On this day I felt the intensity of our stock responses.
“Hey! How are you? Good! How was your summer?” And it went on like this, often at the same time. Sometimes these same questions and answers collided and rang even louder in the air, uttered at the same time for fear of revealing an awkward silence. “Hey! How are you? How was your summer?”
In truth my summer wasn’t all that grand, but I’ve heard some real horror stories gushing out of ‘How was your summer.’ Some girl’s friend tried to kill herself. Another got engaged. How horrific. What a summer. I’ve learned enough to know not to dive into it on the first day of classes. Professors want to show kindness and some people assume they’ll remember what city you visited in Brazil. We rarely go beyond the surface of things.
And of course they let freshly-xeroxed pieces of paper rotate around the center of the room.
“I’ll only be touching on academic integrity… I assume your level of thinking presupposes an aversion to plagiarism…” And so on. I wonder if I’d known how to plagiarise sooner how different my life would be. I’d probably be more comfortable with literature and essays and the written word.
Stagnant in the banal introductory period, I catch the tail end of the professor’s sentence. Something about mythology and cultural relevance, something about belief and making your life a myth. I drift off shortly thereafter and compose myself a miracle.
The Book of Letters
1. 1: After the beginning there was the word and the word was THIS.
2: Middle of the chalkboard, middle of the space, the room, the word was written; writing as the silent original word, scribbled on notebooks before IT was spoken.
3: After the hum, the wow, the big bah, the beautiful singing of the soft-palate drum dancing on rectangle table-tops,
4: Ringing the nail of the boredom tap, clawing the chalkboard IT was echoed,
5: IT was good.
6: Night lifts itself out of the daylit elements, elemental breath, elemental cotton, breasts in their element, plastic elements, keys of elements,
7: After the digital screens sleep in natural hums, this too is ITs element.
2. 1: Being plagiarists of the original word we mirror ourselves in the middle and mirror the middle, speaking in middles, THIS bouncing off the mirror.
2: Listening to our plagiarism the differences piled, and piled into departments in a cabinet file in the space of the room of THIS word.
3: In the beginning there were files for things, flies from the box, sex from the fruit, fruit from the tree and the tree was the scraps of words on the tables.
4: Then THIS too was not an element, and the flesh was good, and the violence was also good, and the skin was crowned in skins and blood bathed in blood, from out the plagiarism.
5: Silence stuffed the soft-palates and mouthed toothless in the rotting room. And IT said, room. And the anger smiled, boom.
6: Heavy was the name for paradise. Darkness became it. And
7: Though light was aritificial we would draw our own, and by THIS alone divining became divine.
8: Everything is illuminative, IT read. And we drew bellybuttons on the steel figures in our seats, and we told them THIS,
9: You kept the sweetness from our mouths, You took our teeth and spit them out like black seeds, You named our paper dirt and erased the written word from our chalkboards, and You told us form over content, and we carved on our wrists just to say something, to say THIS
10: Name is the one IT gave us, in ITs image, in THIS likeness, letter, vowel, sound, song, tune, hum,
3. 1: My drumming, my tapping, my toes on the souls of the floor and the elements, one foot in the earth and its metals, one finger on the pulse of the echo, the original, the organic word.
2: You who lost consequence without the word, all You who wrote nothing on the walls of your skulls,
3: THIS is the medicine for your bones and your blood. THIS is the key for your soft-palates.
4: Holy the word and exalted the holy name.
