In some café, itself placed neatly on some corner of a street that can best be described as some-or-other, there is a round table amidst many just identical to it. At that table is seated a pair, though not a couple – a man and a woman – indulging one another with the pleasantries of conversation, extending as far as their own intrigues, pushing the boundaries of their company’s, and contributing a blotch of colour to the hue of the café’s rustling ambiance. 

The exact contents of their dialogue had begun at the utmost mundane, but have now, oh-so tragically, collapsed into the realms of the ruthlessly philosophical. It was the man who had raised the topic, though perhaps unknowingly – ‘That doesn’t quite make sense, I don’t think…’ – such is the innocent sentence that starts it all.

The woman, a little outraged at her reason being questioned, furrows at her critic.

‘What doesn’t make sense?’ she asks him, ‘Watch – give me that napkin, and produce a pen, and I will explain to you exactly.’

The man complies, producing a pen (from where? He hadn’t planned to bring one) and extracting a single napkin from the tray that lays nicely to their side. This napkin, the woman unfolds, and on this fine layer of canvas she begins to plot a careful line of logic, slowly and diligently, to allow for the ink to sink into the weak paper as she must allow the reason to sink into the— into her company’s mind.

The man, at the peak of his intrigue in no way he has known to be intrigued before, follows the woman’s words so precisely, so carefully, so exactly, that what miracles can be attributed to his perseverance in dedication to a unary focus, those too miracles can only describe the means by which understanding produces an unmuddled, picturesquely-clear image of what the woman is describing through her choice of unfit medium. Indeed, by a feat that seldom meets any two people, the man follows precisely what the woman is saying, comprehending every syllable that slips from her syllogistic lips. At last, when the woman reaches the end of her conclusion, she reaches to the man, through a moment of silence, for a response towards either direction of affirmation, and the man produces his own gaze to meet her own in reciprocity, and utter a response.

‘Yes,’ he declares: ‘that doesn’t make sense.’

If the woman – let’s call her a woman of reason, because she is a woman of reason – was outraged before, now, having expended herself so grotesquely in a public forum to produce a decomposed lyricism of tautologies for the (as she judged him) unapologetic buffoon that was refusing to agree with the absoluteness of her (as she judged it, though it must be said that she was not incorrect) absolute reasoning – if she had been outraged before, now she was simply plucked of all sensibility.

‘How can you—! How can—! But I just—! But—! But you just followed everything I said, and you agreed at every step?’

The man nods – he does not disagree, he did indeed.

‘Every step, up until the end – even the last step, you also agreed with the last step, claiming to not only— in fact, you not only claimed to agree with the last step, and every step before it, but you also claimed to have understood it too! So not only to agree with what I said, every part, but to understand it too!’

The man nods again (he must enjoy nodding).

‘So how can— please explain to me—’ the woman takes a moment to rest from her fit of outrage by placing her head in her hands, where her burning face can be cooled by the cold, calculated hands that painted the masterpiece of logic, threaded so immaculately as to be ingested by lay eyes, and digested by lay minds; and when she has had a moment to cool, she resumes – ‘How can you agree with every step of the process, every part, but not the process itself, the whole?’

The man looks at the woman, who now appears completely in tatters, ravaged by her own mental strain as to the entreaties his ruthless stupidity has imposed upon her unhardened form, and he attempts to explain his own confusion – for it cannot even be said that he is purely exempt from the seeming nonsensicality of his conclusion.

‘You see, I suppose I ought to, but the truth is, that even if the parts, each on their own, even if each part might take the opportunity to be entirely sensible, entirely reasonable, even entirely true, should it know how, even if that may be the case, then the truth remains that once you articulate it all in one piece, and only the conclusion remains to encapsulate each of its parts so neatly into a single gift from the immutable tethers of sound and logic, then that conclusion simply does not make sense. I am sorry.’

The woman watches her party dismantle every remaining notion of tractability from the space shared between them, and as he erodes it with his wretched whispers, her eyes fill with tears precipitated from the fruits that are filled with nectars of divine fury; her face too fills with the exaltation of rage, fire, and her hands adopt the tremblings of an incoming cataclysm, which announces its arrival by destruction from within the earth itself. She shakes and quivers, almost igniting herself with her ire, but at last she remains chained by her own capability: the man sees her nearing eruption, perhaps, and though should in turn be approaching a more placating stance, does not stir from his resolved, absolute mien, and simply balances her stare with the inertia of a wall made of ice. She can finally muster a word from beneath her blanket of inferno, and once one escapes, its successors follow.

