Cautious Fourier, head muffled in the textile of the army at Lyon, under a sky the weakened neck of Novikov's mob of book-sellers, "men with the faces of angels", were they one? Or did the sail divide the passions, drawing them farther along the boom, till the earth was a fixed pupil, one never grudging a master? “In all that you say have you any other purpose except to disprove the being of the many?” The forest held up as a lantern or a swordfish placed across the raft of the body?

From each possible tent rose the murmur of choice, the a priori brew of humanity

“I used to be quite nervous. Now I'm on a new track: I put an apple on my table. Then I put myself inside the apple. What peace!” (Henri Michaux)

For Michaux the worm, the apple was sustenance growing in the free air, unfettered by bells and the Ferris wheel, consciousness was the cupped hands of the sea, which he forgot when he stood by it, speared by swimmers in various stages of exhaustion, livid and bloodless to a bright red. A cascade turned back from the doorway to all flesh.

The organism in the evening, habitable, tide to an overheard sadness, aliquot to a show of hands, each eye.

The intoxication of a problem is connected to its insolubility in vitro. You see a skeleton grin if you are in a certain mood and even then with the most conscientious muscle memory. The problem for example of expressionism pitched against the tired forms of expression that breed us daily.

“I will keep swallowing my spit till I become a blunt end”

Calm -- the first word erupting in your self. And after that initial echo, nothing.

The voice that spoke to you is gone, is now again your own.

You start counting. A calm night, a calm never to abandon us, a calm I felt close to after years, a calm I could not convince to stay, a calm that poisons every commerce between me and others, a calm that hurries along every conversation, a calm made entirely of information about a calm without a forehead on a calm once circumnavigated on the back of ants driven out of a calm driven out of footsteps resting on a calm with matchstick arms. A calm a frisk search of calm.

If the stars were unchanging once, so was I.