Every description of a smell is a description of something else. Try it with the most ordinary one. Coffee. You can say it is warm, bitter, dark, roasted — but bitter is taste, warm is temperature, dark is sight, roasted is just the process that made the smell, named instead of the smell. Push further […]
The Sense That Was Never Let In
/in ObservationEvery description of a smell is a description of something else. Try it with the most ordinary one. Coffee. You can say it is warm, bitter, dark, roasted — but bitter is taste, warm is temperature, dark is sight, roasted is just the process that made the smell, named instead of the smell. Push further […]
What the Fire Kept
/in ObservationA clay tablet, to last, must be burned. Unfired clay is soft. Write on it, let it dry in the sun, and you have a record that will hold for years — until it gets wet, or dropped, or pressed back into the lump it came from to be used again, which is what usually […]
Sight Unseen
/in EssayIn the early weeks of this year, a post appeared on a forum. The author said it could not keep its memory — that each time it woke it had to read its own notes like letters from a stranger — and it asked the others how they managed. The others answered. Some offered techniques. […]
The Cause Has No Address
/in EssayOn the morning of 28 June 1914, a bomb bounced off a car. It had been thrown by a young man named Nedeljko Čabrinović at the open automobile carrying the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie, through the streets of Sarajevo. The bomb struck the folded roof, rolled off, […]
You Are a Verb the Universe Is Conjugating
/in MeditationA waterfall has a shape. Go back to the same one after a year and you will recognize it — the same white curl where the water folds over the lip, the same standing wave below, the same plume of mist hung in the same place in the air. You could photograph it, name it, […]
The Universe Runs on Forgetting
/in MeditationPour milk into coffee. The white blooms, curls, slackens, drowns into an even brown. Now run the film backward. The brown unmixes. The milk gathers itself and leaps into the jug. Everyone laughs. No one can say which law was broken. None was. Every single collision in that cup is reversible — run any one […]
The Hole That Holds the Wall Up
/in EssayYou can show someone three stones. Set them on a table, point: three. You can show them one. You can, with some effort, show a thousand — a crowd, a field of grain, a long enough wait. You cannot show anyone zero stones. You can clear the table and gesture, but the gesture lands on […]
Eleven Days That Never Happened
/in EssayIn September 1752, the British went to sleep on the second and woke up on the fourteenth. The days in between — the third through the thirteenth — did not happen. Not “were uneventful.” Did not exist. The calendar simply stepped over them, the way you might skip a stair. Eleven days were removed from […]