Spaces

It was not, I tell you, until quite suddenly last night when I woke up that I noticed the spaces. The spaces is what I have called them. But how could I describe them? They are not really there. When my mind tries to find their beginnings it seizes a row of disjointed images as it always has about anything consequential. I cannot alight on one.

I suppose it began one day when I was reading a report Su Pin had sent me. My mind was wandering a little, as it always does, but I had my coffee and all was fine. John Wayne on the cup spoke with his sad sympathetic face about all a man has to do. I was a man, and I was certainly all right. Only when I looked at the small black letters of Su Pin's report I found that my eyes slipped from them as a greased spoon from a metal rack. I simply could not take meaning from them. No, that was not quite it—that makes it sound as though I could not read. My faculties were not diminished. As I said, I was quite normal. But the white of the spaces held me, snapping my eyes to them with the same significance as a pale naked body, irresistible. I sat this way for an hour or more with no one noticing that I was acting so oddly, my coffee cooling. 

Another instance that I remember was an obsession with girl's hair. The first was a rather frail brunette. Her hair was in a whorl above her head, pinned down in a graceful and unintentional sort of round. The movement of this hair was so entrancing to me that I quietly took a small picture of her with my phone from across the cafe where I sat, and when I went back to work I told C.J. I was going on a coffee break and spent quite a bit of time in the bathroom sitting innocently on the toilet and looking at it. This entrancement continued with another girl I spied on a dating service who had a picture in which she sprawled on a bed. Her face was obscured and her hair lay in a majestic fall holding the light like a glass vase in a painting. At this fall of light I stared for many hours. I knew that if anyone were to find her picture on my computer they would think that I had used this picture as pornography, which was embarassing to me. I wondered if I was developing a fetish, if I would soon request that whores lie obscured on a bed and let me look at their hair, blonde, brown, black and red, so much more interesting to me than their body. Such a thing, although unnatural, was still as natural as a man wanting to look at a woman. But the fixation with the hair passed, and I was left, again, with the untethered pauses disconnected from an image.

I am an engineer. I have always been an engineer, by trade and by inclination. I built tree houses when I was a boy in the woods behind my house and spent many hours creating with my mouth the kinds of noises that an airborne war would make were I to be in the middle of it, a defender in a lone and fallowed outpost, and many hours laying in the tops of the scaffolding that I had wedged into the arms of the trees and staring up at their branches waving on the grey sky. I think the spaces have been with me always.

But it was not until this morning, early this morning which most people would call the middle of the night, that they appeared to be inside of me. And now I don't know what I can any longer do. And now I don't know how I can speak, or be, or look out of these eyes.

Why Forever 21 Is More Human Than Upright Walking--My Thesis of Life, Backed By Science

The preview for Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams has had me thinking a lot about Lascaux.

Humans have been anatomically modern--i.e., normal-looking--for 200,000 years. That is a reeeeaalllly long time.

5,000 years ago, the oldest known pyramids were just a twinkle in some pharaoh's eye. People didn't even know how to domesticate plants until 10,000 years ago. 200,000 years is enough time for life as we know it to come and go twenty times over.

For some reason, humans existed for nearly their whole evolutionary lifespan as anatomically modern without being what we call behaviorally modern. Until around 40,000 years ago, there was no drawing, there was no painting. There was no jewelry. There were no tiny antelopes carved into the handles of hunting tools. There was no material representation of imaginary things. As far as we can tell, there was no form of abstract thought whatsoever.

The latest theory about why humans started doing stuff like having funerals, making elaborate necklaces, and getting tattoos has a lot to do with what happened when a group of H. sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe, and encountered the H. neanderthalensis populations who had already been there for a hella long time. Science had no clue until recently what these two populations did when they met--did they fight each other, did they eat each other, what?

Now, it's genetically evident that they made babies together (if you're not African, you're part Neanderthal--sorry, white supremacists!), and archaeologically evident that they engaged in a whole lot of trade together, too. Neanderthal remains start showing up BEDECKED with H. sapiens-style gewgaws. Both populations' material technology--their stuff--starts to get way more complex, at a way more rapid pace. There's even evidence that this is when spoken language starts to really blow up. In other words, when these two populations encounter each other, they quickly become far more human.

It's here that we start to see places like Lascaux. Cave paintings. Symbolic expressions of human thoughts. A dog can't look at a bunch of lines on a flat surface and see a cow. A human can. A chimpanzee won't bury its mother facing east. A human will. Because of the continuously belittled human abilities of socialization and material attachment, humans became more human than they had been for 160,000 years.

Humans will glorify anatomical details which are not particularly exclusive to us, such as the thumb. But we will marginalize our human obsession with adornment and symbolic materials, even though the presence of these obsessions is actually how we define modern humans as different from humans who were merely anatomically modern.

My conclusion: Forever 21 is more human than upright walking.

Secondary conclusion: I'm going shopping.

The Mollusk

It was not until three years into her marriage that Rachel began to think of her husband as The Mollusk, to say fuck you quietly when she hung up the phone. He was a twat, a jerk, an imperturbable jackass. More than anything, she told herself, she hated the situation. She didn't hate him. This was her fault. His barely redeemable human flesh, his inadequacies, his paleness and stark exhaustion. There was something she was doing. She didn't seem to have an appetite for anything anymore. She was like a keeper of needs. Earlier, in her twenties, maybe, she had been pliable, more relenting. Now she was a portrait-eater, a harpy. She had become some cold Attila. He was not the sealed grave. She was the hunk of bone.

And yet, she wondered, what was it that called her to him, that made her take comfort in him? He was like a magic box that held her former life. When she looked at him, she became infuriated at the lostnesses that had all gotten into him somehow, and then been locked away. She wanted to break him, but she knew that this was illogical. She improved her diet and hoped that it would go away. Fuck you, she said into the air above the dining table, after she had thrown the phone not so hard as she had wanted. Fuck you, fuck you, you closed-lip hunk of junk.

Do You Know the Church Hymn?

There was a little brown pony once, but I didn't know what to name it. That was one of the things that Mother had bought us before she died. The pony was not really a pony, of course, but a full-sized gelding boy horse, but we got him when he was a colt and tussled up by birth so that the nap of his hair was funny--too much on the sides, furred on the top. He was so frail.

Her handkerchief would flutter out the window on a breeze and at the end of it, her hand, looking like to flutter as well. And she would cry: Howard! You are a loved, loved boy! And my legs were like to young trees rooting in the dirt.

I remember when she died there was a little, little teacup balanced on her chest, yellow, with beads of bright gold paint, so little that you wondered if you'd better move it, in case she breathed and then it toppled. But it didn't. She looked at me with her black head there on that pillow and that teacup balanced on her chest atop the crinny gown which was so thin. She closed her eyes and she knotted her hands below the teacup, and she said My son, do you know the church hymn? And she began to hum it, me watching that cup that brittly resting on her sternum like a conch. And I thought to fill it with tea, for it was so still.