'He only came to my apartment to sleep. He spent almost all Christmas break either working or sleeping, and he went back to Cambridge a week before he had to, to work on his thesis. His honors thesis is an epic poem about variable systems of information-and energy-transfer.'
'She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the "me" she seemed so jealously to covet.'
'He wants to be the first really great poet of technology.'
'I see it like I see weather coming.'
'He thinks art as literature will get progressively more mathematical and technical as time goes by. He says words as "correlative signifiers" are withering up.'
'Words as fulñllers of the function of signification in artistic communication will wither like the rules of form before them. Meaning will be clean. No, she says? Assuming she cares enough even to try to understand? Then say that art necessarily exists in a state of tension with its own standards. That the clumsy and superfluous logos of all yesterdays gives way to the crisp and proper and satisfactory of any age. That poetry, like everything organized and understood under the rubric of Life, is dynamic. The superfluous always exists simply to have its ass kicked. The Norbert Wiener of today will be triumphant in the Darwinian arena of tomorrow.'
'He said it was the most important thing in his life. What does that make me feel like?'
'It's Here. It's Now. The next beauties will and must be new. I invited her to see a crystalline renaissance; cool and chip-flat; fibers of shine winking in aesthetic matrices under a spreading sodium dawn. What touches and so directs us is what applies. I sense the impending upheaval of a great cleaning, a coming tidiness foaming at every corner of meaning. I smell change, and relief at cost, like the musty promise of a summer rain. A new age and a new understanding of beauty as range, not locus. No more uni-object concepts, contemplations, warm clover breath, heaving bosoms, histories as symbol, colossi; no more man, fist to brow or palm to decollétage, understood in terms of a thumping, thudding, heated Nature, itself conceived as colored, shaped, invested with odor, lending meaning in virtue of qualities. No more qualities. No more metaphors. Gödel numbers, context-free grammars, finite automata, correlation functions and spectra. Not sensuously here, but causally, efficaciously here. Here in the most intimate way. Plasma electronics, large-scale systems, operational amplification. I admit to seeing myself as an aesthetician of the cold, the new, the right, the truly and spotlessly here. Various as Poisson, morphically dense:
pieces whose form, dimension, character, and implication can spread like sargasso from a single structured relation and a criterion of function. Odes to and of Green, Bessel, Legendre, Eigen. Yes there were moments this past year when I almost had to shield my eyes before the processor's reflection: I became in myself axiom, language, and formation rule, and seemed to glow filament-white with a righteous fire.'
'He said he'd be willing to take me with him. And when I asked him where, he got mad.'
'I was convinced I could sing like a wire at Kelvin, high and pale, burn without ignition or friction, shine cool as a lemony moon, mated to a lattice of pure meaning. Interferenceless transfer. But a small, quiet, polite, scented, neatly ordered system of new signals has somehow shot me in the head. With words and tears she has amputated something from me. I gave her the intimate importance of me, and her bus pulled away, leaving something key of mine inside her like the weapon of a bee. All I want to do now is drive very away, to bleed.'
"Which is neither here nor there."
'No, the thing to see is exactly that it's there. That Maine is different from, fundamentally other than both Boston and Bloom-ington. Unfamiliar sights are a balm. From the hot enclosed car I see rocks veined with glassy color, immoderate blocks of granite whose cubed edges jut tangent to the scraggled surface of hills; slopes that lead away from the highway in gentle sine curves. The sky is a study in mint. Deer describe brown parabolae by the sides of the forested stretches.'
"I sense feeling being avoided not confronted Bruce. Maybe here we might just admit together that if one uses a person as nothing more than a receptacle for one's organs, fluids, and emotions, if one never regards her as more than and independent from the feelings and qualities one is disposed to invest her with from a distance, it is wrong then to turn around and depend on her feelings for any significant part of one's own sense of wellbeing. Bruce why not j ust admit that what bothers you so much is that she has given irresistible notice that she has an emotional life with features that you knew nothing about, that she is just plain different from whatever you might have decided to make her into for yourself. In short a person Bruce."
'Look: a huge black bird has curved through the corner of my sight and let loose a strangely lovely berry rainbow of guano on the center of the windshield near Smyrna, Maine; and under the arc of this spectrum from a remote height a unit of memories is laid out and systematized like colored print on the gray, chewed-looking two-lane road ahead of me. The trip I took with my family here to Prosopopeia, just two summers ago, and how she braved her own stone-faced parents' disapproval to come along, how she and my sister discovered they could be friends, how she and I touched knees instead of holding hands on the airplane because my mother was seated next to her and she felt embarrassed. I remember with my gut the unbreachable promise of a whole new kind of distance implicit in the dizzying new height we all seemed to reach in the airplane on this long, storm-threatened flight, up to where the sky first turned cold and then darkened to cadet and we smelled space just above. How the shapes of a whole terrain of clouds, from inside the sky, took on the modal solidity of the reaclass="underline" shaggy buffalo heads; tattered bridges; the topology of states; political profiles; intricately etched turds. We flew away over the flat summer board games of Indiana and Ohio. Thunderstorms over Pennsylvania were great anvils that narrowed darkly to rain on counties. We had a steel belly. I remember a jutting, carbuncular ruby ring on the finger of an Indian woman in the seat across the aisle, a dot stained into her forehead, robes so full they seemed to foam. Her dark husband, in a business suit, with white eyes and white teeth and impossibly well-combed hair.'
"And this place you would 'take' the girl to, someday? And why now that she is forever absent does she become that place, the loss of which summons images of decapitation and harm?"
'Little I-95 proceeds north to Houlton, Maine, then curves east into New Brunswick. I exit the highway at Houlton, pay my toll, and, via a side street that leads between the Hagan Cabinet Company and the Atrium Supper Club, come out on County Route 1, again heading due north, through dense farmland, toward Mars Hill and then Prosopopeia. The sun sets gradually to my left over ranges of pale purple earth I learned two years ago are colored by the young potato plants they feed. An irrigation generator howls and clanks by the road a few miles out of Mars Hill, and in this purple now an intricate circuit of tiny rivers runs red in the late light. Just farther up 1 is a hand-lettered sign announcing hubcaps for sale, spoils of war with the rutted road, the improbable wares displayed in long rows on my right, glinting dull pink on a fence and the side of a barn-red barn, looking like the shields of an army of dwarfs. About everything there is an air of age, clocks running slow on sluggish current.'
"The sun setting to the left means to the west, meaning even here you remember things west Bruce, meaning one becomes uncomfortable at this new silence from a subject in a west we have evidence you remember. One voice cannot just shut off another, even in a structure of lies, if light is to be shed the way we profess to—"