1. Turn it up

2. Pay attention

I’m in Bistro 990. I am paying to be here. This is for myself. That’s okay.

*

This is an arrangement, an exchange. They’ll take care of me—at least nominally—and I’ll pay them for that privilege. Clear, simple, direct. Dignified. (Of course, there’s always snootiness, but I can bear that affront.)

*

It takes me a moment to realize that the music they’ve playing is satellite radio—the “Coffee House” channel (endless acoustic covers of well-known songs). The same station plays in a dated and countrified Orangeville café I sometimes frequent. There facile, presumptive, even absurd. Here a little crass, a little disruptive. But no more crass than anything else. Natural. What should I expect? I would prefer something else. But the atmosphere permits the disturbance. What I’m really feeling is a little awe, a slight inferiority, an insecurity (“Is there a dress code?”). Pretension. And pretension bears pretension well.

Especially for someone susceptible to authority.

*

(Pretension: claim to an “authentic” tradition to which one does not belong. “Coffee house” suggests live performance. Acoustic instead of electric, or instead of a large arrangement: more intimate, more “human”, but playing on an automated corporate radio station.)

*

What else? It’s the quiet (I’m alone, in the front room), and also—I’m not ashamed to admit—the clientele. I don’t know if I like the customers who filter through on their way from the dining room. But I don’t have to like them. I don’t have to know them. In Orangeville I’m confronted with the outrage, the exaggeration of the other customers. Their neglect. I identify with their unkempt attitude, even though I attempt to distinguish myself. Right now it’s nice to inhabit a space that excludes, that represses, that hides (I’m not speaking of hiding people, but of a kind of interaction which rejects superfluity, which obliterates—or makes unnecessary—the self, myself).

*

But it’s not all restraint here. Since I’m the only one, since I am by-and-large an insignificant personage, the waiters come in to banter loudly with the bartender. The head waiter, who speaks loudest, with the most confidence, the most jocularity, sometimes catches my eye. I’m not sure whether to acknowledge the affront (is that what it is?) or to pretend as if nothing were happening.

*

The head waiter bends back, tipping a glass to his lips. “This woman didn’t touch her water.” Could he really be drinking from her glass? I want to trust his action, his words, but it seems unlikely. I’ve misunderstood. Perhaps it’s another glass. Sleight of hand—nothing is what it seems, especially not when it appears  simple.

“Apart from that, we had books. He would spin through as many as three a day, sometimes reading while he stood almost at attention but rocking slightly on his heels. I read his books after he finished them, and was quite likely the only ten-year-old at my two-room school in Buckhorn, Ontario, who could speak knowledgeably about the sexual services offered beneath the Roman Forum during gladiatorial matches, the operation of fuselage-mounted machine guns on World War I aircraft, the superhuman endurance of First Nations runners, and British naval tactics against the Spanish Armada.”

From the Walrus (“The Missing Piece”, by Terence Byrnes).

What does Hemingway say about marriage?

“They seemed to like us too and treated us as though we were very good, well mannered and promising children and I felt that they forgave us for being in love and being married—time would fix that—and when my wife invited them to tea, they accepted.”

Time fixes.

When the morning came we found the huts torn and streets rent. The others said nothing—they would not even turn towards me—but it was clear from their silence what they thought. We crossed the bridge in the afternoon, our packs heavy with salvage. We had found no bodies. No women, children, men. No cries or whispers or gruntings. No blood or bone or organ. No hair or nail, no gut, no flesh, no casings. But their things—what wasn’t upturned, spilled, or wrecked—we wrapped and put into our bags. Beneath the bridge the smell of bleach, cords and tires, twisted rods, bent axles, ripped canopies, and the black and bubbling muck. The trees wore fungal bloom, fuchsia, olive, wet, the tips of each papilla white and swollen. With darkness we set up on the road, laying our weary bodies on our packs. We were afraid to touch all else. A fire: dead stalks that had fallen from the trunks, leaves and weeds that we kicked up from the floor, the odd branch. A nervous hum as we scraped to the bottoms of our cans. And, finally, night. For the others to wait until I ceased stirring, until my eyes closed and breathing steadied, until the rot and bleach and wreckage were overcome by blot, by sleep.

“The pleasure of the sentence is to a high degree cultural. The artifact created by rhetors, grammarians, linguists, teachers, writers, parents—this artifact is mimicked in a more or less ludic manner; we are playing with an exceptional object, whose paradox has been articulated by linguistics: immutably structured and yet infinitely renewable: something like chess.

“Unless for some perverts the sentence is a body?”

Spanish
Russian
Swahili
German
English
French
Some Dutch
Some Cantonese
Tagalog
Finnish
Nahuatl

She’s waiting on the other side of the door, we’re waiting on our side of the door. We’re patient, because the car’s here now, and there’s nothing else to do but wait. The subway runs through its chimes: a sound to announce its arrival, a sound to announce that it’s about to leave. But the door doesn’t open, even though we’ve been waiting so patiently. Inside the train, the woman bangs on the plexiglass, to let the subway know that she’s waiting. But the car misinterprets: it thinks she means giddyup, like a cowboy patting the shanks of someone else’s horse. When the next car comes, we’re all a little nervous. Will the doors open, or won’t they? Are doors meant to open? Doesn’t our patience mean something? Does it mean anything?

Beneath the moon the snow is so bright that the air above the snow attains form. This luminence becomes a space that can be traversed. Before the woods, where the bare trees cast shadows and disrupt the light, my three dogs on their leashes. I am with them in the midst of the luminence. The dogs give out their whine. Something moves out there, over the hill where I can’t see. It is all I can do to keep them on, crossing and snapping, halloing the dark. The chill in the air rises in me. And the dogs who will not stop. It is wrong that we are standing here, through the air that is so bright.