, Spinoza Street…streeting around the town let’s call it entire of only one street, and so it’s no town at all, and yet neither a village, only a poor lick of rubble rimming the hoar of the moat — and so it’s an island, if an island singly streeted with a street that both borders it and is it, too, you with me, a street that in turn islands the island; enough that it’s another refuge of sorts, if more forlorn than any before. And less an island, it seems once you’re on it and of it, than a pock of the earth, more like a pox, the scar of a wound from within, from without, bandaged by a moat so small in hindsight, and so shallow especially when frozen and holding or not, that I could’ve stepped across its surface, its depth, in only one step, singly strided. Forgetting the sign, the bobbing slat of its bridge. Onto this street narrowingly small in width if endless in length, in its loop, apparently infinite in its hellaciously circling circle. A street laden with the miscellaneously malevolent detritus that comes with the keeping of openair files: with papers of leave and conscription, with torn passports, the shred of visas to countries no longer bordered, receipts for burials, the crumple of death certificates, and crinkled, inksoaked m.a.n.i.f.e.s.t.o.s., sectarian statements of divergent platforms and parties, their transcripts of speeches and personnel report files, cadre profiles intermixed with assorted briefs on party discipline, calendar reform, and name standardization, stacks of cash worth nothing of late, bribes to (codename) Eurous the easterly wind; tarnished badges and medals, commendations, citations and trophies, epaulets, lapels missing pins, ribbons ripped, and tattered robes of the law, discarded after having been used as wrappers, too, for food, for milk and cheese and as swaddling clothes, blown along with the refuse of drinks, plastic and tinned, cans of pilsen beer, wineskins, vodka flasks and jugs drained of who’s selling; raffletickets irredeemable, and snowwhite, pupilless eyeballs numbered in an approximation of lotto — a squareless street lined with unmarked, drearily festooned stalls, one impossible to differentiate from another, a uniform gray-wood or other cheap synthetic substance as a matter of coarse, lined down the street more like around the street, and then around the street again around the rivering ice of the moat, its submerged then surfacing sign, then around again and again forever and ever, a fixedly infinite eternal return of the now, its street its mode and its trashy stalls its attributes (if only in the founding philosophical system — which no longer prevails), all one and the same of its Substance, which is indivisible and, also, monstrously gray. All the stalls are made of this vagary, of this allied alloy…I’m just passing it on: that the stalls have been created of coin, of planchet, of flan, are themselves — eventually, with the weather — total coin and as such, apparently, totally changeless: this dull gunmetal nondenominational mix, a circulation without breed as unsunderable, indivisble…impossible for its elements to be molten separate ever again; that weather judging down all through the day and night to mint the stalls’ rooftops and reeded sides in the image of rain, of snow, and the composite between them, to a resounding clinking and clatter of no tender issue, overpowering of every imaginable thought, so destructive.
Strange, too, to notice that no matter the smallness of the street, by which I mean how narrow it is as such circle or cycles are as long as our lives, that I can never find the same stall on it twice, ever again and despite following such directions as I beg openmouthed, despite counting my fingers to numbers I’m deluded to mean: and maybe because there are no wares on display in the stalls (everything, and I do mean everything, is kept under the counter, and one should be hesitant to ask, I’ve been asked), how there’re no signs to the stalls, no numbers either except those imposed by memory in its imperfect ars mathematica…the higher geometry of borderless politics, the containment of illimitable will within mundane circumference, the daily and done — no coordinates save those supplied by the worst and, presently, only philosophy left us, which is that of hope…in that, I’m an expert. And then advice, too, which is the only thing in this market given for free, and in a quantity scarily excessive: actually advice, directions, counseling’s comfort, though all with the aim to a profit of any sort to be made down the line, the length of which is infinite, mortality depending. Along the way the long way around, only the forgotten are to be met — not as much met as to be unforgotten, in advice, in directions, in their comforting counseclass="underline" the windword, the snuff or guttering pass, offered to me as to all in hushes, shushes, incomprehensible whispers; such menschs or goys who knows who they are if and when they even don’t, who can care, they prole around, go ghostly a float down the street and so around the moated float of that one uninterpretable sign: Spinoza, who’s he, what’s he got to do with assimilation, with the secularism that’s only adaptation, an evolution toward any new reality, with our governance remade…the intersection of individual life with that of the State, the interstices of mensch and God, and the meaning of what that God is exactly, if not merely the subtotal of us: me, you, Refugee, A refugee, This refugee, viz. I recognize me-in-you, I recognize me-as-you, I recognize only us in proposition and lemma…starvedhollow in tears of scraprags, unshaven into these greatgut beards, this imperious hair atop, too, and those old philosopher eyes — empty, sockets: as if the wicks of candles blown out in their own industrygusts, only smoke; their mouths null islands themselves as they’re opened advising, they’re making their trades, their marking remarx…
This is the Market of Spinoza Street, I’m only guessing…and every day’s Market Day in this sewerside moneyslough, this guttersniping remnant of any vanity’s fair. Upon closer inspection — a breakingaway, a crack in the systems — the street below’s paved with gold, which as it’s abundant is worthless, no good here, take it elsewhere. No new business, no today’s concern (only the wind and its witching flies by what passes for night, which is the same as the day if you’re hungry and thirsty and selling), this is a market of ancient standing, still held to only the most paradisiacal of principles: it’s operated & owned by everybody, which is the same as by nobody, really, if more comforting why, and everyone has the opportunity to purchase everything here, to exchange for everything’s what, trading even each other, even themselves — that’s right, step right up: just decide on a price, whether a trade in kith or in kind, a bargainy cutrated, cut your throat deal, whatever you think of as honest, whatever you think of yourself, whoever you are; all’s fair in vanity, every price has its thing. All these refugees forgotten crawled out of the craterous void, clawed straight out of the jaws of cavernous incoherence, theirs, history’s, no one’s — the island apprehended as if a mouth disembodied: these losers, their names at least, their words, flocking here in a great herding of regret left behind (among their losses, bashful sheep, too sheepish to cross; they wait for their shepherds at the sheer edge of the moat — not desperate enough to dare passage, to enter you have to lose everything), here with the idea of redeeming themselves…realizing I’ve heard, actualizing, too, whatever the term, I’ve been told: in new work, new identity, in new family and so, newer hopes, to sell their souls at the going rate gone, dark-marketed to the loss of supply, the malicious gain of demand; though some prefer renting their souls before buying them outright, others lease out only those names theirs and others’, their dates or occupations, on a plan requiring installments lowly a talent or so less than usurious: you might be interested yourself, only if. Isn’t it time for a change? A revolt? This Market’s open all day every day, weekends and holidays and even the Sabbath included. Actually, it itself is every day and all holidays and all Shabboses, Shabbos — all days indeed and their nights, too, you get the idea: the substantive world centrifugalized to its barest essentials, boileddown in the vat of a centripetal hell frozenover. Might as well abandon abandonment, in with the rest: you have to go through to get out to get in…