Updates have gone missing. No real reason for them to have. The days have gently merged into each other as is their habit when habit asserts itself, and so too with them have any good intentions seized along the way -- the usual record of things done and seen, thoughts finely milled and reconstituted into still other thoughts, places travelled to and fro, people seen and spoken with, smells smelled, tastes tasted, memories made, remembered and forgotten. Another year's spring slough. More to add to the great forgotten menagerie of myself.
A FORMAL ANNOUNCEMENT!
I've made bad on a number of promises. Haven't said what I swore I'd say. Haven't done what I promised I'd do. So too has much of what I've privately held myself responsible for been permitted to run terribly afoul of my own empty agenda. In philosophy, I believe this is what happens when an irresistible force gets together with an immovable object for drinks and casual conversation. Or, politically speaking, the image we would have been left with were Tank Man (the Tienanmen Square protestor) and the tank engaged in not a standoff of democratic reform and individual freedom, but a regional speed walking competition.
SO--
I've decided to impose a new rule at Denny's Diner. Whereas before entries were continuously sought after and every waking thought and passing image potential material for the page, I will heretofore divert all happenings toward an unmarked reservoir somewhere toward the rear of my mind. Come Sunday or Monday evening, I'll check in on whatever has been collected and choose from it those things most compelling, or, if none possess the power to compel, I will find a way to render them significant. Regardless, I'll report something, always on Sunday or Monday, and only on Sunday or Monday. Adjust your schedules accordingly. Reconfigure your bookmarks and reassign your own online habits new orders.
Of course my most recent weeks have not been without event. I'll present them here in my favorite, obsolete form: the aphorism.
6 aphorisms on the occasion of my trip to Muui Island (Muuido), located a few kilometers from Incheon, off the country's northwest coast.
He who visits an island visits himself.
To seek respite on an island is to seek respite from oneself within oneself.
No one is so powerful as to refuse clouds their cover or rain their fall; but weak is the one too timid to wish for what is most wanted.
If you hurt in the morning you didn't during the night.
Too much fun is not fun; it's obnoxious.
Clams are good, but only good.
5 aphorisms and 1 modern parable on the occasion of my friend's departure to her home in New York where, this fall, she'll begin her trek toward a career in corporate law at her alma mater, Columbia University.
When one leaves another, neither will ever be whom he or she ever was.
If one leaves another and never again shall the two meet, both will forever be who they were.
You should have told me you were getting rid of Gravity's Rainbow.
Things begin. Things end.
If someone promises to never forget you, you'd best do the same. Same goes should that person break that promise.
In a grand building overlooking a reputable city there was, someways up, an especially well-regarded floor further divided into twenty-four rooms of equal dimension. Each room was fitted with one soundproof double door and one soundproof panoramic window. The ceiling and walls, too, were soundproofed according to the latest technology by the world's preeminent soundproofing contractor, constructed from parts produced by the world's foremost manufacturer. The rooms were regularly checked to ensure they complied with standard, a standard the building itself determined. If technology developed such that the building's existing facilities were rendered obsolete, the entire building would be shutdown, stripped, and refitted with the elements of the new vanguard -- one seemingly superfluous extravagance among many -- another being the price of real estate demanded to lease space for a boutique on its ground floor -- each of which nonetheless ensured its sterling reputation as a singular, unsurpassable construct. Of the twenty-four rooms, twenty-three were left vacant at all times. Occasionally, into the twenty-fourth, a crowd was gathered for a magnificent feast and for each member to confer with one another on a specific topic the precise nature of which none had been intimated prior to arrival, but to which all were made to swear their exclusive attention before being admitted, after which they were scrupulously monitored (one fact of which they were intimated).
It so happened that well into the building's existence, on a night conducted like every other in the history of such nights in the building, two of the attendees struck up a conversation unlike any other before it. It was not, however, particular in its content, but rather it differed, in a manner of speaking, in its tenor. For the building and more specifically the room, and still even more specifically the topic on which all were meant to converse (and it was different on any given night), never failed to dictate the terms through which all those gathered would communicate. Research, tireless research, more or less demonstrated to the night's organizers that they could suitably direct the party's intercourse by carefully calibrating its setting, regardless of the apparent variety in its attendees. The soundproof door and window were only the most overt effects. But it would be unnecessarily exhausting to detail each piece of the set, for they merely followed the current fashion, met and were met with the prevailing sensibility of the time, differing in style but uniform in substance and function. It is therefore necessary only to comment upon the soundproof door and window. Their technological development never required any drastic alteration to their cosmetic design. Thus, they are the building's exemplary feature. Sound neither penetrated nor escaped from it, yet they themselves did nothing to intrude upon the senses. 'Then' thus chased after 'If' like a doting child following its older sibling down the stairs. It was for this, this intrusion upon the senses, that the tireless research (mentioned above) was conducted. For whatever reason, those responsible for the building were concerned with anything that might provoke spontaneity. Any appeal to the senses was intentional, modeled after the research, and meant to provoke a predetermined reaction, or one of a set of predetermined reactions, which was itself monitored as yet more research, the results of which were weighed in determining the organization of future events.
