Simon Vigneault's Blog

Seated on the bus.

This cruising assemblage of rubber, metal, and wires, holding humans in its belly as it rolls through space, I in turn hold as ‘bus’; it obediently folds its motion, its taking of us from our As to our Bs, transparently inside my grasp of it as ‘bus’. For a moment I see the secret machinery translating the bus’s metal and gears, its controlled explosion of gas and its careful flesh and blood piloting through streets, into the electric linguistic bubble of Bus, neatly resonating within itself all the other sub-bubbles it holds (wheels, gears, line-ups, starting and stopping, get up for the elderly and infirmed, watch for your stop) outside of time, as a neon glow in cognitive space, a phantom of electric attention that could vanish with a firm yank of the cord from the outlet.

In the electric bus bubble, scenery collapses into ‘scenery’, seats into ‘seats’, passengers into ‘passengers’, all filed away within everyone’s private bus. His bus isn’t mine, but he and I include each other, in a hidden pact, on each other’s busses.

Adhering without touching, because inhabiting the very marrow, I persist as a ghost in these machines within machines, wheels within wheels. The bus driver is his own island of turning precision, tracing us through mapped time schedules onto real concrete streets, carrying us to phantom goals within solid walls. And he is my avatar up ahead, manipulating through my remote control, the arcane gears of the electric bus bubble engine, transmogrifying scenery, collapsing space between my A and B.

 On the bus I have somewhere to go.

We all have somewhere to go, and together on the bus we are on the way, getting there. Also, we are prone to let our eyes fall half or all the way closed, and to drift our heads over to gaze out the window at passing sights, taking those sights in with interested, attracted, or repulsed recognition, or gratefully letting them blur together into the soft trance of in between, of not there yet. We can tune in, but are just as prone to tune out, to let the bus take us.

But isn’t there often a melancholy to it, a hidden sadness? I’m here because I have to be here, have to get to the B from that A, where I would perhaps rather have stayed, or maybe even I’m fleeing an A to arrive at an unsatisfactory B. Perhaps I hear this blurring complexity whispering along the streets, singing its woes into my ears, slipping in between the lines of my I-Pod songs.

I can resist; I can set up counter thoughts, counter arguments, screw up my courage, repaint the grid of my fondest maybe even quite attainable hopes, to crowd out this dull oppressive whispering, which always obeys the traffic signals, respects the boundaries of the infrastructure, has one eye on the watch and the other on the bus schedule, the work schedule, on the unspoken emotional agendas that feel too brittle and fragile and volatile to challenge—they might break, might hit me, might crumble into tears, might ostracize me forever.

But there’s always the drifting trance of the in between. I can just let it take me, let the whispering become an alien rambling monologue, let it merge with the growl of the bus engine, with the traffic sounds, the static chatter. Where am I now?

A and B have melted together, the themes of going from here to there, of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’, of ravenous striving commerce and aching dreams of protesting art, have all merged into a theme-less realm of heavy eyes, through which surreal scenery sends its waves, that break against the subdued chaos of mumbling detached thoughts, swirling together with tendrils of sound, all of it washing through ‘me’… But this is another me, a retreating me, with the dial turned away from jagged rocks of the A-to-B station, finding a welcome undemanding static, a nonthematic purgatory which may not be heaven but at least it’s unhinged from the endless themes, the storylines of traffic lights, NO STOPPING zones, and four-way intersections where you MUST decide which way to go, who goes first, and who has the coolest car.

Can I see this though, bring it clearly in focus, and thereby become the driver sometimes instead of always remain the passenger? Can I take it further, travel with it off the map, pave new roads inside the in between of riding the A-to-B bus?

Perhaps this unconscious escape, this drifting retreat, can become tinted with a new curious attention, a sneaky, gleefully conspiring light.

I could slip into this nonthematic in between on purpose. And also I needn’t be bummed by the murky thematic tangles of A and B; I can cast a neon light on them from within the security, the secret refuge of my drifting middle ground stronghold, my sanctum sanctorum, where I can move back and forth at will: I can conspire to see in between the lines, and just let them drift by as curious creatures, as passing blurring scenery I needn’t ‘recognize’; and also I can reach out with intelligence culled from my new nonthematic spy network, and grab the thematic steering wheel, change the schedule, redraw the maps.