On 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, […]
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 […]