A searching of a newer weather. Another push for Why? What made them die. Was it something I said. Or did something. Or didn’t say. I love you. I renounce and yadda. And all an opinion requires is an opinion observed previously. Experts in quotes. A gene, a genome, which is the congregation of genes — a community of their genomes, a Jnome, say. Expelled from the midst. Researchers with eyes blackened from microscopic squint. Bruised tongue with a funny bone. Selfdestructive encoding from the sixth day of Creation — lies dormant on the seventh, inherited on its night. Late abortion by a rib. One doctor DDS, and probably also disbarred from an earlier career as a lawyer and, though briefly, imprisoned — he thinks it a reaction to whatever they’d sustained themselves on, the kosher, kashering food. Another doctor DPM and moonlighting lately as an accountant, dissents. And so to convene another cenacle of scholars. Then wait. Ideas, the ultimate in waste. Tenured philosophers and metaphysicians of the Continental school feel it wasn’t death, couldn’t be — that they’d only disappeared. Absorption. An assimilation, intractable. Rashed out to another existence plane. Palpated hard to dimension the fourth. Is that the best you can do. Group shrug. Mass Hysteria the foregone conclusion of the Free University of Leiden, stemming from latent fear of insignificance, what’s the term in Latin. University of Chicago cites ideal incest with the air. Who knows. And who cares, decisively. Who can read let alone understand these reports coming in by the hour, might as well be bound in skin and stitched with hair; these journals stretching to an impenetrable six, seven hundred pages, with prettily unfocused pictures and blurry charts to graphs and tables the university presses did up themselves and backward as the printers have just begun converting to a new language right to left what with the multinational publishing houses broke and gone. Speeches are broadcast, but the microphones aren’t turned on. Anything but apathy, that’s the idea, the thinking mensch on the street — apathy the breathless cause, though, and not the effect; that they died of apathy, let’s say, and so the reaction to their death must be the opposite, whatever antipode sanctified: enthusiasm, maybe, for their rituals, for their traditions…initiatives initiated, mantles taken up, causes championed to great effect. Accumulating interest. And verily interest would breed regard, would breed affection, then love, which is the sworn enemy of hate. Theirs a hate that had been a hatred of the self, however, which was only a love that should in theory kill, but paradoxically preserved. If only for a time. Dialecticians having a field day in a new field, which is rutted, smutted — the frontlawn seeded only with morning frost. Each half of any dialectic like one of two vases, blue or white, or both, gifts from who remembers — an uncle’s aunt, though she’d been married to — which Hanna always hated but placed on the table in the diningroom anyway, because something had to go there, anything at all…
