The End of the Telescope

The End of the Telescope was originally published by Selcouth Station on October 31, 2021.

It leaned in and out, it twisted and turned. It was raw, unyielding, it was cavernous—but it was always hard to catch it in the act. Bennie and Dexter drifted through it as though they were sculpted into it, as though they could negate time itself.
“I feel like we know more about this building than the people who work in it,” Dexter said. He pulled his bicycle along a bridge that cut straight through the towering facade, its windowed surfaces molded into a box-like shape around the path. When they reached a shift in the building’s architecture, they moved along with it as though it were clay on a potter’s wheel.
“It feels like a secret room from an old video game,” Bennie said, tearing off a piece of a Slim Jim with his teeth. “You can see it, but you can’t get in there.”
The building separated the island into two distinct parts, in the same way that the suspended bridge cut right through the middle of the building. Over there was that half, over here was this one. Over there were high-rises, floor-to-ceiling windows, an amusement park; there were skyscrapers, a private school, some museums. Over here was an outlet mall, an antique shop where you could buy something old. Over here there was a Subway sandwich shop, which seemed itself to be a kind of something old.
“You have to eat outside,” Dexter had told Bennie a long time ago, in the beginning, “because they won’t let you bring your own soda.”
It had made intuitive sense to Bennie—sometimes one thing just doesn’t belong inside of another.
Bennie and Dexter came to a stop beneath an elevated highway, where they could hear the cars roar past overhead. Dexter leaned his bike against a support beam and sat on the bench next to Bennie, who produced a small object from his book bag.
“Here,” he said, handing it to Dexter. “You go first.”
Dexter unfolded it—a small telescope—and looked into it, into out there, into the world beyond.
“Just by looking at it, you make it exist,” Dexter had said once, early on, in the old days.
“What do you mean?” Bennie had asked.
“See for yourself.” Dexter had handed Bennie the telescope.
The rest was history.
Now they took turns passing it back and forth, peering deep into its kaleidoscopic inner truth. They focused as much on perfecting the gaze as they did on what lay at the other end.
Bennie bit off a piece of his Slim Jim. They stared through the window of a deserted McDonald’s.
When they were done, Dexter folded the telescope, putting it into his bag for safe keeping. Carrying the telescope was a duty they traded among themselves, a ceremony held each time by the one for the other. It was in this way that they shared the universe, kept it in orbit back and forth. Bennie and Dexter stood up and walked away.
Leaning against the outside wall of the Subway, Bennie bit into his brand new sandwich. Suddenly the glass door flew wide open, and a bell seemed to ring a moment after, its frail metal body unable to keep up with the violent motion of the glass panel.
“Get out of here,” an old man said to Bennie and Dexter. The old man emerged from the sandwich shop as though it were a cave. He was its owner.
“I’ve told you before.” The old man lightly bashed a broom against the pavement in front of Bennie and Dexter.
Bennie nearly spilled his soda.
“You can’t stand around by the front door like that. The moment someone sees you drinking your own soda, it’ll put me out of business.”
“Sorry,” Dexter said to the old man. Dexter and the old man caught a quick glance of one another before Dexter turned away. The old man loosened his stance, like letting off steam after a dress rehearsal. He peered into their backs as the two trudged on.
“I had a realization recently,” Dexter said to Bennie later. The sun was beginning to go down. It was early evening.
“There’s so much time in a life,” he said. “So many things you could do with it.”
They were crossing the bridge again, passing through the big building. They moved along its contours as though it were living, breathing. Sometimes Bennie would reach out and touch an exterior window.
“You could tell a story with it,” Bennie said. He was still eating his Subway sandwich. “It’s a way to tell a story.”
“It’s already a story,” Dexter told him.
“Is it?” Bennie asked.
The island they were on had the rare opportunity to see itself in itself, to glimpse its reflection in its own windows—it seemed sometimes that this was its very purpose, that it had been built just to reveal itself to itself.
The island was put there for a reason.
“We’re walking through spaces that people made on purpose,” Bennie said. Bennie was sitting on a plastic bench in the concrete cavity beneath a commercial balcony. Dexter watched Bennie eat the rest of the Subway sandwich while he stretched his tendons.
“We’re standing inside a creation,” Dexter said, “that only existed inside someone’s mind once.”
Bennie and Dexter both stopped for a moment to run their fingers over this thought, consider all the possible ways it could be felt and had.
“Can I see it?” Bennie said.
“Yeah,” Dexter answered. Dexter reached into his bag and pulled out the telescope, extended it, handed it over.
Bennie wiped his hands and took a sip from his soda. Standing up and twirling around as though on a barstool, he looked out through the brief, metal tube.
