Here also is an inside.

Down in Dealey Plaza the tourists mill about.

I am far from where we live, and I have not learned how to forgive,

but I will wait, I will wait, I will wait. 



The Mountain Goats, "Blues in Dallas"

I've done a lot of talking to strangers recently.  A couple of brilliant, anonymous responses to my Craiglist postings for dead authors, maybe a cup of coffee later on.  Last night, strangers at the restaurant.  An old couple struck up conversation, and after forty minutes of telling my suit-clad friend about the boards of hospitals and the AT&T phone company mergers they started talking to me.  About what they really wanted to talk about.  My opinion on psychic phenomena.  They had both had a string of strange experiences.  She said "mere synchronicity."  He was worried about his eternal soul.  They kept making a joke of it, and then returning. 

Virtuality is about vulnerability: Reich says that armored man and organic man not only hold themselves differently before the world, but their permeability is also entirely different in substance; the armored man will never know, because he can never observe. 

I think always on Derrida's phonebooth in the Postcard: the new (male) Heloise calling the new (female) Abelard, wondering, will this message get through?  How strong is this connection?  Has the line gone dead?  Which words *did* you hear?  But Derrida is no nihilist: he keeps calling. 

So do the Craigslisters, bless them, marvelous mode of communion; I count on my list of personal salvations from Sartrean suicide the Missed Connections page, the furtive glances listed on the N-Judah every morning.  Some of the glances connect, sometimes.  Sweet gleaners of the fields among the lillies.  I am startled by how deeply I love them. Kierkegaard: the man of God is like any other man; he gets up, he goes to work, he loves his wife; it is only that he has always already thrown his confidence into the void. 

The linguist in me begins to wonder if 'projection' is merely a throwing too far -- throwing again and again without waiting to see if those infinite glances into the universe went anywhere. 

All conspiracy theories, all over-abundant lonelinesses, all paranoias, are ultimately about a lack of confidence that the ache to connect will ever achieve an arch across the void. 

I will wait,
I will wait,
I will wait.


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