from The Midnight, Susan Howe:
Often a well dressed stranger with obsessive compulsive disorder par excellence used to pace the sidewalk outside our building for an hour or more at a time. He appeared to be proceeding in the direction of the water, but at each line of transition between pavement slabs, he halted in a frenzy of anxiety. There followed an explosive colloquy between himself and the concrete. Where philosophy stops, poetry is impelled to begin. He was a man, far away from home, biting his nails at destiny. Pavement to the west which must be crossed, pavement to the east which must not be left. Forward the minutely particular thin line. “Jump at it!” With the stride of a giant, or like any artist attempting a leap in a single direction, he propelled himself forward; but some rigidly elaborate rule having nothing to do with realism from him (praying, counting, gesticulating) back. A ghostly skeptic. Overcompliant. . . . “We’ll hang together – or together we’ll hang.” The direction is always towards the middle. There are people who can challenge transition on its own terms and people who cannot. He was one who could not. As I watched his inertial journey, the murderous aphorism “Step on a crack – break your mother’s back” continually inserted itself into my thoughts. I wondered about the relation between one concrete slab to another concrete slab.
(think: that Elmwood Ave. feeling)
The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist. (video) or mp3version. The LP is Since I Left You.
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