Pretend for a moment, or for however long it takes me to tell you the following story, that I am four years old, not far past the start of my fourth year. I know that it might be difficult, all this make-believe–especially at our age–but still, indulge me if you can…for you must if we are to get through to one another. Life is hard, hard for a child with thoughts and a manner of speaking like I have, with memory and even something left over for the future and future dreaming like I have room, but hard like things are hard for a child. You know this, yes, you, all grown up as you are? How we cry when we’re children–I could do it for you now if you like, throw down all these pompous expressions and start whining in fits you would be hard-pressed to stop or soothe–but even the sorest pain has a certain lightness and gaiety to it, like play. Like hard, heavy play–like a fairytale, with all their monsters and strange, heart-wrenching quests. You see, we are going to have to play this together–I am already getting ahead of myself.
Life is hard and you know why? Not because of this unchildlike manner of speaking and my even more cheerless forethoughts and rear-thoughts, but because I wonder, as the adults are looking down on me, trying their hardest to coddle me or to pretend with me, or to make sure that I am safe in their presence, and the wonder does not cease as I keep moving away from year zero and towards year five and beyond: Are you ready, parents? Are you yourselves ready for what you yourselves have brought into the world? Not only the children you have reared as best you could to deal with the things of the world, not only me–for I feel it would be presumptuous to gather myself as any such focal point of history, especially this childish history of things I am proclaiming–but the world at large, that world of your other children, the mementos and monuments you have erected on the earth, the world of your responsibility? Sometimes I feel–and I wish I could say that this sometimes were not oftentimes or always–that human beings, the adults and so-called responsible ones among us foremost, have a certain defense mechanism, like a long-practiced habit, that aids them in forgetting the pain they leave in their wake and abandoning their responsibility. As though it were too hard to do otherwise, the first inclination, like perpetual baby steps, is to move towards this forgetting as towards an oasis, where they may drink and drink from the river Lethe.
And what do WE do, we children, at least one of the children of our forgetful parents, of our wickedly forgetful parents? We add pain to pain, soreness to soreness, and layer forgetting like a miracle of transparency and openness upon transparency and openness, like membranous layers. We make it no easier on them, even when we have the nerve, let alone the ability or the refinement, the brashness to speak up and tell them the truth.
Now we may put away our game, our childish game–for the time being, or for good it doesn’t matter. But you must see now why I had to pretend the way I did: only a child could speak in such a way, despite its being hackneyed eloquence; but only a child could say what I said to you, when I was four, what that four-year-old dared say to you: such truths and misunderstandings and errors at once; such idiotic ramblings cloaked in a speech fit for a committee; such play mixed with hardship and reflection on hardship; such glimpses of terror and hard-hitting questions, intermixed with play, child’s-play.
Apollo’s ramblings. Dreams tell me a lot but sometimes they blather on like a recalcitrant student or, better, a man who is sure he has all the right answers but never took the wax out of his ears. Just because dreams have a lot to say does not mean–we should listen to them.
The importance of an omniscient observer. He had thought before If I die, at least this little machine could be excavated from the wreckage and my words could live on, because he always carried with him a small word-processor to capture the tarnished or bright-shining gems of thought and feeling. But then he did die, it was a car crash. The metal and plastic and glass smashed into his body like an art project, but before he was killed he saw one last sight regarding his own art: his word processor turned into miniscule shards of wasted plastic. There was no way, he somehow thought before he died, that anyone would be able to extract one file, let alone a sentence or a word, let alone a breath, from that waste.
Any man who would fast for this would be hard pressed for what’s to come, I thought. I fasted, he said on the stage leaning frail against the podium, but his voice strong, I fasted three weeks long because there was some injustice or other. He didn’t exactly say Some or Other, but by this time everyone in the audience, perhaps even he, must be on to the bigger injustices of the day. Bigger injustices of the day, indeed. They become so explicit like a poorly written novel, or a screenplay where all of the actors are forced to say exactly what ills they bring. I think If this man is still alive now, oh, how thin he must be! He must be now, when injustice is frolicking like a bully with all the power, when people are scared for television ratings, when people are bombed for fear and for television ratings, for dollars or the new unit of dollars, pure numbers, when graves are filled, mass graves because of heat or mass graves because of the lives that could not be saved from the disaster and the rubble of the latest air strike, like a fleshy suit weathered by the onslaught holding malnourished brittle bones.
By now, if the man survived these last fifty days, he must in so many ways be weak, approaching death in wasted haste, barely able to take a step onto the stage at the smoke-filled bar and recite his austere poetry. But how strong his voice was, when I heard him last! How strong and delighted to be alive, even if living meant for him one long fast! How it rings in me even now, this voice behind poetry, that takes the thing into the flesh, lives out the poetry, this proud voice blistering with nothing of compunction, but as much a desire to learn as a desire to teach, thundering loud this voice of a man I heard only once, then go on to hear ringing in my head and heart, this fasting voice.
Although I think he might have dropped dead these last fifty days, what with the injustice as Lord of the Earth, as I couldn’t imagine fasting for fifty days, with nothing, as the man told the chain-smoking crowd nodding and praying with the man, but a bottle of water in the daytime, and one at night, perhaps a can of juice if he was running into trouble, I start to wonder if maybe a man with faith like his could fast not only fifty days, as he must have these last fifty days, but a hundred if he had to. Hell, I can hear his brash voice telling the bar crowd, I would damn near last the next four years fasting, if I have to. Give it two years, some heckler would shout. He would laugh, Yeah I could do that, two years, then go on to recite his lines, his fasting lines, his terrible lines, his lines like admonishing music.
