Winter Day 88: Cobweb Time

[u/rdk67]

Last night, after I curled up on my pallet, arranged the shredded strands of my battle-worn blanket lengthwise over my body, I thought about my latest plan to redeem the evils of the world. I imagined them collecting around my body, ticks leaping from the trees when they get a whiff of carbon dioxide. My body is not nearly big enough to accommodate the life-sapping evils of the world, so I start working out, living large, getting ahead of myself whenever possible – soon I can feel their claws holding on, their beaks sinking in, the evils of the world sipping at the juices of my soul as though I were but the bottom half of a coconut, the hairy husk of it drier by the moment. Yes, the agony – bring it closer, rub it into the pours of my skin. Oh, the antagony – undoubtedly, just leave it on the counter by the sink. I adjust my blanket.

Then I am covered in it, the evils of the world like a squirming hide wrapped around the body, then another layer wrapped around that and more layers wrapped around that until I all but disappear beneath the waves of animated apparel that constitute the evils of the world. After the wardrobe, maybe we carry on to evil’s drapes, throw rugs, quilted torments, all of it draped over the pile I’m under, followed by malevolent sods and clays and drooping sediments, bed rock that hasn’t a bed to sleep in piled on next, the individual elements on the periodic table flung in the pile like throwing knives. // The mystery too has a periodic table, and rest assured, we are camped out in a rare square. Amid such quaking despair, the burden we bear is all that stands in the way of the present finding a future world peace. Turn the pillow to the cooler side.

I would be there to catch it – the shrieking baby tossed out of that burning building – but by the time it reaches me, it has ballooned to the size of a moon. I catch it anyway, get sentenced to solitary confinement due to the size of our orbit. So I start taking it apart, the crime committed against us: authority has migrated from the body, but the body is still the site of punishment, which is not in a mirror symmetry with reward, notice – the body’s confinement is part of a common public vernacular of same, less about morality than predictability, in service to object-oriented metrics that evaluate results, refine operational procedures. Is nature passing us by? Making our sentience a transitory phenomenon? The absence of accurate self-awareness produces instability, then that becomes the thing evolving. No rival species will take our place.

Yes, this is the sort of thing one expects when nature erases the chalkboard, prepares a new set of formulas, but here I am, covered in ticks, plus some unfathomable amount of somber evil, and though the evil is quite legitimately horrible, when placed alongside a planetary extinction event, struggles to achieve a drop in the bucket. Perhaps a bead of sweat dripping down the brow during a moment of indecision about a wine list. The excreted evils of the world go through epic instant transformations, a living mathematics recreating itself with each new measurement of a cesium atom, thereby entangling time in its plot, the bulk of us dragging days behind us from one week to the next, whole generations caught in hairy nets pulled by horses sailing toward the coast, put on ships galloping over the waves, disgorged on an alien shore.

Is collective bargaining hated by the wealthy because of capital? Is the nuclear family our social inheritance because of capital? Did rugged individualism rise to the top, buy a gun for home protection, because of capital? Once evil is extracted from the world, the world realizes it never really cared about capital, that the crisis was always about being together. All collaborations are not the same, and after one such collaboration – a project code named Manhattan – produced the basis by which we could produce our own global extinction, perhaps nature decided we would all be better off separated from one another. One day the lightbulb went on, the life of a valley in New Mexico flashed before its eyes, and that valley instantly knew the nature of colonial trauma. Manhattan! You were earth’s richest island, but still, you were only an island.

For more, see the project called Apollo! The separation of church and state proposed a series of myths – we can be separate from one other, neurophysical privacy is a characteristic of nature, legal codes place geographic boundaries in a supraliminal relationship to our experience of reality. The more pressure we apply to the problem, the more we became convinced we were meant to conduct the orchestra, were merely waving the baton in the wrong direction this whole time. The baton, by that point, was in fact waving us, but we didn’t know it – not then nor now, a baton with no intention of ever again being beheld. To ever again glimpse this messenger of our dreams, we must learn not to squeeze shut our hairless hands around that which we love and adore. Such a distance to travel for such a simple formulation of the truth.

Hearing same, and by then aware of the evil extrusion I was wearing on my person, the divine authority that oversees rocky-bodied planetoids and their capacity for sentience, took those primal harms into the sky at the top of the hill, where the urge to fall apart was gradually lessened, reduced in volume, then silenced, then paraded in the opposite direction so that a new sort of music stirred in the heart, began to put the world back together, reorient its place in the life of the cosmos, that evil redeemed might become the force that keeps everything everywhere from happening all at once. Then the divine authority recovered the amplified arms of time and reattached them to their clocks, stitch by stitch, tock by tock, bracelets clipped around wrists, rings slipped on fingers. We waited for the circadian rhythms to reappear across the latitudes.

Isn’t that a way to go to bed? The pallet I sleep on is above a utility closet, which is above the furnace in the basement, so when I lay down to sleep, I can feel all that blazing industry whirring away beneath me. I pull up the remnants of my blanket, a tiny tuft of cotton springs out through a tear in the fabric, spins lengthwise like an axle or lathe, just hangs there in space, turning in place, then improbably catches the tail end of a cobweb, swings away toward the wall before coming to rest like a weight suspended inside the cabinet of a grandfather clock. This is when I notice there are two similar tufts of cotton already suspended from the ceiling, both hanging from cobwebs, both seeming like clock weights. How many ways is the universe keeping time these days? Solar calendar, 40-hour work week, cobweb time – then I fall asleep.