The sound is an obscene popping created with the mouth and intended, I believe, to imitate that made when certain parts of the body are inserted into the mouth and then removed quickly. This is, of course, a process designed to repeat itself, to go on for an indefinite period of time. However long, in fact, it takes to accomplish the unsubtle biological goal. The young man making the sound is of sub-par stature and possessed of the barest traces of a goatee like just about every young man in the building. And indeed, on the street outside. And everywhere in between. I am in the midst of discussing Heraclitus’ odd and fastidious praise of Bias, son of Teutames, but the sound is causing the others to squirm, to release themselves from the grip of whatever reverie had preceded the intrusion of that sound, whatever reverie had taken them safely far away from ancient Priene. They look around as if just up from a two-month coma. Is it possible we are aware of only one thing at a time and that one thing is inevitably, when boiled down to its essence, to the center and place where it is most truly itself and so entirely free of contamination by dust and participles, the workings of our own conscious mind? Sure, that mind is not a vault; it hums in constant call and response to the symphony and filmstrip it receives through the senses, information having its origin, ostensibly, in the world but in all likelihood having very little to do with that world. Where then is it generated? How are we to separate the inside from the outside or even to make sense of such distinctions? Wouldn’t it be better to just start fresh, to turn our backs once and for all on the ideas that have been passed down for just over two hundred generations now and affixed with the rather insulting label “esoteric wisdom”, or, if wisdom won’t do, then at least that which sits on the shelf next to wisdom and keeps it company during the dreariest parts of the winter? My mind fills slowly (like a swimming pool) with visions of my jumping on the perpetrator’s back, of ripping at his ears with my teeth, of beating him to death with a cane that somehow introduces itself into the proceedings for no reason I can gather other than perhaps to give me something solid to enact my rage with, without having to resort to the use of my hands, which are thin and fragile and covered recently with patches of discoloration. That these visions are more than just visions and that I have apparently, in the process of nurturing them and encouraging their maturation (the way you encourage a continuous increase in the local turtle population by tossing the occasional chicken carcass into the river) turned them into something resembling an actual assault -- is attested to by several sudden high-pitched and not altogether female screams and the sound of shuffling about the room, of shoes squeaking meekly against the linoleum and the metal tips of the chair legs penduluming as those in my vicinity realize they may wish to head for the exits (of which there are precisely two at either end of the typically yellow room) before they too risk becoming the target of my Heraclitian, if irrational, ire.  I see immediately that no flesh has been torn, no blood spilled as a result of my attempted murder of the table behind which the mouth-popper sat. Fortunately, this table, though overturned -- its legs sticking awkwardly into the air between us like those of a deceased and bloated horse -- is still in one piece. I can’t afford to purchase the institution another.

Under the surface, under the skin, something is amiss. Flesh fails to register its own solidity. Fibers appear as if out of nowhere and stitch themselves together into patterns that interfere with the patterns pre-programmed into the cells. Those who become aware of this before anyone else are accused of succumbing to psychiatric disturbances only recently recorded in the medical literature. The names given these disturbances are as ordinary as the names we give our kitchen utensils. Certainly if you think about them long enough, if you repeat them over and over again to yourself, they will begin to strike you as out-of-place, as so irremediably contrary to the nature of objects being named, you will begin to wonder if maybe the names aren’t really names at all but elements in a code that you are, perhaps, the first human being in history to detect. And you fear it may then become your destiny and obligation to devote the rest of your life to attempting to decipher it – to taking it apart like an old typewriter you’ve found in the garage, taking it apart just to see for yourself how it works. I walk the mile and a half to work and back every day without complaint but without much of a sense of having accomplished anything either. There are two hills along the way, mild inclines in the topography of the earth and I imagine sometimes as I am making my way up and down them that they were landmarks at one time whereby the indigenous peoples of this region navigated, though surely this area must have been entirely forested at that time and so any increase in elevation as minor as is represented by these hills would have been nearly impossible to spot until you were almost directly on top of them. Still, the forested, be-savaged inclines in my mind are more compelling than those encased in concrete or asphalt that pass beneath my feet, those watched over by nothing more mysterious than loose groupings of black power lines swinging dangerously close to the heads of those of us who make our way through this part of town without ever bothering to linger. Every now and then I see someone watching my progress from one of the windows that grace the second or third story of the buildings built half a century ago, and more, on the slope and arch of these twin hills and I wonder what it’s like to live, in effect, in the sky. My room is on the ground floor of a building with a picture of a sea creature of some sort painted on the south wall. The sea creature is a sandy yellow, vaguely cetacean in appearance, and covered in moss. It has flippers someone has taken great care to render – with irregular knobs across them and mottled shadows meant to capture the movement of light through the upper regions of otherwise very deep water. No one seems to know what the sea creature means. Why it is here and not somewhere else. Why it is constantly watching you with its big gray eye (the other one is hidden on the other side of its massive head) whenever you approach, or (should you prefer) whenever you cross the street so as to avoid its malevolent gaze. This is, I’m sad to say, the option my friends choose more often than not, and so I rarely see my friends now. I am having a harder and harder time each day trying to remember their names or what it is they look like. 

