L'Épicentre

Lyrics

The subject presents with a peculiar fixation.
His hands.
He watches them on the table as if they are foreign objects.
As if waiting for a verdict on their origin.

He traces the veins, the tendons.
Puppet strings of myelin and meat.
He speaks of will. Of effort. Of architecture.
A belief that the tremor begins in the bone.
He is the captain. The author. The first cause.
He read Rotter in a university library, back in sixty-six.
He scored high on the internal scale.
A respectable diagnosis.

But the question hangs in the sterile air between us.
L'Épicentre.
Do the strings run up from the fingers to the brain?
Or do they descend from the ceiling,
from the market,
from the indifferent rotation of the planet?
Where is the locus of the self?
A point on a graph. A statistical ghost.

Then the narrative shifts.
He talks of the wind. A flipped coin.
The decision made in a boardroom a thousand miles away.
The factory worker laid off after thirty years of perfect attendance.
He calls it fate. He calls it luck.
He calls it 'the generosity of the universe'
when a coin lands in his hat.
The score drifts to the other extreme.
A different, but equally respectable, diagnosis.

But the question hangs in the sterile air between us.
L'Épicentre.
Do the strings run up from the fingers to the brain?
Or do they descend from the ceiling,
from the market,
from the indifferent rotation of the planet?
Where is the locus of the self?
A point on a graph. A statistical ghost.

The I-E Scale. Twenty-nine questions.
A forced choice between two adequate fictions.
The man who blames himself for the drought.
The man who thanks the gods for the rain he had nothing to do with.
We measure the shape of the cage.
We do not ask if the cage is real.
We just chart the pacing.

He lifts a hand.
Turns it over.
The gesture is ambiguous.
A wave, a surrender, a simple examination.
The epicenter remains… unlocated.
The strings, if they exist, are invisible.
And the session is over.