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7 Anointing the Unprepared In one disconsolate town, among many rhythms now shutting down for second thoughts, you believe in both the theory and the plumbing, as well as any truths behind winning numbers. At times, you become the period to the last paragraph. Wistfully provincial, and ready to calculate the effects of popular statistics, you wish you could, like a French priest, smoke in church— this in praise of abstracted spirits on a cold spring day in Strasbourg. No question about it, no worthy way to proceed as if only a few lonely notes struck on a piano, jinxed by darkling, instructive times. Come the winter season and its need for deep listening, you leave directions on how to explain the dissolution of boundaries among us. There are conditions galore for our rattlings and tremors, for the suspense of debris in the mirror. Schisms necessarily implicate. Dogmas resound. Always protocols elsewhere. Who loses what when we have more teeth than we need? ...

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