Buber 8

 

What counts is not these products of analysis and reflection but the genuine original unity, the lived relationship, writes the philosopher. I’m not biting at “genuine” or “original,” though I like “unity” a lot. I and Eucalyptus live our relationship in spells, one visit per day. I talk to my dog, but not to the tree. Would talk be analysis? Is the problem that it lives at one remove, is not genuine or original? Ceaseless pursuit of silence through noise. The cat in the blue chair chases his tail. The meaning of his phrase has to do with futility, but the actual chase is fun. He pushes his paws together around his gray striped ribbon of a tail, lets go to play again. Analogy need not be exact or original or analytical, just moving image. After divorce, a new unity, unoriginal but more carefully shaped, pieces of cardboard jutting out from the two-dimensional canvas, flattened again by a photograph. The photograph chases its other dimension, but is most honest when it represents a flat surface with its own. Our era lives on fictions, but demands fact. My students preferred non-fiction “because it really happened,” but the real tear in my heart depended on a missent letter. A postman in Egypt opened the mail he was intended to convey. He was not author or audience, but interpreter at the point of transfer, like a rogue sign interpreter. One puppet slipped out of hand, out of its role, walked toward a child with hands outstretched. We want to be part of creation, even if we’re not its instigation. We want instigation, even if it’s not equanimity. The cliff diver needs the cliff like the tree needs its canopy. A worker weaves wires, as his umbrella collapses in the wind. The wires are transfers, the worker a double-agent. There’s an original doubleness we might leave to its own devices, casting off the nostalgia for one. Casting out the transgender kid is evidence of unitary desire. You are one or the other, Eucalyptus or Monkey pod. But there’s the space between you that promises transformation. The original is change, multivalent. Where silence was is now weed-whacking. It cries like our one cat, wanting the attention of its person, willing to cut and cut to earn its keep. Whackers propped upside down at the back of a worker’s cart beside two or three red rakes. It’s not the handlebars that become the bull, but the bull redefines handlebars as adjuncts to a living being. Take the bull by its horns and steer your way through. The language is full of beef.