My friend Cruz explained a discussion he’d had with Aristotle, the whereabouts of which he located with contradictions.
“Some hut somewhere,” he said. Then, as the conversation proceeded, “Yes, I looked out the window and saw the train pass the way trains do at dusk,” which, of course, put into question Cruz’s use of the word “hut” as the location for his meeting with Aristotle.
But no matter. I served a second cup of coffee just after Cruz had identified the initial cause of the conversation: Anaximenes.
“He was surprisingly coherent about his predecessors,” Cruz said, “who wondered about how things in the world happen and why water should support islands rather than stone or sand.”
“About which Aristotle disagreed,” I said.
“Of course,” Cruz said, disturbed by a fly that had entered the room mysteriously. “My friend, Aristotle, was particularly emphatic about mentation, about it’s immateriality, which was one his great disagreements with Plato” and so Cruz (or Aristotle) wandered away from the subject of Anaximenes to Plato.
On a third cup, Cruz turned the discussion back to the body, his body in particular and how he had begin to see himself in relation to his girl friend, Maricela. He imaged his relation to Marisela the way we might observe the shape of sand inside an hour glass or the warp of air around a box or the non random flow of smoke through a tube or the way a shirt drapes itself around a body, “which is very much unlike a star cluster” or the way the foot fits inside a shoe “but not when you first purchase the shoe. No, I’m talking about how things ‘learn to fit’ over time.”
“Consider a mixture of sand and water. There’s a reason why the sand clarifies,” Cruz said.
I said there was a reason for everything (to secretly promote the idea of Karma), but not necessarily a purpose to the reason for to ascribe purpose to a storm might send us in the wrong direction.
Cruz said, “No, I’ve become to myself a series of clothing metaphors. One day I’m a hat. Another day, I’m pants. But I’ve never been any sort of underclothes.”
“But you have yet to tell me if Aristotle had a cell phone,” I said. “Describe for me his accoutrements, what he brought out of his pack, what he tapped or opened or turned on.”
“Yes, his pack,” Cruz said, brightening up. “I don’t remember, but he would often send text messages. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind telling me to whom he was sending words. At that, he smiled, and rested his device on the table and expressed to me that it was a secret, a great secret. The last thing he told me of significance was that he feared the unknown, that always he had feared the unknown.”
“Which seems logical,” I said, “as we all fear it, the unknown, what might happen in the morning or in the afternoon or what the mailperson might bring or what might come out of that hole in the ground we come upon at dusk if put our face to it.”
“Knowing and not knowing,” Cruz said, “which is a pleasant place for us to end. Maricela’s waiting. I have to tell about my meeting with Aristotle.”
“Which happened either in a hut or near the train station,” I said.
“I’ll tell Maricela that he was with you,” Cruz said, “that when I came for coffee, you were talking to Aristotle. She’ll believe that. Make a film about it. Use randome symbols and use speech.”
And then he departed.
