Moon Petal

Singapore Borges

The room was open, a large open-air space where the librarians all stood waiting.  It was a beginning ceremony for my session there, and I was not used to such things, where a big commotion was to be made over my own very humble work.  I wanted nothing more than to be left unbothered, and I saw immediately that this was not in the cards for this evening, or for the entire month.  I am not given to make complaints about the good fortune of being able to do work that I love, and for a small compensation that allows me to continue.  It is one of the luckier positions, I feel, and particularly in this day and age.  While it’s true that I would have to get used to the same room, and the same hotel, I was free to eat wonderfully at any place I chose.

India is as far from my home as I could get, so in Singapore I was resigned to eating Indian food, which was no punishment at all but would make my days open up for at least those 35 minutes when I was eating dinner and my lunch.  Other than that, I was on assignment and every minute was accounted for, and so I would go through the library and make a study of their card catalog.  There were going to be changes in the world’s library, and they wanted to make careful notes on the ones they deemed important.

I wanted to make my special post something less ambitious and more austere, such as reviewing minor errors in the decimal system.  But instead they insisted that I look for philosophical incompatibilities.  This was not so that glitches in the universe could be removed, but so that they could be enhanced, and used for our own purposes.  I would argue that eventually allowing a glitch will only open doors for more chaos, as like attracts like.  They said that indeed this is what they were hoping for, because olive oil and oil are interesting together.  I didn’t know what this would mean, until I found a napkin covered with oil from lunch, and some notes at the bottom that were a certain clue.

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1. Noise Singapore