And that’s how it was. I’d start off with an army, like the center of a flower with its petals radiating outwards in all directions. Bright blue, a searing fire engine red. Bottles for water and covers for the bottles. Containers to measure out my life into- lives that leaked into spilled words: messages contained in phones. Then coverlets for the phones. Music-boxes and covers for the music. Glasses to see clearly and glasses meant to obscure. Covers covers, boxes and cases. A silver box to capture things as I saw them; a book to capture things as I thought they were. Maybe another box to tie them all up together. If I was lucky, covers for the covers, thin anonymous plastic bags to Arrange and to Organize.
Things in themselves, things as they are when you’re not looking for them, when you don’t have a colored cover to put them in will dance tantalizingly out of reach in your peripheral vision, in some hazy corner of your mind. You could crane your neck, whip your head around, screw up your eyes but it’s all hazy, because it is in fact undefined.
And this is a curious destiny only you could choose for something. I say only you only because there is no one else to listen: but it cannot be limited to you, or me or any one person because then… then I’m right back where I started. So if you should choose, you could empty your ship, evacuate, and throw it all out into a destiny of your (my, our) own creation, you too can savor this heady return, to the undefined.
So I started off with all these containers of colour mashed up in a beautiful melee, all at the bottom of my bag.
And then it would begin. I’d strew them around slowly, then in a frantic rush- feathers floating off a shot pigeon. The meat was startled, arrested midflight; the integrity of this efficient enterprise had been killed. And the feathers all set free. Floating down, each into a void of its own, all into the haziness of the undefined.
I’d find it crushingly embarrassing to talk about the weights I’d thrown away. I was repulsed by the very suggestion of a possession: the putrid look of smug ownership, the greedy grasping act of hiding and keeping, hoarding and possessing. I was pushed towards The Lost and Found, would be overcome by a wave of nausea. I’d only be able to breathe easily once I’d realize that I could never find anything that could be traced back to me there. Then I’d stand and watch, rifle through the discards of generations. Picked and chose that which could never be mine- the only thing I’d be comfortable using. This way I didn't have to lose to be free, I could find, and stay free. It shamed me to admit that I was ever in a state of debt towards a weight, that I could ever have been owned, been made more complete by something that I then chose to discard. You’re careless. And yet it wasn’t a careless tossing out, the departure of every such object in my life was marked out in a definite corner of my brain, the crossing over from the known, the place-able to the unknowable was an Event, a cause for a private celebration, heralding as it did another step towards my private nirvana.
