economy of movement2003.12.10
Dear Gloria, your erratic vibrations are draining my very life force. The way you churn your lips as you whisper to yourself is—I assure you—unnecessary, unless it is your conscious desire to amass the impressive volume of foam spittle at the corners of your mouth, which I witness daily. Also, though the industrial cleaning agent you wear for perfume makes your eyes water without abatement, I hope that, each day anew, you’ll reconsider your decision to carry around a blotter kleenex that you nervously crumple, and rumple, and work, and work, and work, and work, until little balls of ruined fluff drop like silken spider eggs from between your palsied fingers. I hope you will not think me cruel for mentioning these things, but I’ve found that the way you obsessively touch anything that comes to your attention—picking it up, putting it down, moving it just slightly, or just touching it… touch… touch…—is stirring up a demon inside me whose intentions I am not yet entirely clear on.
It’s true that I have, lately, found my attentions focusing on the inefficiency with which people go about their daily routines. Let me be clear, Gloria: I refer here to basic movement. My eyes masked only by strategically lowered brows, I watch with smouldering contempt as these creatures exhibit themselves, obliviously inelegant, and ungainly to the point of being a threat to those around them. The frivolous motions they practice—the receptionist’s valley girl head wobble, the doorman’s extraneous facial expressions, the forever-gesticulating sales staff swinging their appendages around like tassels on a rodeo rider—do not act in the service of accomplishing a discrete goal. If dance is like visual poetry, then my days find me beset by some unnameable screed of black vulgarity.
I have honed my own physical processes to such a fine state of economy that I can regulate the very pucker of my follicles in such a way as to allow the wind to pass most efficiently through my hair. I have made the odd compromise, I’ll admit, as it is not yet possible for me to move through solid matter in a predictable way. But even then I have kept my calculations strict, and adjust only as necessary. Several of my familiars have protested when I breeze by them with only molecules to spare, tiny arcs of static electricity crawling across our skin momentarily. But those same people will accrue miles upon directionless miles by the time they reach the end of their lives, and all that time heading nowhere, like derelict sailboats in the unyielding gale.
It takes timing and coordination, to be sure, and great attention to detail. But the alternative, Gloria, is dire. To squirm and convulse yourself into oblivion, eroding joint and joint, is just not dignified. Consider the Portuguese Man-of-War who thinks of nothing more each day than this: Dangle. And ingest. What shall I do today? Dangle. And ingest. You’ll not come across a skittering or giggling or fidgeting Portuguese Man-of-War, because they are content, secure, and planning for something which we may all come to know in due time.
In the meantime, Gloria, I beg you: please be still.
Related Esoterica
» "what the other hand is doing" (2003.04.26)
» "terminal II" (2003.04.03)
» "terminal" (2003.03.31)
Comments
Marvelous, wonderful.
I have the satisfying ability to slither effortlessly through crowds, to float through the merest openings in the throng, to get where I need to go. It's like a form of meditation, almost mindless. To the companions I leave far behind, struggling clumsily, I don't even appear to be hurrying.
quoth Ronnie on 2003.12.13