The weak power of sharing, or, On the singularity and multiplicity of perspective. Do we share a perspective, or do we share perspectives? Although it is most important that we share, since it seems to be our only escape from a solipsism unfaithful to the world or a relativism that either nonchalantly or in despair admits defeat, we still must consider this question of the singularity or not of perspective. There is something suspicious about oneness, especially as it applies to perspective, because perspective always seems to be A perspective from, and A perspective of or towards, that is, in the midst of and encountering, warring against or fusing with other perspectives or other interpretations. Perhaps sharing is the only concept, or better, the only mode with which to preserve, at one and the same time, both singularity and multiplicity, or both monism and pluralism. The monism of being in the world TOGETHER, of there being a sort of tapestry, tightly knitted or not, where there is the meeting or the jointure of what seemed before to be condemned to separateness and mutual isolation. Monism means then that there is A world to contend with in all of our wanderings, no matter what diversity of avenues we come to in our sojourn on this earth or elsewhere. The pluralism of admitting that there are voices and stances OTHER than my own, or even our own, that I or we are made, as it were, by the borders we have with others, other lives, other interpretations, other worlds. So pluralism is the fracture, the indelible fracture, even in the most encompassing of layouts or maps with portions ascribed for this or that islet of meaning, this or that territory of significance, of the world, where world is at the same time WORLDS.
As four teams may play two different games on a playing field, but nevertheless share the same playing field and the same turf for their practices, so may we share without occupying or being yoked by a strict oneness of experience, of language, of meaning, of aspiration or anything else, for instance the mere view of things, how they show themselves to our eyes, or the sound of things, how they ring in our ears–or not. Sharing does not compel commensurability. Sharing allows for utter difference among the participants in the sharing, since in any case what is most identical, what involves no difference at all, has no need for sharing, no need for the COMING TOGETHER of elements, no opportunity to be challenged by what is near and what is far, or the tendency to grasp things from near or far, or to place them there, at a distance, or here, close by and within reach. World is a sharing and is always a sharing, yes, but it is always too a sharing by degrees and a sharing of degrees, degrees of intensity or degrees of force. There is a scale ever-present in perspective, the scale that makes one thing near and one thing far, one thing dreadful and one thing inspirational, one thing obvious and another closed off, one mighty and other meager. We are given to experience the world by degrees and to face one another by degrees, to take one another’s temperature, as it were, when we come to the meeting-place of our respective horizons. To share in perspective, then, as we must if we are to live–perhaps even when we are dead, we must–is to share not in something static and given all at once but, necessarily and always, something in fluctuation. It is a bitter dream that rids itself of time or duration because of the persuasive at-oneness of a moment or the blink-of-an-eye. What comes to us more certainly than a perspective giving way to another perspective, or altering because of the encounter with another perspective, or changing over time! Precisely over time! This plurality, among the many schisms present in the world, we will be the last to get rid of, we will be the first to admit!
Any tale that proclaims At the start there was one single, unified perspective, until it was forced, by some desire or some inner flame, or some compulsion from without–though where would it be, this place outside oneness?–to splinter into a variety of perspectives or interpretations, now we are forced to give into the ideal of unity with all of our might and all of our hearts–this story ignores that any perspective, even of the ONE itself, is always already splintered, that any perspective always already contains, for lack of a better word, multiplicity or multiple perspectives. All perspectives together, if they were somehow fused into one perspective, would still lack, and lack decisively, the perspective of those things that are not All Things Together, either of the parts of this unified thing or of other things entirely. In other words and thankfully, there is no self-defeating perspective, or no perspective that eliminates perspective and its inherent diversity, no perspective that shuns itself so witlessly. For we have already seen that there is no perspective without–perspective, and whether it was a primordial duality that gave birth to all other perspectives or perhaps a triad of interpretations from which the manifold interpretations other than them sprang, it is tactless and beside the point to go about such questions. What we need to recognize is that already, always, in the one there is more than one. Precisely dividuals, Nietzsche claimed of us, and we may claim of all things: everything is capable of division; divisibility is one of the pronounced talents, as it were, of all things, of every perspective no less and to get to the point.
But this does not mean that we fail to share. Sharing is there, sharing is manifest, even when we, we players, are not playing the same game, WHEN WE ARE NOT PLAYING BY THE SAME RULES. Even precisely then there is sharing. As we saw above, sharing does not compel commensurability, either of rules or of anything else. Sharing does not compel, we might say, does not compel at all or in the slightest. Sharing is more of that weak power, that kenosis, which shares by means of emptying itself, as we always, we porous ones, where things flow in and out, empty ourselves into the world, into what is not us, empty ourselves and, against all possible hope, hope to share with all things.
The most far-reaching community. Every nonhuman being, as much as, perhaps more than, every human being, has something to teach us, if only that our attempts to humanize everything are more than ill-founded, they are pernicious: nonhuman beings don’t say it to our faces as we beg them to, but still face us, and thereby say more than all our chattering and tomes throughout all history combined, something that puts us on the same playing field and makes us play by the same rules. Even if their numbers are dwindling–dwindling at past-alarming rates, dwindling so fast we can’t keep up, we can’t even learn of our fellow earthly ones before the last of them falls and is lost to sand and time and rock and mud and water–they are everywhere, and that says enough: it says Enough, human, you terrorizer! Don’t forget about the microbe, don’t forget about the smallest of us! With a cough, or with a dull ache found inside the head of the first patient, patient zero, the human face you projected, not only all over the earth and not only to the moon, so that that rock too has a face, but everywhere, that face of yours, grinning for such a long time so short to anyone but you, could be made to gasp, could be made to gasp and disappear. That is, we look all around and inspect, whether through the windowpane or the microscope, whether behind the bars of the cage forlorn after protracted rage, and we see them, we see them all and they say to us something like a mood, something of a tone, that strikes once before we get back to human business, teach of something about the most far-reaching community.
Love the Dust 