Parable of the Particle Pair

Guanajuato is known for its  momias, corpses exhumed and evicted from their crypts because the family was not able to keep up the payments. The proprietors of death were able to make them pay eventually by charging tourists to see them. 

The city has attempted to overcome its grisly character with an annual music festival which featured classical personalities of world renown, including Lola Violeta Ana-Maria Bobesco, a Belgian gypsey known to enchant the very animals in the forest with her violin. She is leaving the concert hall after another triumph. 

The narrow undulating brick street. A light from an all-night market. Crying. Wailing as she moves closer. 

Through an open window Lola Violeta  observes a scene of agonizing pain. Desperate adults around the bed with a still child. 

The maestra sets her violin case on the street and removes the instrument. A sound unlike any she has produced so far in the night. She expresses with her constant response to pain and suffering, of which she knows well. 

When she lowers her bow there is silence. She turns. 

The child is in the window. Staring. Transfixed. 

---

The little girl's name is Sonoras, and Lola Viva Bobesco takes her in hand. She will have the greatest teachers, the finest progression into the upper realm of music, will Sonoras. You perhaps have heard her at the Met, or La Scala, or any of the majestic venues known for elite and fabulous presentation. 

---

There is a quantum feature by which two particles, say infrared photons, when separated, remain in contact, though they be cast to the far corners of the universe, if indeed the universe has corners, so that altering the path of one affects the transit of the other at the same instant. If the spin of one is oriented vertically, then the other is horizontal, and altering one means the other adjusts to remain opposite. Siblings are like that.  No one knows how this happens! Besides, by Newtonian physics and Special Relativity, it doesn't. Yet it does, somehow. . 

This movie is Unbreakable. Here are some folk walking. The one to our left is a cartoonist. He is very brittle. Bones snap like plastic. He knows by simple logic this must mean somewhere there is an Unbreakable superhero. The guy to his left is a candidate. 

---

Prudencio Rodriguez intuits the paired particles. He understands without knowing that if his daughter, the lovely and extremely talented Sonoras, is to succeed, he must fail. 

So he sets off on a pilgrimage to accomplish just that. 

Prudencio appeared in our former fishing village one year. He walked in a controlled trundle and wore the same shabby brown coat and he would set his violin case down on the street and produce from its contents the most unpleasant screeches you could imagine. He was genuinely and noteably awful, and this in a region where awful was not unknown. I called him the World's Worst Violinist. 

For years he went on like that. He stared down into his case. A dollar might appear without notice. Nor did he notice pedestrians. Hardly anyone but me paid him any attention whatever, and he did not seem to notice that either. 

Until one day we stopped. We all noticed. The music he played was of an instant most gratifyingly and inexplicably lovely, beautiful even. I have not heard the like since, and I have heard Reloj play his Viva Tequila. 

Prudencio Rodrigue dropped his bow in his case, his violin on the street and trundledd away. Some say he was crying, but I was behind him at the time. 

They say the City gathered his instrument and case and the few dollars he had won that day and took them to Lost and Found. It was expected he would certainly come for his instrument. He never did. 

The next word any of us had of Prudencio Rodriguez was in our local Sentinel some weeks later. 

What's the meaning of this?

Sitting before our gate. A horse-drawn wagon of seasoned firewood. 

It belonged to a neighbor, a malicious lunatic, who had been harassing us for two decades as her meager funds and IQ would permit. I had seen the wood lying around her property. Now, here it was, neatly stacked. 

Was this a pease offering? We were not in the habit of consulting with her, and were in fact quite happy with that arrangement. 

Leaning against the wagon was an ancient motorbike with a small two-cycle engine. What is this? I had never seen this item before. Probably, it's junk. Look at the rust. Hasn't run for ages, probably. 

It kicked right off. 

I rode it down the road. We live in the mountains and I did not expect it to take me down the hill and back. 

It did. 

What's the meaning of this?

"...and further despondent sayeth not."

