4.
Sometimes, it just happens like this: the turning of the doorknob suddenly a symbolic event, the shadow becoming the manifestation of impermanence, the soup can a sorry heaving, a suggestion of false fullness. The camera catches whatever sways in the wind: an abandoned swing, the last leaf shaken free from the bare tree, a rope so knotty and veiny that it serves as evidence that the dead indeed rise again. The drawn bath is only an excuse for compassion, a substitute for the letter that does not come. I grow fearful of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon.
5.
The diner and the lone woman sitting over her coffee have become such a cliché that, considering the summer blockbusters, the director decides instead to frame the absence of love in a dog pound. You see, abandonment does mean certain death.
6.
This last film is scientific and is being shown on a rickety projector to grade-school kids. The commentator of this film explains that there exists such diversity among organisms, such distances in space that, given evolution and progress, we can never know at any point in space-time the bulk of everything in existence. I love you and fear that astronomical discoveries eclipse me; nevertheless, I keep on morphing and rearranging the scenery. (I alone know that the cause of plate tectonics is humanity’s collective yearning, the desire to fit in.) We cannot see atoms, the voice-over insists, yet they exist. If you develop an instrument that is highly sensitive, you can locate almost anything. I am not portrayed as the last survivor of a rare orchid species, nor am I a legendary cowslip possessing miraculous medicinal properties; rather, I am a leaf-cutting ant that, although oblivious to its object at the end of the trail, follows nevertheless with faith that it is being led to something somewhere. Then, I am a speckled spot projected onto the ceiling of a planetarium; now a dusty gypsy moth; now as interstellar gas and dust, I am thirteen million light-years away from you. The film concludes by discussing the power of nuclear fission and fusion and then the redemptive promise of reproduction—in the color of lifeless planets, the color of dust: bright pollen, beauteous butterflies.
Moveable Types
Omissions and errors
Before Gutenberg ever thought to carve the alphabet into wooden blocks, he trained in gem cutting. Perhaps it was his lapidary’s eye—looking into cut and polished precious stones and discovering inverted pictures of reality—that caused him to imagine the possibilities of mirror images. He carved the reflections of letters and words into wooden blocks and then later, as his father had trained him in metalwork, cast them into metal. In the mid-fifteenth century, he would invent a printing press that utilized moveable type, a system that allowed one to use and then reuse a finite number of text blocks, thus permitting a seemingly infinite arrangement of letters. When the first arrangement of blocks was inked and pressed into paper, it would change forever how we lie. To tell the truth is to be a printing press with non-moveable type; it means to produce thousands of replications of the same message: omissions and errors are the fault of the machinery, not one’s own. To admit the truth means to no longer own one’s faults but rather to hand them out in pamphlet form.
A warning sign
A warning sign that things will end in a way that will leave you forever in a state of missing: you begin by discussing books. Inevitably, as the talk of books demands, you will say, “Oh, really, you haven’t read such and such?” and “Oh, you must!” and “I’ll lend you my copy.” As one book will lead to another, and as one author suggests yet another author, you find yourself in bed again, pressed inside new covers.
A different arrangement of words
Sometimes when I say something, I begin remembering that someone else has said it before, but maybe with a different arrangement of words; when I say something in a particular manner, I begin remembering that someone has said something in the same way before—only with me the subject changes. So too whenever I kiss someone for the first time, I begin remembering someone else who has kissed me before but in a slightly different way; then it happens that the only thing that stays is the pressing of lips; someone else becomes someone else, all kissing in a way that makes me liken saliva to ink, and this makes me think that there is no longer any need for speech, everything already having been said before. I think, I am thinking a thought in the manner of a certain author; I begin to think of ways to describe an orange fish by emulating the style of this author when I remember that my subject is love; I begin to say, “I love you,” but begin instead to talk about an orange fish.
Never committed to memory
The invention of moveable type can be traced as far back as 1041 in China. Credited to Bi Sheng, who fashioned his blocks of type out of clay, this press possessed over five thousand Chinese characters, which it could manipulate. Given this range of possibility, one must choose carefully when to replace bat with willow leaf, when to say open instead of downstream, or when to await dusk or darkening trees. If the bedroom can be likened to a meta-textual land of signs and symbols, then I should hope to never rely solely on only twenty-six characters with which to move and manipulate, meaning: I only desire one lover, yet I also desire to have infinite possibilities with this lover. Bodies arrange themselves next to one another as if on a printing block, awaiting the turn of the screw, the downward force of a lever to cause the meeting of
