Spatial Disco

Though syntax is pliant, verbs in Latin long most for

sentence end. Any metaphysical extrapolation

therefrom is frippery, plain and simple. A neighbor’s

cat naps at midday in a depression its body made. A

hollow crystal pendant’s pendency supersedes its

emptiness, no matter that quality’s funerary purpose.

Laughter outlasts dialogue in Faces, a film about

marriage and friable sociality. Debuting as Maria,

former secretary Lynn Carlin, Oscar nominated and

thereafter obscure: “I’m not a sex machine. I’m

bored. I want to go to the movies.” To humdrum frisson

I prefer static action. To Joan Blondell I subordinate your

randy regimen. In Latin, the passive periphrastic

cauterizes the verb to prime it for infinite thought.

The younger Seneca: Saepe animus etiam aperta

dissimulat; ingerenda est itaque illi notitia rerum

notissimarum. “Often the mind dissembles even that

which is obvious; and so knowledge of the most

acknowledged things must be inflicted upon it.” In

time, action shrinks to “is” and must face the

unindividuated adjective. A swath of carpet yellows

from habitual spill. Yesterday and on August 28 a

screech repercussed that I traced to a teenage hawk.

\

Muriel, or

I suffer from an extraordinary
amnesia: I have, so to speak, no
childhood reminiscences, something
which drives my mother to despair.
~ Jean Cayrol, screenwriter of
Muriel, or The Time of Return
(1963)

All the critics note that crucially,

Muriel never appears in Muriel. Any

diegetic talk of her must thus advance

a definition of absent as “meaningful.”

So a widower attributes his wet diaper

to castoreum, though no beaver’s

there and he can’t, at the moment,

discern he’s peed himself. Castoreum’s

adjacency to urine, moreover, is

unlikely to register; he’s lost except

when he cathects the chihuahua in his

condo. Once a thicket hid an egret.

The egret wasn’t especially fond of

brambles, but it nestled there for a

stretch, or the boy, who had

heretofore only brandished a slipshod

shoe-lace slingshot, eyed it lancing

through the bank-brush. The eyeing

didn’t hold because his gun did. First

the reverberation, then its memory,

and finally a hint of pine settles in the

living room. The chihuahua’s bum eye

leaks. He dedicates a harmonica solo

to it before asking what its name is.