From the passenger seat, I watched
an unlit cigarette dangle from your lips.
You said, January makes me feel new.
But it only made me feel cold.
You struck a match and let your cigarette kiss
its flame, and I remembered thinking
I was too young to be parked outside
that hotel steaming with city rot, the rat-a-tat
of a grumbling furnace. My father thought
I was at school.
20090308
.you.don't.say.
One of my fondest memories, but not one without its own nostaligic laments, occurred not too long ago, nor too recently. I happened to be on a trans-oceanic flight, and to keep myself occupied as we raced the Sun to the horizon I had brought some research material for a book I was working on at the time. Foremost among them was a vintage book by a noteworthy deconstructionist, who does not need mentioning.
My reading was droll and I looked out the window to break up the dense prose. As I turned back around, I was surprised to see that my neighbour had picked up my book from the seat pocket, and was flipping through it rather flippantly. And not only that, but it was none other than the intellectual that had penned the work in the first place!
What a lot of malarkey this is, wouldn't you say?-
Excuse me, sir?-
I'm not entirely sure I wrote this in the first place.-
Ah. Well, it is a seminal piece nevertheless, I suppose.-
He sighed.
My thesis was hardly airtight, and the whole text fails to really stand up to careful, or careless even, scrutiny.-
True of most vehicles of thought, though, isn't it?-
I hoped my joke would be successful, not too obscure, not too pretentious. But as if on cue, the plane lurched, and the pilot announced amidst the flickering lights that we had lost an engine. A second.
As I regained consciousness, being deprived of any memory of adventure in my own story, I realized that I was lying on the shore of what appeared to be a small island, as much a desert as it was deserted. It seemed that my mentor (well, at least as far as my research goes, and if only unrequited) had also washed up as I had. He was tearing pages out of his/my book to start a fire.
As he told me later, I had passed out as the plane plummeted, whether from fear or nausea or lack of oxygen was anyone's guess, and in retrospect, it was probably my having been completely limp that had spared my life upon impact with the water. He told me that he had managed to slip a life vest onto me and dragged me out of the sinking plane, watching as panicky survivors hastily inflated their life jackets prematurely, before realizing that they were now trapped in the chest-high water of the fuselage.
The two of us managed to leave the wreckage, me mostly having been dragged out of the body before my lifejacket was inflated. As it happened, my mentor (it still sounds lofty to refer to him as such; I shall proceed with the tentative word "friend" from here on out) happened to have a carabiner keychain that he clipped us together with, before swimming towards the island on the distant horizon. At some point, he had passed out with exhaustion as well, and when he woke, we were ashore where we were.
You saved the book?-
He admitted to having been in the military as a youth, and thought that the pages might come in handy for starting a fire. He had tried his best to seal it up in one of the barfbags, but it seemed that the pages were still rather waterlogged.
I thanked him several times for having saved my life, and as we watched the sun beat us to the horizon, we had the type of unadulterated confessional conversation that occurs between mutual survivors. We gave our respective biographies, recalled our favourite foods, and discussed with sweeping generalizations about our current research.
We had a good laugh at the irony of being washed up on an island with no name, a signified with no signifier.
We scavenged the island for food, and found ourselves able to locate some fruits here and there, resembling the supermarket produce we were familiar with only superficially. We eventually managed to get the fire started. I thought about the certain degree of romanticism that sprouts from catastrophe, like a clover from cow droppings.
As we dug around for rocks to surround our bonfire, my friend happened to strike upon something that was more metallic than stone, and we discovered, to our surprise, a lamp of indiscernible origins. By the looks of it, it was from some type of whaling vessel, the faint smell of burnt whale blubber still lingering as we removed a seal that kept the inside airtight. And just for the record, the smell was indeed familiar to me based upon my childhood residence in Norway, where I encountered whale meat more than a few times.
With the seal removed, we tried to buff up the glass a little bit, to see if it was indeed still useable, and to our great surprise, a smoky-eyed genie emerged from the lamp, confounding both of our logical intuitions. The genie yawned and appeased us more quickly than I would have thought was possible for such a supernatural phenomenon. In retrospect, I suspect that his nebulous trails, which smelled strongly of incense, might have been some kind of narcotic.
I thought your type only lived in Arabian lamps.-
And rather than the Robin Williams, Disney variety of genie, we had a bored and apologetic genie, not cracking a joke, only stating simply that one lived where one could these days.
I suppose maybe if that's your type of humour.
So as you can imagine, we had the expected set-up, or rather, we were granted wishes, but due to the collapsing economy of the wish market, we were only getting one each. No wishing for more wishes; no wishing for the power to grant wishes. All the usual fine print, that I couldn't help but wonder if genies came with End User License Agreements these days.
In any case, age before beauty, I joked, and offered my friend his turn first. He gave me a slightly dejected look, and I asked him how he could be so crestfallen when we were being presented with such a boon. He reminded me of all the "beware of what you wish for" stories, and how his entire life's work has been founded upon that very idea of language betraying us, of language as being self-defeating. And now we were standing at the one-way gate where we our undecidable language was being granted a certain degree of omnipotence.
Furthermore, we realized, with only one wish apiece, and the restrictions of the lengthy Genie EULA that was read off to us, there was no way for one of us to test the loyalty of our language to our wishes and report back to the other, and still get both of us off the island (trust me: the Genie EULA was complex and convoluted and we could not work out a way to resolve the problem).
As my friend thought it over, I could only think of an undergraduate paper I had written on the works of Søren Kierkegaard - most specifically on Fear and Trembling - and however patchy and amatuerish it may have been, I remembered the basic thesis I had tried to argue.
