The truth is, much of this is likely to be a cognitive illusion — a product more of the way we think than of what we are seeing. Our brains are fabulous pattern-making machines, and when given powerful music and shifting colours at the same time, we immediately finds ways for them to be somehow expressing each other. We seek these ways out, and having found them, we find ourselves moved by them. What the brain in the film is really thinking is, inevitably, extremely hard to know. Is a particular flush of colour — processing sound, responding emotionally, thinking about an itchy knee, pondering lunch, forming the piece of language “Jeez, how much longer am I going to have to keep my head still in this MRI scanner?”, and so on and so on — ? But even while this specific information about the film-brain’s connection to the music is not very available, for our brains when we are watching the piece, it simply doesn’t matter. With the examples described above, all four combinations of music and brain (music low intensity / music high intensity; brain mostly blue / brain with red spots) work perfectly. Within this set, whatever the brain does, and whatever the music does, it makes sense. Our brains make it make sense. We find ways to marry up the rhythms and mood of the music with the shifts of colour in the brain, and thus actually create the beauty we perceive ourselves to be witness to.

This kind of pattern-making is well-known to neuroscientists (the wily Daniel Margulies among them), and is dubbed “the Christmas tree light effect”. The term comes from experiments showing that if you blink christmas tree lights randomly at people while playing them music, they will automatically discern relationships and synchrony between the two. The trick is a useful one indeed, and has been put to great effect in many contexts.

I noticed it for the first time when I was editing a little movie. I’d made a rough cut, and so dropped in the music and played it back to see how things were shaping up, and — magically — the timing of everything was immediately just perfect. I hadn’t planned it at all, but watching, I saw a musical phrase finish just as the character left the apartment, the door close on the end of the bar, the man throw his hat up right as the trombone came in, and catch it again as the clarinet joined …. On it went. I couldn’t believe it. The rough cut and the music were a perfect meet. Just to see, I moved the music a few seconds forward in the timeline, and watched it over again. And there once more — magically — everything was perfect. Only a new perfect. This time the character left and the door hit on the headnote of a new bar; he threw his hat up and the melody arrived at a long sustain, which seemingly held the hat in the air until he caught it again, and moving on down the street, the trombone came in …. It seemed to be every bit as felicitous.

What I was discovering was that a good piece of film music is so rich, and so riddled with melodic shifts, changes of instrumentation, and points of rhythm, that almost wherever in the timeline you position it, a world of connections and alignments will swim upwards into being toward you. In fact, to cut a piece of film in such a way that it doesn’t go with music — i.e that it somehow prevents the magical dance of image and sound from weaving itself together — is much harder than it is just to let it happen.

For film editors, the Christmas tree light effect is bread and butter. As indeed it is for “vj”s, who throw up semi-random video clips while dj-ing, safe always in the knowledge that almost whatever the clip is, it will work out fine with whatever music they are playing. But the implications go much further than films, or clips, or Christmas tree lights. Because the effect embraces the entire world of sound and movement.

I want to talk about dancing.

Here is what the Christmas tree light effect means for dancing: when you are dancing, and music is playing, you can make a lot of movements, and even if they are completely random, those movements, and that music, will form themselves into a magical expression of pattern and alignment in the mind of anyone watching just by themselves. There is nothing for you to get wrong or right. Just bring together time, movement, and music, and the magic will happen.

On a practical level, this suggests two immediate dancing principles:

1. Firstly and most obviously, make a lot of movements. The more movements you make, the better the chances are that a number of them will strike on something: a headnote, a melodic shift, an instrument coming in or out etc. etc.. High movement density will cover the greatest possible number of things the music can do. This dancing principle can be thought of as the principle of maximum everything all at once.

2. Secondly, if you want to perform a specific movement to coincide with a particular point in the music, you need be much less precise than you think. This is because the pattern-forming brain is very magnetic, and can take any part of the movement, and align it to the musical moment in question. Take the example of a jump to mark the music doing something. It you perform the jump anywhere around the time of the something, the act of leaping up can be the something, the moment of landing can be the something, the moment of maximum upwards acceleration can be the something, and the peak of the jump can be the something. In fact, as the peak of the jump encompasses the period of the upward movement slowing to zero, the motionlessness at the very peak itself, and then the downward fall starting — i.e. the greater part of the jump’s entire duration — the musical something can occur anywhere around the peak and it will work. Essentially, the jump produces such a wide spectrum of potential connections that it is highly likely the music will do something that will relate to the jump very nicely. By this, you can perform your movement (a jump or anything else), and feel free in the knowledge that any part of that movement can be that moment in the music. This dancing principle can be thought of as the principle of free reference.

