All I need now is to become a pilgrim. Or how about I float to you, like some Oriental holy man, on a piece of pumice? Normal guys use it to scrape calluses off their feet. Too bad I can't offer them a similar tool for their brains. But I’ll sit on a chunk of it and float. Yeah. Where should I land? Stockholm Fjord? Buenos Aires? Shanghai? The Gulf of California? Where the Yenisei meets the Arctic Ocean or the Danube meets the Black Sea? I’ll start at the Limpopo and float down, down, on the Missouri, the Amur, the Amazon, the Darling. That's where my journey will end. Where time is half an hour ahead or half an hour behind GMT plus nine or plus eight. In central Australia.

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You’ll get up and walk out. I know it. You don’t ask extra questions. You don’t ask them of yourself. I do. How many questions did I just ask myself?

Question, answer, counter-question. Intellect, thought, mental work. What’s the main thing?

You’re sipping coffee, walking towards me. Trying to walk towards me. Usually, it goes like this: you get up from the table where you’ve been sitting alone, turning an awkward hip movement into something like a buzzard’s wing flap. You don’t give a damn how it looks. You’re just enjoying what you see. You get real pleasure from the realization that you live in a world of material things. For you, tactile sensations are everything. Not the the friction of two epidermises, à la Françoise Sagan, but the impulse created somewhere deep inside from touching any object. That’s how it seems to me. Denim fabric—warm and rough. Empty. The zipper on a fly—zzzzzip! Those vibrations. A feeling of fullness. Even if it’s the fly of jeans hanging on a hanger in a store. Fullness belongs to metal, to plastic, to you. That’s how it seems to me.

A sheet of paper. It makes a sound. It crinkles and wants to slice your skin. It’s light and thin. Your fingers find each other but can’t touch. 

Rain. Information pouring straight from the sky. Touch it with your lips. Yes, a wet stream of information. The stream has to be wet. That’s how it seems to me. It seems to me that tactile information is sexual, no matter the object. That’s my perception right now. 

Right now, in this cafe, on this chair with wooden beads crowning its back, as I watch you, as I inhale this thick, barren air. Just as in the intellectual world the main thing is the structure of thought, its creation, its genesis, so in the world of material things, the main thing is the structure of biological life, its creation, its genesis. That’s my perception this minute.

You disagree? The main thing is union. That’s why every time I touch the round, one-legged, flip-top table I’m sitting at, watching you approach, I radiate sexual energy. That’s why, pulling out my key to check the mail at home, I radiate the same thing. But there’s no reaction in either case. You’re not a mailbox, are you? Or are you more alike than I thought? Either way, for the final sublimation, I still have a lot to say.