guanabana juice in the mornings.

for it is written:

"All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again... The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." (ecclesiastes 1:7-9)

and that which disheartens me is the premise that there are perhaps only a handful of singularities, a collection of only certain entities and that the substance of everything is made up of their variation, the infinite possibilities of the combinations of their nuances. there are perhaps only two or seven people in my life, in the world, each complemented by infinitesimal (sic?) personal nuances.

and to emphasize my point, the preceding paragraph is practically borgesian plagiarism.

*

outside, my respiratory system fills with smog and the mountains kiss the clouds. after dark, the quechua indians dig through garbage. at times, i´ve been able to mumble primitive syntax in their language and make myself understood, a fact which has made to smile, but more than anything they´ve wanted that i buy something.

at once, i thought they were here first, but later found that they, too, had been conquerors. and neither is there comfort in the fact that the conquest does not continue infinitely throughout time´s spiral. or does it?

have you ever thought, mr. gregory, of the horrid possibility that perhaps there was never a beginning. what horrible emptiness. what grotesque cyclicalness.

and that there are combinations of words eternally lost because eldon spangle isn´t writing at this minute, they are gone forever.

*

we are damned rational beings. here i´ve been told that putting a burnt match back in the box brings good luck. i only wish i were so superstitious.

in 1587 in what is now modern day perú, the quechua indian guaman poma de ayala wrote of los conquistadores

"Y que de día y de noche hablauan cada uno con sus papeles, quilca."

or roughly,

"And night and day each one of them would speak with his papers, quilca."

de Ayala was giving an account from the perspective of a strictly oral culture the phenomenon of reading that he was witnessing.

he narrates the process that these men, whom he describes elsewhere as having "faces covered with wool", undertook-some sort of magical communication, a talking, with this "quilca", which in quechua means "pictorial representation", or drawing.

de Ayala had no idea what the fuck was going on, so he mythically filled in the gaps.

and what i wouldn´t give to possess that magic, magic that reason murdered, magic which in aquel tiempo filled in the gaps, caverns that modernity has defined in only negative terms, and the mere presence of the word "ignorance" in my vocabulary is testament of that fact.

this seems an odd place to leave off, but friend, i have nothing else to say. i go to smoke a cigarette.

i really should be correcting a translation of an economic article in the new york times on how fucked the economy is here.

just wait...