Vulnerability as a layered thing; it is closer or farther away, which is not to say it’s not a constant. Constancy seduces us into an image of stability, cat on his usual maroon pillow, dog’s nose poking out through her blue blanket. But not the mountain, looking on like a watchman behind trees and townhouses. There’s a strange stability in cast-offs, a potato chip container pushed into a chain link fence, an old McDonald’s wrapper resembling an orange leaf, inside of which a real one. Trash is both vulnerable and eternal, in neither sense admirable. It promises decay, even as it refuses the kind offer, perpetual in its plasticity. The mind’s plasticity steers it around the obstacle of forgetting, or hearing loss (more common in Republicans, I read). Piles of twigs on a beach are either washed up from the ocean or placed there by a sculptor selecting time as his co-artist. I appreciate how the photographer left a blur in his shot, introducing impermanence on the right side of an otherwise stuck image. No rhyme or reason to what stays, and what seems to leave the scene sketched there.
That there is only one subject now (war, massacre) doesn’t mean we write only about it. A Buddhist abhors distraction, but the ordinaries among us need its flags. A desperate contrast between game and horror marks them both as troubled. Worse yet, there’s no calm between them, only a crazy wobbling. The game brings us despair and the war, oddly, hope. Or does it? We’re so trained to hope that affect precedes experience, warping it into a cast-off narrative of love and escape. The pretend battle offers love; the real one a series of hatreds so deep we can’t measure them. The test tube of our vulnerability has no hash mark for hate.
Forgetting hardly matters, except as a sign. Remember what is socially demanded (your anniversary, birth date) and neglect the rest (human history). If forgiveness is desirable, isn’t it a function of forgetting? I remember the feeling I had while I read his novel, but I don’t recall the plot. What I remember is my body, the angle at which it hurt.
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