"No fixed abode"

If this is not the calling card of the atemporal, then there isn't one.

They are hard to imitate because they are hard to find; even time travelers have a place, a time, to which they go back to, from which they first came, and which most owns them. But these, these they, are as much at home (which isn't to say that they are) in one time as any other.

And what is more: because of this, where time traveling things slip back into their time period when they are no longer points of interest for those in other times, atemporal things seem to disappear completely--out of mind, out of sight. Out of everywhere, until it should be summoned up again; not constantly, not on a whim, but risen, like the dead, through ceremony and necessity (it is extremely rude to wake the dead without reason, of course).

I have begun thinking the phrase "I apply no such criteria." I do not think I meant it (or knew how to mean it) at first. It was just a thing I heard in a book in a place. But the more often I say it (think it--I always mean to say it, but I never do. I think saying it would turn it into a criteria, somehow), the more it seems to..function. It is difficult to describe. Moral arguments are more quickly identified--and more quickly abandoned or skirted. If it is a bad idea, it will be killed; if it is a good idea, it will be fed. But still, we have not asked what it is. What a strange thing, this inclination to protect or destroy before just...sitting and staring. Before touching.

I do not know how not to do; I know only how to do and undo. I lose much time in this fashion, much more than if I knew how not to do. I will not say it is good or bad, but it is not very efficient.

The dogs that wander the cities, certain cities in particular, maybe, must live the strangest lives, I feel. In unpeopled areas, it is clear what will probably eat you, and what you should probably take a snap at yourself; in houses, your greatest worry is keeping your nose just far enough away from the table to entice the hand to mediate between the two. But outside of these houses it is a very strange. Who can say where kindness or cruelty will come from? If man cannot read the intentions of his own fellow men, what chance does anything born outside of a house have? It may perhaps not be very difficult to live (survive?) as these dogs do--perhaps there is enough food in some places, enough shelter, even companionship--but even still, it must be very confusing. Even interactions with other animals, half or wholly or not at all as acclimated as he, must be very confusing. I wonder how he makes meaning of these things. If he ever presses the soft top of his head into the asphalt and thinks of a peach tree.

Very small loops, I was told. Gad, if only you knew. But eventually, they are escaped, I am also told, though because I cannot remember the source of this one, perhaps it is only something I have told myself.

"This poem is one that's sort of haunted me ever since I first read it"

I don't collect these things like I used to, like a Mike Rose-Richard Rodgriguez sorta scholarly kid. But some of them I write down, or keep, because it..it's important to be understood sometimes, or at least think you're understood sometimes, if only because constantly feeling as if you are not quite probably leads to some sort of deep neurosis. Or boredom. Or something or other.

"I'm sure it means something"

"And I don't get it"

Hearing this (and..I don't quite know why I wrote these down too) is nothing bothersome in and of itself--not at all. It is just a note. But a single note, over and over, ceaseless, is--

Can you imagine? an island, filled with a single voice? A single song?

This is why criteria does not matter; context, the notes around, can do anything to anything. I do not care if it is good or bad. But if I have haunted someone, if I have scared someone...there is function to that.

I am very tired.

I am very tired.

I am very tired.

When I can think of nothing else (which has become increasingly often), I think of some, or all, in any order, of these things:

4

2

2

clockface

Palimpsest

Atemporal objects must be hopeful things; I can ascertain little else as of yet, but this must certainly be true of them. They have no place in the past, and their ties to the present are tenuous, at best, made to rely on the object permanence of weak brains. Such a well of hope they must keep, then, for future days which will again raise them to life...