fragment in the wind
The whole is in the fragment, its many splintered stories spell a pictureless picture. What is shown, remains unsaid.
The essays of Montaigne, the aphorisms of Adorno, the avant-garde propositions of the late Wittgenstein, the Woolfean diary, the Benjaminian stroll, the Pessoan delirium of unslept years, and many Freudian sniffs.
The speculative nature of the essay, or “attempt”, is always subject to demise, always late to the party. Like nature, it always fails. But its failure is one of non-assimilation, of difference and novelty, a lie whose truth remains that of being entirely meaningless, like words in the wind.
The ruminations of Emerson and Cavell, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche have, at best, remained in the confines of the ivory cottages, or at worst, to the boards of fanatics and the taxi drivers of the digital age. Looking for systems that exhume us of guilt, we find what we deserve in the methods we employ.
A poem is a thesis, and a scientific paper is an essay. Quality becomes quantity, and the shopping-aisle separation of here/there, us/them is the sole judgment (Urteil) we live/die by. Fragments are never quite thoughts. They are slivers, pitstops, impressions of light, and, most importantly, little pieces of shit for others to eat and love/hate. But they’re never on the menu, we throw it at the wall to see what sticks, or if it does at all. It eats, it thinks, it shits. Any tweet will do today what Oscar Wilde did for yesteryear. Only the stakes have been raised, and we gamble on the biggest splinter.
Our biggest magnifying glass is now the content we consume, whose difference is eroded by kitsch, pastiche, mass production, nostalgia, and the waning of historicity that makes the northern patriarch cry tears of gold for hordes of brothers, Roman archetypes, greek alphabets, and American cars.
Deleuzian ramen packs have become digitized. They fix toilets and build houses with Ramen noodles. Prisons use Ramen noodles as currency, non-perishable empires of Japanese World War hyperfood. Techno-orientalism falls back unto itself, as KOREAN SPICY NOODLES approach with the spice of life, the mask of flavor, the celebration of poverty whose reaction one records.
As our eyes gaze upon the screens, let us stay with the splinters, resist the splitting into good and real, mourn the whole of our shattered selves in verse and prose: in fragment.