These two principles, as well as many others along similar lines, can, if you’re following me, be drawn into a single super-principle: dance and fear not.

With cognitive illusions, there is a continuous dance of sound and movement in everything. There is an infinitude of correlation to draw on. And so to become a better dancer, all you need do is become part of this dance. The dance embraces all dance. There is no dance outside of the dance, and the dance itself is neither more nor less than being. And so, my heart, dance — dance, and your cognitive illusions will catch me.

Announcement: Invisible Hand is an exhibition and residency by Tim Vincent-Smith featuring harmonographic drawing machines, dismantled pianos, live music and the world premiere of Goat Song, a work in progress by Uma Dragon.

Thursday 12th April 8pm: Live music and movement from Sink and guests. See here.

Saturday 14th April 1pm: Reading of Goat Song.

Gallery 1, arts complex, St. Margaret’s House, 151 London Road, Edinburgh, Scotland.

The brain really is a piece of work. You pump in a supply of glucose and oxygen, and the craziest stuff comes streaming out. Amongst these streams are the works of Stravinsky, Kant’s Critiques, and more recently, this piece by Daniel Margulies and Chris Sharp. The film is a continuous fMRI scan of a brain listening to the Rite of Spring and pondering Kant — showing the floods and ebbs of cortical activity as the music rushes through it. Very suggestive, very beautiful.

“Untitled” is currently on show at the Wellcome Trust as part of their exhibition Brains: The Mind as Matter. If you are in London and haven’t been: go! It is a fascinating and delightful show, featuring: a brainbow mouse, a time lapse film of a chick’s brain spinning itself into existence, old medical movies of brain surgery, casts of eminent brains, trepanned skulls, anatomical drawings, phrenological tools, and much much more. Entry is free.

good analyst noun 1. a person who analyses social or environmental good, 2. a person who is good at doing this, 3. an analyst who is a force for good (cf. good Samaritan, good witch)

The Good Analyst is a new book about how a better understanding of social value can create a new set of relationships between society, money, and people’s access to an ok life. Money can be difficult to move around in society — getting stuck sometimes in the wrong places, or being imagined to be somewhere where it turns out later it’s not (or not any more). In the social sector these difficulties are often compounded by money not really knowing where to go, or how to be effective. But there is a potential lead. As the sector is really about impact — meaning the social or environmental good that comes from somebody doing something — by looking at impact, it is possible to send signals to money as to how to move. And so put more distinctly, the book is about how analysing social impact can inform and guide the flow of capital through the social-purpose universe to the places where it can do most good.

The Good Analyst presents a methodology for impact analysis, along with a set of guidelines for measurement. But any act of analysis is dealing with two kinds of information: firstly and most obviously, information relating to the object under analysis; but also, though often in more coded form, information about the person performing the analysis, and how they think. A methodology deflects some of this away from the individual analyst, but it rapidly falls back on the methodology itself, embedded within which will be the assumptions and opinions of whoever devised it.

To be transparent on this front, as no doubt my philosophy has shaped both the methodology and the results it produces, the book opens with an outline of where it has come from in terms of the ideas, beliefs, and perhaps most importantly of all, the aspirations as to what it can do.

A good analyst, for the purposes of this book, is one who analyses social and environmental good, as well as one who does so well or skilfully, and is in this sense good at doing it. But there is a third meaning too, as like a good Samaritan or a good witch, a good analyst can I believe be a force for good, with a moral power and a social impact all their own. To grow impact and, as a society, to invest in it, we need to know where and how it is taking place. The genius of the good analyst is in finding this knowledge out.

MORE ABOUT THE GOOD ANALYST
DOWNLOAD THE EBOOK — FOR FREE!

BLOGPOST POSTSCRIPT: To those who say, “But this post is whoring the kilometerzero running eye blog to the book’s author, Adrian Hornsby, and its publisher, Investing for Good” — I say, “Yes! But it is whoring for good!”

The author on the synthetic Euroclay court of his home club.

