Looking for seed, grain.
Let us assume that much can be proven with a few words: an unprogrammed plus-minus, answer-surplus frightening through synthesis the other as well as itself, that which answers. Perhaps the Unfounded was right to have buried the anchor in laughter. Someone questioned laughter with great originality. Canetti, if I’m not mistaken. “We laugh instead of eating.” What’s more: “the whole interior process of gulping down food could be summed up and replaced by those movements of the diaphragm which are characteristic of laughter.” Canetti indeed. Crowds and Power. Devour me, Lord. There’s a plus-minus in me that only frightens me. And there’s Amanda and the kid. The house. The University. There are books all over the place and I can’t interest myself in them any longer. After that thing I don’t know how to explain. Of incommensurable meaning. And what was I doing at the time? I was there on the top of the little hill. Was I thinking of transcendents? Of number theory? No. The theory of ideas? No. Fermat? Eratosthenes? No. I was looking at the tip of my shoes, the scuffed tips, I turned over my right foot, and yes, the sole was bad too, two dark ants passed close by my left shoe, I stopped on the path, they were conferring now, and I thought there were sounds my ears couldn’t capture, the sounds ants would make, did they emit sounds as they touched each other? I smiled. So there. Some days beforehand Amanda had said that I was smiling in a new way. New? I asked. Yeah, weird, you don’t smile like that. But was I smiling? Of course you were smiling, Amós, or at least your mouth was all stretched out, look, you’re almost always smiling, and it looked like this. Her mouth made an imperceptible movement to the right, a little crease on that side of the face. And yes, it looked like a smile. But why was I smiling?
Made of phlegm and laughter
Myth-gambler
I equate chimeras
I’m a beginning and plump
And go descending the abyss
Of your third.
Ants. An animated and cohesive world. Superproduction. Silos. Do they have infirmaries? I’m ill. Short-circuiting. Little bodies running about in perfect health. There on the farm they toiled at night, on the veranda. Father used to say that there wasn’t enough money to kill so many ants. Killing? they worked so hard. And how did those little bodies manage to move themselves? What aura hovered over those little bodies? What was it that made them walk, select leaves, find their routines, their secret places? Father would go scraping the sole of his boot over their ranks, and I would go to my room brimming with compassion. Those feelings. Painful, intense, pulsing without rest, my body a tremulous throb, a continuous living mass attempting to conceal itself, there was danger in life, there was danger in father. The words vanished from my lips. One or another at times glittered, the shimmer of the back of some fish as it emerges from under a rock, takes a few quick turns, and returns to its lair. Life so colorful, mother, that they frighten me, these colors of life, I said early one morning while gazing at the magenta pastures. She looked at me like someone who understood. I wonder about those delicate women who marry crude men, always flushed with blood, vulgarity and rudeness, I guess they like it? But why do they later turn so dry, mute, my mother as mute as I myself, piety and stupor and from so much of all this the same old muteness? He: there are people who think the boy is mute. Mother: stupid people. He: a few slaps to the mouth and he’ll open it, you’ll see. mute? Mother would get to her feet, look at father dead-on. He would cough, dissemble. Later he’d go away saying: kids, what a drag.
I saw words and numbers
Circles, tangents
Extensive theorems
On the slinky back
Of a tramp in the midday sun.
He looked at me between his rags:
Numbers, words?
Oh, no sir, misery is what it is
But my deepest thanks
For thinking me a blackboard
As they’re just sores upon my back.
I tried to follow him.
He entered a hilltop thicket.
I entered.
Empty tunnel
Opening onto everything I’ve passed.
I looked at numbers formulas equations theorems and it was a pleasure, a fiery freeze, a bodyguard for wandering alone without the speech-rupture of others, logicality and reason and nevertheless the possibility of surprise as though we were unfolding a piece of silk, blue triangles on the fresh surface and suddenly just a dull little grid, lines that we can separate and recompose into triangles again, yes, this we could do, but where did the blue get to, where? And everything begins anew, the patience of these animals infinitely digging a hole, until one day (I hoped, why not?) transparence inundates body and heart, body and heart of mine, Amós, animal infinitely digging a hole. In mathematics, the old world of catastrophes and syllables, of imprecision and pain, was cracking up. I no longer saw hard faces twisting into questions, in tears so many times, I didn’t see the gaze of the other on mine, what a thing it can be to have eyes on your eyes, eyes on your mouth. Waiting for what kind of word? Such formidable cruelties occurring every day, humans meeting and in the good-mornings and good-afternoons such secrets, such crimes, such a chalice of lies principally in the good-nights, good-night of husbands and wives, of lovers, of supposed friends, good-night my love Amanda tells me, sated in this moment, her arms finally at rest, one of her hands on my chest, such effort to complete that act, such an effort I’m making, debaucheries that I wrenched out from a darkness in me, Amanda-Libitina interlaced, I nude in my forty-eight years sucking her down the middle, the hair wet, I nude at twenty getting royally sucked, the two mouths salivating over this poor cock, and then I lift the sheets and look at cock and thighs and a certain smile comes to me, yes, I’m smiling in that funny way Amanda told me about, I go to the mirror, there it is, a perceptible movement to the right, a little crease on that side of my face. And why was I smiling? Some joker will go and cite “a certain smile.” The one that Amanda read.
I leap over the path
I croak. A blabbering of cripples
Jams the traces
I should pursue
To follow in this light of dust.
Walking stuck to the walls, banging into doorjambs, many times stumbling for no reason, was there a stone there? Uneven floorboards? No. He also stumbled through the poems he mentally constructed, squinting haikus emerged from him the moment he began the class:
A path without steps
The wing of the bird touches
That virginity.
Duration. All-enduring.
The gold of your name
Amid the flowing water.
Under the pomegranates
I caressed your face.
As you slept?
Fifteen minutes? the dean had said. Yes, the sentence went like this: fifteen minutes is too much, Professor. Fifteen minutes? For me it was only a second. A little bee, the kind they call Little Star (don’t kill it, dad, it’s a Little Star), landed on the back of my hand. I think I watched it for barely five seconds:
It’s summer.
The little bee
Lands.
Shall I speak of Zeno?
I realize that the classroom is empty. I light a cigarette. Someone opens the door, apologizes, closes it again. I turn to the blackboard. There’s a note there. A poem: “we wait for your return / take care / before the door closes.” I get up and it’s as though I were a little drunk. The desks arranged in a semicircle. Yes, the other half is missing. And half of me knows that Amós is here and that at this time he should be composed, perfectly crisp in all their eyes, back turned, facing the blackboard: let’s take, for example, using the formula that we found, let’s consider, let’s assume, now let’s imagine, according to our rule, we’ll wait a moment, but this is only an impression, etc.