the curse of the peripatetics

We rent a plot of land 130 ft. above Taiwanese soil. it is hard to distinguish this as land, feeling more like a holograph, a certain dependence on the angle of refraction and the happenstance of the viewer having turned suddenly and without any particular motive. all this no less on an island floating in the south pacific on a loose tether to the mainland -- none of it more determinate than the position of a mirage hovering above a desert highway. as electricity moves freely through groundless conductors so does the insipid through these shadows and sillhouettes, these nameless and unaccounted, crowded together as living aberrations.

"we're held in place by this only, this huddled communion - look behind you"
startled brick buildings in the first sun
"it has no commerce with that world, being
built of thin air and invisible wisps of breath, only”
3 plastic chairs and a plastic table a spotted sidewalk
"insofar as any one of us continues to speak, can we even"
in the early morning the people of our tomorrow look
with creep and clot upon their yesterday
“refer to it, and in the first silence we’ll float away to
our separate oases, among illusions, grasping blindly at
the familiar” and Wittgenstein said it himself
there is no such thing as
“grasping, grasping, take these drunks emerging from the
pub at daybreak clouded with the night’s effusions, spent
from chasing phantom romances, the beached whale of their
night thoughts asphyxiating in the sharp-edged quotidian of
daylight. they wake slowly and improbably to the call of fishmongers
from the impromptu street market that barricades the entrance
to the pub. in the slow sacrament of early morning they are half
to their heads with swill and gargle, through rows of flayed meats
and barrel fires. In the night all you can see through a window is your
own reflection surprised to see itself where it had sought an escape
as in daylight the hardened crystal of the fishmongers eye returns
your broken and tired visage where you had sought communion.

they’ve decided upon a sinewy fish with a Velcro skin

“this one here – ’
“this one, what’s its name if I could ask?”
“you wouldn’t understand if I told you”
“no I speak Chinese actually, I assure, can’t you tell? Well, I’m speaking Chinese right now sure enough…”
“no I just mean you wouldn’t understand anyway, even if I told you”
“well I’m quite familiar with the names of fish, I eat here quite often you see –”
“next customer”

he watches her brandishing a large butchers knife cutting along the fascia
making fine separations between fat and muscle casting the detritus in a
slumped pile he sees the penultimate death flop of a small mackerel
and he thinks of all the dogs who dream of the woods through the night
how their legs never reach the ground.

we won’t recognize ourselves for the strangers we’ve become, a bloodline of settlers whose virtue was to forget quickly and take to the place where we awake with spray-on grass and sprinklers. a gorilla can learn to love a milk-dispensing plastic mould icon of its mother and the propensity for abstraction in humans has not distanced us from these behaviours but taken our acceptance of these adumbrations to ever-more far flung extremes. in daylight the residents of this once rundown enclave can’t see themselves in the windows of their old homes where the souvenir shops now stand, their cameras in hand, can’t see themselves tourists to their ancestral homes, mistaking the longing of displacement for the collective nostalgia of an era.

the waywardness of this age is in the shallow belief that our loose memberships and conscriptions, passive participation, cohabitation in vast cities or digital networks amounts to a kind of illusory community. Increasingly capable are we of capturing these relationships even as they spiral to incomprehensible levels of abstraction. something will emerge from all these terabytes we believe. and so we wait.

sometimes it’s best to get in your car and drive out from the neon cytoplasm of the inner city to a large trucker highway dark but for the fluorescent lights pulsing out into the visible distance, drive until your eyes are weary and your muscles sore and the speed of all the vehicles around you is as irrefutable and constant as the blood running through your veins and when you’ve gotten there you should pull out onto the breakdown lane and get out of your car and let the dust of the road be blown across your face by the oncoming traffic, look out at the unfathomable corn fields and the blood red moon. only there for a moment on the pitched asphalt can you believe yourself to be standing on a cold dead rock, a boulder hurtling through inhospitable space in spite of which we are alive and alone. knowing this, one know its obverse: all the withering sacraments of intersubjectivity, shared experience, touch and the earthen warmth of home.