What Comes Of The Idiosyncracies Of An Unwitting Solipsist?

I picked up a poem I'd started one night in Fés, it's now on The Euphemist. Just a little thing. Now revising a story about which I don't know how I feel. It's been happening a lot with narrative lately, my own and others--I just don't seem to have that discriminative faculty to the same extent as I used to. Easier with poetry, but not hugely. It's as though, paradoxically, the more I look, the less I see--the more perceptive, fewer borders drawn--enchanted by language rather than any particular usage, everything being good as what it is. We'll see, I guess. It is both disconcerting and exciting to be mystified by even myself, to fall into formlessness or habit and not know into what degree of either one falls. The joys of particularity are envisioning imperfections as perfect, or at least as radically uncertain (joyously arbitrary). Either I have lost some assumptions or they have become invisible.

I feel sane, and in a good way. There are a few gnats in my room with whom I've been trying to figure out how to make friends, but I keep forgetting this and blowing them away when they get close. Not that they are substitutes for humans, or even for pets, but curious presences. Curious presences which I can personify while zoomorphing myself. Still, there is sanity in this.

My words are leading my thoughts, unsteady ground of intuition does not belong to the order of trust and accountability. Words coming before meanings, the watery movement, easy and

I met Jalal 2 at a café and he said I was only two minutes late; I pulled out my watch and it said I was on time. I showed him and said perhaps my watch is off, I can change it later. It was very Moroccan of him to tell me I was 2 minutes late and not give a thought that he may have the wrong time. Perhaps there is something implicit in making a rendez-vous that one must arrive early to avoid being late. I do not care. A man passed by in a three-wheeled wheelchair-like contraption appearing to have some degenerative muscle disease. Watching him and imagining how much he must rely on others, how decimated his independence, I reflected on how ridiculous was the man strutting by in his leather jacket that he walked with what appeared to be so much self-importance or so little fragile humility or such misplaced values. This I read into/projected onto twenty seconds of some stranger's day. I feel very human.

We went to see some tombs, there was a room for children. All those little unknowing bodies. Then we saw two palaces and waited to meet up with Jalal's girlfriend. I accidentally drank tap water, but it was fine (which reminds me for some reason of someone's story about arriving in Delhi I think during a flood and seeing dog carcasses being swept off on the tide). The girlfriend arrived and was cold cold, clearly upset with Jalal for something and not willing to humor anybody. Jalal was dopely trying to pull her hand onto his thigh and she pulled it back again and again as he lovingly told me several times how she was his "puss" and asking isn't she pretty. I should have gotten up and left, but instead I left my body at the table and refused to take on any awkwardness.

That same night I went with Jalal 1, Premier Jalal, to the hookah bar, Audisia. He and another worker, Mustapha, and I walked in the same direction as their boss, who was on his way home. When our path diverged from his, we waited about 20 seconds and turned back around to hail a cab. As we turned onto the club's street, the cabbie asked if we were going to mosque. We entered an unmarked door to the side of the main entrance where the Italians and I had entered the week before. Apparently the downstairs is for the older crowd, described to me as a livingroom. We ascended a staircase and came into a room of benches, music, and smoke. Neon lights outlined the moulding and strobed slowly all night. It seems as though the drinks are half as expensive if you come with your own Moroccans. Everybody was having a good time together, not trying to prove or judge anything; I was relatively at ease. A girl named Selma sitting with us began smoking a cigarette with her navel. Another girl picked me out to dance in the crowded space narrowly afforded by the benches. Reticent at first, I danced and began to enjoy myself, getting compliments on my dancing and then another wave of constriction. She looked at her watch while dancing and I was loose enough to freely be myself in the midst of whomever, so I took her wrist and pretended to study the watch, mockingly approving of the time. I sat down and the girl continued dancing at me. Jalal remarked approvingly, "look at the waves" of her butt. Her eyebrows were very precise or painted and not very expressive, her face was some mix of uncertainty, thoughtlessness, and boredom. She bent over to tell me something. Give me money. I laughed and said what? She repeated for me and I laughed again and she talked to Premier Jalal. He told her to knock it off, we hung out a bit longer and then called it a night. I have resolved that the next time I am propositioned by a hooker, I will tell her she can pay for me.

One does not learn to dance, but unlearns what keeps one from dancing.