With My Dog Eyes: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

laughter with great originality. Canetti, if I’m not mistaken. “We laugh instead of eating.” What’s more: “the whole interior process of gulping down food could be summed up and replaced by those movements of the diaphragm which are characteristic of laughter.” Canetti indeed. Crowds and Power. Devour me, Lord. There’s a plus-minus in me that only frightens me. And there’s Amanda and the kid. The house. The University. There are books all over the place and I can’t interest myself in them any longer. After that thing I don’t know how to explain. Of incommensurablemeaning. And what was I doing at the time? I was there on the top of the little hill. Was I thinking of transcendents? Of number theory? No. The theory of ideas? No. Fermat? Eratosthenes? No. I was looking at the tip of my shoes, the scuffed tips, I turned over my right foot, and yes, the sole was bad too, two dark ants passed close by my left shoe, I stopped on the path, they were conferring now, and I thought there were sounds my ears couldn’t capture, the sounds ants would make, did they emit sounds as they touched each other? I smiled. So there. Some days beforehand Amanda had said that I was smiling in a new way. New? I asked. Yeah, weird, you don’t smile like that. But was I smiling? Of course you were smiling, Amós, or at least your mouth was all stretched out, look, you’re almost always smiling, and it looked like this. Her mouth made an imperceptible movement to the right, a little crease on that side of the face. And yes, it looked like a smile. But why was I smiling?
    Made of phlegm and laughter
    Myth-gambler
    I equate chimeras
    I’m a beginning and plump
    And go descending the abyss
    Of your third.
    Ants. An animated and cohesive world. Superproduction. Silos. Do they have infirmaries? I’m ill. Short-circuiting. Little bodies running about in perfect health. There on the farm they toiled at night, on the veranda. Father used to say that there wasn’t enough money to kill so many ants. Killing? they worked so hard. And how did those little bodies manage to move themselves? What aura hovered over those little bodies? What was it that made them walk, select leaves, find their routines, their secret places? Father would go scraping the sole of his boot over their ranks, and I would go to my room brimming with compassion. Those feelings. Painful, intense, pulsing without rest, my body a tremulous throb, a continuous living mass attempting to conceal itself, there was danger in life, there was danger in father. The words vanished from my lips. One or another at times glittered, the shimmer of the back of some fish as it emerges from under a rock, takes a few quick turns, and returns to its lair. Life so colorful, mother, that they frighten me, these colors of life, I said early one morning while gazing at the magenta pastures. She looked at me like someone who understood. I wonder about those delicate women who marry crude men, always flushed with blood, vulgarity and rudeness, I guess they like it? But why do they later turn so dry, mute, my mother as mute as I myself, piety and stupor and fromso much of all this the same old muteness? He: there are people who think the boy is mute. Mother: stupid people. He: a few slaps to the mouth and he’ll open it, you’ll see. mute? Mother would get to her feet, look at father dead-on. He would cough, dissemble. Later he’d go away saying: kids, what a drag.
    I saw words and numbers
    Circles, tangents
    Extensive theorems
    On the slinky back
    Of a tramp in the midday sun.
    He looked at me between his rags:
    Numbers, words?
    Oh, no sir, misery is what it is
    But my deepest thanks
    For thinking me a blackboard
    As they’re just sores upon my back.
    I tried to follow him.
    He entered a hilltop thicket.
    I entered.
    Empty tunnel
    Opening onto everything I’ve passed.
    I looked at numbers formulas equations theorems and itwas a pleasure, a fiery freeze, a bodyguard for wandering alone without