A quiet bookstore, a place where thoughts are kept as sequences of words written down, the sequences organized into stacks of words on pages, the pages folded and pressed against each other into page-stacks, the resulting stacks of stacks of thoughts themselves turned on their sides and organized into larger stacks on their sides, rows of stacks of stacks of stacks of thoughts quiet, quiet, and quietly still.
Children run into the bookstore, flailing smooth peach fuzz string cheese arms, sexless ear-slap dog yelp falsetto-rasp squawks screaming. The children run in laps around a loop formed by two central bookcases. The leading child yells "I'm winning", contributing the expression of another thought to the store’s concentration of thoughts.
The height difference between them makes it obvious that the leading child is older than the trailing child to the point of inalienable dominance. The children run round and round, and the trailing one will never catch up. The children will grow up, and the one trailing will never catch up. Some thoughts are taller than others when written on a page and turned on their sides. Grab a pencil to notch the wall in the garage before they get away.
To think any thought is for something to happen in your mind, to do something with your mind or to have something done to your mind. So thoughts take a certain amount of time, with beginnings, middles, and ends. Like running children, some are faster than others, and they eventually end.
The running children trail their fingertips along the shelves curving round their loop, book spines sounding dadadadadadadada as they run, each ‘da’ standing for some word momentarily pointed at by a running child within the book issuing the sound. Each lap of a child's pointing finger taps out its own sequence of words, ungrammatical sentences expressing unique incoherent thoughts, the growing incoherence progressively pointed out by the trailing child trying to catch up with the thought outpacing it. The thoughts chase each other round and round. Each can be pronounced 'dadadadadadadada...'.
To think or express a thought one need not know which thought one is thinking or expressing, nor need one know that one is thinking or expressing a thought at all. In childhood, one need not and one cannot.
The leading child continues running and yelling, working fragments of multiple thoughts into a single yell, “You’ll never catch m---last one there is a rotten egg”, the leading thought running along the child's breath until it is caught by the trailing thought, which devours it and uses its material to sound out itself before the thought caught can arrive at coherence by being written in air.
After the children have grown and their yells have learned to quiet down, the yells still will be there, having quieted into inner yells, yells running through minds instead of over breaths and bookstores. Their yelling thoughts will chase and feed on one another with the full unflagging force of the delirium of childhood, pulling wakes of rotten egg fragments of each other into racing loops looping round a core of inarticulable disorganized feeling, circling the milky germ of one’s being in the world as it is felt, where categories cannot detect or mark differences, an inverted disco ball scattering and dissolving rice krispie crackles of information, information blown to bits, anti-information bright confetti flickering, undifferentiated movement so fluid and constant it is not countable motions but only movement, movement as such, movement enough to be the hum of nothing at all.
dadadada