I saw a Pathan Jimmy Durante today in my walk through the Mutaredh Oasis. Jimmy Durante had popped into my mind a few days ago when I wrote those attempts above at Surrealist writing, just the exercise of automatic writing to get me warmed up, a gesture I sometimes make to get back into the habit of writing. There he was his hulk approaching me as I neared the mosque on the edge of the oasis. His eyes looked like black buttons and his face the color of a polished yellow sand like leather shoes almost caramel but not quite. I had just drifted past a group of Arab boys playing football in the street outside a typical walled accomodation. I say drifted past because I was like a wraith as not one of them even glanced at me, that exercise Burroughs talks about, of remaining invisible by looking, thus deflecting gazes at you. However, more than likely foreigners especially whites are gazed at intently, from a kind of passive well of water from which not even a bucket of water can be fetched, a gaze some whites find unnerving. It goes to prove that we are all in a mental state in which it is subjectively certain that these states are objective. I can say that they did not objectively see me because they were in an induced state of sleep out of the mere habit of playing football in the street, language being the soprific and subjectivity inducing factor. If I had had some sort of rehearsed tape playing in my head such as oh stop that you nasty boy why did you deliberately kick that ball against that car I might have intruded my thoughts and thus my presence on them, that is subjected it/me on them. By merely saying this it was a thought though wasn't it? But the magnetism did not emit, mine. However, earlier, before I entered the oasis I had approached another group of boys playing football in the street and my tape began in my head those boys are antagonizing a cat but when I saw what they were actually doing well I discovered it was retrieving a ball from under a car. The boy may just as well as been a cat because the small boy under the car was like a cat hiding under a car, so my supposition in my tape was not half wrong. Usually the Pakistani workers in the oasis, the caretakers, are suspicious when we pass each other on the cobbled tracks through the oasis but one talking on a mobile raised his hand in a wave as if he were greeting me from a great distance or relaying or exuding the same happiness he was displaying futiley to the one on the other end, end of the line? how stultifying language is in describing reality, at the end of what? I exited the oasis at an egress that I had never exited from before. I believe there are five ways to get in and out of this oasis

Magreb, dusk, call to prayer and the shouts of Pakistani children in the back of the building where I live, in the rubble they are playing cricket. The Pakistani laundry man I don't know his name, but I tried the only Urdu I know, "Tee-kay" and he said, "mafee maloom Urdu" as if he didn't believe me he was so happy. His warm palm, dry and cracked, and his direct gaze and his faint smile with greetings in Arabic, his eyes in a half wink. He is in his laundry shop, just a small room facing the street with another one next door and barbershops, tailor shops, small groceries, a pet shop, and a bakery that sells large, round flat bread (nan) for 75 fils, all up an down the street, behind which are dwellings and then behind them the Mutaredh Oasis. Only one dirham for each article of clothing and a little more for a sheet. We wash them in our washing machine and he irons them with a flat iron made of iron without the plastic carapace of the latest models.

I have never known myself as much as I have lived up to it. And so I will tell all. In other words, in other words, I'm glad the porter is helpful. His name is Sami. This can't go on, but needless waste is the purveyor of the most economical means to arrive there. This will help out in the end when the bills come due at the end of the month. The conduit will convey what I mean. This semblance of writing is not to be misconstrued at all. For, this is next to what I cannot construe as true in the sense of the word as it stands corrected. By all means suck you finger there in the offing. The aftermath comes always before the tolling of the tocsin. I feel quite justified in saying that. In the aftermath I began. The woodcock pirouetted up into the cold spring air like a tocsin and his wings whistled in his dance to impress the female on the ground. They have primary wings with holes in them thru which the air whistles when they fall in a gyre to the ground. It's next to nothing I should have said above in the air that the woodcock transpires and expires in a deep heave of rain. The spring air was bracing and the dampness from the ground creeped up my legs. All forthwith by which I mean he left no trace of himself in the air, so he went up again to try to get her attention. You can't see them go up like a top released in the air from the hand.

I don't own to know anything, nor do I own up to anything I have known, any knavery. So my cover has been blown, especially since I owned that Chevrolet Caprice, or was it an Impala, white, its boot, trunk, as big as an Egyptian woman's ass as they say in Saudi. Aswad means 'black' in Arabic and aswang means a kind of vampire in Tagalog. The ownership of a tooth ache is moot. This is not meant to be more than ore born down on us wogs. I can't remember what to say next in line, thou's lined up like thoughts, wound up in a paper tin filled with Seminole Indians. The seminal remarks of Harry J. Asshole ... Succor comes cheap. I have suspended in sostenuto what happened today on the playground, the purees and bolgers we flipped with our thumbs at Immaculate Conception G.S. on the macadam. Sister Victoria bopping her great boobs her arms folded tightly under them, they were so big they jutted out like horizontal lighthouses, her habit like a white table cloth falling to below her knees, the long rosaries hanging from her tin leather belt at her side. Unctuously I trebled, "Sister Roselda is bopping her boobs". She then smashed me into the pavement like a cockroach, and Fr. Dolan came to succor me and refurbish my bones.

