Here are my limits. Where can I be taught, and where might I contribute? Stretching myself without giving too much away. My boundaries reserve me for another day, to love and listen better with grace and humility. Moving through an entire day with verecund slowness and quick wit, what a day it would be.
Scattergood
Mobile device micro-attention is the scattergood of our day. The spendthrift divulges on our devices and the emptiness from feeling bankrupted by them. Where has my time and attention gone? When time comes chopped up into minuscule moments, it seems so cheap and easy to give away. When we pay long, sustained focus on something time becomes is so valuable.
Anfractuous
Straight-talk is overrated, as Latour suggests. Truth has made us numb to speaking well about something. The anfractuous path reminds us to take things seriously in their own right, for they might teach us something. Truth is just a scheme forced on objects. In truth, things show us nothing, they just mouth what we know to be true.
Coffers
Inside these coffers lie treasures untold. The murky underground potential we explore, the savings, and layers of meaning unfolding. In the black hole, the quantum entanglement, the soft breeze, they all untangle for us and others unlike us. A tree falls in the forest, and everything around it is placed on notice—given a difference announcement it would have for us.
Taciturn
We carry weighted words not spoken, choked before a verbal explosion. When we remember ourselves, we remind the sentences not verbalized—a reversal inwards, which creates our sense of self, for better or worst. If our vocabulary’s lacking, we might never articulate and sort our own verboseness. Then the taciturn turns on us.
Clamber
Across the road darts a chipmunk and scurries, I would clamber to climb. Light-footed, almost floating, it appears to mock gravity. I battle the uphill of Harlem hills on my second ten-kilometer lap around Central Park’s loop. One day little chipmunk will join you in your levity.
Fungible
Lego loves lego, and builders love lego, and lego loves artists in abstract. Fungible blocks building imaginings which strip away senseless detail for sensible, sensational delight. Worlds arranged through simple shapes as they are mined into mind crafts or Minecraft. Squares are neat with other squares, joined in infinitesimal dreamwork.
Mirabilia
They come both in the utmost disruption or the crease in a canvass. Normality disrupted by the shiny bursting forth with and through forces unknown. It forces us to revisit the graveyard of our language, metaphors undergirding words long forgotten. Grappling with the agonizing awe mirabilia brings, we gasp and grasp beneath prose for our first utterance.
Singularity
Asian mystic traditions and Christian eschatology mingle into a silicon dream. The singularity realizes history’s technological forces, but as with any eschaton, it fractures the world. Unlike the spiritual revolutions of the past, however, all are not invited to take part. As a reality-denying elitist Gnosticism, it seems the perfect religion for those who have long ago forsaken contact with or care for the poor.
Fain
Goethe watches Bryant Park’s carousel. Children fain oblivious to the German laureate. Around and around, the joy palatable. A circular wonder for the watcher. Always and never the same repetition and difference. If only someone would gift Goethe’s bust with a hand. What wonders would he write of what he saw?
