>Grey light spilling down past the Spire and still the morning crowds shuffling, feet scraping stone, while somewhere a harmonica threads blue notes through traffic din. Tennis bag heavy against his shoulder and the words swimming now, all morphemes and phonemes dissolving into pure etymology, pure abstract meaning without sound: harmonikos, from harmonia, joint, agreement, concord, but no concord here in the damp Dublin air.>Past Nelson's Pillar (gone now these twenty years but still standing in some dimension of memory) where a tall American leans, playing those notes that might mean something if you knew the code, might map something vast and terrible across European skies. The harmonica player's shirt pocket stuffed with rainbow silk, and something about his stance suggests waiting, watching, though for what even he mightn't say.>The tennis player (young, though age seems irrelevant in this morning light) pauses mid-stride, caught perhaps by a familiar chemical signature in the music, some faint trace of DMZ or Onanist's Grace or formulae best left unremembered. Inside his head the dictionary pages keep turning: preterite, passed over, left behind, from praeteritus, gone by. Gone by like rockets, like tennis balls, like films spinning in empty rooms.>Their eyes meet across the flow of pedestrians. A moment of recognition, or perhaps just interference patterns in the cosmic background radiation. The harmonica note wavers, bends, breaks. Above them seagulls wheel, describing parabolas that might mean something if properly analyzed, might contain messages about entropy or addiction or the nature of entertainment itself.>But already the moment dissolves. The tennis bag shifts weight, the harmonica resumes its plaintive mathematics, and the crowd flows on like the Liffey below, carrying its cargo of stories and sorrows toward some distant sea. In the eternal city morning, two vectors cross and separate, leaving only ripples in the stream of consciousness, only echoes in the vast systems that spin above and below the surface of things.lol
