wjsullivan.net

Overloading the Machine

He & I See the Iris a Little Differently

You place four men in a wedding and always dress them alike. They're collectivity, the possible, options, beneath the breath. He can hear moments of contact outside the expanse of direct visual perception between entities without expecting physical proximity.

These short, lived moments inject the lived with the digital, showing distance by the shortness of his dial-toned voice. His sounding of you, an alphabetical ordering of responsibilities, is like a transcription of notes to manuscript paper. Here, sheer enunciates shape. Melody

through rhythm and space. He suggests an appropriate line, to communicate in directions, like grooves cut by skates on a pond — snowing over themselves.

Remembering one conversation would be, as if you listened to a box of messages and their time stamps. If I daydream I hear a voice in a box, this is technique sprung from idea, musical not because of my emotional attempt to conduct it.

An operator might say, if it's possible, to help a little extra.

People pause, stationary on the landing; gray office chair, gray telephone, rainbow flock of paper cranes. I watch her head going by, and the staircase constitutes her trail. Its solidness is emptied by how the echoes sound—the connection of distant source with near destination.

At the desk is a colleague, one purple sweater, two gray socks, a leaning over, the open textbook. The swelling of recalled apprehension is not expressed in steam above the tea cup nor in the brewing action of an ocean's wave only if he speaks to her. For each single click, we experience the world as conveyor, as subject that quits our flesh at death and might carry on elsewhere. For the moment, it might carry on here.

If I daydream today that tomorrow, both are in fact.

A potted plant at the top of the stairs, like a child in front of the television, can seem devious, deceiving both movement and stasis in the same stare. Because some side of subjectivity will leave the body-object, its elegance, as of ratios between overtones

unfolding upward from the horizon note, owes its organization to the one who hears, not to an intrinsic pattern. Her attraction to the tones of overheard conversations in other rooms is an appearance.

Her slim patterns of expectation are like water droplets in a cloud, because clear droplets carefully float together in a cloud that appears to be carelessly white.

The more convex the mind (blueness, the perimeter of the television screen), the more able one is to display submerged occurrences as unique material capable of having all movement viewed away and still arriving. There,

sun at the top of the stairs lights the hanging portrait of the man and the frame of him against the stairs; how music fills the throat is how substance provides the vehicle for (this) spectacle to her:

First, sun rising on mountain fog, then a candle flame like the color of lost eyes, then framed paintings thin in their exact slots, an invitation from a musician's tapping foot to where you search for his fingers like a stamp on a letter.

When her yen for his desire for her want flattens, his expression earns degrees of opiate sophistication.

A screen displays only four men, competent at having all surrounding context read away and still standing capital—the ease of a procedure that is efficient. This is as persuasion-

-the shaking of the hand at the first dip of the brush. The potential outline of an arrow against the encouragement of its display, dust-tunnels on glass, has the viscosity of cosmetics, as of a surname to a first name, a sign turned askew

on its post. Visceral assurances are conveyed in the liquid within a crystal display, not in its digits and symbols but in splashing through puddles at night; the assurance that someone can explain the way a pause connects to its silence without a ripple, rinsed away.

This page was last modified on 2011 December 20. "He & I See the Iris a Little Differently" by John Sullivan is Copyright ©2003 - 2011, and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.