Phala Shruti**Sanskrit for The Fruits of Hearing

When I first indulged reading Elie Wiesel=the "train" left me off at the station of self-identification.

The circular ruins of the mind's library--the entirety of a life's history as before me, was the visualization that ascented my lethargy just in work-a-day few moments at a Dairy Mart where I was employed right there at the Univ of Ky's campus. (mid 90s) Like a train upon its tracks, the apparition was almost tacit, and the symbol of what a train may be thought to represent was its impact as well. That being a long distance travailing life. And even a few moments which may inevitably be the divinic dynamic of the vital life well lived, can seem interminably long... Think of an ants life, or insert anything sentient, supposedly awake--and theirs is no different than ours. But as to the halucination, I could anticipate that I was giving up on one open book, only to be received unto a No-book resolve, meaning I'd become destined to an unstaged and un-fated trajectory, because I couldn't "fulfill the book." (so the tracks were shelves leveling out into infinitude) The void within sought oblivion, because that is where I could find freedom from having to answer for all that which was all too soon availing my senses... I selected a book from the shelf, looked to the front of the store feeling exposed as if I was an open book, and folks could dismiss this or that word or this or that page, without the consent of ME the author. I wasn't wanting time to deny when and where I would catch the ambient wind of contentment, as I knew right then standing next to the icecream cooler, whatever book chosen would fall to a sense of identity in an inopportune time. Just the sense that I had to make up for something and thus ceasing to deliberate on anything more recent would not have been made room for in the book's fulfillment. Strange but compelling, disorienting yet impossible to stop the impact of the train in its slo-fidelity as it came to my depot. Wiesel allows for a sense of exile, and has us wonder who would accompany us: G-d, is the obvious choice, but alterior selves drummed up from the recesses of experience in this temporal kingdom may intercede too!! It was in Elie Wiesel's writings or perhaps his contemporary Primo Levi, where I read that a "musselmanner" was the term employed to describe the wasted human specimen in conditions from which there was no return in the lagers. That we intrude upon cultural relatvities is enough for me to reflect on the honesty behind the fact that we indicate the"other" behind the stereotypes. I'm feeLing like a cryptic Muslim: not in the sense that frenetic media depicts. The denouement of superficial status, is merely looking at things as you do--we are safe, buffered in fact; A kind of concealment from those who pay their dues as we do. And... we try to reign over that distance strung from our commonalities. Do unto to others, duh duh duh, tis enough.