Designifying
I make truces with myself
I am not flesh and blood
Nor dust. A black wall
With cracks of dark blue
Espy my new armor
My face of wax.
Mathematics. Fervor and vigor. And in university meetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, megalomanias. He’d leave, totally spent, despondent after listening to so many drawn-out tiffs. At night returning to his studies, searching, searching principally for order, mind and heart integrated once more in those magnificent suns of ice formulas expansions expressions, Amós would drift sublimely over some pages, and wasn’t it in a sudden burst that everything was no longer? Like if you thought you knew every little corner of your own house and then discovered, for instance in the hall through which you’d passed many times, in the hallway my God, you discovered a crag with mirrored surfaces or a black prism. But they weren’t there, I shout, they weren’t there. And everything is a beginning-anew. This strangely distant look I let fall on my son is also a beginning-anew? As if the kid had nothing to do with me, and the yard and the hibiscus fence and the hour, I’m not even sure of the time, a light illuminating and shading my son’s face, he on the bicycle, now going slower around through the arbor, and this sofa where I’m still stretched I pass my fingers over the cloth, I cross my hands. Am I still alive? and one day I will leave this house, the sofa for sure, I’ll never see the boy or the man again, and the hibiscus and the arbor and I’ll stop seeing any kind of light or any kind of shade. Or will I myself be a shade? And I will stop feeling you, Amós, and I will never again touch paper and books, nor anybody’s flesh, not even my own flesh. I swallow as though I were sighing and swallowing at the same time, I get up and shout from the room: son, I’m leaving, stay here and I’ll be back in a little bit. You too? he says. Me too? I say to myself.
Designifying
I’m melting the measure
I created.
Blotting the lines:
Circles
That all around me I drew
And where I lived
Distorted and trembling
Before the auburn of life.
I can tell my head is inclined too far to the left. I try to center it. It keeps leaning gradually to the left. And the fact that I am standing also worries me. How is it possible that I can stay standing up? I’d be more comfortable on all fours, my eyes scraping the floor, my hands wide-open and stuck to the surface of the streets. It would be safer for me. Now I should get in the car. I’m going to Isaiah’s. We always understand each other even though we almost never speak. It’s true he lives with a sow and he seemed to be doing fine the last time. And why not live with hilde? A Germanic name. She must be blonde. What I mean is she must be a white sow. They’re rare. And what will I say to Isaiah? About all that. He’s going to ask: does it tend to zero? The moving streets. Five o’clock in the afternoon, I see from a clock on the avenue. I stop at a signal. An old man carrying books and papers is doubting if he should cross. One of the papers falls to the ground. Another man stoops to help him. Maybe they know each other? They smile. They exchange a warm handshake. The one who knelt places his hands on the old man’s shoulders. People swerve around the two and make annoyed faces. The old man seems to be explaining something about the papers. He’s upset. It’s not possible, he’s crying. The horns behind me. I advance. I look in the rearview. The one who knelt points for the old man, to what? The bar on the corner. I lose sight of them. I am affected and tense. Am I showing my papers to somebody else, and also in such despair? My equations. Hopes: Amós Kéres, mathematician, proved today by scientific methods his conception of the univocal universe. He’s being hailed by physicists and mathematicians, more later on the eleven o’clock news. I almost run over a dog. Finally, Isaiah. His pants threadbare, his sweater black. hilde comes along behind. Various pairs of eyes upon us. The neighbors. hilde’s eyes on me. Isaiah: come on in, my friend, come on in. hilde comes in too. You remember her, right? hilde brushes against my legs. Just like a cat. I say amazing and always this charming? Oh always, says Isaiah. Acrylic triangles suspended from the ceiling. A huge desk and lots of papers filled with purple ink. I’m not bothering you? It’s been twenty years since anyone bothered me, Amós, twenty years of these purple hopes and the only surprise resolution was hilde. A beautiful nonobvious. Immediately: what’s up with your head, there a crick in your neck? c’mere, sit down, would you like some wine? I say okay and tell him everything: the hill, the tips of my shoes, the ants, the pondering of sounds, and all that about incommensurable meaning.
I had something like that once. But I saw shapes.
What kind?
Polyhedrons. Shining.
And then?
And then I understood that only polyhedrons exist. I myself do not exist. I’m certain of it to this day.