Cause and Fall
At the bakeshop I go to most mornings, this morning old senile Lolita turned left, shying a bright white bandage on her cheek. What triggered the bandage is unimportant. It is the turn left--the shy--that I care about. The ancient human instinct, when Eve knew her nakedness. We do not act. Something acts upon us.
That morning there was rain, and a drunk grandson yelling above his lungs at a door for the key. Yelling at a door. Grandson: we all have our old lolitas, even after we grow up. But what about the key. The door had an accomplice in this conspiracy.
Back up. Rewind. There is a nice little spiritual song about the door of my heart but what I care::::::right now::::::about is the literal. So. The door of my house--the real door of my house--is the protagonist. It is groped by my hands, spread-eagled, forced entrance. My legs tread the air to and fro, marching in place. The door rushes here and there to meet me.
But why. What is the door's motivation.
Drop drop Drop. That morning the rain glides upward in time, analog on rewind. The era of backwards time is obsolete, that glorious non-phallogocentric Derridean gap between LP and CD when we knew the fiction of forward motion, and I played with Lego on shag carpet. Now it is only a steady march in place while artificial intelligence, creative computers rush toward us.
All that's left to tell the story is the Mannlicher [sic]. Dead rubies, ferries, walkers, marinas, earls. We know who pulled the trigger on the Mannlicher but who or what pulled the trigger on Oswald.
After he was a composer Paul Bowles wrote a story about a professor of linguistics whose tongue is cut out by Arab bandits, the Reguibat. The accepted reading is that this is an implicit consequence of the professor's assumed cultural superiority. Simple cause triggered simple effect. But I like to think he sought it, knew what would happen, sensed it more or less. Wanted it, the abject humiliation of a Lars von Trier heroine that brings the numbness. What Freud called the death instinct. But why. If the professor was the Mannlicher, who or what was his Oswald.
Protagonist starts with P. Remove the P. Rota, Latin for "to turn".
Sapir-Whorf's sorry cultural linguistic hypothesis is now a distant episode, a whorl in a faded thumbprint: there are many words for rain but only one for water. There are many words for love but only one for love. There is no word for the protagonist behind the protagonist.
Surely the singularity is at hand.
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