"El Derecho no existe, imbeciles, es simplemente una ficción enajenadora, el polvo de oro de la gran píldora de la propriedad privada, y no lo que dicen en las Universidades nuestras, esas grandes fábricas de gallinas.”
—Pobrecita Poeta Que Era Yo
From Fanny Howe’s Indivisible (p. 124):
“Bricks frame my view from this seat and I think the water wants to be saturated like a cloth dragged through the water the way it runs so lamely.”
b.
And then at the bottom of the page comes this exchange:
“Mimi asked: ‘Which would you rather be when you die—the air or the earth?’
‘Please, the water,’ I told her.
‘And you?’
‘We will never be ether,’ is what I think I heard her say.”
This morning I found a parking spot just outside the office, it being Sunday. Everything has its season, or so we are promised, and on Sunday mornings parking spots are plentiful. I was pretty happy about it all. Mildly happy, I should say. Not quite ecstatic, but I knew that I would be able to see my car from my window, several stories up. I didn't expect the car to do anything amusing or to be particularly worth watching or even to have anything exciting done to it, but it's comforting to be able to glance out the window every now and again and reassure oneself that things are where you left them. Especially large, expensive things like automobiles. And so I sat, a couple of hours later, in my desk chair, sipping coffee, swiveling, and took advantage of my good fortune earlier that morning to glance (swiveling left) out the window at the street below, and at my vehicle. A woman stood crouched between my car and the car in front of it, but she seemed benevolent enough, and was engaged in sorting through her possessions, which she had piled on a purple luggage cart. As she wandered off into the street, pulling said cart, I noticed that there appeared to be something in the rear of my car, just behind the back window. I couldn't quite make it out. Cotton batting, something like that. And as I puzzled over what it could be and arrived at the conclusion that I had left nothing there and began to wonder what lunatic would break into an automobile, stuff the back seat with cotton batting and leave it otherwise unharmed, I realized that there was likely nothing in the car, or nothing I hadn't left there myself, and that it was the window itself I was seeing, not the seat beyond it, that someone or some power had sprayed the rear window with smears of white paint, which was of course infuriating and also more than a little odd, because whoever or whatever it was had not written anything, as is customary in such situations, they hadn't tagged the car, hadn't even allowed a drop of paint to drip from the window, which was in itself odd, given the looseness and general chaos of the swirling pattern they had drawn. And as I debated whether I should get up (swiveling right) and march to the elevator, out the door onto the sidewalk and around the corner to inspect the damage, or should wait until I was ready to leave, because the damage would surely wait for me, it occurred to me that it was not paint on the window at all that I was seeing, and not cotton batting beyond the window either. It was the sky reflected in the glass. It was the clouds above the car. And the funny thing is that they looked nothing like the clouds in the sky, the actual clouds.
"Inscribe your letters in laurel trees,
From the cave all the way to the city of the chosen.
It was here that Destiny stood wondering.
Oh Night, are these lights that I see real?"
—from Emad Abdullah Hassan's "The Truth," in Poems from Guantánamo