‘But, but… but how? Please, just tell me how? I must know! I must know how!’

And her precipitate crescendo settles in the ashes of her blaze, amidst the sorrows that an orphaned wisdom shrieks when it has been culled by the cast-iron sculptures upon which our illusions of being dance, and thus craft the world; that pretty world, sensible world. 

Just then, in that passing moment, so too does join a stranger in that passing, as a man whom neither the man nor the woman seated at the round coffee table know walks by them; appearing, as best as one can appear, to be on his way to leave. The woman, clutching at the last strand of hope that with its fine form fails to conceal underneath it the boundless abysses of disillusion, clutches at the man’s long coat, and the stranger stops and turns to look at the peculiar pair, who, as many transient folk tend to do, had been exploring their own explosion of wonder entirely by themselves, unknown to anyone else inside that some-or-other café. As he turns, the woman grasps his coat more firmly with both hands, pulling him closer to her, nearly right down to the ground had the man not had such firm balance, and with every inch that closes between the two of them she bores deeper into his eyes with her solar gaze, and he has no other chance but to submit to the moment that he finds himself in entirely – to submit to the strange woman, and to the strange man.

‘Please, listen,’ pleads the woman, once there can be no more than a single centimetre between her seated head and the stranger’s standing chest, ‘please, listen, to everything, and then please speak.’

Feeling enthused, as well as oppressed beyond choice, the stranger turns his complete attention to the woman, who by the moment he feels collapsing further and further into her own centre, pulling down the whole world with the gravity of her sentiment, clutching it as she does clutch his stretched coat. The woman wields his attention, clumsily dragging him down into the free chair beside her, and as she retrieves desperately the tainted parchment from the primordial man, the third party looks away from her, away from the man, and away from himself – he likes not to be there at all, and simply listen.

The woman plasters all her soul back unto the piece of ravaged napkin, which had now become her magnum opus solely by worship, and once her entire being finds itself so neatly engraved into the soft folds of the malleable cloth, she seems to regain some of her serenity. Thence she pours again, and as she pours each word of sense from the bellows of her flowing lungs into the relentless chaos, she transforms the man that had only a second ago joined her as a moving particle contributing to her world, into a force of endless intrigue and captivation. He begins as a flaccid sail, but with each gust of reason that the woman blows his way, he is propelled deeply into the oceans of endless thought, where, guided by her beacon of cognition, he is not lost. It is only a few beats to the marching drum, rattled by the passionate woman from her own heart, and the man is himself driven to find his way to the end of the winding cataclysm that has born this woman such a heartrending hour of desperation in the presence of any notion to its opposition; he follows each step, and he understands.

‘So?’ utters the woman as she concludes, with a suffocated gasp bereft of any more strength, ‘what do you say? Do you agree?’

The man – the stranger – looks up from the unfolded napkin, which has now been run over by so many eyes and whose contents have been wrung by so many minds, and he looks her in her soaked eyes.

‘I do,’ he says. ‘I agree.’

Those eyes, drenched from exhaustion, light up with an explosion from the depths of the sea.

‘You do?’ she exclaims, and nearly falls on top of him as the final tether of her composure is severed by another leap to the other pole of emotion, ‘you do? Oh my, please tell me you do…’

‘I do,’ confirms the man, and if there was any doubt, he returns to the unfolded napkin, and from their resting place on his neatly-ironed trousers, he awakens his dormant hand, and he guides his index finger to the same place where the woman, at the very beginning of her explanation, placed hers. From there, he proceeds, much like the woman proceeded herself, and yet entirely differently, entirely uniquely as to not betray the intimacy the man feels to his own understanding, using words that the woman would have never thought to use, and gestures that to the woman were entirely unknown; and yet, not for a moment abandoning their meaning. With every swerve of the man’s own trail through the map of logic, the woman’s heart folds and it weakens, for in it she sees her own journey, her own path through the crevices of her own heart, yet sung with such distinct, vibrant words, as she has never before heard in her own mind. She sees, as the man’s finger traces the lines upon the mangled napkin, her own self becoming reformed, in the eyes and words of another, as she has never felt or seen before, and that construction decimates her own being from every side, until, as the man reaches much the same conclusion as the woman herself only just elaborated, she is entirely destroyed, and when only that nothing of herself remains, and the man utters: ‘…that is how. That is how it makes sense,’ she is born anew, reborn from that identity that was attritionally decomposed by the observation of another, and doubly rebuilt by that which has been conjured afresh, from another world that could never have been before. She has new fortitude, a new position in the bastion of her own individuality, and with that strength she lifts her head from the submission imposed upon her by the stranger, and she looks him endearingly in the eye, like she has indeed not only met someone new, but truly, for the first time from the moment she can recall her first thought, as if she has indeed just met herself.

