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Today I’ve found another topic, tied to the transmission of the flesh. I’m having a philosophical moment, writer, I feel really good as a philosopher. The transmission of the flesh. You ever transmitted any? I’m sure you have, maybe into more than one uterus, that’s what you modern writers do, take a wife, get her pregnant, dedicate a book to her, because a wife is a wife a wife … and then you might take another … another child, another dedication, various pollinations.… and meanwhile the printers are hard at work … the registry offices … because the human race can’t be wiped out … Cain’s line deserves to be transmitted … and so do the books the human race has come up with, otherwise, what’s the point of this spinning globe we wander?… The transmission of the flesh provides some kind of sense to this asteroid spinning on its axis where we reside, but don’t kid yourself — the world’s not turning — it’s just something thought up by some atheist scientist who believes in optical illusions: everything is fixed, was fixed from the start, in the sense that everything’s just the same, Ptolemy was a genius, everything is fixed, how it was created or blew apart on its own, everything was born and then stayed fixed in place, we’re the ones walking by, and we believe everything follows us while we walk, but everything’s been fixed in place from the very start, frozen like this noonday’s frozen and was frozen from the very start; do you hear the cicadas, feel the heat through the shutters, and that light inviting us to close our eyes, to abandon ourselves to the frozen ocean that pretends to move? And yet it does move … Illusions. Nothing moves, this noonday is fixed, had been, was, and will be. How many days have gone by since you came to write this voice of mine, how many days this August? No, don’t bother, he won’t last more than a month, the doctor said, whispered, really, to Frau in the hallway; I heard, the dying’s hearing is acute, he won’t last more than a month … That was early August, a Sunday, I remember it clearly because they started giving me morphine, morphine is Ptolemaic, it tends to stop everything, it crystallizes, turns time to candied fruit … Now to the point: Tristano didn’t follow the obligatory path of the transmission of the flesh, he didn’t want to continue in another, he spread his seed on Rosamunda’s belly, and his one true love, with whom he’d wanted to share his seed, his Mavri, he abandoned on one of the Aegean islands, I’m speaking metaphorically of course, he abandoned her like Theseus abandoned Ariadne, not really knowing why, maybe because, like Theseus, he was a moron, I’m still speaking metaphorically, the myth doesn’t say this — I do — Theseus was a moron. And sometimes someone does something all the same and he doesn’t know why, he just does it, that’s all, and then he spends the rest of his life with it gnawing away at his conscience, while he beats his head against the wall, or against a vineyard stake, the way Tristano did …