The Prodigal Son confronting Zeno's paradoxes
Ten years from today, in either direction, he is running toward himself. In both simultaneous instances, he carries an arrow. One version of him is building up speed to throw the arrow at some unsuspecting target,
the other is being propelled by an arrow caught in midflight. To the one in the middle, the two runners appear as frozen images (or would appear as such if peripheral vision had no limits)
and he feels himself expanding toward both of them, like a series of points along a line. To him, everything is in the plotting: there is no line without points, no surface without a line.
Reason precedes existence. Why argue the matter? The line is not chalk on a sidewalk or a crack along the chalk mark; it is not the imprint of a fallen reed swallowed by wet sand—the explicitly sexual mouthful of water waiting
to follow the sunken reed. Reason is the self-sufficient animal that devours itself in order to survive. The line is not a rope or a string or a section of barbed wire cut for the escape. He is running against the generally accepted notion
that sees lines as the envoys of abstract distance. His dismantled agenda sets the pace.
The Prodigal Son in his own words: Rhetorical answers
Under conditions that are only possible elsewhere, I tend to feel much better though I'm beginning to get the impression that things are improving locally.
It hasn't been that long: I remember the road years, itineraries clouding my eyes. Time goes south when it's not in a hurry; it repeats itself in fragments.
I'd have to be standing there, awake, to know how well or how miserably I sleep on any given night. Those few times I witness the dark dissolving into morning, the
whole incredible thing is an afterthought revisting itself. There is more to this than this, like the series of expectations in the case of the child who raises an arm,
as if to pat herself on the head, and says, "I'm this tall," the hand still hovering inches above the uneven part in her hair. There is a partial end to everything.
Each day, a different stranger passes for me; they differ from one another as much as I resemble every one of them.
The Prodigal Son locates the epicenter
It's always better to forget. When the voice says coordinates he doesn't know if the news is about fashion or warfare, he's not even sure that it's news; it could be interference,
unclaimed freight, the last work of an ecumenical hermit, a game of hopscotch without numbers, his hand, his other hand clutching dice in his pocket. There must
be something palpable that separates incidental from accidental; otherwise, the suicide is mistakenly filed under wrongful death and life goes on as if
this were the curtain, this the proscenium, this the cue to burst into the scene with an unintentional soliloquy.
© Dionisio D. Martínez. All rights reserved.
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