compulsive liar. Even more ironically, her compulsiveness meant she had not even completed the thought when the beginning and middle were in Joel's ear. Incidentally, the beginning of his thought of Africa formed at the same time as the end of hers.) It was not until he was in Heathrow airport that she called and told him the truth, but when she found out his itinerary she screamed bloody murder and dumped him. So he decided he might as well go to Ghana, at least until she was out of the apartment.

On a whim one day in Accra, he had turned into an Internet cafe, having about an hour before he had agreed to meet his friend Kwame for a beer. In his inbox he was mildly surprised to find a note from Heather's roommate Delia, a florist with scary round eyes who had always been nice to Joel, the few times he'd met her--even helping him arrange his bedroom so that the pigeon droppings would not blow onto his pillow and his karmic energy would not clog the bathroom--saying that Heather had just gone into labor, and had just as recently divulged a) the pregnancy and b) its cause. Delia just thought Joel should know.

And so Joel found himself pacing the cement outside Kwame's rich uncle's house until he lost count of the nights. The airplane was no less frenzied but at least British Airways served free alcohol. Headachey and incredulous, Joel passed a nine hour layover in Heathrow scavenging the stores for a suitable baby gift (whether for Heather or the baby it was not determined), before he realized he had 100 cedis and 2 dollars but no f-ing pounds. He finally slept on the plane to JFK but woke to find they'd been delayed 5 hours and hadn't left England yet.

Eddie Fontaine picked him up from the airport and tried to get him to clean and shave and eat and sleep before meeting his new family, but Joel insisted. Heather was nowhere to be seen and the baby, he was duly informed, was safe with a foster family. Having not eaten or changed clothes for almost four days when he collapsed, he was a right mess and the same nurses obligingly made up a bed for him, where he spent the night. Eddie came through again the following morning (luckily a Saturday), and by doing so convinced Joel that had to go home, clean up, and approach this the right way.



"Oh, sorry," mumbled Joel, head down, as he went to step around her.

"Oh--it's okay--I mean, hi Joel," said Lisa, who knew who Joel was, partly because he ran into her all the time.

They lived in the same apartment building, and had for a couple years now, a fact of which Joel was completely unaware. Lisa didn't mind. She was shy anyway, and could do with one less person trying to engage her in small talk in the hallway everyday. But she liked Joel.

Joel was an imperfect person and he knew it. It seemed to him that he really could not be any other way, given his genetic makeup and chancy upbringing; of course, those didn't affect his future, so conceivably he could be any way he wanted, but they determined his actions of the past, which he knew one should not cry over anyway. And the future was constantly slipping into the past, like sand through the thin part of an hourglass, or the land rushing beneath you on a plane, so fast and irretrievable it was hard to tell which moment was where. As soon as you see the Nile, he reasoned, you are over it and there's nothing to be done about it. He hadn't flown over the Nile on his way to Ghana but he knew this to be true because rivers are thin, not unlike the neck of an hourglass, and planes are fast, not unlike life. For Joel, there was no present, only the future whizzing by him into the cesspool of history. Or, the present was the whizzing sound it made.

Ever since he had pulled Jack, who he loved so passionately, into his life, he had been wishing desperately to have a present.

Lisa, on the other hand, had no Jack to speak of and possessed a very different view of time. For instance, she was constantly amazed at how much faster time passes when you are a grown-up than when you are a child, for whom one day stretches out like a summer vacation. To her, the present is all there is; she imagined time like an inscrutable map laid out on an enormous table, over which one pores with a magnifying glass, and because the map is so staggeringly large, made larger by the magnifying glass, and because we can only look through the magnifying glass, bent low over the table, we never see what the map is of--but if we could step back, we would. The present is the circle of the magnifying glass.

1.

Words that form a sentence are not

(or even a fragment) to be separated for

without one another they have

no meaning

in speech there are gaps between

words (one would hope) but

they must not be filled with silence or

uncertainty for that would turn a

word-ship in tindersticks, and

a sentence into words; no,

there is meaning in the gaps

2.

Some people know how to convey the sounds

between words that give them their proper meaning.

Perhaps they think more fluidly too and

understand the molecules that link the

particles of a thought

if that's true perhaps they are the ones who

inherently understand language

3.

If you do not already know what I mean then

what I say will have no weight to you

(no root in the shared consciousness)

unless, of course, you find it phonetically pleasing

in which case you could not possibly really not

understand

(form follows function)

And words are merely messengers between two friends who

know what the other thinks anyway

words are the empty symbols that only call forth

knowledge you must already possess, or be capable of

possessing.

words do not create

4.

Or, if that fell on shallow ground:

words do not carry thought, but they awaken latent thought

(thinking in terms of poetry allows you to see things from a

micro or telescope and orbit your thought)

when two or maybe 3 people

find the same meaning within themselves (to which words call

attention) then

they have a bond less arbitrary than language because

they have found a direct path into each other's minds, so to

speak

5. And sometimes I think people can only share an idea if

it's a true one because

with all the false ones floating around what are the chances

they'll both pick the same one

(or maybe that' s not really why but sometimes I think it

anyway)

so words have the power to inspire recognition (like symbols)

(I've thought that before) of

Truth

and they work best between like-minded people, or

Friends

If words' ultimate goal is not Truth then

we are merely making guttural mellifluous sound

but truth may have to be a side effect of words

and poetry the goal