Wandering Alone in a Dark City

Wandering alone in a dark city. Series of Victorian or Georgian - boxy with two floors and a portico on the second. It was just here, but in my walking I have lost it. This is the street where it was, where she was. She seemed interested - but now I hear her. She's broadcasting to a companion about me, ridicule, meant for me to hear.

Now it does not matter where the boxy Georgian was.

I go and there are others. I sit. It's lunchtime. I say, in answer to a question, no, I have no job.

Someone sitting with me says, heave to, we'll find you work. He leads me into the yard where various workers pass. Ask that one, he counsels. She is an ordinary cook. I ask her, but only to gratify my ad hoc career counselor. I am not very coherent, but she isn't listening.

Alone, I see back at table a strange object take shape under the rice and gravy. I am utterly revolted. It seems to be a male appendage!

I bolt the table. Something must be done. But what? How does one complain about such disgusting outrage?

While I'm wandering about in the courtyard I see my place has been cleared. I'm not really sad I have not that to deal with.

I have only my solitary state in a noir set of unconcerned strangers, my natural dreamstate.

From Timothy by Saphire to you!

Focus Group

We are somehow assembled in a studio. It's a TV commercial, we are to understand. None of us comprehend how those two facts came to be, or even if they are in fact facts. Still we wait here, because, TV.  

Four of us sit all in a row. We are instructed to move our arms left, forward, down, in a very definite gesture, while singing a jingle, the lyrics helpfully whispered to us. We are told it will all make sense in the final compiled product so we do as we are told. Every member of an orchestra has a small part which does not create harmony on its own, we are told.

I am instructed to toss the contents of a bowl, apparently filled with graffiti, into the face of a smiling lady down below, remembering the jingle. It's all right, I am assured, it won't reach her. So I do as I'm told. The graffiti does in fact reach her, as anybody might have foreseen. 

I could never remember the lines of the silly song so I faked it under my breath. It did not seem to matter. 

We are next ushered into an auditorium and a pleasant lady addresses us.

"You have all been the subjects of an experiment to determine just how gullible the public can be. An anonymous political entity wondered just how far the general population might be led by an electronic leash. You have all been most cooperative and extremely encouraging. Thank you very much."

And she exits smiling through a door in the wall behind her … which immediately dissolves into wall and ceases to exist.

We sit. There is now one door in our room and it's to our rear and it is glass so we see if we turn it is an exit onto the street.

"TV, huh. "

"I prefer radio myself."

 "Did that lady say she would be back?"

Chortles. Some look around. A large room with one door. An exit. Three blank walls.

"Did that lady say she would be back?"

Still we sit.

  

🔚

From the night dawning into 19-Oct-2016. 

Traveling Mien

He wasn't sad or angry, just resigned. It was late in his season and prospects were dim. He was beaten. It was a nefarious plot they had in mind. All of them were better oriented for jail than I was. I listened, though, from the next booth. His face was red but from weather not drink. He slid to lay in the booth.

 

There is a series of bays, inlets, lakes, and they all look alike. I don't know where I am in the series of bends in the road. (This sensation has occurred before, but I don't know if it was a dream or real.)

 

On foot, I am confronted with a huge mass of apartment complexes, as far as I can see in either direction. I must trespass to continue my important journey, so I begin to climb.

 

Now on a bike, a sinister character overtakes me. Perhaps it's the trespassing. I worry about him stealing my new SE (just arrived that day in waketime). I am taken to an ancient very small room with clapboard and barnwood forming nooks and corners everywhere. He has a companion and they discuss me. (Waketime reference might be the two guys showing great unhurry in admitting me to the hospital, Ft Polk, LA, February 1965; "He's 104," said one eventually.) One says to the other, "Release him," so I slither through a small fissure in the wall and ceiling juncture.

 

The mission is a b-line hike through the jungle, clearing brush and even plane trees in our path. It's grueling. Objective is a straight path from one village to another quite distant. We grind each day, and tomorrow will look just like today.

 

Son Casey will build something up on the east meadow, he tells us. He and his crew begin. We notice that as well as grading the field, they have ground up our driveway  and taken out our fence and from the gate all along the drive. Hey, what gives? We cannot even keep a dog now!

 

He says nothing.