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Lecture Hall FC also known as The Saints is over 100 years old. It stands not far from the bank of the Zala River, separated from the water, by a busy road and a row of small lemon trees. I cannot enter The Saints because readings are by invitation only. Instead I sat on its steps and watched the moored boats and canoes bob up and down as cars passed by. On the other side of the river—perhaps I was not seeing clearly—I saw the woman I watched read at 6th and I historic. She was walking with a book in her hand. So many weeks later—to see her again—to see her reading again. I thought it was more than coincidence. I watched her better today. In the light. Though I couldn’t make out the book she was reading. But she surprised me by looking in my direction. I panicked and opened a booklet about the history of The Saints that was folded in my hand. I read from that booklet as if I were reading from the most beautiful book ever written. I studied its folded and frayed pages; I lingered on the sounds the words formed in my brain, on the shapes of the letters. I thought about how they tried to live for me, about how together they and I moved towards the understanding that while we were all frayed and coming further apart, that we were coming apart together, and that we could spend what little time we had in each other’s company without fuss and perhaps even pleasantly.
what i was reading on the steps of the saints 11/28/2013:
from Gounot’s A Guide to The Dictionary of Coincidences Machine lecture
Sartre’s idea of a Dictionary of Coincidences Machine has been studied by both philosophers and neuroscientists since he broached the subject at Lecture Hall FC. While poets have postulated about the Machine, Gounot suggests that their postulations are really nothing more than hagiography to the Machine, its creator, and the postulations themselves. Nonetheless, Gounot believes that the advantageously misguided interpretations of Sartre’s original concept by poets reveal the variability of the Machine and its capacity for absorbing, mutating, regenerating, and creating neural pathways in human beings. Neuroscientists have cautioned poets to stay out of the scientific debate vis-à-vis the Machine and to focus instead on the Machine’s “cortical” effects. But Gounot, in his own landmark lecture at The Saints, cautioned neuroscientists to stay out of poetry.
