Thought Experiment

for D.P.

1
The train sliding smoothly, how smoothly it surrounds
and becomes all in its own world. It’s too simple and
too much is simple, so we’ll live here and let cell by cell
dissolve in else. There is a next. There is a man sitting
next to you. He looks like Einstein, with the underwater
hairdo and those very particular eyes. So Einstein lives on
in the train, a small man with a flashlight and a brother
with another flashlight and a twin who never returned to
earth. Such odd wealth — the one growing older and the
other lost like glass in water: this was once a face. And
this is a person who can’t turn around. If the past is the
past, why have you lost your voice.

2
We begin with the proposition that the world is beautiful,
and that from a train it’s a beautiful thing. Einstein loved
trains like the rest of us love the world. Speed that
infinitely approaches white and lodged in the breath. How
the twin gasped, flung from view. What do you see? A
light bounces off the ceiling of the train. A light that lands
beside itself like its own twin but that neither recognizes
nor resembles, among all the different identical, you were
the one I loved, the one I was and where. Now it appears
that the destination can be chosen afterward and the
landscape collapses like a lung — you were the one on
the train traveling to the sea who said, look — a fire in the
field where we are on fire in peace.

3
When one train passes another in the opposing direction,
the air between must split, each of its particles twinned
and racing for the same location before the decision can be
prearranged. We went this way. A long slow curve across
the beauty of the world which at this speed is finally and
clearly perceptible as a suspension of flight; some flying
thing with a permanently held breath. Some understanding
of green and blue and red that sees the spectrum split and
sees the fan of slivered light sink in. “This window between
us” you’ll say as you have said but it is so among us that we
have seen the world. It is arriving, and though it has not yet
arrived, we are sure of its tender, transparent body, of its
tendency to gasp for air until it splits into all its possibilities
and of its desire to be with us as breath is, indivisible and
interior and always falling in a curve like that of a hand, held
palm up or that of a face where it curves at the edge and
can therefore end.

4
But the face that underlies a landscape is only perceptible
from a train. Einstein knew this and “the world has a face
that looks back at you, and it is your own.” Wittgenstein
said it and Einstein couldn’t deny it and so they shook
hands, one turning one way and the other, the other in a
clean bisection of available space and if you ever see your
brother again (the one who’s gone) the features rapidly
approaching white. He was your own. Repeat the word
now. Now. Now the world is beautiful and now it is a single
thing and this renders it silent so that the light can pass
through in any direction, altering the nature of motion, and
everything that moves is newly legible though unsayable;
one said it wouldn’t be possible but another turned around
quickly and is still turning.

5
We pull into a town with 17 steeples. Cows falling down
green hills almost to the center. Once the train begins to
move again it all makes sense. Like the hands lying folded
in a lap where it’s woven: one life into another and under
and beauty being the only thing holding them together.
“ All we ever see is light” in its lively fracture and saturated
rails, but it never reaches; though pale lies down upon pale,
the white recedes into such exactitude that a lip can be
clearly discerned. “That’s not my face.” “No, it belonged to
my brother.” The one struck speechless who is still falling
backward. The one who loved nothing more than numbers
and for such very good reasons.

6
"T rains and Sleep.” That’s how the movie begins as a long
train pulls through an unidentified station and in each
frame sleeps a face without worry, history or identifiable
features. Sleep like glaciers, their faces shine with that
underwater light that in motion becomes iridescence — a
wing separated from its flying thing for a moment at rest
and for a moment almost white on the windowsill where
the sun, hovering above it in chips like mica, fracturing its
own light yet keeping it tied to something inside. You lied to
me. They’re not asleep, but when the body attains a certain
speed (the human body) and the eyes no longer match the
seeing which is freer now though not necessarily returning
to the relatives waiting on the platform.

7
And now one is returning on the train because the train
goes back but never on the same route to prevent its
recognizing the world, which in all its beauty would freeze
from seeing. Flee at the touch: mountain ranges recoiling,
trees falling out choir after choir — that held note in which
you recognize your own voice; how cell by cell the self
abandons the same and the unrecognizable comes so
close that a kiss uncovers the entire face. The intricate
musculature, delicate pattern of veins: the face below the
skin spread so beyond the window: fields of wheat; you
said once and what you said became and thus it became
one though the name has still not arrived like that of a town
in which you’ve lived so long that you find every landmark
oddly novel if you look at it straight on.

8
While walking on a moving train, if going in the same
direction does speed add to speed so smoothly that the
landscape becomes unstable, begins to slip and green
blinds into green until the voice is no longer recognizable
as that of an individual. Something mathematical that
begins to tick from cell to cell, tree to tree and begin a flying
that is traveling somewhere above or below the speeding
train there is this pure landscape which is to say liquid
and urgent and brilliant and shy. Take flight: if you walk in
the opposing direction the cells fold in upon one another
and time begins with a choking sound in the throat. A
small piece of paper folding over and over until the face is
reconstituted and it’s your own flickering, field after field.
Repeat after me: You can now see the world as a single
streak, something built of transparent speed; pure white of
the sort they say no one person, unaided can perceive.

9
Einstein had a word for it and he died. This will become
of motion no matter how often you see Wittgenstein cry
out at the sudden recognition: many after many: there
are faces at the window we simply must reclaim. When
you’ve known them long enough, the similarities, “Why,
they’re all really” you say with a lump in your throat; whole
cities reflected in rivers where the real cities lay breathing
water like your twin brother who has grown into a tiny
curled animal that takes up no space. Space that, so like
the beautiful world that we labeled “beautiful,” has no
facial features and so goes aimlessly and wherever there’s
an electromagnetic wave that can penetrate solid objects
and there’s an old recording (quite rare) of Einstein talking
with Wittgenstein over a cup of coffee in a railway station,
I’ve forgotten now where, and they were saying something
about something white.