cafe polyclinic

I have not felt much like blogging as of late. End of the semester woes, mild existential crisis on re-engaging with themes and ideas that I left behind a few years ago. To the rescue comes my dark brother Allen and dear Graeme who get me thinking about Paul Auster and Siegfried Kracauer. For them, I’ll just post this quote from a seat at the Haymarket Cafe:

The author lays his idea on the marble table of the cafe. Lengthy meditation, for he makes se of the time before the arrival of his glass, the pens through which he examines the patient. Then, deliberately, he unpacks his instruments: fountain pens, pencil, and pipe. The numerous clientele, arranged as in an amphitheater, make up his clinical audience. Coffee, carefully poured and consumed, puts the idea under chloroform. What this idea may be has no more connection with the matter at hand than the dream of an anesthetized patient with the surgical intervention. With the cautious lineaments of handwriting the operator makes incisions, displaces internal accents, cauterizes proliferations of words, inserts a foreign term as a silver rib. At last the whole is finely stitched together with punctuation, and he pays the waiter, his assistant, in cash.

Walter Benjamin, ‘One Way Street

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