I shook hands with my friend and mentor, if only for a formality. I told the genie my wish, and like a terrible Disney movie (I have taken my daughter to several over the years), I woke up in my university library, my partner shaking me awake and joking that I hadn't pulled an all-nighter since my undergrad years.
Over the next few weeks, I tried to look up my friend's phone number or email, but only found a university address where he used to teach. I wrote a few successive letters, first joking, then musing, and finally murmuring.
I never heard back from him.
My reading was droll and I looked out the window to break up the dense prose. As I turned back around, I was surprised to see that my neighbour had picked up my book from the seat pocket, and was flipping through it rather flippantly. And not only that, but it was none other than the intellectual that had penned the work in the first place!
What a lot of malarkey this is, wouldn't you say?-
Excuse me, sir?-
I'm not entirely sure I wrote this in the first place.-
Ah. Well, it is a seminal piece nevertheless, I suppose.-
He sighed.
My thesis was hardly airtight, and the whole text fails to really stand up to careful, or careless even, scrutiny.-
True of most vehicles of thought, though, isn't it?-
I hoped my joke would be successful, not too obscure, not too pretentious. But as if on cue, the plane lurched, and the pilot announced amidst the flickering lights that we had lost an engine. A second.
As I regained consciousness, being deprived of any memory of adventure in my own story, I realized that I was lying on the shore of what appeared to be a small island, as much a desert as it was deserted. It seemed that my mentor (well, at least as far as my research goes, and if only unrequited) had also washed up as I had. He was tearing pages out of his/my book to start a fire.
As he told me later, I had passed out as the plane plummeted, whether from fear or nausea or lack of oxygen was anyone's guess, and in retrospect, it was probably my having been completely limp that had spared my life upon impact with the water. He told me that he had managed to slip a life vest onto me and dragged me out of the sinking plane, watching as panicky survivors hastily inflated their life jackets prematurely, before realizing that they were now trapped in the chest-high water of the fuselage.
The two of us managed to leave the wreckage, me mostly having been dragged out of the body before my lifejacket was inflated. As it happened, my mentor (it still sounds lofty to refer to him as such; I shall proceed with the tentative word "friend" from here on out) happened to have a carabiner keychain that he clipped us together with, before swimming towards the island on the distant horizon. At some point, he had passed out with exhaustion as well, and when he woke, we were ashore where we were.
You saved the book?-
He admitted to having been in the military as a youth, and thought that the pages might come in handy for starting a fire. He had tried his best to seal it up in one of the barfbags, but it seemed that the pages were still rather waterlogged.
I thanked him several times for having saved my life, and as we watched the sun beat us to the horizon, we had the type of unadulterated confessional conversation that occurs between mutual survivors. We gave our respective biographies, recalled our favourite foods, and discussed with sweeping generalizations about our current research.
We had a good laugh at the irony of being washed up on an island with no name, a signified with no signifier.
We scavenged the island for food, and found ourselves able to locate some fruits here and there, resembling the supermarket produce we were familiar with only superficially. We eventually managed to get the fire started. I thought about the certain degree of romanticism that sprouts from catastrophe, like a clover from cow droppings.
As we dug around for rocks to surround our bonfire, my friend happened to strike upon something that was more metallic than stone, and we discovered, to our surprise, a lamp of indiscernible origins. By the looks of it, it was from some type of whaling vessel, the faint smell of burnt whale blubber still lingering as we removed a seal that kept the inside airtight. And just for the record, the smell was indeed familiar to me based upon my childhood residence in Norway, where I encountered whale meat more than a few times.
With the seal removed, we tried to buff up the glass a little bit, to see if it was indeed still useable, and to our great surprise, a smoky-eyed genie emerged from the lamp, confounding both of our logical intuitions. The genie yawned and appeased us more quickly than I would have thought was possible for such a supernatural phenomenon. In retrospect, I suspect that his nebulous trails, which smelled strongly of incense, might have been some kind of narcotic.
I thought your type only lived in Arabian lamps.-
And rather than the Robin Williams, Disney variety of genie, we had a bored and apologetic genie, not cracking a joke, only stating simply that one lived where one could these days.
I suppose maybe if that's your type of humour.
So as you can imagine, we had the expected set-up, or rather, we were granted wishes, but due to the collapsing economy of the wish market, we were only getting one each. No wishing for more wishes; no wishing for the power to grant wishes. All the usual fine print, that I couldn't help but wonder if genies came with End User License Agreements these days.
In any case, age before beauty, I joked, and offered my friend his turn first. He gave me a slightly dejected look, and I asked him how he could be so crestfallen when we were being presented with such a boon. He reminded me of all the "beware of what you wish for" stories, and how his entire life's work has been founded upon that very idea of language betraying us, of language as being self-defeating. And now we were standing at the one-way gate where we our undecidable language was being granted a certain degree of omnipotence.
Furthermore, we realized, with only one wish apiece, and the restrictions of the lengthy Genie EULA that was read off to us, there was no way for one of us to test the loyalty of our language to our wishes and report back to the other, and still get both of us off the island (trust me: the Genie EULA was complex and convoluted and we could not work out a way to resolve the problem).
As my friend thought it over, I could only think of an undergraduate paper I had written on the works of Søren Kierkegaard - most specifically on Fear and Trembling - and however patchy and amatuerish it may have been, I remembered the basic thesis I had tried to argue.
I shook hands with my friend and mentor, if only for a formality. I told the genie my wish, and like a terrible Disney movie (I have taken my daughter to several over the years), I woke up in my university library, my partner shaking me awake and joking that I hadn't pulled an all-nighter since my undergrad years.
Over the next few weeks, I tried to look up my friend's phone number or email, but only found a university address where he used to teach. I wrote a few successive letters, first joking, then musing, and finally murmuring.
I never heard back from him.
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