Notes on the Perpetual Deferral of Being

A twist on the key tensions the main spring until there is no play left. But the steady tension of that wind turns the clock's arms in measured jumps. In the escapement, the wheel is caught and released discreetly, and seconds don't run like fluid around the face. it is two, and then it is three – the in-between is a blur. Time was digital even when it was analog, as those teeth and cogs ensure.

listen
I hear my father breathing

I had a dream which featured two eggs. One egg when I cracked it, was more mature than I had anticipated. Out of it came a grey-feathered chick, and I registered surprise as it emerged tentatively, awkwardly from its confinement, very much alive.

It was already a few days back that I dreamed this: a doll made of flesh. It stood statuesquely in a clearing, out of doors. It was too big, not just for interiors to accommodate, but to really be a doll — a thing that would serve a child for play. I saw it like one does a tree that stands above the others, or an outcropping of rocks emerging lifeless from a verdant canopy.

A humble suspension of certainty seems necessary ... almost always: in order that a conversation can take place; in order to think. Otherwise there is no motion, no mobility in argument, in reasoning, in dialectics. There has to be a space: an empty position as a kind of parameterization so that one can entertain possibilities serially. Not just one hand and then the other, but this that and the other: or, or, or. Something might fit. And judgment might be made. But the entrance of judgment depends on a parade of alternatives, not on an a priori certainty. Judgment is a choice, an imposition, a selection.

My first encounter with the word was in the dentist's office. My brother had an extra tooth. Its surgical removal was painful and grotesque, as was the small bit of bone extracted from his jaw. It made sense to me in some way, that this disgusting bit of flesh was a part of my brother, whom, for “psychological” reasons, I suppose, I had already associated with deformity.

Experience is not dear. We come by it as a matter of course, a consolation gift for just staying alive. Which is why there is the memorable and then everything else. No matter how nuanced that gesture with which I swabbed my ear was, it is unnecessary to carry its memory to the end. Maybe, only until tomorrow, at which time I will repeat some version of that gesture again, must I remember. Maybe only for that short period after bathing where I might be prompted to swab by my proximity to the medicine cabinet. I am saved from having to examine the state of my ear, and from having to compare the gestures of then and now, by remembering for just the right amount of time.