The position requires little in the way of current research or even grooming. It is the kind of opportunity that arises when someone else has passed into the netherworld we make mention of so frequently – a place we imagine as having enormous chandeliers hanging from the ceilings and decorative plush pillows scattered about on the outsized leather chairs lining either side of the front gallery. The less we believe in it the more we embroider, leading some to publish a rule to that effect, naming it after some seventeenth-century statesman they just happened to read about one morning, or a nephew struggling with alcohol issues and other issues related to the alcohol but seeming to belong to an entirely separate universe. Like the habit of mispronouncing other people’s names. Or of dropping hard-to-replace objects (hard-to-replace because of the sentimental value attached to them or the boutique nature of their origins) into bodies of water in the general vicinity of where he lives. I am hired because I wrote a book on Heraclitus once, and though no one here has ever actually read it, they know instinctively this is the not the sort of thing most people would find it necessary to make up. And they have heard of Heraclitus, they are fairly certain. They say the name rings a bell. But I know the iron in their heads is more likely to commence vibrating to the frequency given off by sitcom characters or catchphrases borrowed from past presidential campaigns. In the corner of nearly every classroom someone is huddled on the floor with his knees pulled up to his chest and is muttering something that, should you approach closely enough to catch a snippet, turns out to be not so much the incantation one expects of the mentally ill but more a laundry list of items to be secured so as to make the speaker an ordinary, contented individual like everyone else. Baby Ruth candy bars usually place somewhere high up on that list. They are followed closely by clothes hangers to be bent into animal shapes and old-fashioned money clips with synthetic rubies in the middle, actual rubies being, of course, scarce and so prohibitively expensive. Try spinning out your moment to moment ruminations on the fragments of the pre-Socratics in a setting such as this! You will be lucky to get beyond the first ten years. I hobble home at night certain that they will no longer ask me back and if they do, certain that I will refuse, but none of that comes to pass and before I know it, my craving for raw corn starch and Irish whiskey has reached such a fevered pitch as to threaten to swamp both my emotional well-being and my intestinal health once and for all. At this point, the nights are lonely because they are made of equal parts moonlight and silence and when I try to remedy the situation by purchasing a desk lamp or a prostitute, I become so disoriented I think for a moment I might simply disappear, might cease to exist the way the last ten minutes are no longer available to you no matter how you try to get them back – yoga, temper tantrums you throw while lying on your back. Eventually everything has this habit of swimming back into view, though, and I realize that if I am going to continue to live in this manner and in this place, I am going to have to abandon all desire to pursue what they call a “purposeful life” in the pamphlets well-dressed strangers hand out to all and sundry at the strip mall down the road, between the fountain at the center (a fountain that has, of course, run perpetually dry and is stained an unseemly yellow) and a very narrow store where they sell, among other things, electronic devices that pinpoint your precise location on the surface of the planet as it goes spinning its endless and unperturbed way through outer space.