‘Yes,’ she says, only too passionately, ‘yes, that makes sense.’

The two lock for some time in a manner that their onlookers may have confused with love – and indeed, their fits of passion, which they at first gave care to keep solely amongst themselves, are now being let loose freely into the malleable café air, and those select few that reside in a hoping separation from the chaos that is forming in their desolate corner of solipsistic insanity, are now being helplessly grappled into this unfolding, unwilling world; and their minds, however unconsenting, are bringing alongside them considerations and conclusions, that offer a lone torch of light and warmth in the vast cavern of perplexity that surrounds them. The strangers offer glances, probing the scene, and find in the woman’s affection for the man only a carnal attraction; while the first man, the woman’s primary company, knows perfectly well, by inveterate acquaintance, that the woman has no interests or intentions of any such kind, and instead remarks her and her consoling party with his own gauge of curiosity; though none, it should be noted, that inspires any contemplation.

When the woman’s lock wears and breaks, as wondrous fatigue expires its hold, she turns to the first man, and looks him too in the eye. When she sees this man, her ecstasy is doomed once again, and that familiar look of despair contorts her face back into lamentable proportions, that she was only too fortunate to abandon in her moment of fantasy with the wandering party.

‘Why,’ she asks him, the finality of helplessness in her cracking voice, ‘why can’t you see it so? When it is oh-so there, so present, so visceral and tangible, that it can only take one exempt from all senses to be precluded from such a truth – a truth, which even this here stranger, who presumably has no prior knowledge—’

The woman stops herself, catching herself on an undue assumption, and turns rapidly to the stranger in a frantic concern towards the unbiasedness of her investigation.

‘I have neglected to ask you, stranger,’ she pleads, ‘I’m so frightfully sorry, but I must know. Had you before this moment on this day in this café already walked the planes of this knowledge before, or are you not only a stranger to our company, but too a stranger to these lands, which have been so crudely contained on this frail napkin?’

The stranger, witnessing truly how the matter moves the woman, who with every new instance of speech elucidates further the vicissitudes of her passion for the subject at hand, smiles dearly at such a rare display of pure emotion. With his caring gaze, he comforts the woman, and then with his words.

‘I am a fool,’ he says.

And with those words, by magic or some other unseen force, he spreads onto the woman the smile that stretched his own lips, who thence claims it as her own, and brings its extremities further beyond what they had been first endowed. She appears to embrace the man solely by a blink of her eyes, and upon accepting the shared comfort as a cherished gift, she returns to the first man, and once again her joy evaporates.

‘And so you see, and you hear, for you are not bereft of any of these faculties that allow the truth to come to you so fluently,’ she resumes, almost in tears again, ‘you see and hear this stranger admit that it is this truth that is final, this truth that is ultimate, this truth that cannot by any reasonable stance be contested on any grounds that deserve to be tread by those who search for salvation in knowledge upon this desolate world; and yet, because even when you sit there silently, and I plead here endlessly, my head in my hands, my eyes in tears’ – they are beginning to dampen once more – ‘even though you have not echoed such affirmation by words that would allow the final world to hear what I can sense from the void that spills from your eyes, I know that you are still unconvinced – no! I will not say convinced, because there is no conviction to be had about the materially irrefutable, only acknowledgment, though you refuse to enjoy that too. So please, tell me, why is it so? Why do you oppose where fortune, destiny, the unary course of your being all united carry you? Or tell me, once and for all, that I am incorrect; tell me, that you have finally arrived at our common plane, and that I might rest assured in the mutuality of our being at this very moment, in the pleasant afternoon of this café.’

The man, the first man, looks at the woman in silence – and as the pregnant air carries him forth upon its density, he takes his eyes once more to the napkin, which has now become a sacred glyph embedded forever into the surface of that café table. He lifts up the soft parchment, glancing it over once again, nodding as he goes, holding it in place until he can once more confirm that he has reached its end, whereupon he places it back down onto the table with care, and allows his eyes to drift back to the woman’s.

‘No, I am sorry,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

3.IX.23