D. Wilson - Primordial - An Abstraction

I have a secret to tell somebody, anybody.

I go off campus to get my sushi.

The sushi that they serve in the cafeteria of the Student Union doesn’t even qualify as sushi. It insults real sushi with its glib artificiality.

So I go to this place in the city.

Very covert.

None of the employees speak a word of English, but I can tell they like me. The inflection of their gazes indicates nothing to the contrary.

There’s a problem.

Every time I eat my dish of sashimi salmon and tuna draped over sticky brown rice, I use more and more wasabi.

Every time.

At this rate, soon there will be only wasabi.

The fish, the rice, even the soy sauce and the garnish of pickled ginger — it will inevitably dwindle to an nth degree of meaning in the face of such Rampancy.

The laws of thermodynamics command it.

Zeno was not the idiot that the Eleans so desperately wanted him to be.

This doesn’t stop me. I’m concerned. But I still need and want my sushi.

One day I go to get my sushi and the place is gone.

Not closed.

Gone.

There’s a building, but it’s not the same building.

There are no doors or windows.

It’s really just a colossal, upended cinderblock. I wonder if anybody’s trapped inside. The city looks different too.

I try to ignore it. All of it.

Depressed, I go back to campus.

I walk around for a couple of days. It gets dark and light and dark and light and the air is cool and warm and cool and warm and it always smells crisp and natural and earthy, like good incense.

At some point I realize the University has fallen apart.

Despite my situation, and despite faculty residences, I recall how the gothic beauty of the architecture used to invoke feelings of the Kantian sublime in my sensorium. How the seas of fog flowed beneath the stately, dark-bricked buildings and halls. How the cathedrals and the gymnasiums and the bibliotheques crouched beneath the heavens like autocratic Nephilim with garden-fresh breath. The elegant steeples. The cobbled turrets and their wayward belfries. Stone bridges ran between the tallest bluffs; they were at once medieval and futuristic. To walk among the architecture was to stand atop the Fell and gaze into the Tarn.

Now the University lies in ruins.

I don’t remember when this happened. I don’t remember hearing any buildings fall down.

My dorm is still intact. So are all of the administrative fortresses and sanctuaries and gazebos.

Everything else is rocks and dust, flotsam and jetsam, savannah and wind.

Professors roost on the debris teaching old books to brained students who lay comatose or dead in the gravel. I pass by one classwreck after another. The professors seem to have new springs in their pedagogical steps. Their eyes are sparkling and I can see their teeth and they’re gesticulating with animation as they read aloud passages from assigned texts and pause to discharge canny hermeneutics that flow over the students like expanding rings of fire and ensure the certain fossilization of their bodies into the bones of the ragged earth.

It’s a good dream. I’m sorry to see it dissolve into reality.

Existence is an illusion for the Blankness on the Other Side.

REVISION: Existence is an illusion for the Blankness that is the Otherside.

REVISION: Existence is nothing but a curtain that, yanked open, reveals the Empty Stage.

(NOTE: Stop capitalizing the first letters of select words in order to incite Big Signification in those words. It looks forced. And very dumb.)

REVISION: Existence is nothing but a big curtain that, yanked open by a fat man, reveals the organs that skim across the surface of the body electric like deranged waterbugs.

REVISION: One day deranged waterbugs will usurp the tyranny of bureaucratic echolalia.

REVISION: The harder you study, the dumber you get.

(NOTE: Cliché. And poorly written. All of it.)

REVISION: I can’t get the theme song from that movie out of my head. Did I hear it recently somewhere or did my unconscious usher it onto the stage of my consciousness?

REVISION: I don’t like my roommates. Not one of them. I miss my wife too. Not enough to call her. She’ll just get mad. I’m mad enough for everybody.

REVISION: Madness is like life: it goes on and on and on and then somebody passes the baton.

(NOTE: No rhyming. No alliteration. No assonance.)

REVISION: There is only one Quasimodo. Everybody else is a crude imitation at best. And when the earth swallows the bell tower, all that remains are sonic memories and matte bronze skies.

REVISION: I don’t want this for me. I don’t want this for anybody. I’ve had too much coffee. I haven’t had enough wine. One needs wine. One needs wine. One needs wine.

FINAL REVISION: Too much coffee, not enough wine.

I feel like I’ve lost something. Myself perhaps. Or somebody else. The rub is: Who is the Father dictating the angle of this adamantine repose?

The professor is explaining what we need to do for our upcoming essays. I don’t understand what he means. I raise my hand. He calls on me.

I say, “So should we include a title page?”

The professor says, “No. As I pointed out about fifteen seconds ago, don’t include a title page.”

I say, “So no title page?”

The professor says, “No. No title page.”

I say, “All right. No title page.”

The professor says, “Yes. No title page.”

I say, “I just want to be clear. You don’t want a title page, right? Is that what you mean?”

The professor says, “That’s right. No. I don’t want a title page. That is precisely what I mean.”

I say, “All right.”

The professor says, “All right.”

I say, “Why?”

The professor says, “What?”

I say, “Why? Why don’t you want a title page? It introduces things, like.”

The professor says, “Title pages are superfluous. A waste of space. And paper. Center your title at the top of the first page of your essay.”

I say, “Center the title at the top of the first page of my essay. Right?”

The professor says, “Right. Center your title at the top of the first page of your essay.”

I nod. Then I say, “Will we get points taken off if we include a title page? I’m only curious.”

The professor looks at me.

I say, “Professor? Are you ok? You’re just looking at me. Should I repeat my question?”

The professor says, “Again, no title pages. You shouldn’t include a title page. There shouldn’t be one. Don’t include one. Don’t include a title page. I don’t want you to. Don’t do it. No title page. Don’t do it.”

I say, “Don’t do it.”

The professor says, “Holy Christ.”

I say, “But let’s say we do it. Include a title page, I mean. Hypothetically, like. Will points be taken off?”

The professor says, “Whoever fights monsters—“

I interrupt, “Don’t give me that Nietzsche shit. Everybody quotes that one anyway. Articulating that aphorism is more of an indication of a lack of erudition than an assertion of epistemological prowess. I’m talking about a title page.”

The professor says, “Somber is human life, and as yet without meaning: a buffoon may be fateful to it.”

I say, “That’s a little better. But Nietzsche is really off-limits. Too commercial. If you want to sound smart, quote somebody like Feuerbach or Binswanger. Only real scholars know who they are. But I find it troubling that you can’t come to grips with this title page debacle. I mean, for God’s sake, who cares? It’s not a big deal. I have ideas for fonts and so forth and you’re really throwing a ratchet in my machinery here. I just want my essay to look as good as it can. A title page can make things look sharp, you know? Well.” There’s something else I want to say but I can’t remember what it is.