I notice the upper jaw doesn’t move at all, only the lower. You see the skull so clearly I wonder people don’t think of death whenever they witness speech, or speak themselves, feeling that hinge flap up and down, and even back and forth a bit—how can it go back and forth? Is the socket that loose, or is it something else, like a leather hinge, like a book binding? A man sitting near to me is speaking emphatically. I’m wrong. He’s reciting something from memory, either that or he talks like a book, and some of us do. I imagine a book that stumbles and blunders, um-ing and uh-ing and stop start again what I mean to say—well, put it like this, you see there’s too or rather what matters here the emphasis ought to it’s more productive of consideration it’s more produ-producti thoughtfully produ it’s a fertiler field of it’s a more sophisticated it’s a less crude it’s a more sophisticated ... and so on.

I watch emphatic speaker’s mouth, and I can’t hear his words really, only the strident tone. I am falling under the spell of that clipped speaking of his. There are moments where the mouth seems to take an entirely new position without any intermediate movement, simply jumping from one to another like a sleight of hand too fast to follow with the eye, so that the mouth actually seems to flash like lightning. I feel something like a weak panic at this man’s unceasing, precise, emphatic mouth speaking those written words he has fanatically memorized. What other motion of a part of the body, and only a part, the rest still, so controlled, rapid, transfixing? But then, after all, it isn’t hard for me to shift my gaze to the flame of the lamp on the table.

There it is, the flame. I will think, which necessarily means I will think obsessively, about this flame.

Is it there?

What is there?

Is it there the way an object is there every moment, considering that it is not exactly an object but a procedure?

Or an exhalation?

Are all things like flames, in that they only seem to be as it were stable entities because, after all, it’s always the same name, more or less, more or less the same, used for them? I mean, it must be something stable because I keep on recognizing it and calling it that, this time, another time, over and over, but then again how can I know that I am recognizing, and not just sort of improvising with myself? Or repeating myself?