Tunnel, Imposition & Gravity race
by Jared Carter
[ poetry - august 07 ]
Tunnel
Far under the city, a forgotten passageway of enormous dimensions, into
which the overflow of even older waterways and cisterns and conduits
continues to empty. Lateral feeder tunnels branch off into the darkness.
Vaults of brick encrusted with layers of crumbling lime. Monolithic walls
and blind arcades. Narrow vertical shafts through which the sounds of work
and commerce, filtering down, can occasionally be heard. Music, at times,
and voices.
We were able to enter only because there had been no rain for days, and the
river, subsiding to its lowest level, revealed the opening. The city
continues to rise, the inhabitants have no time to imagine the corridors
spread out beneath their streets.
Imposition
It took on a life of its own, this piece of paper folded first into a
starburst, next a swan, then a chrysanthemum. It moved like a living thing,
rising into different shapes and forms, vanishing, rising again. Starfish.
Sea urchin. Cicada with indrawn wings.
In book manufacture an "imposition" is a nested sequence of numbers
dictating which pages of a book will carry which paragraphs of text. We
tried to follow its bidding, but the book, when printed, kept changing
before our eyes, its passages shifting endlessly.
Was this an infinite progression? Mandelbrot curve? Fourier
synthesis?
Everything could be represented in this book. And yet when it was opened at
random, there was only silence and emptiness, a glacial world. As though a
fresh snow had just fallen.
Gravity race
The cars had no engines. They were simply chunks of metal mounted on four
wheels. Within minutes each descended some two thousand feet of mountainous
road and whirled with remarkably little sound through the streets of the
village toward the finish line.
Townspeople and tourists crouched behind bales of hay lining both sides of
the track. The cars gleamed like falling meteors. Their drivers struggled
to control them, but too often the brakes failed, and they veered off course
and scythed through the onlookers.
The competition had begun as a harvest festival, a propitiation of the gods,
and as quickly as the injured and maimed were carried away, others crowded
forward to gain a better view of the spectacle. All agreed that once begun,
the race must be run to the end.
