30 December 2023

 

I opened her book to “Decreation,” then lost the page. A gentler destruction? Rather than cut the knot, pull thread from thread until you’re lost, still lacking a narrow string, but less fazed by it. Decreation’s a lost art in the digital age; it takes too much time.; there’s no end to all of its middling. Hours that could be better spent celebrating suddenness. Destruction’s quick, but exhausting, Troy unbuilt in a night. On destruction there’s no copyright, as Gaza and Kyiv can attest. Just mimicry: airplane flies, bomb falls, rubble accumulates. Rubble its own economy; each empire craves more of it. Someone constructed a creche in the rubble, before they canceled Christmas in Bethlehem.

Hope is creation without a tool. It’s that dream running out the door of wakefulness. That window misted over to turn ferns into x-rays, moisture into a fancy filter. It’s mostly filter, albeit without subject, as if you could look at empty space and see it melt into itself. That leaves an equation I can’t solve for x, though y remains an active question. To see without seeing something; to witness before actors come on stage, blindfolded and confused. To understand before there are words for it. “Do you feel anything?” is classic condescension to those who think, in the language they think it in. The future content of this sentence. It’s like buying futures while suspecting that the word might be decreated by then, like eight Hawai`i birds we see on a laminated sheet, no longer in o`hia trees. I slapped a mosquito in Volcano, knowing it might spread disease to more birds; mosquitoes are generalists. Any blood goes for them, while for the bird with the intricately bent beak, only one flower will suffice. Some trees wander more quickly than these birds.

Extinction is slow destruction, but not decreation, which suggests a kind of reverence for the object taken apart. The last bird sang, and the recorder sang back. That’s not Narcissus, but helps me understand him better. Perhaps, like the bear in the woods confronted by a mirror, Narcissus wanted to knock the mirror face down so he couldn’t see himself on its surface. But ponds don’t work that way; you can’t turn them over and rest in the indifference of a wooden frame. So it’s better to love what you see than to wish for its destruction. The bird’s desire to live was contained in its song; dramatic irony made the scientist cry.

If we only saw ourselves in mirrors, we’d see even less. We might hone in on some detail, like the strand of hair that rides a wave between cheek and ear, but that wouldn’t be enough. The full image is too much to bear, though someone makes these things and we put them in small rooms to make them appear larger. It’s all in the light, the openness of the flat mirror’s false sense of itself. Hold a mirror in the crowd and note down details it spits at you in reverse. The hand you write with doesn’t move, while the other pushes your bangs away from your eyes. This is witness, at once witless and only partially adequate to the time. On television, I saw children with bandages where their legs had been. The image burns my eye’s mirror, but what oh what am I to do with it?

Note: The book in question is Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace.