and some time later in their congregation as she was pouring him his fifth cup of tea and he had no more pockets to store the teabags in and that was when the junkie himself who had not spent any nights there in the flat for some time entered the girl’s flat and from his look and also from the her own look the junkie perceived that he and she had been talking about the junkie and his junkie self. and while the junkie pondered this he the non-junkie he on the other hand took in the bisexual increasingly religious former heroin junkie who was also quite tall and he saw that the bisexual increasingly religious tall former junkie had so many mountainous attributes and epithets especially in person all most visible and imposing that he did not quite know by which he should refer to the bisexual increasingly religious tall former junkie for he could not memorize other people unless he chained them to a single dominant explosively visible attribute and this was most confusing and debilitating and it rather murdered the conversation in fact no conversation to be had for none opened it and the bisexual increasingly religious tall former junkie was constitutionally a very impatient man who lived and spat and snored by the ebb of the conversation and there was none to be found or distributed here and so the junkie left and he never managed to meet and know and laugh with the bisexual increasingly religious tall former junkie.
and after the junkie stormed out she cried awhile out of her sombre eye no more than was regular or decent and she doubted as to the celibate binding intentions of the former she insisted former junkie and he handed her a noxious shrug gratis and taxed her a further teacup for his second but even a shrug was a gesture and so she gave him his tea and miracle succeeded in pouring six consecutive cups of tea and eleven if one counted her cups as well without breaking or dropping the samovar and all this in a most dangerous and willowy condition of mind.
and since the junkie’s departure she hadn’t said a thing and even on her best days there was such a shattered globe of hereditary quiet in her not that he could claim to know it and in truth furthermore he hardly knew the girl at all he had just come in for a glass of warmish tea but he found himself challenged by the obstinacy and the ease with which she gave away her self and her papier mâché dignity to a mirage of indifference a dervish of deeply lodged splinters a bad poet’s dream taken seriously they were all such bad poets ultimately. but at this she protested the junkie was much greater no the junkie was worthy of her salinities and he said the junkie was but a bloodless wildean epigone, a bloated flaccid codpiece of moth-eaten velvet in his the junkie’s best of days and at this she gave him the chance to explore the ruins of a smile and served him another cup of tea and he looked at her and looked outside into the street at the ambulations and at all the people and outside there were only people and erections as uglygray as old soviet architecture as if the whole world had been written by kundera and it did not take him long to decide he preferred even the world to her and to her girlish person in her small room but she stopped him yet again although she too had forgotten him in all these years. and she told him to look closer to look again and take in how the whole world was but unconscious mathematics and vacillating chains of numerals and atlas pillars of purified accounts and ossified symbolics and a crush of codicils and how people walking became data-impregnated screens as well with illuminated ciphers sliding across their shirts and cheeks the truth behind the image and the pretty colours as they ambled through the street markets and in all she was not lying so he stayed in her small flat.
and then she ventured that since the world was quite rigid and sanitary one could simply try to marginalise that section of the world that pertained to one directly that engulfed one and could not be persuaded to allay its grip and fix it tend to it improve it in gradations of forgiveness and ductile schematisms and the beauteous to be discovered in this slice of world was to be either artistic or moral and political for these were man’s instruments in mollifying his world and substituting his own systemics for its unyielding barbarism and gory linearity and thus rendering a small corner inhabitable and to each a small corner in the geometry of forgiving the world.
and he said that moral pontificating atop the smoulders of the cadaver politic was boring and overdone and of course quite cheap and as for art well art was speech and human speech and look at literature as its representative and that he for one had noticed an increasing inability to relate to literary characters when they shout at him in (what is for him) sign language and these characters they writhe their bodies and twist their minds in morality and emotions, and he just can’t get them no comprehension no chasing no clutching, and the semiotics of feeling, of judging, escaped him and thus he cannot at all project or empathise and he did not even need to but all these characters expected and wanted him to he was not understanding them if he didn’t and therein crackled and died down the futility of art at least for him.
and she said that he spoke of art with that profound knowledge of love of him who had never been loved and this occupied him awhile but later he said that truly he spoke of it with the profound knowledge of love of him who had never loved, avec cette connaissance profonde de l'amour de qui n'avait jamais aimé.
and she said that his literature his view of literature was bacterial and multitudinous and had long been cleansed out by reality but that even he had to admit that in some pages in some sarcophagi there was a ton of man, a ton of novel. and he acquiesced certainly this might be so but literature did not require such ballasts to prevent it from flying off like coughs and helium and that literature, hers the face that launched his thousand neuroses, and then he added that tzara had written his name in the snow with a walking stick and said there. i think ill call it the alps. and she caressed him naïve and warned him he was magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life but he could not simply quit simply retire and refuse or negate life silence was not in his nature and she knew this and she guessed at his nature by poking and pricking it constantly. and he stared at her and admitted that silence is impossible, even the death of language is discourse and that destiny can never be conjugated but in the perfect, it is a sealed time and a literature unmolested by the echoes of the spoken, the rarefied words, ghost-wor(l)ds in the interior of the word, silence and the quill cutting into the white and drawing black blood and the hunger for the word, the cannibalism of the logos and the world is not unexplained so long as one recites it, so long as one can recite it, especially in a monotone, and writing is a duration of dead signs who only matter insofar as they are transported away, invisible, and literature is the cadaver of language and style is the author’s prison, his solitude.
and she said that he was simply dribbling out a fractured fall into himself and that such livings could not help but evanesce peel off into their own whirl because no one could fall for ever. and he informed her she was being wrong and that if anything hamlet had crushed yorick’s skull in his hand and let the dust dance in his hair hamlet’s and that most of the time he wanted to shut himself out but he couldn’t because j'effraie le silence infini des espaces éternels.
and he said to her that he was among the loneliest people she or anyone would ever meet, and yet the supreme value of an human entity had always been for him that human entity’s conversation, by which he did not at all mean that he swooned at a good kingsley amis or henry james, not at all, but in his modest appraisal the key thing about a good conversation was that it should be utterly unlike his own. and she was surprised at this his own and asked what his own conversation was like. and he told her it was the type wherein every three to four exchanges he would toss his interlocutor a bone with just enough casual wit left on it to keep him his interlocutor happy for a painfully short while, after which grace period he would resume his not so very veiled requests that his interlocutor should cease humping his foot.
and he felt himself slip into prodigality but could not quite arrest himself and he further said to her that he was of course on the wrong side of thirty. and she acted surprised and constructively exclaimed that he was only twenty six. and he said that he knew and that there was no right side of thirty, and no right living in wrong life.
and then she said she was only too glad to be this wrong life’s lawyer before his aberrant witch hunt or tribunal and no tribunal if not the tribunal of reason, for truth. and to this he told her imprimis that truth is that which survives dialectics the longest and his dialectics is the cheer of a bloodsport and item that lawyers were loathsome to him and that he abhorred them and lawyers were his third most hated profession and joint top were suitably economists and professors of philosophy. and she asked him what of philosophers proper. and he said there were no more philosophers, just professors of philosophy and that if any of the latter lay claim to the title of philosopher she and anyone could rest assured that their the claimants’
worth as such could not possibly exceed that of the physical ink accidentally spilt on their phd diplomas and that he was sorry to be peddling such platitudinous positions but there it was.
and she told him of course that there was something truly scary about stupidity made coherent and he was only too glad to wolf down the hint and get up and negotiate the recalcitrant yale of her small flat but that was not what she had meant at all and she wrestled him back into submission at her tea table and proffered a new cup and teabags of different hues and he had to concede defeat once more and whenever he stopped talking she would extend her foot under the tea table and she stepped on his foot as hard as she could and she was strangely wearing winter boots inside her small flat and thus he had appreciably valid motives for supplying her with a dependable flow of conversation.
and he talked to her of man being absolutely seul entre tous les êtres animés de sécréter pour lui-même de l'irrespirable. and he talked to her of the rabid joy of the screaming of le verre d'eau dans la tempête. and she asked him why he was being so petulant and facetious and negative and she did not see why poetry gentle graceful poetry could not pacify the storm and purify the water in the glass of its subreal pollutions of the invisible worms and invisible hungers eating the glass from the inside. and he scoffed at poetry and said that bon nombre de poètes pourraient passer pour surréalistes, à commencer par dante et, dans ses meilleurs jours, shakespeare.
and she smiled before his bespittled sentencing and said that in spite of his titanic youth he spoke and faith’d as if all those years of maturity or the prime of life that awaited him up and down the acclivity looked to him like an interval between two bouts of vomiting, approximately, or that was how he spoke and how she understood him. and at this truthful ignominy he told her that he felt like he had walked into a swordfight armed with a dildo. and he lamented her steady employ of ad hominem assaults and logical bear traps and especially since she had said in the beginning or so he thought that the world outside her small flat was frozen and unbending and enslaved to logics and standards and sand-arts and why was she summoning that very same world in even the chastest and clinkingest of her words and worded winks.
and he confessed to her than if one were to ask him he would not at all deny that like most young eastern europeans, all he had was a dream and an hard-on, sans the dream component obviously. and she winked and told him that it was her firm conviction attested by countless hypostases of the above that every erection is positively unique: those bitches are like snowflakes. and he did not know quite what to do with this but nevertheless suggested that he himself believed (if at all) in two (if any) forms of communication: sex and irony.
and the turn of the conversation pleased her girlish person for these were roads well trodden and she asked him why the duopoly or better yet adversarial dichotomy of sex and irony for she favoured collaboration in most if not all things that was just what she was. and he once again confessed that as far as he could crystallise it there was little denying that his life – and its petty excuse for drama in particular – felt to him like the brief but violent narrative or leaden conversational interludes in between the fuck scenes of a confused porn flick masquerading as a film, not that there was much conversation to be had of late for evident constipatory reasons.
and she smiled at this and it was curious to him that she was the only one to smile consistently or at all in such conversations and she said to him that he struck her as being one of those rare creatures who can be correctly accused of suffering simultaneously from both verbal diarrhœa and mental constipation, or perhaps the adjectives were to be reversed and inverted, or perhaps both phenomena were purely verbal at hollow heart. and he raged at this and carried forwards by the relative veracity of her amused statement he promptly brought to her giggling attention that he was the best conversational fuck she had ever had and that granted, they were often tugging and pulling in opposite directions and actual (mutual) contact was rather rarefied and also they often appeared to be of the same gender, but that did not dilute the experience, not one deep inch.