Hellfire and bleach made available to beat down mnemonic multitudes, whatever volume is required, until that felt sense of fecundity is burned down, distilled to a clean empty canvas. So many stories told in the flat timbre of the unsurprised, the unseeded, and the chairs arranged in a circle so no one could just sit and stew unnoticed. The utterances of conscience are elicited, marks on the ledger are made, and at the end each part of the whole stands in place, hands extended like atomized tightrope walkers, forming a circle out of which might be swept the remaining dirt and the plants gone to ash.

Then the ensemble moves from one set of chairs to the next, bumping into walls and knocking done lamps, as though blindfolded or new to the idea of limbs, disaggregating into a white-walled kitchen with three bare bulbs and a coarse wood table and bench on which sits a cone of smoldering incense.

On the range, above the blue flickering flame, so many seemingly empty pots simmer and steam, containing round flat stones that fit in a palm and might in another moment skip across a lake in every smaller concentric circles. In the water’s bubbling persistence they rattle in staccato rhythm, so that the flavor of time itself may be leeched out and thicken the broth. Some salt is added, tumeric too. Piles of squared potatoes and little tubes of celery, slid from the cutting board into each pot, in roughly equal portion.

The upshot - what passes for gruel in this gulag of modernity -is eventually doled out in steaming bowls and spoons with empty centers. Slurp slurp, and aeons go by before the tip of the thick burned tongue touches the mouth’s roof and it all hits at once, the bad acts recounted, the gratitude declaimed and quantified, the predicate to the meal becoming the object of its consumption, the way a cacophony of a crowded classroom resolves itself to silence when the teacher stands up to the podium and first looks up from the text.