There were twelve of us sitting cross-legged in a circle, a talking circle, and I was lost in us as the face of an analog clock, our host a psychopomp who had told us he would be there on the lawn behind the noisy machine-powered FCCS Building at 2pm to take us not from midnight through the morning (a.m.) to the afternoon and through the evening (p.m.), but to a place amongst ourselves, by virtue of what we had in common.
It would have ruined it to say so, even though our host told us that "to call it a talking circle is wrong," because it is not a talking circle but another of translation's travesties, as if to tell us why.
Each of us was asked to share in clockwise rotation (our host was in the twelve o'clock position, I was in the six o'clock position) a story of someone who had an impact on our lives, a teacher. I had time to think about this, but in thinking I was unable to retain the first thing that came to me, and so I was left not with the story of a teacher and the double portraits they inspire (with their students), but of lessons, authorless texts, a worldlined object in four-dimensional space-time.
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