Ennui

(The Distinction Between Pure and Empirical Knowledge)

I take another walk to the airport coffee machine,
put four quarters in the slot, and perceive a measure
of intricate sound. Every transition of the quarter roll
is a determination of time through the generation
of perception. A paper cup rattles, falls to its cradle
and fills with coffee. Our flight has been delayed
for another hour. They've moved our immediate point
of departure back and forth between gates
several times. The airline staff in charge of this
migration is mostly absent. They don't tell us anything,
so we sit and watch the Wilson/Rove affair on CNN.
In my black vinyl airport chair, I presuppose
the active participation of human minds. My brow furrows.
The invisible nukes of Iraq have become the anti-thesis
of empirical knowledge, rendering pure reason
inaccessible. A woman in the seat across from me
grinds her teeth. She's been sitting for hours
and her ass is growing numb. John Sandford's latest
murder novel is open in my hands. I read, distracted.
Innocent people are being flayed. It's gruesome.
The quantification of ficticious, brutal concepts
cannot agree with my own experience of cosmological
ideals. I should be reading Mother Jones.
All this time I know three things to be certain:
I'll spend the night in an airport waiting
for a connection; eat Burger King, because
there's no other food available; and I'll ponder
the empiric logic of Wilson's original disclosure
concerning the pure and infinite magnitude of specious lies.
I don't imagine I'll be sleeping on the concourse.
It appears that time has only one dimension
and the moment I speak of now exists outside
that dimension, simultaneous with the pure reality
of objects found in space, but not simultaneous
with the normal experience of time or empirical
reason. People begin to snarl. We are unhappy
as the day is long. Hours drain from our faces,
dripping on the foundations of imposed metaphysical
constraints. There is no mathematical principal
to ascribe a pure understanding to this sense of ennui.
A bald man in a business suit paces back and forth
talking angrily on his cell phone. He makes wild gestures
whenever he curses. Another man tries to see
down the loose shirt of a pretty woman bending over.
No luck. Empirical universality is arbitrary.
When he smiles at the pretty woman, she smiles back.