Our attention was completely occupied in the words of Fr. Luke in front of the altar. He was a short, barrel-chested Indian in jogging shoes, his white cassock falling to above his ankles like a muttawah. Fr. Matthew had asked me to assist him during the mission (retreat) while he was away. I had no reason not to refuse his request, so I became involved in the four-day Lenten retreat, which is called a "mission", in the capacity of Eucharistic minister. I too had to wear a white cassock, and so I looked perhaps like Don Quixote to Fr. Luke's Sancho Panza.

Indian Catholics are largely from Goa and Kerala, places I would like to visit some day. Fr. Matthew, an Indian, took over from Fr. Francis, an Oxford-educated Englishman, as pastor, the year I left Al Ain and the UAE for the first time in 1994. The church building has not changed since then despite the growth in number of parishoners. Today, as usual, I felt like a sardine in a tin in the sacristy during the Friday children's Mass. Late arrivers attending the Mass crowd together into the sacristy without any compunction or regard for another in intruding into her personal space once the back of the church is full. I am no longer amazed at how many can fit in a pew. I learned after two assignments as Eucharistic minister that it was better that I get dressed in the cassock before Mass started rather than to wait until after the Our Father was said to go to the sacristy to put on my cassock. Otherwise I had to squeeze my way through a crowd of immobile parishoners deeply involved in the Mass.

The Indians and the Filipinos who make up the large majority of the congregation are very pious. Filipinos, especially, have the habit of stepping over the calves of a kneeling parishoner thus passing behind her. Where I come from, one politely sits back in the pew and lifts up the kneeler to allow the one entering the pew to pass or even moves down the pew to allow for room. Usually the Filipino who has been 'climbed over' is not in the least flummoxed especially when she is deep into saying, or responding to, the rosary. I find this reassuring because I know that where I come from an 'un-Christian' response of indignity would ensue, though many a regular church goer where I come from would have stopped attending the church because of its sardine tin capacity. I know of one Filipino, however, who has stopped attending for that very reason, especially because of an Indian woman who had not the least regard for showing common courtesy. I have to add that the kneelers are attached to the pews and so can not be lifted up. I have found myself sometimes standing with my knees slightly bent because my calves are not perpendicular to the floor because they are touching the back of the pew. Consequently, I have to turn my foot at an angle to lift it up to extricate it from the narrow space of the pew because the pews are pushed together to economize on the little space inside the church. I've noticed one chap who even puts his feet in front of the kneeler when he stands as there is more space there.

This description of austerity goes to prove that faith, or at least piety, has nothing to do with our comforts because you may well imagine that the pews are manufactured from slats of wood, which does not make for comfortable sitting and the cushions of the kneelers have so lost their sponginess that one may just as well be kneeling on the carapace of a beetle. But there is air-conditioning and sometimes it's too cool because Fr. Matthew has high blood pressure and he likes it especially cool.

So I must admit that I was not looking forward to the retreat which Fr. Matthew (a man who does not stand on ceremony and shoots straight from the hip) had roped me into, and which was to take place inside the church. On the contrary, I was more than pleased to find that Fr. Luke was a very dynamic speaker and obviously not only pious but a holy man. I was especially intrigued when he described part of his novitiate as a Jesuit priest. He had chosen to live on the streets for a month ("on the footpaths" as he put it) of Bombay with the rag pickers and such sort from the untouchables caste. He recounted his experience to illustrate his point that suffering, quite simply, is part of life and that God is with us despite and because of the suffering. His mother, who had no idea where her son was exactly, in fact decided to sleep on the floor during the month he was on the footpaths. Fr. Luke said this relationship of a mother who identifies with her son's suffering is exactly the relationship of God to us. I wish my friend, who expressed his rejection of God on the basis of the seemingly uncaring Father who has the power to alleviate suffering and evil but does not, could have listened to this short, hairy, childlike Indian with the dynamic delivery, this holy man who happens to be a Jesuit priest.

At the end of the retreat I had the honor to thank Fr. Luke and announce how much we had donated to him for his time and inspiration.