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With his pillow hut, Monsieur Clod was crossing downtown – step by step. A red dress, a tree, a sparkling light beam; in a pocket kept a sea, some roots of thought were instead spreading inward from the breast pocket, like a pale blue prince. The story had started upside-down – from his feet upward. It´s easy to say feet: but sunrays are not feet, coffee spoons have no feet, grass stems– are neither leaves nor feet. He had a quiet, quite awkward demeanor; like an accent falling always on the penultimate syllable. He would limp like that, walking through intricate, wild thoughts with the only help of the sentence-stick. Bad ideas, like snails or snakes would run away beaten up, or, slip downhill when the ground would tremble: not out of fear, rather along the sound-waves of a beautiful thought. Thought? A dream, a promise, a map. Who knows. There is every sort of map. The most common kind is the city map: among them there are also of quite uncommon: some represent streets and streets shadows, others benches and paradoxes: in the info-point you might get those punctuated with touristic attractions; in the Internet, Google-Map shows shops and markets flagged like stars and milky ways for galactic mice of modern moles: the archives have also precious findings – reproducing walls whose memory is almost a blank space on a notebook of genealogical trees: Berlin wall, the Great Wall of China or the Transsiberian rail: you come to the Pacific ocean: there are maps of whales´ landscapes too, of nuclear wastes, of radiation fat weeds and tuna fish, of neutrinos´ speed ways & car highways. But with the common kind we have reviewed only a little part of the Great Realm of maps. There are, in fact, also many ephemeral, transient, not only those which draw the way things are – like chemical formulas or physical skyscrapers of matter´s bones: here we recount also logic, grammar, the utterances of a prayer or the ingredients of a soup: a hand the dealer shuttled, like a clairvoyant: word games, stock market, stocks and pigeons´ stocks: maps to find the eggs at Easter´s Day, not easy, maps to forget and forge new maps: identikit maps, ids., passports, passwords; there are maps like x-rays and scans: to localize the baby in mom´s belly. But we are not done – not yet – there are also other maps – here and there: maps like prints, not plants: not prints of those which stay for a short or long time – finger prints, letters, shadows, images or ideas, sounds, names; prints more transient than transience: which never touched nor fell in the frame of the blinking eyes. They didn´t move in nor pass by – it is rather the map of the blinking itself. Behavior is a map. He walked quite clumsy, Monsieur Clod – and no wonder the map would change at every new, awkward step. Just behind the corner of the block he stumbled and fell down. [First Fall – This век].
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There are questions, maybe, we are never done with. In the beginning was the word, but we don´t know whether it was alone or accompanied by an exclamation or an interrogation mark, by a comma or a full stop. Maybe there was a colon instead. If that is the case, as soon as Word entered (or made) the scene, s/he stumbled down over a comma at her feet, or bumped against a staring, rigid but polite, exclamation mark. One could expect some of a more triumphal entrance from such a theological and philosophical star – maybe, for example, she would get off her private colon limousine parked right in the middle of the sentence, or would advance only behind a meadow of petals on both sides of the slash. Three dots would symbolize an infinite hand´s clap following her appearance. Maybe there would even be a star, just after her shoe. But these are only hypothesis of a lower rank. Both philosophy and theology took the thing quite seriously, that often means, in their own terms, to ignore the problem, rather starting with a final assumption. A bit like, having already a shoe in one pocket – start looking for the other. Who would take seriously the discoverer then, announcing his exceptional, never seen an equal of, finding? Nonetheless it seems that a great surprise and astonishment followed (for centuries) the discovery of the beginning of philosophy. Allegedly this thousands-years-old tradition started because of curiosity: a question mark. Theology instead, the broom, seemed always to have preferred (quite explicitly) the imperative form of the exclamation mark: be it a prayer or God´s speech. After all: was there before the egg or the chicken? What kind of questions! Was there before philosophies or question marks? Or the chicken? What then the bride, philosophy, and theology may be, after they change their cloths and return to an ordinary married life – that´s a bit like asking what are words, without their punctuation. However it might be, on that early morning of May, Monsieur Clod who – no need to say, neither was a philosopher nor a theologian – even less some modern contamination between the two – whose back was too bad for a kitchen porter and whose appearance and voice induced spontaneous disregard – who, in short, was jobless, poor and quite rude – whose bike had leant against the shop window for two hours already, as he fell down smashed his nose on a floating piece of paper – a paper which had been floating, and lied flat now under his cheek. “What´s this?” a philosopher would wonder. Certainly another philosopher (like my grandmother) would object that only the use makes the object (a pragmatic revision of the form-content identity) and would patiently wait to see – till she would have waited too enough and deduce it must have been useless philosophy, idle thinking or even (almost) worse than that: poetry! How then it is that poetry, or philosophy that may be, lies flat on the ground nowadays… for this nostalgic criticism you should wait for yet another philosopher. Among so many philosophers a fourth one would feel comfortable enough to dare a more complex, almost Scholastic endeavor: A Benjamin like many applied on time the general rule of Lichtenberg´s devaluation: to the old good Hour correspond today only 1200 seconds. In the same way we might say that to the previous Philosopher correspond today circa 1199 thinkers and two academics. That´s fair enough and explain quite well why Monsieur Clod would have been surrounded by as many thinkers as flies if only instead of paper his nose had run into a bigger misadventure. But before the next Graduate School or MAGNA UNIVERSITAS MAGISTRORUM ET SCHOLARIUM could get instituted on the spot, Monsieur Clod stood up and gave a look at the paper. We know Heidegger taken on it – he would have presumably started not from Adam and Eve rather from the ´paperness´ of the paper and if a “picture hangs on the wall like a rifle or a hat,” this paper was actually lying as a piece of something else. We have already had fleeting occasion to mention that even if Monsieur Clod was certainly not among the quickest spirits, on this occasion he picked up the piece of paper before too much of a fuss would be bestowed to it. His gesture – like his general person often – passed quite unnoticed. And after a fast glance the paper was collected in his pocket. The most attentive readers would remember though, that Monsieur Clod kept a sea in his pocket. In fact the paper had already taken on the shape of a boat – like all kids can make folding a sheet – and without being especially aerodynamic or as fine as an origami, the paper was floating now among a rich collection of findings.
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