grammar and syntax — scenes from lives…

The status of the word as the minimal structural unit, perhaps a morpheme might be… Sometimes when she was alone with him she allowed her english to fall away from the grammmmmmmar and syyyyntax, to allow the content to slip away from the structure like well cooked chicken flesh that slides off the bone. “It’s eight-thirty , almost nineness “ She might say looking down at him in her white towelling dressing gown, her loose grey teeshirt covered with white stars showing through the gap in the middle, her bare legs, (if she moves in just the right way he will see the inner thigh of her left leg) and feet in black slippers. We need grammar and syntax in a society for without them we make little or no sense, [you might understand this as you write notes in a meeting discussing the future of (condensation) a man who you are about to condemn for his behaviour in events outside of his control, condemning by your monitoring the harm he has caused…] Often you have both tried to stop trudging to the end of the world and yet in this you have failed. Grammar and syntax have little meaning here for what matters is that they are together. It is morning, they have been together for twenty years, the majority of the time spent in this house. The private language which is theirs is meaningless to those outside of their dangerous war machine. She will slowly get up, slowly dress, put on her face, put the new knives, forks and plates into the dishwasher, eat some breakfast, which… i have very little understanding of how i ended up here. She says. Knowing that only her feelings matter in this space, with him. Only what they talk about matters. That’s fine, I really have no idea either, except I have never wanted to be anywhere else, just here. [The word is the ideological phenomenon par excellence. The entire reality of the world is wholly absorbed in its function of being signs.] They are an island, a small group with their own tropes, “almost nineness” she said, which both he and she understand as containing scarcely hidden meanings and desires that are not shared outside of their island. Later, much later she is waiting for her significant other to arrive, she is reading the Kluge text in english, words on love, snow and occasional German soldiers fortunately dying at Stalingrad. She wishes she could be reading a Japanese equivalent, soldiers dying on the Manchurian coast, being killed by Chinese or Russian troops. When he arrives they sit drinking and eating, sipping flavoured vodka shots from cut crystal glasses, and espresso made with the house espresso blend. Eating ratoushki with smoked salmon, herring, and the last few with syrup. Quietly exchanging the details of their current working situations. It’s cold here so that he feels unable to remove his jacket. They are grateful for the time they can spend together now that their children are teenagers. They are speaking japanese. When speaking japanese, she always tends to revert to almost being the person she was when she was called Tatsushi Motohashi, she knows he finds this entertaining. He smiles appreciating the truth. Waiting for the additional cappuccino he realises that he had left the phone at work. Seamlessly they switch to english. Their voices having the accent and dialect of southern england. “I left my other phone at work, I’ll have to get it. The auditors may want to access it… “ Almost wanting to forget the necessity for the messages to be reviewed. The brass filigree retro lamp that hangs down above the table sways in the gust of wind from the opened door. […] Some people sit down at an adjacent table. A man talks of his new business plans with his systems architect. He speaks of the purchase of consecutive freephone numbers, how number 1 refers to the CEO’s office. Idly listening she realizes that she has no idea what he intends to sell. Nothing he says suggests that he is involved in making anything, perhaps its another new currency or a financial solution to existential anxiety, perhaps its bitcoin, perhaps its a drug or to give people temporary prosopagnosia… Further along a bank of schzioanalysts each in a cubical speaking in hushed tones about how to find love. Eventually tired of speaking they leave. “Criminals,” she says, “Even more criminal than I am these days…” She moves the pink newspaper round and directs your attention to the interview with “Sophia Han, youthful investment supremo of Shanghai…” …

He went down and walked around the floor, asked the receptionist where she sat. She directed him towards her glass walled office and then watched him move carefully through the desks. The receptionist always wondered why she couldn’t help like watching him flow across the floor like that. She was sitting in one of the office meeting rooms. The glass door was shut, he walked into her office in which non-decisions are reversed and decisions are made, where indifference was more important than difference. The low background hum of the office floor will only be heard if the door is open, otherwise it is silence. He will read a few of the reports he brought with him, printed in colour folders, each colour is supposed to convey a meaning, but he doesn’t know what that is as the semiosis of their imaginaries escapes him. The hardest thing about being in exile in this country is having to live with their social imaginaries. The nicest thing is sitting in a place, anyplace at all, with her and or the children, even if she is involved in a complicated discussion with somebody with agency or not about whether they should do something to someone or not… whilst he is reading files, files, the files and wondering if the contents are accurate. He writes notes on the files he has brought with him and sometimes on the contents. (((Yes, No, and who has the financial estimates for this one? Does it add up? Insufficient lifecycle information, obviously criminal on the next one and so on))) He thinks he makes decisions on the basis of finance, but since he can never spend any of the money he earns… He has known for a longtime that this is not a job, nor even work because he is not free to leave or even free to be alienated, just as she (( sitting across the desk and saying to the man, “what should we do then ?”)) cannot leave her work. He thinks they are prisoners who are not quite sure how big their jails are. All they can do, as they’ve agreed, is to “never go bourgeois “a phrase he has grown to love even if he is not sure he really understands it. Eventually three of them, the two women and him go for a late lunch in a noodle bar and talk about happiness… Sometime after this, days or weeks later a car stops outside of an office building. This same man gets out and waves goodbye to the person driving the car, enters the building and asks her; “are you’re bored yet ?” “ÿes sometimes, all the time sometimes” Thinking of both the immediate and the longer term. “anyone left to see?” He is only thinking of the immediate present. “only Janklevitch, he wants to talk about a new security contract. ..” “Let’s have tea instead, and then leave…” She looks at him, thinking of the magic he has brought into her day. “OK “ she says putting on her socks and shoes. Writing [yes] on yet another red file. And [perhaps] on the green one. The red file is about investing in offshore wind farms with a security aspect included. The green one about something else, Scandinavian safe houses in Denmark. Her phone rings on her desk as she pulls on a sock, she ignores it. […] They go to (goto) the rooftop garden. It is surrounded by glass and metal windbreaks, they drink tea to the sounds of the city, other people on the rooftop are sitting in groups, pairs or alone talking. They leave and walk north. “Perhaps I should create more fear in their lives…” She says when talking about the meetings scheduled for a few weeks in the future. “Only if it makes you happy…”He says taking her hand. “When I lived there before, I thought I belonged, and that I was part of something bigger. I thought that, in some way, I was responsible. Whereas here there are so few people who need us…””Yes, us, we are we. A small group of people….” They walked westwards towards the underground station, they were following the route of the underground train that would catch shortly. back towards their home. “Ï like it here, “ She said. Watching the people on the platform at Euston S. The train was empty when they sat on the bench seat at the front of the train..”People aren’t automatically scared, afraid of you anymore. Which is nice, must be nice” He said quietly to her. “Yes. That’s true though If i was really invisible we could go for a weekend to Stockholm, a week in the starzengracht…” “A good man is not necessarily law abiding…” Words are falling away into meaninglessness. perhaps though, she thinks, its the proliferation of meanings that matters.

([In many stories and fairy tales, it is a prince who takes a girl of low social class, a swineherd or a maid, and later makes her his queen. But love knows another way. A Chinese schoolmistress from a rural commune near Suifenhe, on the Russian border, made the acquaintance of a Russian who often crossed the border for trafficking purposes and they fell in love]