E

Uh. . .uh. . .the ear, like the eye, can leave the mind to turn things over. A little drift, a lack of stress for five seconds isn’t serious. Some thoughts set off a keening. Every time you swallow, you could drown. Is there reason to worry that when you exhale, the heh, magnified, is the sound of a question? Or a nervous laugh. If this were an actual emergency, you’d receive instructions on what to do. Sometimes you ask what? and then realize you already know.

F

Zeno believed that you could never make it from the Food Court to Sears, for first you’d have to reach RadioShack half-way, and before that Victoria’s Secret one-fourth of the way, and so on in an infinite regression. Zeno never went to your school, where you learned that half-way there is all the way there, that five rounds up to ten, that even four and a quarter is four and a half, which is five, and therefore--. All this knowledge is possible because one day you were one day old, which becomes one and a half, which is two, and you can figure where the time went: it was never really there. No wonder, viewed whole, this forms a "complete variation on the O."

O

For proto-Sinaitic scribes and Emerson, the eye is the first circle. O—so begins a celebration. Yet there’s little difference between the signs making "in the future" and "to weep." O—the sag of error. Explaining that you have no money to donate to the police, clocking in: the only things you can call obscene are outside your body. A friend tells you don’t worry, you have dozens of reasons to be happy; you tell her don’t worry, she has dozens of reasons to be happy. The commercials are split. You’ll have to pay closer attention. You’ll have to open everything wider.

H

Victor Hugo spied a façade; Court de Gebelin decided that it was a window, or maybe an enclosure. Geoffrey de Tory placed it on the left side, at the hip. As if you needed anything more there. Maybe no one will notice: consciousness grasps only sixteen out of every eleven million sensations the mind sifts. Yet you can still recall seven plus or minus three forms of "no": "the volume of mail prevents personal reply," and "please don’t go out of your way," and some that aren’t voiced exactly but are there: "Next time." In an early form, "h" was a lotus. You forget where you read that. Or how it came to mean "obstacle." You need to forget more.