If You Loved X, You'll Probably Hate Z, And Who Knows How You'd Feel About Y, But This!
This Will Leave You Completely Indifferent.
It began and it seems, like a novel
by Tolstoy, like it will never end, but one day—zip-zap, zap-zip—
the sun will supernova, and we will give back
our copper and plutonium, our aluminum
and titanium. The calcium in our bones will contract into dimensionless
singularity, along with all our shiny silver fillings, our stalks
of wheat, our shocks of turquoise hair.
—Martha Silano1
Chapter One
There is time and time enough, he thought to himself, drumming his fingers along the desk, aimlessly scrolling through his phone. I am the master of my domain, the king of my castle, but what is my domain exactly? He surveyed his room, the fake ceiling, the white LED lights, the fans, the two ACs working in unison, both on, both humming. His room was always cold, the children complained. He explained that he liked it that way. There was such a thing, he said, as being too comfortable, and the children were far too comfortable far too much of the time.
He drummed his fingers and sipped the coffee as it cooled. Where to marshal his resources next? The books had been returned, the issue of storage was now in contention, but that could be finessed, that could be dealt with in the course of time. In time, everything would be dealt with, and the contents of his classroom would be irrelevant.
The world was burning. People were starving to death. There was a hernia in his gut, a skip in the step of his heartbeat, his vision was not perfect, in the event of a catastrophe he might hyper-ventilate, but he might also be perfectly calm. It was a toss up. He had been late in the morning, coming in, he had woken up late, or rather, he had woken up exactly on time, but then he had gone back to sleep, just a few more minutes, he could hear his brain saying, just a few more minutes, it’s so nice, isn’t it so nice. Finally, at 7.36, he no longer bought the lie and threw himself out of bed, out of his crevasse.
Over the years, weight and habit had plowed a him-sized furrow into his bed, from whence he would rise and to which he would retire. He vaguely missed it, at times like this, sitting aimlessly, waiting for the minutes to move past him, wishing he could brush them aside like curtains. It would be 1.45 soon enough, but also not soon enough, it would never be soon enough. It was always too soon, and it was never soon enough. Something like that. He had thought, erroneously, as a child, that the primary task of a teacher was to teach or, barring that, to bark instructions. Instead, with age and experience, he realized that the task of a teacher was to wait and out-last. Everything could be and would be waited out, everything would be out-lasted, deadlines, attention spans, everything could be ground down by the simplest of exercises…by waiting and doing nothing.
He could do nothing with an almost religious zeal, and it was, he realized, one of his best attributes. Some were physically incapable of it, and were in constant motion. He was, but quite often, he felt like he wasn’t doing anything at all. He was floating in a void. He was floating in a void full of things.
Recently, he had begun to obsess over the word “Orphic”, had begun describing things as having an Orphic quality or qualities, or being directed by a certain “Orphicism” or “pseudo-Orphic characteristics”. He liked the idea that one could originate or propagate a certain kind of virus of thought, a certain form of mind disease. After all, some people did it professionally, and in a real sense, he felt that he was one of those people.
Learning, as John Berger once said, brought one close to foolishness, because at the heart of both was an utter mystery, he didn’t know why he knew most of the things he knew, he didn’t know how he knew them. How did one know anything at all?
He looked at his phone.
There were 25 minutes until the meeting. His coffee was lukewarm at this point.
Get It?
You’re not supposed to get it. Not until the divorce and the hail-storm and the bankruptcy and the pills and the cat getting snatched up by a bald eagle on national tv in the middle of a baseball game. Getting it isn’t really the point. The point is to get out.