Panic sets in right before resignation and the two begin an intricate dance that puts anything else you have seen (on the island of Bali, for instance) to shame. Later, the same groups of people who first set eyes on one another at the airport are asked a series of questions, the object of which is to suggest they have been trusting their eyes far too much and ought, at some point soon, to switch allegiance to one of the other senses. Of course no one is going to admit this up front, and, when confronted, the authors of the experiment refuse to act as if they can even write. They stumble about with their hands swinging aimlessly at their sides like broken scaffolding, and as the setting sun gets in their eyes they begin a wailing and a caterwauling more appropriately associated with common apes. There is no point in judging, though, unless judgment will make us feel better about ourselves. This occurs frequently enough, I suppose, to encourage some people to comment on it and others to act as if they have been aware of it since they were very small children. They were in the habit of observing everything that went on around them. The lighting of the oil lamps come sunset. The whispers growing to a crescendo over time. You can determine for yourself whether or not these whispers had anything to do with talcum powder, but, for my part, my mind is made up. It’s made up before I ever even step into a room and see all those who might be arrayed against me. Each sitting bare-chested at a desk with an open bottle of ink on it and a handful of old-fashioned goose quills yet to be sharpened. Imagine my horror when I realize what is going to take place. How I have been tricked into showing up through promises of wealth. Ingots stacked up in crates. Pieces of paper with my name on them and the insignia of what I can only imagine were, at one time, venerable financial institutions or government agencies long since passed now into the mists of non-existence. Someone at my elbow (there always seems to be someone at my elbow these days, as if I have grown so notorious complete strangers can make a living now just by promising to keep a close eye on me around the clock, from morning until night when really they ought to be in their beds sleeping and dreaming about what it’s like to make love to someone you have only ever seen at a distance) says something I can’t quite make out, but I know it is intended to warn me of the approach of danger on my other side, on the side where my other elbow is located and, at least for the moment, unencumbered by someone’s being “at” it. I just have time to duck my head when something weighty, and no doubt very sharp, passes over it, something that makes a terrific hissing sound as it does so, its bulk and momentum sufficient, I suppose, to separate the oxygen molecules in the air from their companions and therefore threaten to make everything around me blow up. At least that’s how I imagine things happening at precisely the same time as they are happening. Perhaps then I have merely to imagine my way out of this predicament as effortlessly as I have imagined my way into it. I have merely to furrow my brow and suddenly, just like that, everything will be back to the way it was last Tuesday.

The pit at the center of the cherry stands no chance against my teeth, not on this day when the sounds that drift down from the floor above are those of fallen bottles and someone playing a familiar melody on what I take to be a mandolin. I’m left with innumerable hard bits on my tongue, intermixed with the half-chewed pulp, and an unpleasant sense that the melody is going to haunt me until late in the evening when I can finally put a name to it. When I can tell myself that what I am doing is no different than what everyone else on the planet is doing at some point or another. Barking commands at imaginary underlings. Exploring roads that seem to have no set direction -- no single identity of their own -- just so as to have something to do for half an hour. Or until the clock stops working because it is one of those with hands and the force of gravity has finally grown stronger than whatever force it was that allowed those hands to defy gravity for years on end. Of course, just when I think I have turned a corner, when I think I will be able to continue without suffering one abominable pang after another for the rest of my life, I look into her eyes again for just a moment and I am lost. How can the most intense experience one knows in a lifetime be the simple act of gazing? Thank God at times like this for the invention of the trombone! For those who know how to make the trombone sound faintly like a full-fledged thought first emerging from that region of the mind where thoughts have not yet been granted their full compliment and arsenal. Where they are mere lines and shadows floating about at the surface of something very like a soup or stew. And you are expected to dip some sort of implement (this, in the right hand, I suppose, is the trombone itself, though it could also conceivably be other items like a spatula or a novel, so long as you are the one who writes it) into the soup or stew so as to dredge up from the bottom whichever pieces have gotten stuck, have been burnt on and so can be expected to contain the greatest concentration of minerals and collagens and whatever peculiar shapes give our thoughts their solidity, their ability to hang together even when we hurl them at objects in the outside world that we might otherwise expect to dash them to pieces. Stone fences. Barbecue pits. The tongs used to move the meat about above the fires in the barbecue pits. Soon it becomes obvious that it will never be enough for us to exist inside our own skin. We are expected to occupy other selves as thoroughly as we occupy our own. And yes, we are supposed to ask permission first, but that doesn’t ensure a painless transition. Quite the contrary! There is blood in there and we will, by definition and the laws of physics, displace it. We will take up space previously reserved for nerve fibers and whatever serves as the interior equivalent of a mirror.

