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Transference There's a strange mind-sharing phenomenon that happens when you spend too much time in the company of one person, a word here, a pause there, your speech becomes theirs, and perhaps vice versa in some reciprocal sort of way, each assuming qualities of the other, changing as the impetus for change shifts itself, a simple differential equation really, one that in this case points only toward a final unity. It's happened in particular with Josh and Zack Shipley, not Josh Shipley mind you (a stranger or complete figment of my imagination), no, Josh Garcia, a Josh who in my personal dialogue needs no second name; he is the Josh. But poor Zack Shipley, the only Zack I've ever met, will always keep that second tag, perhaps because of foreignness it implies, no not foreign, not unknown, just not quite in, a friend of mine not a friend of ours Al Pacino told me. It's more than that though. A powerful egocentricism keeps that Shipley in place. Zack after all, is me and only me, even if I do spell it with an H. The foreignness is not just to my circle of friends, but to what is fundamentally me, a foreignness that divides the internal and the external, me from that vast separate outside that can look and even touch, but never come in. So no matter how close we grow, how our personal languages overlap into an indistinguishable one, Zack remains Zack Shipley as a reminder that we are not one, our words amalgamated, but not our thoughts. Some times the words push into thoughts though. Some powerful and misunderstood Whorfian demon changes outer to inner so the newfound voice comes not from my mouth but from my mind, ringing and running around somewhere between my ears it seems, but more importantly only seeming there, not really anywhere, the where implying a place, but still really real, intangible but present, the first half of Descartes' division of existence, but certainly second in terms of our understanding. Somehow the book skips a step. Without ever speaking Pynchon's words or style I've taken a piece of his intangible, let the words rain down incessantly, parallel like railroad tracks, never straight but always parallel, winding their way across the countryside or down out of a cloud replete with brilliant flashes of lightning. Intangible there to intangible here (as if location still meant something, maybe his and mine would be better though so terrible vain claiming ownership of that which I can't grasp, not in the way I can't grasp Allegra's fractal forming plastic toy, but in the way I can't grasp the wind or even gravity) all done without the typical medium, without a whisper even, instead laid down on paper, taken subsonic, slowed for a closer review and more permanence, perhaps even immortality. . . So now I take my stab at the undying, grasp hopefully at something timeless, chase the sun on its westward journey across the Atlantic, knowing this DC-10 must stop eventually, that time catches up, that even this timeless trip was paid for by a quickening going the other way, losing a day, perhaps as Marco Polo's crew believed, on some angelic calendar. Too bad they never sailed the other way, really looked immortality in the eye, all original sin and omnipresent Catholicism be damned. But even a one way trip provided more of a scare than perhaps that crowd was ready for. So I arrogantly presume that I know something more than they, something that might make me worthy of my own star, those apparently everlasting points of light in the never-ending night sky. Time and space both seem so infinite with just one glance up at the glitter over black velvet that blankets ours sleep. So with a laughably puffed up chest I put pen to paper as if I had a new idea, unable even to break out of the style that stole so silently into my own voiceless inner monologue, into me. |