On the other side, this village, this town, if it’s even anything of only one street. What’s it called? What’s its name? I forget, didn’t have the time to notice while stepping down on what’s said. That sign, floating around and around the moat, over and under its weak skinflint freeze — if you’ll just wait by the banks, for a moment, you’ll glimpse it…it’ll come around again and again, have patience, have faith. Everything occurs twice, to begin with, to bore: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce; the third time as the third time, then the hundredth as the hundredth, unlessoned, unlearned. A sign in that many languages, related and not: Spinoza Straße, Spinoza Prospekt, Spinoza Ulice, Spinoza Gatve, Str. Spinoza, Vul. Spinoza, , Spinoza Street…streeting around the town let’s call it entire of only one street, and so it’s no town at all, and yet neither a village, only a poor lick of rubble rimming the hoar of the moat — and so it’s an island, if an island singly streeted with a street that both borders it and is it, too, you with me, a street that in turn islands the island; enough that it’s another refuge of sorts, if more forlorn than any before. And less an island, it seems once you’re on it and of it, than a pock of the earth, more like a pox, the scar of a wound from within, from without, bandaged by a moat so small in hindsight, and so shallow especially when frozen and holding or not, that I could’ve stepped across its surface, its depth, in only one step, singly strided. Forgetting the sign, the bobbing slat of its bridge. Onto this street narrowingly small in width if endless in length, in its loop, apparently infinite in its hellaciously circling circle. A street laden with the miscellaneously malevolent detritus that comes with the keeping of openair files: with papers of leave and conscription, with torn passports, the shred of visas to countries no longer bordered, receipts for burials, the crumple of death certificates, and crinkled, inksoaked m.a.n.i.f.e.s.t.o.s., sectarian statements of divergent platforms and parties, their transcripts of speeches and personnel report files, cadre profiles intermixed with assorted briefs on party discipline, calendar reform, and name standardization, stacks of cash worth nothing of late, bribes to (codename) Eurous the easterly wind; tarnished badges and medals, commendations, citations and trophies, epaulets, lapels missing pins, ribbons ripped, and tattered robes of the law, discarded after having been used as wrappers, too, for food, for milk and cheese and as swaddling clothes, blown along with the refuse of drinks, plastic and tinned, cans of pilsen beer, wineskins, vodka flasks and jugs drained of who’s selling; raffletickets irredeemable, and snowwhite, pupilless eyeballs numbered in an approximation of lotto — a squareless street lined with unmarked, drearily festooned stalls, one impossible to differentiate from another, a uniform gray-wood or other cheap synthetic substance as a matter of coarse, lined down the street more like around the street, and then around the street again around the rivering ice of the moat, its submerged then surfacing sign, then around again and again forever and ever, a fixedly infinite eternal return of the now, its street its mode and its trashy stalls its attributes (if only in the founding philosophical system — which no longer prevails), all one and the same of its Substance, which is indivisible and, also, monstrously gray. All the stalls are made of this vagary, of this allied alloy…I’m just passing it on: that the stalls have been created of coin, of planchet, of flan, are themselves — eventually, with the weather — total coin and as such, apparently, totally changeless: this dull gunmetal nondenominational mix, a circulation without breed as unsunderable, indivisble…impossible for its elements to be molten separate ever again; that weather judging down all through the day and night to mint the stalls’ rooftops and reeded sides in the image of rain, of snow, and the composite between them, to a resounding clinking and clatter of no tender issue, overpowering of every imaginable thought, so destructive.
