Left Foot

One can tell whether different amputated parts of the body were originally left or right. The philosopher used his hands as if they were loose; his audience could see exactly what he indicated. Feet, too. Even ears. One young man fingered his left ear as if to check out by touch. I loved that philosopher, because he was able to strike poses which gave new light to life around us. For a few wonderful years, I believed he loved me as much as I loved him. I grounded him somehow, made him whole.

The slant of each knee gives the game away. He spoke to me later in the privacy of our bedroom. His skin was so thin I imagined his head to be a skull in disguise. Cross-sections would be equally identifiable left or right. I only had the mirror to double-check with regard to my own features, padded out, as they were, with cross-sections of unnatural tampering. High cheek-bones that I would model for years in philosophical circles, where the aging thinkers seemed to enjoy beauty as much as the deepest or darkest of thought. So, yes, he was a philosopher who maintained that logic lived and breathed with inexplicable joy. He took offence if anyone claimed he was a cold fish professor. So, I ever congratulated him on his means of dressing his dry-as-dust theories in unstinting gorgeousness. He even managed a sense of anxiety to creep into his behaviour so as to prove that logic could encompass such human frailties. He played with my depressions, my subsequent need to prettify myself with oils, paints, unguents and other cosmetics, as if such characteristics of modern life were games to spice his lugubrious views of God's existence; he even invented demented deities for whom the otherwise strait-laced study of religion often found its means for variation and laughter, claiming that such unexpected infiltrations would act as foil to the truths they harboured. Each part a foil to another part, foils of foils, as it were. A skinned set of cross-bones through which one could see the tracery of red-blooded vanity. A flirtation with the nemonym. He explained it clearly to me. On the one hand this, on the other hand that. Corrupted hindsight is the culprit if it all now sounds confusing. And being dead could not help, on the face of it, to further his thoughts logically, even if his standing (or image) strengthens by the day. I am now his conduit, the carrier of his thoughts for posterity. His posthumous brainwright. His veritable right hand in tenebrous haunting. He surely thought clearly enough when deciding that I would be the voice for his unwritten gospel, with my every ill-fabricated confusion, afterthought or forgotten footnote, each fit of anxiety, helping to engender the thing-in-itself, the nugget for which he yearned via my imperfect channels of written communication. Chasing the noumenon is the noumenon, I vow. I scream.

Indeed, his academic peers were left in the dark by an inverted exegesis. He still stood before them as he ever did, both hands gripping the lectern in grim death or through lack of feet. They would relish his spoken words forever because he hypnotised their inattention into an awareness of listening to him keenly, critically, rationally - whilst they really spoke amongst themselves in an ever-growing bloody babble of misunderstanding; failing to realise they were sharply diverting from the accepted text-books with every tangent in a ladder of tangents towards becoming a huge shaft of cathedral light that slanted from stained-glass window of ancient mythic depiction to a rough stone floor where they crawled on all fours continually searching for their own feet that followed on behind.

Clarity would serve us ill. There were no neat endings - other than painted nails.