More from "The Quiet American"

I got another one of these emails. I'm just going to keep posting them I guess unless they get too bizarre, because, frankly, I want to see where this guy (girl?) is going with all of this. If he's going anywhere.

The Quiet American Sleeps Sound

The sound might carry. This might institute a carrier wave. There may in waves be found the waving of a flag, a glove, a skirt, a handkerchief.

Handkerchief used to be two words. The Quiet American has always been three.

The Quiet American is also one.

There are moments in which the behavior of an individual is a fractal representation of the behavior of a society.

Consider the individual following slowly the actions of the group, moving steadily into synch but accelerating.

This is following and it is a form of invisibility.

Consider the individual as he begins to catch up and move simultaneous with the whole. In so doing he becomes indistinguishable from the whole.

This is one form of invisibility.

Consider the individual so adept at imitation that he begins to anticipate the moves. He moves before the society moves. The society is now following him.

Despite appearances, this is an illusion. This is also a form of invisibility.

The individual is only visible when his movement is contrapuntal and harmonic with but separate from the movement of the whole.

This is the essence of what follows.

An essence exists but not prior to existence. This is what Jean-Paul thought he proved. But Jean Paul was not the Quiet American. He was not even American. Jean-Paul was French.

There is a place where a woman with alabaster skin the color of black lacquer waits in ponderous stillness for the approach of a more viable option. It is not the purview of either Jean-Paul or The Quiet American to try to present a more viable option. Both Jean-Paul and The Quiet American are still interested in getting laid, however, and The Still Woman, who sits as it were at the focal point of the Foucault Pendulum, Michel, Ma Belle, would be the ideal candidate for that particular penetration as far as either are concerned. Luckily for The Quiet American, Jean-Paul is dead and unlikely to get in the way. Michel had AIDS and died, of course. The Still Woman is clean and pure in her essence. Without the stillness of her immune system, still inside her without microbal invasions to combat, makes her fragile, of course. Because there is a fragility in non-movement that The Quiet American has learned to shake off through the way that we move.

We understand this to be metaphor, true. But there is value in understand all metaphors to be literal. You are not the Quiet American. The Quiet American Loves You.

The Quiet American Loves You.