You near another intersection, which appears to be a precipice. On the side from which you've come, apartment blocks sprawl out into the harshly lit distances, devoid of movement or signs of habitation. On the other side, there is nothing but windowless brick facades - auto garages, collision centers, HVAC offices... The sidewalks there are strewn with powdered glass from smashed car windows, long since either towed or driven away (for no cars are parked there now).
You realize that you must cross the street if you wish to unlock the coded phrases being murmured in the palm of your hand. The street is thankfully absent of traffic; even so, you bound quickly across it, somehow certain that a rampaging fender could materialize at any moment to flatten you. The sound of glass grinding under the sole of your shoe goes some way in reducing your anxiety. What's more, the streetlamps here appear to be of the antiquated, sodium variety. They cast a deceptive, tinctured light that makes you believe in the continued existence of lone maniacs. You may be one of them, even.
Beneath you, there are occasional slabbed segments in the concrete, filled throughout with cryptic signs. They have been laid down in high-visibility yellow spray paint. When you encounter them, you notice that they leave no space unused within their quadrilateral boundary. Undoubtedly, they were written in a state of horror: horror vacui. They want you to believe them to have been authored by municipal workers in reflective vests of equally high visibility. You are meant to accept that the Men of Midday have left a record of their maintenance tasks - their chiselings, pourings, strippings, steamings, installations, and so on. But you feel a suffocating knot in your throat, as you did in childhood when drunken, jobless men would invite you into their apartments for a glass of cola and a microwaved danish. You know a ploy when you see one. So you note the markings well, pausing the tape, even, so that you can kneel down and record their arabesque entanglements in a notebook that never leaves your person. Some of the lines which you take down are rigid, while others hang like deflated liana vines in the Amazon, and still yet others turn toward you to reveal their hollowness.
These tubules seem somehow to agree with the indifferent voice preserved in the magnetic tape - the speaker serves as a kind of narration to the street-side scriptures as you pass them:
"[turbulence swallowing everything]... So... so first things first: I imagined myself speaking into this thing before I actually pulled it out of the bag and pressed 'record.' There was an oaf on the EL who... reappearance of Theodore Roosevelt, with his foreshortened walrus whiskers... tiny spectacles drowning in the hypertensive meat of his face... I attended a short talk given by a 'Marek Bienczyk' yesterday and, without completely recounting the entire discussion (which I have taken down elsewhere in my notes), I just want to mention an episode of his book Transparency... His vehicle has been assaulted by a bicyclist, whom he has just hit to very little perilous effect. And, as a result of the bicyclist striking his windshield, a small web-like crack opens up in the glass... And the perceptual character - the narrating consciousness, who is presumably Marek Bienczyk, himself - goes immediately into a grocery store, and... Mania, a state of hysteria, because... suddenly, the experience of life's objects has become too immediate. And there's no opportunity for the gaze to penetrate and understand the depth of those objects... The surface becomes utterly unintelligible, bringing on a feeling of searing helplessness: you are exposed as a blind man to a world that has butted right up against your useless corneas. And this, to me, would seem to be one of the functions of the Beast of Conglomerate Surface. The Beast is brought about when the distance between one's critical cognition of the object and the immediate physical experience of that object in space has somehow collapsed. The objects, when they become apparent and he realizes that he is surrounded by them, and that they are not the transparent idea of themselves that he had grown so comfortable with... they gut him, making him a bloodthirsty shrieker, hungry to gnaw at viscera with no orifice-beginnings or orifice-ends... There's a tree over on the west-facing sidewalk... whose trunk has been artificially made to twist... looks like a licorice rope or a bewildered baobab, grown over with splintering bark, having parted the soil and broken out of the underground... We have to return to the concept of a certain reality? A reality that no one will ever appreciate or perceive until a group of people who have the ability to fixate on the peripheral details of the world are able to come together... and assemble these particles of fact into something... terribly, terribly true?.. And, also, I guess, there is something about this group coalescing and assembling these pieces into a new ultimate account of 'reality'... It will necessarily involve their deaths, or at least their disappearance - the dissolution of their identities as recognizable people. But I guess the problem with these sessions is that they always wander about... the idea of pure, wandering abstraction and analytical interpretation of the world is... it's a very sultry means of existing. Living life without seeing things is clearly worse. We are made terrible because of the fact that we cannot fail to see the things others can never notice. So you have to be able to drill into any surface that comes up to meet you, realizing the futility of doing so - recognizing beforehand the miserable opacity of it all... The surface can reflect and retain light, as if it were the parabola of some unhealthy porcelain (or milk glass), in which... some sort of sputum can be perceived, whose sole meaning is the culture flourishing and multiplying within it...
"A street is like an unmade bed, with disordered, mangled blankets and sheets, flattened into a frieze that boils over in its stillness. Every urban street is an empty canyon that will one day collapse in on the fossils of those who would pass through it. And here I've spilled into the abstract again, but, you know... burning heaps of tropical garbage give off a plume of the densest, blackest smoke..."
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