Oblio?
To invent a choral measure requires a new genre.
Lost data? Yes, and then there is that which is so overlooked as to pass unnoticed; shall we say, absolute data, because without category? To introduce a series, in the genre of OBLIO. Not a MEMOrandum, nor exactly its opposite, OBLIvion, if something of that, oblivious, forgetful, forgettable, or to be used and forgotten, OBLIque, OBLIgated, OBLIgor (one person obliged to another), and certainly addressed to us. To speak of why Xanadu is here and there, with what will have been occurring, to borrow the name "Doppler" for this affect of approaching and departing sensation of time. Momentarily rhapsodic, but only just, because I'm not getting any younger.
To record a meeting at the local source of burritoness, the dish powered by the pinto bean, but including beef (Hitler was a vegetarian, so in protest, but not excluding your tomato and onion, if few peppers in respect of quietude). If this genre did not require brevity, I would elaborate on the burrito as cosmological model, to introduce a mise en abyme. "Z" (Burrito Brothers) Now displaced, occupying a formerly holy site (a church at least, perhaps mistaking this company for an order of Monks?), with urbanal renewal in progress just beyond (coming-soon condos at the corner of University and 13th).
To note for now the hour that stretches, that arrives and lingers and disappears, not in passing but in anticipation and rememoration, just to acknowledge xanaduty, that we are here, present, (quod), in the light of early afternoon, the usual heat but unusually low humidity, more like the Southwest and tasting of guac. Thinking the child racing with his brownbagged taco from the pick-up window to the back table to join his mother in the deep shade. The tiled surface of our table (a spot of black beans), the napkins animated by a breeze under the umbrella, one of the gestures of Chronos. Nuance beyond purpose.
Tilson arriving with a wave, young Nikolaidis entering by the back gate, pondering all how a city image may be adapted to a database, with oracular properties, that is, a support for contemporary wisdom, forming collective and individual decision, because who else and why not us, t/here? Why did the theorist say that chance replaces wisdom "now," since where one is, the other will be also? When you read histories of what happened, X and Y met at Z in some city at some date, and later it turned out they were making what Pound called a vortex. To do our xanaduty we have to say and mean (again)-- why not us? Or is that just the pinto beans talking?
The genre was christened in ignorance of its pun, the great Oblio of The Point (1971), an animated story about nonconformism, songs by Harry Nilsson, directed by Fred Wolf. "This allegorical classic had a simple but direct message--accept everyone for who they are and not force them to fit into a preconceived notion of who they should be. Oblio and Arrow his dog are banned from the town they live in. Why? Because the Evil Count decides that anyone that can beat his son at a game (misuse of power) and looks different (Oblio's the only child with a round head not a pointed head) shouldn't be allowed in the town. He's called pointless by the Count and others. But Oblio in Nilsson's extended allegory finds that nothing is pointless least of all himself."
This allegory enriches the (mortgaged) point of oblio as a genre, whose purpose is to intimate chora. It is a gift. And why such a genre? Because chora is by definition beyond the reach of literate categories (that is, beyond definition) and must be understood otherwise, by circumspection of particulars.