bus

It is easy to memorize the relatively few train lines in even the largest city. If you know all the buses, you’ve a better brain than Wittgenstein. All timetables for public transportation are modernist masterpieces of dialectics, digression, and confusion, laid out in an obsessive symbolic economy. The bus-devotee adds up the parallel lines, skipping over the tedious gloss to get to the heart of the matter, which is Arrival and Departure. All of life is somewhere between those two points, whether vegetal or mammal. Speculation about curved time and the Beyond are confined to angry complaints and threats – but only if the bus is late. Like the Tao or Torah Scroll, the folded schedules project into the past and out to the future simultaneously. The Present is a static trust in the continuum of routine. Statues seen from light years away… long-deserted routes keeping time by extinct clocks, almost for pity’s sake.

    -- Martin Billheimer

a-grandroute-waiting-for-the-bus