When I play tennis, I serve with my right hand and generally volley with my left hand, although on occasion, when a deep ball is unplayable with my backhand, I will flip my racquet to my right hand, giving me an extra 50 centimeters of reach and an added chance of making the shot. In reality, this limb confusion means my serve is less powerful than a true right-hander and my volley is less powerful than a true left-hander because neither hand is actually dominant. Which also means I am destined to remain a mediocre tennis player whose enthusiasm (and on-court sartorial elegance) far outpace his actual game.

But in my mind! Oh, in my mind I am an ambidextrous monster who, by magically switching my racquet from hand to hand can bewilder opponents and reach the most unreachable balls. How many times, while rallying at my local club, have I slipped the racquet into my right hand to make a shot and heard the awed announcer at Roland Garros gasp, ‘Mercer has done it again! The amazing ambi-man is on his way to another French Open title!’

So, prone as I am to such fantasy, you can imagine my intrigue when I stumbled across the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory. The test was designed in 1971 by R.C. Oldfield of the Speech and Communication Unit at Edinburgh University. The idea was to create a universally accepted measure of handedness that could be used as a baseline for any experiments involving dexterity, coordination, or hand control. Oldfield’s test became widely used in the social sciences and has been cited in scientific journals more than 10,000 times.  The basic version of test can be taken here:

Edinburgh Handedness Inventory

Thanks to the fact that I throw right, write left, and strike matches with both hands I managed a score of -33 on the Inventory, which sneaks me into the ambidextrous category. Elation!

But, then, I dug deeper. It turns out that in recent years the Oldfield test has been slightly discredited because, among other things, it includes both drawing and writing, and thus is too heavily weighted toward muscle acts that are highly similar. So, Dr. Stephen Williams stripped the original Edinburgh test of three questions: drawing, opening a box, and using a broom, and added one new criterion, using a computer mouse. Here is Williams’ version of the test:

To check your score, give yourself –50 for each ‘Always Left’ answer, -25 for ‘Usually Left’, 0 for ‘No Preference’, +25 for Usually Right, and +50 for Always Right. Using this system, anything between –200 and +200 is considered ‘ambidextrous’, but Williams tweaked the definition and created two categories: clumsy mixed handedness (-200 to 0) and coordinated mixed handedness (0 to +200). Imagine my alarm when, using this new test, I scored a –25, which made me a clumsy mixed hander!

Could it get any worse? Oh yes!

It turns out that several scientists are now using a combined Edinburgh test, which considers Oldfield’s original parameters, Williams’ revised parameters, and new criteria such as what hand your key is in when you unlock a door. What’s more, this new wave of handedness assessors believe that the term ‘ambidexterity’ has been tossed about far too freely and that true ambidexterity – equal ability in all tasks with both hands – is exceedingly rare, with fewer than 1 person in 1,000 possessing this trait. They now prefer the term ‘mixed handed’ for those with some ability with both hands and in the United States the population breaks down something like this:

Strongly right handed: 55 percent
Mixed right handed: 35 percent
Mixed left handed: 7-8 percent
Strongly left handed: 2-3 percent

So, it was with trepidation that I took this more rigorous test, an online version of which can be found here:

Handedness Questionnaire

Did I manage to win the elusive crown of ambidextrousness? No. According to these more demanding measurements, I am merely a ‘1st decile left hander’. Ahhh, the disappointment: ’1st decile left hander’ doesn’t roll off the tongues of my imaginary Roland Garros announcers quite so smoothly …

I frame this verse, in somewhat antique style,
For thee, Miranda open-eyed and bright,
The sole lady of thine enchanted isle
Now Prospero hath sailed into the night:

And both to him, and thee, I offer thanks
For that haven of fellowship and art
He conjur’d up on swift Sequana’s banks
By Notre Dame, Lutetia’s very heart.

In thy heart also may there ever dwell
The humane passion that thy father proved,
And strength besides, to live that passion well
And love the calling as he also loved.

Fight, like Sir George, with reason and with rhyme
The dragons of this calibanic time!

Pia Copper-Ind writes:

The world sees few men like George Whitman. In the harsh capitalist world of today, George’s morals and his motto “Live for humanity” almost seem a thing of the past. For so many people, 37 rue de la Bûcherie, Paris was so much more than a bookstore, it was home for a few months, a place to dream, to write and be inspired in front of one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world, Notre-Dame, a site Whitman referred to as “Kilometer Zero”, the ultimate address.

