Eye Contact

For some time the world of the novel, the traits of worlds and characters in their progression, recession, or stagnation, kept the critic in a prolonged at-rest feeling. His wife asked constantly, so it seemed to him, to go on vacation, to see things outside of the flat and away from the classroom. His self-restriction to these places became so hyper and heightened that even a coffee in a shop on the campus felt as though he were away from his empire, an empire of streaming and unavoidable building. He built the beautiful cascades of literary criticism. His fellow critics, students turned critics, professors and assistant professors, adjunct visiting artists; all of these groups kept a vibrant conversation about him. He was, in fact, loved. His wife loved him. He worked tirelessly and kept two journals, of morning and night; a small book of reflective sentences; his masterworks and their books sat on his desk and ordered left to right beginning to nearly complete; a large lecture of his mind's eye and the development of literature in small town, a stack of handwritten and typed cotton paper; and of course, his drawings in ink, some of which were so fine and attainable to the eye that his wife had them framed and hung on the wall of her bathroom in her bedroom. The day before the day he sat breathless he had discovered an important piece to his theory about the writer and the written piece. On a yellow note book, scrawled in Parker ink from a half-empty bottle he'd written: and this, a time unbound by the clicking clock, comes without eye contact, without the vivid seeing of the novelist's soul through the eyes, but only observing the novelist, head down, in a very moving but stationary posture, writing their work as if the inertia of the planets moved through the hand---this and the very light of the room, where ever it may be, comes in a holy way as placed by the hand that needed it to see its own scribbling---a tilted goose-neck lamp, a hung lamp, a candle, a candelabra of many, the fixed light of a track system fixed on the area with others shooting off in other directions to places the novelist will go to flip through the rows of dictionaries, or the map drawn in haste stapled with expediency on the wall across the room, these fixtures placed to light the way through the novelist's dream and on the end of the work the collapse, or the fleeing from the room, these actions done without eye contact, a ruthless and demeaning hand thrown in the way of our eyes as the author runs from the room of the novel.