Recalling the last couple hours is similar to waking, as is any attempt at memory. One wakes and remembers or remembers and wakes. The horizon between perception and consciousness shifts to accommodate these states, phenomenologically disclosing the worlds of present and past. Simply standing in a room, focusing one’s eyes on the small, quavering movements of one’s hand, the world of the present is continually disclosed. It is as if one has opened some sort of portal, a radius of activity wherein the world is performed to us. Except, in the last couple hours, this portal that we opened merely through the efforts of our own erratic perception, revealed to us an aspect of ourselves, already performing, in the travail of the hand. We woke to our hands. And once we began waking, it was difficult to stop. The intrusions of memory helped assuage us, but they were, conversely, difficult to hold on to. For instance, within the shaking a moment of the past would open. Something seemingly inane. A collection of words. Having been a poet, often the words that came to me were my own. If you consider memory as an act of perception this quirk loses some of its hubris, though I can’t say I wasn’t aware of some lingering embarrassment. Moment’s wing broke. Those are the three words that came to me. It was both the title of a poem and its last line. A sort of drug-influenced poem from my early twenties. If I profess little self-awareness within the actual events of the last couple hours, this small memory alone would seem to contradict me. So it is with the mind, even in the thrall of revelation it is convulsing with possible thought, self-commentary and game.
If anything seemed game-like in the last couple hours, it didn’t in any way contradict the seriousness of our endeavors. The idea of a game is a little like the idea of a joke. For years I had been completely preoccupied by my incapacity to answer the question, “What is a joke?” The possibility of a joke is activated by any number of subtle maneuvers in perspective. Part of the joke seems to be one’s intention of framing it as such. Same with games. Having been yoked for nearly a decade barreling my way through the subterranean commute of millions, I knew getting to work was a kind of game. As was work itself, not to mention showering or making coffee or waving to the woman behind the counter at the diner from the sidewalk outside as I hurried past. Seen objectively, an act that has become difficult if not nauseating, all limitations imposed on the body, when combined with some degree of repetition, constitute a game. And that’s the problem with objectivity—I can immediately identify a slew of exceptions to what I have only just hypothesized. All of this is beside the point, except of course to the degree that my divergences have themselves constituted a kind of game. The important thing is that gaming is something one does with the body. It is a way of expressing what it is a body can be said to do in the world. If it was serious enough for Spinoza it should be serious enough for us. And trust me, I know plenty of jokes about Spinoza. Perhaps the question, “What is a joke?” is the same as the question, “What is a body?” Certainly the humor of existence, its cloying absurdity, is rarely lost on anyone for long. And so games could be said to function as a countermeasure for the joke of the body. And so back to laughter.
In the last couple hours the laughter that was shaking that was the act of becoming oneself through becoming one’s hands did not stop. Like an object put to motion in an ideal, frictionless world, there was no opposing force to counteract the initial inertia of the shaking once it began. I use this example because it couldn’t be more wrong. Part of becoming the shaking that was one’s hands was relinquishing any and all remnants of the ideal that malingered by habit or convenience. And friction existed not as a force, but as all force. Friction was the engine of the real. It was friction alone that allowed the body to veer and zag, to refract and carom. This is why shaking was laughing. Moving included a necessary element of surprise. What was done was never known before the moment of its doing. The only inexorable force was coincidence: one body overlapping another. So it wasn’t an object traveling ceaselessly in one direction, it was the exact opposite: one body detouring inexorably through the surprise of its coincidence with other bodies. That is why I love you. And love, before, had been such a mystery. And it was still, but not an impenetrable mystery, an inexhaustible one. The very word love was itself, to quote Merleau-Ponty, “the surface of an inexhaustible depth.” Perhaps this was one of the mistakes about love before, that it might be without friction, or that it could travel in a single direction. As with any phenomenological enquiry, of which love was surely an example, it came down to attention. How closely is it that one looks at the coincidence of bodies? How well can one disclose the phenomenal aftermath of his or her collision with her or him. As with the revelation of our hands, its inexhaustible nature makes for a terribly exhausting undertaking.
For that reason, the last couple of hours were lovely. That is, they were characterized by love. I laugh and I love you. The Chinese and I love you. The last malingering ideals eviscerated and I love you. Which is one of the reasons, perhaps, that my lapses into thought so often consisted of you. One in particular kept recurring. The paradox is that it took place in a location where I know you have never been. It was daylight, just. The house was still cold and the grass in the backyard was arching with beads of dew. I tiptoed through the lawn, never looking down. It was my conviction that the several pinecones in the untrimmed lawn were only avoidable if one did not try to avoid them. So I looked forward, fixing my gaze on some middle distance between the far alleyway and myself, and emptied my mind of pinecones. My ankles were becoming very wet and the smell of the garden was growing heavier, but I was not stepping on any pinecones. Though this walk to the garden only took an average of seven or eight steps, when it recurred to me during the last couple hours it sometimes seemed like the length of an avenue, and I was so deeply engrossed by the process that imagining the end of the walk could never take enough precedent to actually end it. And all the while I thought of you. It occurs to me that even then, when I was only a young boy, crossing the lawn to eat snap peas and cherry tomatoes before the others had woken, I thought of you. Assuming you feel the same way, this shouldn’t seem at all improbable. Which, if we are to return to the notion of friction, would be perfectly acceptable even if it were so. Of course these things are improbable. Why else would we be here? Of course the pinecones are moving in accordance with your effort not to make an effort not step on them. Why else would they be there? That is why I love you.
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