The Veranda of Momentum 

“This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze.” Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. 

Gwen put her book down. She thought: But what am I about? I am not about space since I started the Atkins Diet. I am not about language because I have no one to talk to. And I am certainly not about death because I am a young person and death is somewhere, sure, down the road, down at the end of this long journey called life but it is so far down the road that I think right now, at this accumulation of moments, I do not need to trouble my head with it. So apparently I am about the gaze, although what the gaze is I’m not entirely sure, but I like very much being about something and I think that if you’re going to be about something it should be something you’re not sure about because in that way you’re essentially about adventure and I like the sound of that. 

There was that bell again. Often times, Gwen realized, a bell sounded and it meant nothing. It meant that someone pulled a rope and the sound of a bell resulted. But what is pulling a rope in its essence? Pulling a rope is not like pulling a mule, although Gwen did not know what the phrase pulling a mule meant even though it had an ugly sound she liked. What was important was that pulling a rope could be distinguished from pulling a mule and while some people might not be the wiser she felt that she herself was the wiser and who could find that disagreeable. When you cull away the essential from the extraneous you have an assortment of vowels and consonants that in their blight as gibberish still feel good upon the tongue. 

Gwen ran her tongue over her lips and sipped her ice tea. Someone just beyond the veranda was playing the ukulele. The ukulele was one of Gwen’s favorite instruments. Its sadness. And she remembered many stories her mother had told her about Arthur Godfrey, one of the greatest ukuleleists of the modern era. But that was tosh. Tosh was very enticing but she had decided to undertake a program of improvement in order to make herself worthy of Bradford’s gaze should Bradford ever recognize that she was alive. Thus, she had set off on a program of improvement that included reading fifteen minutes a day. She read: “This gaze, then, which refrains from all possible intervention, and from all experimental decision, and which does not modify, shows that its reserve is bound up with the strength of its armature.” That took care of today’s fifteen minutes. Gwen adjusted her sunglasses. She raised her gaze to the horizon. A few fleecy clouds floated along the horizon as if they had nothing better to do. One looked like someone she knew. The chin. The small cleft in the chin. The curve of the mouth, its belch of derision. My reserve is my strength, Gwen thought, my immaculate probity. Pamela might have her qualities (that cleft!), but I have my qualities also. And my armature. Pamela’s armature is as if nothing compared to my armature. My armature is pure. It is essentially non-existent and thus pure, non-existence bestowing upon a thing its ultimate purity. And I’m a girl. That compounds.