5/2/19
The hardest part of living is sometimes accepting my own solid presence.
Mass and molecules; memory incarnate.
Atoms, flesh, and else which make up body. I-- we-- should be fluid, condensation, vapor infinitely expanding and collapsing.It would seem more likely. . And yet--- a body all the same. Unwanted, perhaps-- here, even so. Stillness. Sort of. Potentialenergy, bone-bound.
Every body-- every living, dying, digesting, cell of body-- borrows the space it occupies, respirating its rent. We consume,gather, collect, touch, sustain, deteriorate.
Self-preservation, endless and oblique. Something to do.There is order and then there is chaos, or so we proclaim (somewhat presumptuously) over that which we do not understand.We try to maintain them into oblivion. Solace in strategy. Magnetic repulsion manifest. We fear and know the loss autonomythat comes. In our blind panic we manufacture markers of our own significance. Immersion. Pilgrimage. Womanhood.Sacrament. We ritualize what we do not understand to make palpable the unchangeable.
This is what it must mean, then, to be human. We yell it into the wind and wait.
We come from, sustain ourselves by, place. Natural, perhaps-- but manufactured too. Placeness as yet undefined in ourunderstanding of self. Our bodies biograph our own manifest landscape, gathering, building on, damaging. We are written byour spaces.
Dust to dust.
We gather from it, turn it over. Mutual sustenance; symbiosis of the yet and the not-quite. The weight of It All. The weight ofeach other-- or perhaps just of Other. Too much; necessary because of how we live, or how we think we have always lived.Necessity is only a single sensibility, after all.
The colloid of memory collapses infinitely. It occupies no space. Presses on. Conferring value, somehow, or disintegratingbefore our eyes. Sometimes changing. We mark it, memorializing ourselves and our parents and grandparents and great-unclesin it, things we think we remember. We try and contain it to quench our need for order. This is my history we say, and so itmust be. We speak quickly so no one hears our own doubt.
History. It nods acknowledgement to our calls if we are lucky and then changes faster than we understand, then slows,imperceptibly-- and sometimes we trip right over it. Ours but not-ours, to have and to hold. Collective, yes, but deeplyprivate. Accumulating in corners of our habitats and minds and the seams of our sweaters, runs of hosiery.
A thousand dresses that are not my own. Homespace, former, archived. Memory as object or camera as sleeping-space. Or something else. Object as desperate document for that which we cannot archive of ourselves. Immeasurable yet ever-present. The absence ofsomething that is More. It becomes the mythology we tell ourselves and our children as we drift off to sleep.
Myths create noise. We are our own histories written in flesh.
Body and blood, given.S. P