Many thousands of twenty-something men and women from all over the world, would-be writers and artists, were served up George’s pancakes and his strawberry ice-cream while they strove to become the next Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway or James Joyce. Whitman would tell people to ‘read a book a day’ and ‘write the next great novel’ upstairs. Everyone had to write their biography and leave it for posterity. And there were writers. Lawrence Durrell was one of George’s greatest friends, Richard Wright was a regular, Henry Miller called the place a “wonderland of books”. His companion-in-arms was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who also came to Paris in the postwar years with POW money and then started his own bookstore in San Francisco publishing the “Beats” who drifted between Paris (Shakespeare and Co.), Tangiers and Big Sur. George was even rumoured to be a “Don Juan” of the arrière-boutique, seducing the mysterious Anais Nin. But perhaps he was more of a Prince Myshkin or a Don Quixote, as he liked to call himself: a man of books and letters more than a man of passions. Anais Nin called him “a saint among his books, lending them, having penniless friends upstairs in his Utrillo house, not too steady on its foundations, small windows wrinkled shutters.”

I myself found Shakespeare and Co one cold November afternoon in 1994. Someone told me to go and read in the library upstairs and I did, spending a few luxurious hours in the first-floor sitting room, leafing through the moth-eaten volumes which all seemed to be autographed first editions. Suddenly, a man with a goatee appeared from behind the books, seventy or so, a wrinkled figure, his clothes dandyish, paisley and velvet.
“What are you doing in Paris?” he asked. “Studying Chinese at the Sorbonne,” I replied. “I grew up in China. We lived in a fortified house with my parents who were missionaries. It was when the warlords were in charge. I used to picnic on the hills of Nanjing with Pearl Buck as a child. Yang Guizi!” he yelled, “yang guizi,” imitating the Chinese when they used to shout at the blond- and auburn-haired foreigners with their westernised long noses. I told him how I too had lived in Peking in the Friendship Hotel when everybody was wearing the blue Mao uniform, and had always dreamed of coming to Paris, to write and to have a literary salon like Mme de Stael. The very next day, I received a note in the box of my rooms at the Cité Universitaire: “Shakespeare and Company needs you. Come at 8.” When the time came, I was welcomed by George who gave me a pencil stub and told me to invite any writers I should encounter to live upstairs. I sat in the midst of the volumes, as though surrounded by the souls of thousand writers and their lives on the shelves. Though havoc ensued. I had no idea how to sell books, could barely count in francs and didn’t know where anything was. No matter, I soon understood and when I left the bookstore that night, walking out into the glorious salmon-colored evening, past Notre-Dame and the bateaux mouches throwing shadows on the walls of the buildings, I knew I had arrived. From that moment on, Paris would be my home. That was nineteen years ago and the Canadian girl never left.

Of course, the bohemian years are almost over. The years when George one Christmas Eve thrust half a Roquefort cheese at me and a young British-American writer and a film producer from LA and told us to “go and celebrate in the streets.” I remember also the day George announced a “millionaire Communist” had arrived and introduced me to Allen Ginsberg who had to use his credit card to open the writer’s studio, as George had mislaid the keys. Or the day Ted Joans arrived, the only black Beat poet with his gorgeous ethnologist girlfriend. Joans came to stay and collect moneys for his annual pilgrimage to Timbuktu. Or when Ferlinghetti, George and I shared too many sweet sherries from the marché at the place Maubert and he sang songs from the ’30s such as “Do not violate me in violet time,” and recited poetry with gusto.

I particularly remember George, always generous, in his “rag-and-bone shop of the heart” where he urged people to “be not unkind to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.”
I made some of my best friends at Shakespeare and some of these went on to great things. I myself became an expert of Chinese art, after spending hours drinking cups of tea in unheated artist’s studios from Shanghai to Beijing to Chongqing. George was alway there to welcome me when I got back, with a “you start tonight”, noting my hungry look. George always had a book in his hand and it was always the latest book, even down to Barack Obama’s memoirs. He was forever reading, always talking, always plotting among the books. Romances grew there. Books were born there. Friendships germinated among the books.

