AS IF FALLING

Final Privacy Song

Alas, how is ’t with you, That you do bend your eye on vacancy And with th’ incorporal air do hold discourse?

She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

The problem with tense is that neither past nor present will really do—the latter suggesting timeless issues, frozen in the ethnographic record, the former that they belong to a vanished and no longer relevant era. Neither, of course, conveys the truth since ideas are not so mobile nor so immobile as any such attempt to locate them suggests. It is a pity that one is tied to the grammatical choice. And it is a pity that English does not have a dual, for then one could also use 'we' in the sense of 'we two', an inclusion that would not obliterate separateness. Indeed, the work can be read both as an apology and an apologia for a language and a culture that does not make that particular possibility of central concern to the way it imagines itself.

For there are two kinds of flux. On the one hand, there is flux in straight lines, or lines that form circles that close back in on themselves; on the other, there is turbulent flux, spirals that never meet back up, dis-archic tops. Our world tends to produce flux at a constant speed, like a treadmill, where one advances without taking a step. The treadmill versus the top. Becoming without ever undergoing the test of loss, loving without venturing outside oneself: This is what is proposed as a “way of life”

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe; it gives life back to those who no longer exist.