Why do people find themselves sovereign?
We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one. "NOTEBOOKS," VOLTAIRE
99 tiles shatter on the floor. To be careful is to be bound, a senseless, self-inflicted harm upon the body is to be hypervigilant of the self relative to others. Are you determined to fight against your ego developing? Are you afraid of getting wet?
home tiles 38-51tile 38: mein herz. the belt is cool against my back. leather is much like a balm in the sticky sweltering summer. my eyes are rimmed red. i dont have the energy anymore. i am saddened that my belt is hogging the bed.
it lays sprawled out on the better, cushy side of the bed. in a letter to parliament i write that they should keep museums forever. in a letter to my dog i write itd be ok if he got rid of his collar after i die. he wags his tail and licks my face and i smile. in a letter to the oak tree behind my house i write that i hope it does not itch. would its branches help it out then? the belt is cool against my back. dont belts deserve lives too. i hope every belt buckle and wallet chain and mirror is happy with its circumstances. i hope every bill and prescription bottle and ceramic geisha is happy with its circumstances. its hard to glassblow in the sticky sweltering summer.
the 39th tile asks you if you know what you're doing. do you think if you just tell everyone what they are thinking then it'll go away? even if you tell on yourself you can't rid yourself of the rot that sticks to you. slimy, sticky, film that shows that even if you're afraid you look like an attention seeker, a fraud, a liar, a loser, a failure, if you say it before anyone else can, it doesn't go away. wouldnt it be better to confront your own behaviour and change. if you know and are worried you're making a mistake and do it anyway you just tell us about you instead of be someone self-aware and accountable
if it seems so then how can you course correct. if it looks like it how can you change it. if you are so tired and so guilty so remorseful and repenting for your actions for the way you're perceived then why do you persist so in the perception you hate so much? in the one that makes you feel so. why not choose your life
the refusal to change when you know better is slow suicide
tile 40 is about the life outside.
outside in the spring, after the rain of april and right before the growing heat of the end of may, the pastures are greener. in the organic alive world everything is moving like they told you they would. cicadas cry out to the world like newborn babies fresh out the womb of soil. beneath the tree in the shade lies someone who admires the rolling hills and rare, freeing breaths of breeze from the stratosphere. the tree grows peaches, heavy and ripe and glisteningly orangeish pink. peaches so ripe and abundant they bruise just by you holding them. they're so beautiful that it's fragile now. handle with care.
you aren't promised a perfect life. you're promised a tender one. with dirt under your nails and butterflies landing on your hat. you're promised a basket full of strawberries and the salt of ocean air, crisp and clear, swelling around you. you're promised sand between your toes, fruit from trees, smiles so hard they hurt. more blades of grass than people on earth, more freckles on her face than stars in the night sky. the peaches are ripe but the residue begs for ants. what matters is if you throw it all away or wash it instead
about that huge megalonyx that went extinct far before it was even found
the belief that nature is fixed and that it is already complete is melancholic. the idea that such a massive creature simply going extinct was inconceivable to the minds of enlightenment era men is only terrifying because it meant that they believed that it was impossible—the concept that life was not solid. it meant that it could change and was malleable but surely, such a wondrous and interesting creature is not lost forever. to confront the loss of an entire species was to swallow a bleak truth: that maybe perhaps nothing was ever truly set in stone. nothing was ever fixed or 'ours.'
to jefferson it likely felt like a personal failing that he could not find any extinct animal to be still alive. that the world was in fact able to be destroyed on quite a minute level. a rotting from the inside out, a notion that proved that the men like georges buffon were correct and right about american degeneracy—that these animals vanished not by any natural order but by humanity, that the very continent they set foot upon was rotten and incoherent. he didn't ask lewis and clark to look for the ground sloth out of naivety but rather because if it had gone extinct it implies creation wasn't harmonious, eternal, complete. it broke his ideology; nature was irregular and at times irrational, and enlightenment deism's tenets surrounding nature at the time were wrong. and if one brick falls...
but how could he have been wrong? the world isn't already complete and everything isn't already decided? it meant much more than an animal going extinct, it meant that maybe also they are completely wrong about our own singularity. maybe all these megafauna disappearing meant that what we called america was wrought with animals yet to be found and gone with the wind. it isn't really a new world, is it?
it wasn't full of abundance it was just land and such an irreversible loss wasn't just about earth, either. it meant that a whole universe could diminish, perhaps even on an infinitesimal level. that sloth surely isn't the only thing gone. what has left since we arrived?
it is inherent to want things to be the same. there is a comfort in knowing the world around you is safe and complete, that everything that has, will, or is, is forever in the state of rational and finished. that your only purpose, really, that can mean anything is to explore and catalog everything possible within your lifespan. for an animal to disappear begged the question, if the sloth isn't finished, what else isn't?
anything can happen, theories have been thrown around to how this animal went extinct. but still, something irretrievable, simply gone, was less about the why and more about the what. what does it mean to go extinct? are you still extinct even if you are known? even if you have your own taxonomy? even if they assigned you a genus, a kingdom, a family? when do you cease to exist in entirety
expecting a consistency in nature, and by extension, the world around you, is always going to be an expectation built only upon the clinging of safety and comfort. they finally proved a negative: the animal is gone. what's next?
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home tiles 38-51
