Circular Procession

Abstract

Circular Procession Brian Clifton (bio) "You a night guy?" a man asks me in the locker room of Dallas' Medieval Times, a chain restaurant themed as a medieval jousting tournament—think Dixie Stampede meets the Renaissance Fair. The man's angular face ends with a long goatee. His name is Gregory. He laces up his knee-high biker boots. They are plated with faux-chrome flames. He says, "I wanted to be a knight but they put me in the kitchen, probably because I have a DUI." He stops talking to tie up his hair. I start undressing. My pants are off when he says, "I don't need a job. I just can't stay at home all day. My girlfriend's a stripper, so she makes all the money. I'm just doing this so I don't have to sit at home." Gregory exits the locker room. In a few minutes, I will join him. ________ Coined by Jacques Derrida, hauntology is a near homonym in French to ontology. It refers to a situation in which the presence of being is replaced by a deferred non-origin. It is a philosophical ghost—neither present nor past, it haunts that which will be. Mark Fisher used the term to engage with music that shows its production seams to collapse time—distant past, close past, and present occupying the same moment when the stylus rolls across vinyl. ________ Washing dishes in most restaurant kitchens is a conveyor-belt affair. One dishwasher rinses the dishes in a sink and places them either in a thick plastic container or directly on the revolving belt. The belt carts the dishes into a large metal box with jets that blast off food and grime. The jets are a mixture of cleaning chemicals and water heated to around 140 degrees fahrenheit. The dishes emerge like new from the other opening of the machine, where another dishwasher removes them and stores them. At Medieval Times, there are two to three shows a day. The dishes begin to pile up about an hour into the night shift. We clean them and store them as quickly as possible, but there is always a backlog. After the first show, we often wash until, as if nothing had happened, the dishes reappear dirtied, waiting for us to do what we know we had already done before, the dishwasher churning between us. The machine is so loud that one employee cannot easily communicate to another, cannot warn one that a kitchen knife that might easily slice open a palm is coming through. So we do not speak. We do not try. We load; we unload, our simple and assigned task. [End Page 68] ________ Rowen and I visit the Menil Collection in Houston. We have begun to say I love you without hesitancy. It is early in our relationship—I still try to impress her with my inconsequential knowledge. Today's task is translating the Greek on the 12th and 13th century Byzantine icons. Translating is doubly difficult because I haven't practiced Greek for half a decade and because the icons have only a name and a single word. There is no way for me to pick up on context clues for meaning. Furthermore, the words are handwritten in a wavery text, broken randomly around the painting. I stammer through pronouncing the name of a saint I know nothing about. I lean in, as if being closer will jog my memory. Rowen does the same. We are enthralled with the syllables, the stylized bodies and faces of saints. A docent thrusts a hand out between the art and us. She says, "Please, back up." The museum rises up again, its white walls, its suit-jacketed employees, its opulence at the edge of the Montrose neighborhood. Museum docents, on average, make between nine and twelve dollars an hour. They are paid to stand silently, to ensure a safe distance between a museum guest and the art, the history it represents. What would happen if someone touched an icon? Would it crumble? Would alarms go off to signal the communion of past and present? ________ In the kitchen, there are constant...