We (Part II)

We are followers of threads, much like tracers of wires, jiggling their bulk to see what fits where and never quite completing the circuit diagram. And how can we, with so much left unsaid, so many impressions unrecorded, so many dreams fleeting, so many languages unlearned, childhood blemishes still prominent? But we make do. We can spend an entire evening nodding at jazz and saying "yes" on the streets and the crowds are mighty and annoyed but we don't mind. We can be mighty and spontaneous, as big or as small as we like, as understanding but competitive as we want, as smart or as pretend-stupid. We breathe heavy snowfalls and share it with nobody but ourselves in ingroup jargon. We know what's right, it's just that we're paralyzed with semantics because the buildings have never looked so permanent and edifices never so sheer and vertical. They are terrifying yet we have never given up on trying to be across the universe and inside a flower. We try to induce crazy visions: like at the jazz bar where the solo began as spider eggs covering the ceiling, which then hatched and spun webs to ensnare the basist and cocoon the drummer, all the while sparing the trumpet man--for the spiders have quite different plans for him. We are steadily approaching the state of being "uninhibited", shedding the elfin superego and leaving it in rags in the alley, a bottle of brandy for fake warmth, a harmonica for entertainment, and rags for real warmth. We are enamoured of shopping carts: really the idea that one can get so much metal for just a quarter. We gamble, but only with money. How much is a person worth? (And we don't mean an arm or an intestine or a cornea: the whole person.) We will eventually learn a few words of a foreign greeting which will render us labelled and utterly incapable of crossing the generation barrier. We are the grandchildren of modernity whose struggle all the world will soon have to endure. We do not build worlds, but we have no choice. Our lives will reach a swelling chorus, enough to being a tear to the eye, enough to compose a tanka for someone who will be named in initials at a socially appropriate time. Subtlety has woven chains around our walks and talks. Propriety and proprietariness has begun, and all the years of plastic labelled buckets now start to spill over onto people: people become described by words, and we all forget that for some reason we are in love with the Signifier and not the Signified. We try to pull threads of insights together from matchstick scrawls, from graffiti, from books and plays, from conversations, from the mentally ill, from ancient schools of practical philosophy, from exercise regimens, from musical expression, from foods strange and exotic and alleyways containing soup and wine, from bulletin boards stippled with rusty staples, from utility poles similarly covered, from drugs, from walks, from peaceful afternoons where brief rays of sunlight dance off the coffee table, from machines, from personal anecdotes and personal experiments, from drum circles under icicles, from awful dirges perfomed a propos of nothing. What picture is beginning to emerge? The picture of us? Hardly.

Consider: "wallcovering / Map of the World too large / for the space / we trim off everything / south of the Sandwiches."