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You began by studying contraptions and drones—their gorgeous honour, their numbers and their orders—and you allowed them to lull you towards a position. They composed an inaudible sound in your mouth and they registered this sound as a position shorn of noise. You studied how numbers could impose longer and shorter positions and how they could formulate your explorations. You studied how to humanize a random set of computations.
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If those computations were produced by coincidence, who were you to complain? The numbers located your position and you found that position could not be considered from an outside point of observation, but rather from the point of its fundamental personality as nil. You learned to allocate values to those numbers: zero for naught, one for left,
0
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two for centre, three for right, four for moon, and so on. The outcome offered by those numbers touched the way you spoke and your production of sound. You learned to stop or go on your voice. You thought the truncated quality of your voice would offer some sort of common opposition and so you spoke about numbers as though they wore out politics.
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Possibly you were wrong, though you did not know that then. The truncated sound of your voice piloted you towards your studies of the social: what objects cost, how they spread, their death and the death of nationless pockets of countries, along with the mourning of local foliage and the absolute dominion of acoustic solitude. And of course, the ubiquitous power of domains, rooms, and their owners. You formulated notes and located them in position. But that was not enough, so you turned to reading stories which you thought had been cut adrift from their social moorings, as though such an occurrence was ever possible. You pondered those stories, confused, unable to count them or to account for their improbable contents. Abandoning all, you studied how to soar among clouds, and you soared.
3
You turned among clouds to locate a home in air. You saw a face glow darkly near the lustre of your hair. Until you learned to disappear—until no residue survived, no monikers, not even the optimistic moon-light which was void and shadowless
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and which encompassed the thousands of clouds while you stood with one toe in a cup of water and the other in a wall socket, nor the vanishing point, nor the null set of calculation, no. No one supposed that you had learned how to be spacey with undertones.
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No one supposed that you understood how to be dismembered. For you had chosen to deploy an age-old formula to throw your joints and bones towards an otherworldly position, where you learned about prototypes of love. You turned into one obsessed with sums and how they organized your joints and bones, collecting them around your otherworldly position. You became lonely and lost in that otherworldly position, but refused to ignore your vocation. You called it soul and you thought you heard it shouting for coherence. Moreover, from that position your joints learned to cure and your bones learned to love and your torso became heroic with numbers. Your meditations revolved your skeleton around and through equations, and your joints and bones were reconstituted by those equations.