And so it is not surprising that the two attendees upon whom our short tableau is focused were energetically talking back and forth on the assigned topic. But how exactly it is that they managed to slide into an unforeseen vocal register, so to speak, is a two-fold mystery. First, as with all sensual variables, the organizers had indeed discovered the key to all manners of communication -- to name a few among the many: connotation, allusion, intonation, the silent, kinetic language of the body, even the invisible lines transmitted in furtive and overt glances. Therefore neither lapse in control nor in observation could support the anomaly. Second, the results were not even observed, properly speaking. Thus, in truth, no one has authority to confirm what follows. The conclusion drawn must be regarded as conjecture. And as such, and seeing as it is, as has just been stated, an anomaly, the organization itself paid and continues to pay the conclusion scant attention. It was made a note of in passing and filed away with the whole report whose general attitude reaffirmed the research, perhaps to be picked up by a future researcher interested in esoterica, but, more likely, to be forgotten.
Here is what happened, without being observed, our conjecture: At some point in the night the woman -- the two before us were man and woman -- excused herself from their conversation. As is polite, the man granted her leave. He met no difficulty in joining another discussion, made all the easier given the condition that everyone in attendance contemplated the same thing. At some point the night emptied itself of its duties. One by one the attendees left the room, left the building, left one another, once again meeting at street level the world in a state more or less unfiltered. Long before the night was over and each of the twenty-four rooms once again vacant, the man finished his last drink, made his final round, and left. All were free to leave on their own, when they saw fit. He was among the later in leaving, but even then their remained a significant crowd. He was somewhere in the middle.
It was only on his way back home, by taxi, that he felt what we have come to call our 'conjecture'. Although he swore he made his last round throughout the room as something of an unconscious act of distraction, merely sweeping the grounds as one does before locking up, as if he were responsible for the calm order of his own evening, he now came to realize that he never again met the woman, and wondered if, beneath the one level of unconsciousness there was not a second level supporting it, as the foundation surely supported the boutiques on the building's first floor. And it was sometime during the brief ride to his home that he decided, based on nothing but his own instinct, an instinct of which he remained extremely suspicious, that the woman had left before he, that among the busy room he had sensed the exact moment she shut the door behind her with him still inside, but that his attention was diverted elsewhere and so he could not seize hold of this event within the event. Furthermore, he felt his final sweep was not out of habit, but led by the force of a distinct purpose, namely, that he must, for some reason indiscernible to him, find her. Why? That he did not know. To say one more thing. To not say one more thing. To ask how her night went. To comment upon his own. To ask her opinion of the current politics, her opinion of tourist spots in Southeast Asia; whether she prefers coffee or tea; whether she thought her time in university was the most cherished of her life thus far, or if she longed for still earlier times, when perhaps pain had not yet borne itself upon her conscience and still remained only on the surface of her body as he was sure it did for everyone up to a certain age; or was it that no time for her had yet brought her the delight she felt all people deserve and her patience for the future was thinning; maybe he would have probed through her thoughts of her own friends, her lovers, her family; to ask, calling her by name (if he knew it and remembered it) and laying a hand on her arm, if she'd ever lost someone, or whom she missed most in her life; to gain her full attention, employing every social tactic to which he had access, a rueful smile, a tacit gesture, a calculated tone, and then proceed with something like: "I'm sorry, miss, I hope you don't find this too untoward, but I've been meaning to ask since we first met, do you remember it? it was earlier this evening. Anyway, I've been meaning to ask: 'what do you think of your own teeth?' "
Then, suddenly, a second thought struck him, cutting across this first, like a sobering draught (or was it only an open window?). He was home. The driver awaited his fare. The man paid enough for a generous tip. When the driver went to return his change, he refused it and exited the car. He said goodbye to the driver, who thanked him and wished him a goodnight before leaving. Now he was alone, virtually at his own doorstep, the shortest of walks away from the comforts of his home. It wasn't late, but it was dark. Cold? Not really. A warm night. A little humid. Must be summer. A sky scattered with details he didn't notice. Things were going on in the background. What was it, though? This he thought on his way to his front door. What was I just thinking about?
---
There's an alley outside my placed lined with stacks of discarded cardboard. It's less feral than the above post. The result of having not put a word down for over two weeks, having a Subway sandwich and Coke to maintain my energy, and finishing an auspicious last night of Korean (with the final test this Thursday). Sorry if it reads like an unorganized cryptogram. See you next week.
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