␢

...and the light came streaming in at around 11, through the long eastern windows, filling up the room with warmth and old times, patterning out the brightness in bars of shadows on the floor. there are at least two, possibly three, flies in the room. their brief lives of no account. we've been without electricity all morning. don't really care. the thought occurs to you: do we really need that much? as humans, i mean. it's a kind of liberating moment, a sharp moment of recognition, of freedom from the earth's minerals, ores, heartlands, rhythms, songs of necessity, like the ancient dream an astronaut carries with him into all that vastness...

you think of shire horses, englands of the mind, and thick slices of mature cheese. little r asleep, surrounded by all her friends, a closed book, 'the moon man', which she hasn't taken to yet. she is aware of his sadness, though.

the house is empty and quiet. in each room all you can hear is the patient and faithful near deathly-silence of clocks ticking. the only logic in the world. time in each room closed off, framed by glass and wood.

you turn to read, one leg up on the sofa, sprawled leisurely with your self-contained thoughts. De Lillo. a word, a line, begins to grate. my better self says i shouldn't care. it's this: "And he had a coke with a straw bending out of the can". it strikes you as totally superfluous (even though it's the reason for your stray thoughts to alight on something). it's troubling. who speaks like that? maybe a poet or a novelist, or God maybe..yes, God describing a situation..."I was about to strike that man down but he seemed so peaceful, "and he had..."

you have to let it go. don't be snared in the net. there's no sense to it. let the words fall away, like coins in the fairground slot machine. some count, others just fall down into the side-darkness. the relentless logic of the world and chance and fate and all the things you've never understood. only this time you've got to let it go, you've got to kind of will it into play. (I'm trying to help you out here, kid).

"but," she replies (as most women do)..."are you really?...Isn't this about you?" Her, with her high ideals, light from her eyes streaming into our world at 11..."why do you always follow the negative way, the path that no-one cares about or knows?it's like, you know, you're describing plants in darkest Peru by saying they're nameless, wonderless, no more open to our perceptions than shadowed stars.

..and you're not really a reader, let alone an attentive reader anyway. classics. holey moley! not even read more than handful of books, your straight-laced training in dismal subjects put an end to that. not that you set any great store by that. but it's remarkable just what a fake you are. anton, roxana, the dougal, darling C..throw their arms up in delight, like Puritans finally vindicated on hearing the confession of a degenerate. they say, somberly, 'we told you so'.

~~~
so, there you are, standing with your clean metal tray, trying for all your life to jam it back into the empty slot of the stacked up rack. you would have thought that after 5,000 years of civilisation the Chinese would have managed to figure out how to make a straight one, but this one just happens,as luck would have it, to be warped. i can sense some of the students behind me sniggering; others just become increasingly frustrated at my antics. For Christ's sake, fit already!

lunch had been as uneventful as always. this was, i guess,a fitting end to it, a final gloss on or reminder of the futility of putting up an appearance of restraint and cleverness. you sat though lunch, praying that no-one would talk to you. keep your head down and shovel the food in. you eat, but do not taste the food. a mark of how institutionalised you've become. old t, in his immaculate tweeds, harping on about the greatness of persia or some 18th century sub-continental sufi. my stomach churns. next to him, the slightly grotesque figure of the philosopher, dirt poor and a day away from stinking. there he is, rolling off quotes from Ghalib, wheeling out faintly ridiculous stories, when you'd expect him to elaborate on the logic or wittgenstein or whatever bunk it is he teaches.

i think i see thought everyone here, or maybe it's just my ability to see like a human being has been tarnished, whittled away. maybe that's why everyone sees through me. if we had better knives, i might slit my wrists...