Dear friends,

It recalls the expression about those who can do and those who can merely teach, and those who cannot teach and who then do something else. Oh the endless aphorism. In any case, that which you cannot speak you should theorize, that which you cannot theorize you should draw, that which you canot draw you should describe. It goes, of course, forever, but that is where I can stop for now. I can describe.

1. Around the country at coffee tables and desks of diverse sizes and finishes there sit, together and apart, a collective of young men smoking. And as they smoke the inside of their houses distantly oboe like seashells, the sound rolling in and out rythmically. Of course, it is only the blood in their ears, as with the seashells, but it sounds like the sea. One of them wrote on a sheet of paper, "It is the sea."

And cigarette paper is a metaphor: dry like driftwood. And cigarette filters are metonyms: the cigarette butts already smoked poking out of the sand, cigarette butts as chimneys on the sand suburbiae of children without imaginations. And the smoke is somehow really itself, a hot dirty wind. And their coffee tables and desks are placed somehow at the shore; their toes, not yet socked and maybe not to be socked until next time they need to go to work, burrow in piles of loose papers as if in sand. Paper as sand is always the crushed shells kind, dishes as sand is always the lava rock kind, laundry as sand is always sand like pulverized stone.

And they are watching the television like the ocean, the whoosh and wheesh of the blood in their ears washing back and forth, a gentle working surprisingly like thought. They watch, together and apart, for real ships to arrive on a poorly imagined shore.


2. The Kabbalah Centre (and I present the Rav Philip Berg as a synecdoche for the Centre) claims to have broken the mystery of chronology by drawing a picture of a great hotel building. The image is scrawled in the impossible flatness of Flash animation, somehow flat even against the white paper of the internet, a building crafted in the opposite of origami. The lower floors, the Rav explains, are the past, and the upper floors are the future. A lighted window somewhere in the middle is where I am. The building having something like thirty floors in this parable, maybe I am on floor seven or eight. Look, he exclaims, all of it is right there at once, always existing together. The past never leaves, he shouts, it is always right here, acting on us in surprising ways.

But his ommissions add up to a lie. Why, Rav Berg, does the building have a ground floor at all or a roof? You believe in reincarnation, and I believe an nonfinite present, and most of your readers believe in something smoky and neverending. None of us believe that a year moves us a single step toward such a low roof. But we move, don't we? We climb steadily up the structure of this bottomless and topless building in ways not described at all by serial residence on discrete floors. We are trapped in an elevator, Rav Berg, and you know why. We move through this endless time always in the same place with respect to ourselves, and always in the endless middle with respect to the structure. We never stop moving to find our bed and sit down, we can never pull the plastic off of our little cups or drink our grainy coffee, forever moving up.

But that is not the worst of it, Rav Berg, why do you say that there is no time if all causes ascend to their effects upwards along faster or slower vacuum tubes? Maybe the message that I ate pork or touched mentrual blood will not be sent up immediately. It could sit in an in-box somewhere for weeks before facing the bureaucracy, and might only be sent along at great length, my fitting curse (in this case, failure in business) only finding me four years into my next life as a little boy in Spain. But the sins are always shipped upwards, time always follows our arduous and invisible ascent through the futures.

If there is no time, Rav Berg, why can we not send our sins back to the past? Why can't we do wrongs later that will have hurt us soon? No one really wishes to recieve or not recieve what they are due, we wish to have recieved now what we did not think we wanted then. And you know it, Rav Berg, you know we are not vexed by time but by chronology. You know we want to change the past with today's virtues and vices. Perhpas you can, and I like to think that you are cruising up and down on your private escalator, sometimes getting out and relaxing, taking off your shoes at sixteen years old, coaching now the games of catch you played with yourself even then. But you have never told us how, and until you do, there is still time. The hotel does not change that.

What sort of terrible service is there in this place that we cannot even send a not down to the lower rooms? Why can't I relay even the simplest thought downwards? I'd say, "stay right where you are, someone will come down for you soon."

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I am sure I will have more of these soon. They will either keep coming for a very long time or they will not, for whatever reason.

Much love as always,
Vincent