THE PATH OF APATHY
1.]
Artisan or citizen. The war erases us and singing changes nothing. This is one of several narratives in which an aesthetic fails to render, or make better, or explain. There are other ways of saying this, but these, too, despite sincerity, become commodity. The world is made of things.
Painted broadly, the noise a person makes
contributes to, and therefore is,
atrocity. I want to say this kindly, from the heart,
[its center pulling inward,
pulsing] but here, immediately, the words fall out and fail within the borders
of their argument. It is difficult
to tell exactly where our speaking comes
from nothing
and where it is precisely
2.]
Say, for example, the experience of others exists primarily as a vague impression on the horizon. Empathy is like this. The love that is
the bottom of the self as it exceeds the flesh and spills into the desert of another life must do so having listened to the scream dissolving at the edges of its end. Who is speaking
there among the photographs
and rubble
torn from
stone?
3.]
Existing at the level of the actual, differences among civilizations
are “real” as well as “basic.”
Dimensionally, in gray and dark gray increments,
the world becoming smaller.
Agree or disagree.
It is possible the processes of economic modernization and social change
perform a radical and irreversible separation.
Of people from longstanding local identities, of language from a source
that can’t be named.
Enhanced by the dual role of “the west,”
the increasing occupation
of a consciousness organized
around dualities
becomes encompassing. Here and there. You
and I, etc. [subject,
object, thing]. Akin perhaps to capital asserting dominance
across the desert
cultural difference develops into a dramatically less mutable exchange
4.]
The noise exceeds its culture and exists.
Amid the weight and war
of privilege, I am thinking
firstly, “have I eaten,
have I slept.” The world goes on
like this. The days and longer hours. The weight of seconds
as difference continues
to exert itself. As difference continues.
Moving inward from a distant point on the horizon,
like a bright and blinding light
across the desert, economic regionalism
is growing
5.]
The mind cannot define itself in the face of these events. Here we are, or not here. With them, or without. In this, the age of terror
existing after irony, both the war and one’s desire for its abatement begin to mingle in the middle-distance
dissolved among
the spectacle, which is a dance between polemics.
Unmarked, a silver canister
in the center of a market. Existing at the edges of a town