With many thanks to , of , I came to edit this with more of an ear to the possibility of actions wrapping up existence in understanding. All of which is to introduce an inaugural installment read aloud, in the final minutes of apartment sun.
It is time I told you about the flowers, fake mixed roses atop a quickset table. Itself populated sparsely—necessities only—and staple of the CVS vaccine booth: a place established for a purpose, extending small authority. Here are three folding metal chairs, here is a place not wholly covered but able to double into itself in case you would like your immunity to be private. This red color is a contract in geography, this is a site of appointment, this is a pinpoint we agree matters.
It is time I told you about these flowers because the shadows of my own are angling obtusely to the east; it is time I gave them some thought myself.
At the beginning of the week I get a pinch that lasts, hope it coincides with the HAIM song overhead, here in this little terrain of everlasting last-ever memory, totally ripped apart by today. (Every shelf, every wall we looked at before now empty—save for greeting cards and vitamins, which I would imagine worth stealing, too).
And yet it does not coincide with wanting you back. I am not marked with some cosmic solitude nor conglomeration. There is a total purposelessness to things. Surely I am not the first to suggest this to you lately. Except. Someone in that CVS thought to put on that table—along with a very ugly biohazard collector, textbook blue cloth, and industrial pump of hand sanitizer—a promise of uplift. Why?
I find a related question, about life’s mileage and avail, in another site of unexpected reckoning. A candy basket foundling passed to me by a thoughtful hand at the bar bears disclaimer on a miniature wrapper, the kind listing only the most pressing information for want of space. Allergens, address, and the sentence “The orange color is a trademark owned by The Hershey Company.”
How much do you think they make from a certain configuration of reds and yellows? Prevention of usage, hoarding of our natural possibilities in mixing and beholding, hoisting up numbers from everything that could be and will not be…what does this make?
Someone’s needlessly kind touch for those who will sit a minute at a time, cruelty scoring milk peanut and sugar. However crudely and however neatly: symbols presenting two sides of our culture’s thinking coin.
A mode of thought beholden to catastrophe alone.
Writing to myself I name as limp and naïve the part of me going against bitterness rightfully held by astute observers. I charge myself with holding “a cell of inspiration that draws from the guarded imagination that better, if not strictly possible, nonetheless surely exists.” But “people will latch onto they who are brave enough to look into the darkness and report back only their most foul findings”. I do not want to have to dim the range of my eyesight from fear, yet I charge myself with fake flowers in a vaccine booth: nice to have perhaps, but unrecognized, improper, and disposable in the end. Not the truth of things, not a harsh reality that some small set of people keep proving ownership of. Not a difficult thing but an easy thing.
Olga Tokarczuk, in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, names sadness as the “quintessence” of our material universe: an unseen dimension directing its very atomic compositions. This month inclines me to agree. But I would like to kick a manner of talking to ourselves built on a basis of indestructible evil, invited in by calling it a necessary arrangement, innocent as the booth that will, if you want, protect you from seeing and being seen.