Thursday, September 20, 2007

Vectors, Logarithms and Algebra

A crone’s blue-skirt sky, arisen arose arise. Skies (all skies) are identical, cut from the same swath of blue cloth. Yes, some may appear bluer, but it’s an illusion, all skies are the same, alike, dissimilar only in the illusion of being so. Crone’s-blue, indigo, cobalt, azure and billiard-ball blue, one sky that appears as many. The noise gets louder the bluer the sky becomes, sometimes deafening. They told us that the noise is in our heads, but it’s a lie, proof that something’s can’t be explained away with vectors, into’s and out-of’s, Turing-machines, logarithms and algebra.

One day the man in the hat saw an old man riding the bus whose hairpiece was on backwards. It bootstrapped the wings of his ears and came to an abrupt stop somewhere at the top of his head. It reminded him that the older one got the less attention one paid to one’s appearance (dementia and decrepitude, the unholy sisters of spitefulness) and that in the end very little mattered if anything at all. He kept pretending he was backcombing his hair with an imaginary comb he produced from an imaginary pocket in his imaginary coat. The man in the hat tried ignoring him; he looked out the window, up the aisle and over the back of his seat, but could only watch with rapt amusement as this feeble man played at hide-and-seek with his imaginary pocket-comb.

‘I found this in a poubelle’ said the backwards wigged man pointing at his pocket-comb. ‘Someone must have thrown it away, dumb bugger, and still got most of its teeth.’ The man in the hat tried in vain to avoid making eye-contact but couldn’t help himself from staring entranced at the old man. ‘These are the good ones’ he said, holding the comb up for all to see. ‘Not your run-of-the-mill average Joe pocket-comb, no soirée’, not by a slingshot. ‘I seen a couple of these before, behind the Waymart across from the Sears next to the aqueduct, but not one which has such nice straight teeth; this is a gem, a real Boniface gem’. The man in the hat couldn’t help notice that the old man mistook certain words for others, like Boniface for Bonaire and soirée for spree. But then again he wasn’t much for words and proper spelling, so didn’t give it a second thought.

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"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
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