a sleepy place

It's a noisy world beyond my window, and the sounds that filter through are an apt montage of the greater city. The foreman outside got a translated copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and now all the laborists are acting out "eternal return," caught with the same jackhammer and the same dust in perpetuity. Or is it that when I awake in the mirk of early morning these sounds are indistinguishable from yesterdays. In this city of repetitions, I often fumble for a point of reference.

In the rising tide of voices at 5pm there is a comfort like the creakings of a house on an early monday morning as parents prepare for work, its a passive sound that you let in unguarded because it's as familiar as your own heartbeat. so what is this feeling of dissonance, this animal moment of cold regard? It dawns upon me that the fuzz of chatter below is composed of tiny little inscrutabilities, the chinese of schoolgirls in sincere blue skirts bussed in from the countryside - a current that is both mine and beyond my imagination. I remember on new year's eve in Providence the explosion of fireworks and the concise movement of their soundwaves through the city in the aftermath - I pictured it like the shadow of a high cloud bounding from road to rooftop in quick successions. Here is the dull thud of firecrackers richocheting in alleyways like a tired voice in your head, latent as the word you reach for in the darkest recesses of your memory. the slow walk of youth in brightly lit nightmarkets, or in circumscriptions of small bare parks where the elderly assume blank stares and the middlers chew a nut wrapped in a leaf coated in lime which turns their teeth red as vampires. on odd days the humid density of the tropics is a contagion, people looking cross-eyed and confused, you're bound to see little girls on teetering bicycle fugues, and three or four seconds into the blare of a scooter horn, a grown man snapping to in a crosswalk. germany has its zeitgeist, taiwan's is sleeping beneath a palm tree.

the pied piper of hamelin is a phantom who appeared before historians and mythologists on a stained glass pane in the middle of the last millenium. the pane succumbed to some or other unlikely catachlysm, but the image of those sullen-faced white-cloaked children following an unhinged flautist through the hinterlands of german imagination persisted and a story gathered around it. a young dishevelled looking foreigner enters a small village named Hamlin with nothing but a flute in hand. the foreigner casts about for jobs in the local farms and markets but finds nothing save for the hoards of rats skittering under crates, in the drippy shadows and refuse of sick homes. they were growing in number every day, one felt the slow crescendo of their collective sqeakings, the manifold twitching of noses and the blood red eyes - it was enough to strike a kind of fear, no, mania into Hamelin's youth, the moral fibre of the community gradually unwound, dogs howling, a conflagration. to all this, the flautist brought his panacea, a song so beautiful it would entice the snittering masses from their hollows and down, eventually, to the river where they would meet their demise. having secured the townspeople's approval and the promise of a fee upon his success, the flautist commenced his song. rising and falling in imploring thirds and compound asymmetries, the melody communicated a kind of protracted longing that became manifest in the sea of rats trailing behind the foreigner as he made his way down to the water. this the profound and tragic innocence of their animal torpor, like the snake and his prey sleeping away the winter in the same lair, a matter of the mind relinquishing its individual nature. then, with the litter of rats floating inanimate at his back, the stranger made recourse to the hills where he was owed a debt.

the vigor of his sweaty climb, the joyful anticipation of his reward well-earned, all of this gave way in a moment: the silence in the streets and blank stares of the attending indicated what he would have feared. there would be no money forthcoming for his pains.

one traces back through the drift of particulars to the nebulous Fact of ancient history, a frayed document with the words, "it is 10 years since our children left," what gruesome details succeed these words, the frail, hollow-cheekbone endurance of the child caravan drawn on by the music in unending verses, along ridgelines and swampy pits destinationless. what of all this can be recovered? the structuralist would say look to the immediate, the facts unravel in the mythic present. and sun-ra in long-drawn improvisations sought the precise moment of his forefathers, those floating sarcophagi, the horrid stacks of cotton picked from long rows, the feel of the blistering sun and the whip, his attainment. the locals say the garbage truck song that unfolds beyond my window in daily repetitions is the very same that the pied piper may have played. the sleeping masses in orderly lines drawn by the same longing, the flautists unfilled tonic refrain.