Finity

Life is a plane, a train, a zooming of a carriage from one point to the next. I'm in it, I'm sitting still or maybe I'm standing against the wall or maybe jumping up and down, maybe I'm banging on the door to be let out. Sometimes I resent having each stop pre-defined for me; and that the motion is linear, inevitable.

Forever is hypothetical. Time is counted out like coins: half an hour before I need to check out; an hour to get to the train station; thirty minutes' buffer before the train leaves 17 minutes past the hour; almost three hours exactly until I'm where I'm headed; I'll be able to have a hot bath, watch some TV, check my email in an hour and a half. Yearning for that, or yearning to be home, or yearning for a different context, or waiting around until the alarm goes off and I need to start counting out the minutes again.

That's why I used to miss my flights. I flipped my finger and wanted to just be in a place, just be, for a moment longer and not have to worry about things that tend to sort themselves out. I believed in just-in-time manufacturing. In my charmed existence, cabs miraculously got me wherever in the nick of it, concerts started late, people forgave me, coincidences happened fortuitously, the kindness of strangers was dependable. Sure, I'd curse and scream when, on the odd occasion, things didn't work out. Like that time heading toward Seoul, or worse, that time coming back from Paris. Fifteen minutes, even five, were the difference between now and another 12 hours, between life and its opposite, between movement and stasis.

My mom lives in what we fondly refer to as her own time zone. Which is half an hour earlier than the rest of the world, whichever way you spin it. She'll be at the airport unfailingly ahead by three hours. Is it something about getting older, I wonder. You come to the inescapable age to put away childish things-- like subjective approaches to clock-watching.

I was doing so well on this trip I was on. To there and after there. Five train rides, responsibly early each time almost. Almost. But my resolve was all but depleted at the end. I nearly missed the last one for no good reason, really. Just as likely, in an alternate universe, I was still pottering around and packing while my oblivious mode of transportation dutifully arrived, waited with a respectful pause, and chugged forward just as indifferently as it came.

"And the years shall run like rabbits" What comes to mind suddenly is Ethan Hawke intoning the poem, imitating a recording of Dylan Thomas reading W.H. Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening". And J. Alfred Prufrock, measuring out his life with coffee spoons. Me, I tally the March twenty-sevens.

I'm turning thirty-one next week. Come buy me a drink.




But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time...
In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

The Citadel (working title): Background Notes

In a city with a few million lost souls is a man who lives by his pen and his mind's eye. He is a celebrated artist. Monumental renderings of his sketches, colored in by his charcoal pencils and pots of black paint. The curvature of bone, muscle and sinew is drawn in sharp relief; his subjects often awash in the white of negative space. His craft resides in the shadows he casts on his surfaces, trapping movement within his frame. But the faces he does not draw. Although each elbow and knee, penis and vagina are drawn in all their distinctiveness, all the faces are featureless and smooth. On occasion, he wakes in the dark from a dream of a woman laughing at him. Colors and sounds, and the shock of rain--the dreams baffle him.

She is his lover. He was once fascinated by her and the scars written on her body. There are a hundred of sketches of her that decorate her otherwise bare life. The angle of her shoulder. The parabola of her spine. A leg extended. In repose, in action--she hoards these sheets of paper covetously. But even if there were a thousand of them, it wouldn't be enough to convince her that he sees her. She wants to be fixed and certain in his gaze. She resents his other lovers and wants him to be hers alone. In her youthful naiveté, she plots to have his child and keep it.

The year is 2031. Global nuclearization has successfully eroded international institutions following the accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon in the Middle East in 2009, forcing undeclared weapons to surface. The procurement of nuclear arms went virtually unchecked, develop capability or enter into alliance with nuclear powers. Defense and security budgets spiral upwards while social sectors and services get next to no funds. Democratic governments elect increasing numbers of military figures into power. The trend of suspension and deterioration of legal protection of civil rights, triggered by the wave of terrorist attacks at the beginning of the millennium, are exploited and new restrictions constrain basic freedoms. Borders are closed, immigrants repatriated, refugees turned away, populations divided. While the language of universal rights and democratic ideals has been retained, liberal democracy is generally viewed as a distant goal which would be nice to achieve once global security is again established.

By 2018, the city had barricaded itself with rare and tightly-controlled flows through its walls. Procreation is now state-controlled and mainly through in-vitro fertilization. Doctors have accelerated gestation and harvest fetuses after 7 months; children are reared by the state; this system was perfected and implemented in 2014. Child-bearing has become a well-paid profession; in order to continue to grow the population, the state purchases children from abroad as well.

.....

The coffee cups grimed with the solid excess of what you tipped into your mouth. I am one with it.

I am the cigarette butts. The ashes. The excesses that you leave behind. The words postspoken. The unclasped fingers. The released embrace. I hate your women and I hate your men. Your shallowness. Your craveness. Your unhappiness.

How many hours have you spent with your eyes on my body? You trace the scars on my skin with your fingers, first, and then with your pencil on paper.



another abandoned project?