Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XIV

A dark room, or perhaps antechamber. Six rats clamber up a damp wall, a bit of garbage is strewn upon the concrete floor.

Ah, we’re in a subway station, a station of the underground.

We’re in a tube, the damp wall the six rats clambered up was covered in slick, slippery, white but dingy ceramic tiles, making the feat remarkable. That’s a clever rat pack.

The Enlightenment down here is from flickering and buzzing fluorescent lamps, also tube-like, arranged in parallel rows about six inches below a slight crease in the tiles marking the line between the walls of the tube and its ceiling. It’s an imaginary distinction, however, because the tube’s walls and ceiling are continuous with one another.

Two old panhandlers (or are they college professors? The line between these two is also imaginary, as the characteristics distinguishing them are blurred) stand huddled in the middle of the room, whispering and occasionally shouting hoarsely:

Carlos-O(1) “However, the predisposition to mythic thinking is inscribed in the cognitive structures through which any complex, hierarchical society is produced and reproduced. Therefore, the task of critique is without end. An infinite and incompleteable critique.”

Orla-O(1) “Plato--The master of dualisms. The first computer programmer of binary thinking. 0-1. Why is he still relevant? He has never been more so. As the king to revolt against.”

Both wear brown fedoras pulled down over their foreheads, partially covering their eyes, giving them a somewhat shifty appearance. Both wear dirty overcoats of the kind we associate with dirty old men, perverts. When they are shouting, it isn’t in anger, but because they can’t hear each other. That’s not due to the noise of the underground trains rushing past,however, because sometimes they shout when there is no train going by. It may be they don’t hear each other because they can’t hear each other. But they aren’t deaf, either.

Carlos-O(1):“We’ll have a Platonic dialogue.”

Orla-O(1):“No, a Deleuzian-Parnetian one.”

Carlos-O(1):” Damn you, dirty larva!”

Orla-O(1): “Damn you dirty ape!”