Yesterday afternoon, the “Tumbleweeds” (Shakespeare’s aspiring writers, thespians and literateurs) were gathered upstairs to recall their stories and drink tea with Sylvia, George’s daughter who has taken up the challenge of restoring the place and offering room and board to starving bright young things. She even started a literary festival, and continues the Sunday tea parties and the poetry readings almost every week in the bookstore. Sylvia looked pale, her wavey blonde hair framing an angelic face. She wore a long, black skirt with small roses. “George would have approved,” she said. She had just spent eight weeks with him, saying goodbye. She told us how a statue of Don Quixote, George’s literary hero, would grace his tomb at the Père Lachaise, where he would be in fine company: Balzac, Apollinaire, Jim Morrison and co.

We cried a little, laughed a little. Recounted our time there and the old man and his legacy. We all waited together for George to leave the bookstore, huddling outside with a tumbler of wine. The bells of Notre-Dame chimed seven and he left the bookshop for ever, on to other horizons. But the spirit of the place lingers. The poetry of it, the atmosphere of the past, the enthusiasm and dreaminess of the Lost Generation where and when we could all be Zelda or Djuna or Gertrude or Henri and Paris could be our place, a grand theatre of life. As Adrian Hornsby, now a playwright living in London said upon hearing the news, “Curtain down on a grand and human show. We’ll never see its like again. But we’re much much richer for having seen it once. World – throw your roses!”

– Pia Copper-Ind

A Kolya-n tapestry?

For those who lurked about the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in the early 2000s, Kolya, or Nicholas as many of us knew him, was a familiar face. He was a sans-papiers from Eastern Europe with a entrepreneurial flair that boggled the mind. He devised elaborate hustles to fleece department stores of money, recruiting many an empty-pocketed Shakespearean to abet him along the way. He resold cheap Chinese jewelry to tourists at a 1,000 per cent mark up. He painted henna tattoos on the legs, backs, and breasts of the young and foolish at the Les Halles park for 50 or 100 francs a pop, often using KMZ friends Tom Pancake or Ryan McGlynn as a sidekick. And, yes, suspicions were rife that perhaps he lifted a book or three from Shakespeare and sold them down the road.

Well, like most everybody from that time, Kolya moved on from Paris. He drifted to America where, once again living without papers, he lived for a long time by selling contraband punk rock T-shirts. Now, he has surfaced again with a Kickstarter project that seems to defy logic. Kolya, the man of the thousand scams, has discovered a love for tapestry.

From what we can tell, Kolya hopes to create a series of contemporary tapestries and donate them to modern art museums across the United States. ”Coming to America, I was excited to explore native American tapestry as well as contemporary tapestry,” he writes. “[U]nfortunately I was also disappointed that such great tradition was somewhat shunned away by commercialization of the art scene.”

So, now Kolya is asking for $20,000 to make beautiful tapestries. Could it be true? Who knows. Can we at Kilometer Zero assure you this isn’t some elaborate fraud? Not really. But we will say this: One of the greatest artistic talents is simple survival and in that sense Kolya is perhaps the most talented artist we have ever met.

(If you wish, you can visit the campaign page *here*.)

Kolya as we knew him in Paris

Whenever Gutei Osho was asked about Zen, he simply raised a finger. Once a visitor asked Gutei’s boy attendant, “What does your master teach?” The boy too raised his finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. The boy, screaming with pain, began to run away. Gutei called to him, and when he turned around, Gutei raised his finger. The boy suddenly became enlightened.

Do you get it? I don’t know if I get it. How does the boy become enlightened? What does the visitor make of it all? What does the master do with the finger?

Zen koans are famous for simultaneously suggesting and resisting meaning. This one however I cracked. Through a process of ‘inductive leapfrog-thinking’ I realised there had been an error in the translation. The translator had consistently rendered “raised a finger” for what in the original Japanese had in fact been “gave the finger”. Thus the true koan reads:

Whenever Gutei Osho was asked about Zen, he simply gave people the finger. Once a visitor asked Gutei’s boy attendant, “What does your master teach?” The boy gave him the finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. The boy, screaming with pain, began to run away. Gutei called to him, and when he turned around, Gutei gave him the finger. The boy suddenly became enlightened.

Makes much better sense. Still, not very Zen.

All or nothing for Tiger Woods?

Tiger Woods has long been one of the most dominant figures in all of sport. He’s won 71 PGA golf tournaments and an astonishing 14 majors. And thanks to his golfing prowess, he’s earned more than $1 billion in combined prize money and endorsements.

