Syllogisms for an Impatient World

[Image: For a book project I’m working on, I’ve been going through a bunch of old and half-remembered stories I’ve written over the last 30 years. I haven’t yet found the story from which this partial excerpt is taken, but I did (obviously) come across this photo I took, in November 2017, of the excerpt as it appeared onscreen. Now I’m curious…]

From whiskey river:

The Waiting
(excerpt)

Love, these lines
accompany our want, nameless
or otherwise, and our waiting.
And since we’ve not learned
how not to want,
we’ve had to learn,
by waiting, how to wait.

(Li-Young Lee [source])

…and (in slightly different form; the narrator is on a long road trip with her family):

Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. We haven’t understood the exact way we are now experiencing time. And maybe the boy’s frustration at not knowing what to take a picture of, or how to frame and focus the things he sees as we all sit inside the car, driving across this strange, beautiful, dark country, is simply a sign of how our ways of documenting the world have fallen short. Perhaps if we found a new way to document it, we might begin to understand this new way we experience space and time.

(Valeria Luiselli [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Girl on the Bullard Overpass

The girl on the Bullard overpass
looks happy to be there, getting soaked
in a light rain but waving her hands
to the four o’clock freeway traffic
in which I’m anything but happy.

You might think she’s too dumb
to come in out of the rain, but rain
or shine, it doesn’t seem to matter.
She’s there most every afternoon,
as if she does this for a living.

Some living, I’d say. Doesn’t she ever
get bored, or wish someone would stop
and say, “Where to?” and her life would change?
That’s how I’d be, hating the noise,
the stink of exhaust, the press of people.

I can’t imagine what her life is;
mine is confused and often fretful.
But there’s something brave about standing alone
in the rain, waving wild semaphores
of gladness to impatient passersby

too tired or preoccupied to care.
Seeing her at her familiar station
I suddenly grin like a fool, wave back,
and forgive the driver to my right,
who is sullen and staring as I pass.

I find her in my rear-view mirror,
then head for a needed drink and supper.
I don’t know where she goes, but I hope
it’s to a place she loves. I hope the rain
lets up. I hope she’s there tomorrow.

(Peter Everwine [source])

…and:

The future is losing its fascination as the idea of progress begins to decline… Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.

(Octavio Paz [source])

…and:

Impromptu

First there was Jim, clamping to my long black hair
that nine-pound Cleopatra wig
with nylon bands and bobbie pins.

Meanwhile I was on fire for Chad, who coached me
a bit impatiently Tuesday nights
on my Joan-of-Arc inflection.

Then Terence said I’d be perfect for the lounge-singer-
turned-whore, and as it turned out
that was a fairly easy gig.

Max signed me on soon after, claiming I was a natural
for Eternally Aggrieved Girl,
which in hindsight hurts me deeply.

So by the time you followed me back to the green room
to wait in the hallway—whistling!—
for my scrubbed face to emerge,

naturally I was wary, waiting for the script
you never bothered to come up with.
It was damned awkward sitting there,

nothing but milkshakes between us. Maybe, I thought,
you’d assumed I was the one with a script.
Finally I decided to give Terence a call.

I didn’t like the way you looked at me so steadily
with your chin resting on one fist,
as if the table were a table, the boards

A floor. Listening there as if you meant it,
as if something I could say were true, and every
moment from now on would be my cue.

(J. Allyn Rosser [source])