"She spent hours at the computer screen looking at a live-streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane road in a city in Finland. It was the middle of the night in Kotka, in Finland, and she watched the screen. It was interesting to her because it was happening now, as she sat here, and because it happened twenty-four hours a day, facelessly, cars entering and leaving Kotka, or just the empty road in the dead times. The dead times were the best.
She sat and lookied at the screen. It was compelling to her, real enough to withstand the circumstance of nothing going on. It thrived on circumstance. It was three in the morning in Kotka and she waited for a car to come along-not that she wondred who was in it. Simply the fact of Kotka. It was the sense of orginization, a place contained in an unyielding frame, as it is and as you watch, with a reading of local time in the digital display in a corner of the screen. Kotka was another world but she could see it in its realness, in its hours, minutes and seconds.
She set aside time every day for the webcam at Kotka. She didn't know the meaning of this feed but took it as an act of flowing poetry. It was best in the dead times. It emptied her mind and made her feel the deep scilence of other places, the mystery of seeing over the world to a place stripped of everything but a road that approaches and recedes, both realities ring at once, and the numbers changed in the digital display with an odd and hollow urgency, the seconds advancing toward the minute, the minutes climbing hourward, and she sat and watched, waiting for a car to take fleeting shape on the roadway."
VIA THE BODY ARTIST, DON DELILLO
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