But, as those of you who follow the scandal sheets know, Tiger has suffered a spell of personal trouble. Despite marketing himself as a loving family man, Tiger was actually a raging horndog who had affairs with a sordid collection of women. When the seamy mess became public, Tiger’s marriage imploded and he took a leave from professional golf.

What’s now truly stunning is how poorly Tiger has played since returning to the pro golf tour in April 2010. He’s gone from being the top player in the game to a mundane also-ran. He hasn’t won a single tournament in the past 17 months and he’s even missed the cut a handful of times, something that was unheard of for pre-scandal Tiger. His poor form has golf pundits abuzz: Is it residual anxiety from the marriage break-up? Lingering effects of an old knee injury? A change in caddies? Or simply a question of age?

Well, based on the theories of Roy Baumeister, there may be another explanation: Tiger is expending so much mental energy resisting the urge to horn it up with skanks that he can no longer focus on the golf course.

Baumeister, a psychology professor at Florida State University, is famous for his seminal experiments on ego depletion. The term is based on the Freudian concept of ego as the entity that controls our passions, and according to Baumeister, the ego can become exhausted from overuse and subsequently lose efficiency. Will power, then, is akin to a muscle.

In one experiment, a group of hungry students were asked to try and solve a series of puzzles. However, just before the test, they were left in a room with a bowl of radishes and a bowl of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. Half the students were told they could taste the cookies, while the other half were told they could only taste the radishes. Baumeister noticed that the radish group looked longingly at the cookies and some even picked up the cookies to smell them. Afterward, when it came to solving puzzles, the students who ate cookies spent an average of 18.9 minutes on the puzzles and made 34.3 attempts to solve them; the radish group spent an average of only 8.4 minutes on the puzzle and made only 19.4 attempts to solve.

Baumeister theorized that the radish eaters had spent so much will power resiting the cookies that they had no concentration left for the puzzles. To further test this theory (and make sure it wasn’t just the power of the sugar rush), he arranged dozens of more experiments. Sure enough, subjects who were forced to exercise will power in an initial phase of an experiment went on to drink more beer, think more about sex, and spend money more freely in later phases.

As anybody who has played golf knows, the sport takes a tremendous amount of concentration. With his sponsors demanding that he clean up his image, perhaps Tiger is so busy trying to ignore the buxom lady at the iced tea stand that he can no longer successfully focus on his putting. If this is the case, he has a dilemma: he can maintain a respectable image and remain an average golfer; or hump away and regain his former greatness.

Taken from the perspective of a stay-at-home writer, the choice seems pretty clear. From my experience, writers are willing to sacrifice all standards of decency to produce a few good words. We smoke until our lungs are thick with mucous, we drink hard liquor before noon, we rush to satisfy every bodily urge. We do this because we know that staying at the computer requires such immense will power that we can’t waste a speck of it trying to quit smoking or fighting off images of the lingerie advertisement at the local bus shelter. (One famous writer once confided that when working on a book he relieved himself on average five times a day!)

So, dear Tiger, in the name of your genius, gorge yourself on women. It is a small price to pay to stand among the pantheon of greats.

What It Takes

A man who lost his family
—two kids and a wife—
in a blameless accident.

He knows whatever there is
can’t imagine
how we sustain ourselves,

whatever there is must also be
surprised when we are
consumed by senselessness:

One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings,
I went out unseen,

my house being now all stilled.
Slowly his life begins again
though he finds anything

can turn into omen, into hymn:
imagined smell of brewed coffee,
sound of a toilet flushing—

He rises early. He begins to eat again.
He reads the morning paper,
bewildered by the faith

of a woman who saw the Virgin Mary
in a grilled cheese sandwich.
Her vision printed plainly

across the cover page —O delicate touch
that tastes of eternal life—
a photo of the sandwich in a Ziploc baggie

held up next to her smiling face—
there is the news, the paper, the faces
manufactured on the page

looking up at him. He imagines
this woman —does she
have a husband and grown children?

Through dulled senses he sips his coffee,
wonders at his idea of her
bowing her head before her sandwich,

her mouth moving over
a common prayer—there in a place
where no one appeared.

(Note: Italicized lines taken from “Stanzas of the Soul,” by Saint John of the Cross,
translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez.)