Needlessness

 

3 July 2021

But is cruelty needless? Those times you told them “need” and “want” aren't the same thing, though both signal lack. Perhaps they needed cruelty to land a 737 in a night ocean. The Coast Guard video x-rays a gray ocean. Somewhere one pilot clings to the tail, another floats on cargo. The cult of cruelty gets organized around those moments when it’s replaced by heedless generosity. Needless and heedless suggest a lack of volition, though we know that less is more, that the lack of need is precisely a need to take some ground, to hold it. Needling is one weapon. Like an insurrectionist wielding his flag-pole against a man in blue whose life mattered until this day made it needless. Tweedledee and Tweedledum were one man in a Janus mask, turning from and then into the light. We attended it like a vault of stars, our faces lit up to display our wonderment, because all things must leave symptoms and clues or they haven’t happened, an archive without arrest warrants or packets of seeds or a pair of glasses the historian left there last year. Clue to his altered vision, no doubt, or our need for vaults and tombs. Or the PODS where we live after a hurricane, mobile homes turned death traps in the Arizona heat. His newer work (because previously suppressed) is more spare than the older work he composed at the same time. Open a portal to reveal what was always there. The Gulf is on fire, again, as boats spray water at the ocean where it burns. What was allegory is now true; Dante our documentary comedian. The thesis: we still want what we cannot have and remain optimistic it can be had. Late capitalist hope is cheaper when it’s manufactured in other countries, but we’re the best of its consumers. Or it’s hope not. Against is another with. My ally is my enemy. They had an east and a west, my friend writes, being both unto themselves. Auto-correct does not allow themselfs