On nonsovereign stimulation and the way Lingis speaks of ground.
The metal tables of that one coffee shop all stare at that parking lot too casually, like as though it’s an okay thing to be looked at. A large cup of coffee costs 4.75 and the parking lot is pretty barren, and just hovering there like barren, like grayed-out desert, like really no place for life, so large and blank, very really empty but somehow still baiting for attention in this way like also sortof charismatic and so loud, so filled with traffic and movement and really smacking with vitality, more than any of us with our fingers drinks and tables.
There’s a hump-up or a bit of a hill at the south entrance to the lot. If the car riding up on in is going too fast its gut will scrape the pavement with a twanged metallic screech that’s impossible to ignore. Heads flip up from their laptops each time. A cyclical ticking of attentions interrupted by all that heavy matter striking heavy strata. Hotshot driver and car body all whipped up into a real hard entrance. I think, it's not time or the place for this prominent corrosion.
If the driver’s going slow in its entrance the body of the car heaves itself over the hump with such a painfully slow swell on the wave of pavement that you can see maybe four or seven different moments in the balance of the vehicle. Passengers wobble into the door, slide in their seat, grab the armrest through the ride. The metal and the flesh all arch and vault and spread across the stupid hill of the parking lot, launched into the coffee world where there was quiet a moment ago and now theres nine scratches carved in the asphalt.
Theres that yank of separation between me and my table from the humped-out noises of this lot. I’m tugged and tugged again towards the lures of this flat gray thing. I think because of this it might be part of the shop, which swindles out its edges through asphalt expanse. We’re all doing this endless movement of always approaching edges. Nancy says "the edges are all one for the other in a double rapport of attraction and repulsion". Theres no brinks or limits, (its all brinks and limits), encounter between shapes gets very blurry when you're standing on this endless spat of paved ground. City stretch. Mortar involution. Across a state, then a Nation. One can(t) approach the other edge, or engage it, just catch a whiff. One can(t) go overboard, one can(t) also spill over, maybe exactly in attempts to get over to the other side. Unless in the process they get turned around end up back where they started, or get caught headless in the nothingblur of the edge (these are the same). It all depends on the energy, the impetuousness with which one starts to leap out.
The strip mall on the other side is slack and makes no noise across this gray scraped sea. Its storefronts are heaped together in my eyeline into a tackle of words denoting ways we could use this rectangle of rooms– ‘chicken sandwiches phone repair eye emergencies’. I confess I’m dispatching from a drink-sipping really hard-sitting world where the metal chair bites into my thighs so hard that red lines are left there for hours and I dont carve myself away and take a walk to see what inside that strip mall on the other side of the tarred planes.
Im worried if I do I’ll be hit by the smack of the pavement waves or have to watch hotshot driver swing his carkeys on his finger and that seeing that might trip a switch in my nervous head that makes me never come here again. The slap of new things coming to exist to the senses– the weaponry of stimulation that troubles the desire to seclude, stay low in my own delight.