Yes, it’s worrisome when Eulalie professes a new fascination for the love suicide plays of Chikamatsu. Not because I think they’ll give her any ideas but because I can’t imagine Eulalie’s interest piqued by anything so tangible as ordinary words strung out crosswise on a piece of paper. Nothing you can hold in your hands, nothing you can peel the outsides off of the way you are compelled almost to take the clothes off a doll. But we shouldn’t put too great a burden on this observation as it is frail at the center like all observations, and therefore wont to buckle. And it is apt to make a noise when it does so that we will spend the next six months attempting to decipher, ignoring in the process those who would be willing to love us, even groom us in the old-fashioned way, despite our ungainly appearance. Our outsized ears. Our shuffling gait. Maybe Eulalie is trying to tell us something the only way she knows how – through extra sensory perception. And the language of the body which is a language everyone speaks in common even when we find we are no longer possessed of an actual body. We have relinquished it due to an unforeseen illness or an accident involving the railroad and our poor peripheral vision. This is the point at which, if we were adept at moving our puppets, we would have them move to the center of the arena and gaze intently into each other’s enormous eyes. We would wait breathlessly for the trumpets to play in unison off-stage, the agreed upon signal to proceed with the final act: the raising of the blades, the shaking of those empty heads, a shaking designed to signify either grief or the overwhelming anxiety one would, of course, expect when facing the termination of one type of existence and the consequent beginning of another. Not that I put too much credence in those doctrines that say we are going to recognize immediately and cleave to those who mean the most to us when we meet them on the other side. When you get right down to it, there probably aren’t any sides. No angles, no walls. And even if there are, you can all but guarantee that these things exist precisely to separate us from one another, to insure, for instance, that Eulalie will remain forever out of reach. Like a pomegranate in a locked cupboard. The kind of cupboard, say, with glass in the doors so that you can see what it is you are missing. You know you have merely to break the glass, to reach in and take the pomegranate, to make off with that which has tempted you so sorely. But you won’t. You are afraid of cutting your fingers. You are afraid of accidentally ingesting the microscopic shards of glass that will, no doubt, have lodged themselves in the meantime in the pomegranate’s otherwise flawless scarlet skin. 

What is it about Vronsky that makes it so difficult to remain conscious? How am I to take the foreshadowing, the tick in my left eye that seems to grow in intensity until it is no longer a tick but a full-fledged shudder, an indication of pathology at such a deep level that there is no hope, really, of ever being able to un-earth and eliminate it once and for all? The only option available at this point is complete surrender and then a lifetime of rehashing the events that led me to this place – a gate nine feet high, someone pacing back and forth behind the gate in the shadows cast by poplars and other indigenous species of tree. Who is that over there and why does he keep lighting pieces of paper on fire and then waving them about above his head? Could it be that what we call communication is really just a way to isolate ourselves even further through gestures designed to seem meaningful at first glance, while still managing to withhold any information that might otherwise let us know what is at stake and who is liable to be harmed in the process? Of course I don’t mean physically, but I don’t mean emotionally either. Think of the concept of the hybrid, the thing that is both itself and something else at the same time. Or at different times, alternating times. Like an amphibian which is both reptile and fish. Or at least has the potential to turn eventually into the one and revert back finally to the other. I like that the hum produced when this occurs is very like a soothing human voice. If you listen closely enough you will begin to hear barely discernible words. Whether these words actually exist or are inserted by the mind afterward because the mind can’t help but to operate through some dim approximation of language, is anyone’s guess, and there are as many schools of thought on the issue as there are individuals who are willing to create a school of thought. So that they might be taken seriously, perhaps for the first time in their lives. So that they might have something to point to when they too are standing before an imposing gate and whoever is standing behind it, in the shadows, asks them why they are there and what they hope to achieve once they are granted access to the environs behind the gate. The limitless plains, the villages laid out as symmetrically as handsome human faces. The residents of these villages as happy and contented as if they had been allowed to reside forever in the most spectacularly fevered of all their tens of thousands of spectacularly fevered dreams.