To perceive is to be both objective and subjective. It is to be in the process of becoming one with whatever it is, while also becoming separate from it. We witness the death of migrants in the river only in words, but words also drown. My friend tells me care for the homeless was his day job; the park was not his home. His mentor took sex workers into her apartment, fed and counseled them. I take in images on my television; people suffer in my living room. But I can turn them off (again). You could put up cubicles to push back the light. A shoji screen testifies to what is shadowed, not what is most bright. I have a free app that alters photos to draw out shadow and contrast. “Application” covers a lot of bases: we apply ourselves to a task; we write applications for school and jobs; we apply a coat of paint. All of these mark changes by which our lives are improvised. But the app revises directly, only appears spontaneous. Another app announces my “new” memories to me, as if it were my subconscious. Proust in a phone. Who needs accident, when you have algorithms?
If witness were an app, we’d need to spend less time on our phones. At random moments in the day, they’d flash atrocities at us (you have a “new atrocity!” it would announce), or just the smaller traumas of private life. Despite his privilege, my friend understands that he’s been traumatized. The trick is to translate that back into daily practice. Trauma as hat trick; stick it up your sleeve and it comes out a rabbit. The dead is as soft as the live, and that’s a hint as to the afterlife. It’s not our afterlife we look for, it’s another’s. To touch the dead rabbit is to participate in its life beyond its breathing. We wish that for ourselves. Paul wished he could hold John for a day, but he was decades too late. Regret witnesses love. Write a song to bring the afterlife to silence.
The psalm is a koan. We knead it like dough, rolling and teasing it into the shape of a loaf. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. The mystery is not silence, but speech. Screech goes the bird outside my sliding door. Wind shifts like a curtain. I can know these things by listening to them. A word’s only true if your embouchure’s right.
Note: quotation by Etel Adnan of Anne O'Hanlon; line from Psalm 19.
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