Bermuda Triangles in my body.  (the crease of the wrists, the far side of the throat, the base of the tail.)  Give me thirty minutes more to warm up and it’s not that I’d chart them absolutely to the Enlightenment but I’d come to some kind of accord with them.  Coexistence, maybe.  It doesn’t mean I have to believe them, but I can graciously hear them out and offer palatable bits of wisdom when we find ourselves implicated in the same grocery checkout line.  It’s like a country with feisty semi-autonomous territories within it wheedled from outright civil war and into some kind of collective coherence precisely by being left accorded their non-homogeneity, their block-headed alterneity voire aesthetic incompatibility with the rest.  I permit them to articulate as they will, as long as agreeably within bounds.  In fact, my hearing them out is strategic: I begin to ‘understand’ their point of view.  This, is information: it is data, it is polling, it is qualitative research – depending on my level and nature of patience today, and of course the speed of the checker.  I begin to see their stakes in this or that policy change, their high-strung weaknesses and over-active strengths, their ir/rationalities, their resources, and just how far any of these can be pushed to the edge of either catastrophe or spontaneous regenerative restructuration.  And all these reconnaissances come back to Headquarters, to serve the development, unity and progress (oh, but there are other options for these triadic slogans of moral might … : fraternité, industrie, vigilance, rigueur, tolérance… would it make a difference?) of my vision of the whole.  Unfortunately my vision of the whole is pocked by these incomprehensible hold-outs of ignorance.  Ingnorant because I am ignorant.  Patience, I repeat, as my sham-mantra: remember the lessons learned by imperialism; resist the spectacular urge to push your heavy tanks on through.  I may offer them compassionate yet market-suited aid for their general and specific development.  Am I liable to begin to buy into my own rhetoric of mutual respect?  Can I trust the aesthetic ramifications of these opacities in perspective and essential lack of control?  Or can I accomplish my conviction that only I am in the position to see all as it is and must be, by gradually convincing the eyes of the storms of my Bermuda Triangles to see my way?