Love is not consolation; it is light. Morning orange through tight and looser screens, blotch of shadow on the blue chair, dark puddle on tile beside one cat. Catalyst, my software suggests, the analogist that resides inside my laptop, spitting apt alternatives out of letter patterns. Another cat lists to hunt on the lanai, which might be typed as “language,” the machine’s longing for replacement. If love is part revulsion, then revolution is but a circle. The cats make triangles, lines, any shape that obstructs the others. It’s the design of their politics, like a flat slalom or Raelian garden, replete with concrete statues. We could offer repetition with that order, but to clone a mother to make a daughter is to split history in two, as if on tracks that promise parallels, but don’t deliver. A baby was cloned in Israel, far enough from Miami that no one could see or touch her. She’s older now, but lines of communication grow less precise. Is teenage Eve aware of her provenance in a lab? Is clone a peculiar incest, made again of itself?
Above the meters in a dingy garage, I spotted a pigeon on a bed of sticks, tucked beneath the ceiling. I couldn’t tell if it was alive, until I saw its eye flicker. Pigeon was making itself, again, patient on its perch. Nearby, an open door revealed a large room of lazy-boy rocking chairs, meditating on their emptiness. A cat cafe had chairs, but also movement; a woman smiled at me, two kittens on her lap. $15 for 50 minutes of love in the light of an Aiea strip mall. I’ve conflated Kaimuki and Aiea, as if one were the other’s clone. The mall is future rubble, when it will all appear the same. Death no longer levels us, but concrete might.
We hear the screams of a Palestinian teenager seated in a car beside an Israeli tank. We hear shots. Later, the frail voice of a five year old girl traces her final days inside the car, alone with her dead family. Eleven days. Her mother still stands outside the hospital. My word processor offers me “motherfucker,” but that’s the other guys. Not an alternate spelling, but an alternative affect, the mother’s tears, our passive rage behind our screens. The light through those screens puddles like blood.
Note: first sentence by Simone Weil.
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