Livitsky’s Brother

Reinhart Brodsky Livitsky’s brother was casual. He cornered strangers every Friday morning, as the birds realized their turn and the crowd was still and just and half awake. He was called Christopher and cornered strangers, not all of them women, before retiring to his space and cornering himself. For Christopher Mendel Livitsky the right angle was an immeasurable and infinite heaven. The right angle was perfect in its impossibility or, as he hoped in the seconds before falling asleep each night, its rarity. The right angle, like the straight line or the circle (“perfect” is a redundant adjective when discussing circles, which are, by definition, perfect. An imperfect circle is not a circle; it is an oval.), does seem to exist in nature. A craftsmen is restricted by his hands and his tools. An artist is restricted by his hands and his tools. A machine is restricted by its construction and its programming. Light is restricted by gravity and purpose. Nature is always curving imprecisely, but somewhere – perhaps in G-d’s infinite wisdom, or against G-d infinite wisdom, or against the roundness of it all, or in mathematical accident, or without prejudice to reality, or in effortless coincidence, or in reasonable laceration, or somehow in a socialist realist portrait of V.I. Lenin’s nose, or in between these – a right angle might exist.