“It’s good today,” Bennie said. He handed the telescope back over to Dexter.
Dexter pointed the telescope up into the overcast sky. Dexter put his eye to it and looked through it that way—something new—and Bennie could perceive a newness in the air, a sudden change in the cadence.
“What is it,” Bennie said.
“It is good today.”
There was a pause.
“Do you want to go to the store on the other side of the island?” Bennie asked Dexter.
“Oh, that one?” Dexter asked Bennie. “Hmm.” Dexter considered the distance. He lifted his bike from the wall he’d leaned it against a moment before. “Yeah,” he said, “I think that will be okay.”
By the time darkness had fallen, they had nearly reached the 7/11, and its lonesome sign suspended high above guided them in warmly like a lamp. It was as though it were a tractor beam, or the North Star, or else as though the North Star were a tractor beam. They were the wise men—they’d arrived.
“Remember last time?” Bennie said. He drew the telescope and pointed it through the brightly-lit windows.
The store’s construction made it seem squashed, like it had been dropped there on the shoreline from a great height.
Sitting right beneath a bridge to the mainland, the store’s parking lot sprawled into an asphalt plot that gradually became a rest area. Rows of tractor trailers had already been posted there to keep watch through the night. How many were asleep in those cabs, on the other side of the darkened windows spread out in rows right before them? It was impossible to know.
“It’s bright inside,” Bennie said. “But it’s not weird like last time.” He passed the telescope to Dexter, who took it after chaining his bike to a bench outside.
Bennie and Dexter passed through the sliding doors that served as the threshold to another world.
“That was so long ago now,” Bennie said.
“Mm,” Dexter said. Dexter held the telescope up to some magazines, some items on the shelf.
The man behind the counter looked on, as though he expected a truth to impart itself to him. He remembered the last time.
“Is it in here, Dexter?” Bennie asked. He combed through some snacks on the shelf. This 7/11 had the good snacks. It was because of all the truckers.
“It’s everywhere,” Dexter said. He folded up the telescope, stuck it in his bag. “Do you want to get one of these?” He gestured plainly towards a selection of calzones on a refrigerated rack.
Bennie was silent.
“You can get one kind and I’ll get another,” Dexter said, facing the calzones. He turned to look at Bennie.
“If one of us doesn’t like ours, we can trade.”
Dexter was microwaving his sandwich at the front of the store as Bennie was paying for his.
“Long time no see,” the man behind the counter said.
“That was so long ago now,” Bennie said, “I’m surprised you remember.”
The moon was a spot in the sky when Bennie and Dexter got to the bench where they parted ways every night. Bennie sat down on it, and Dexter looked at him.
“We did a lot today,” Dexter said. He was standing up straight, holding his bike there.
“Do you feel okay?” Bennie asked Dexter. He could still faintly feel the heat of the calzone on his tongue.
“I could talk for a little while if you want,” Dexter said.
“Can I see it?”
“Yeah,” Dexter said. Dexter reached over his shoulder and pulled the telescope from the side pocket of his backpack. He handed it to Bennie.
Bennie took a deep breath and pulled the telescope open slowly, so slowly that it felt like an eternity to everyone but Dexter.
“How is it now?” Dexter asked. Dexter pulled his bike around a pillar where he brought it to rest. He took a seat on the ground beside Bennie and looked up at him. Bennie was silent for a few moments as he peered out further and further.
“It’s fine,” was what he said when he said it. “Same as always.” He kept staring straight ahead down the vibrant, refractive column. Then he said, “It’s still you and me from last time. Just looking down the same telescope.” Bennie handed it back over to Dexter. “See for yourself.”

Skeletons in the Pantry

     It’s the day of my 26th birthday—March 12th, 2020—and the pandemic is tipping over the precipice, the toilet paper is still starting to fly off the shelves, and it’s just about time for a drink. I get a phone call from one of my friends. 
     “I’m thinking of driving out to the Kroger in the suburbs,” he says. He’s forgotten it’s my birthday, which is just fine with me. “They’ve got a bar, and I wanna watch rich people do all the shit they say poor people do.” He inevitably scoops me up in his Cherry Red Kia Soul, and we Google the Kroger bar to find out its phone number, calling ahead to make sure it hasn’t already been turned into ruins.
     “Krobar,” the bartender answers. 
     We’re pushing our carts around with draft beers in the cupholders not long after. The scene is so chaotic, the air so tense, you feel like dropping a match could send a ball of flames into the world. “I might get some spaghetti,” I say. My friend and I each grab some boxes of dried noodles, and then I put one or two back in its place. “I’ll be fine.” We’re both bartenders, and the money hasn’t been great lately. 
     Neither one of us has a clue just how much of this will be gone soon—how much of our lives will be lived inside our homes, how many of our meals will be eaten out of boxes, how much of our exceedingly social jobs will have to be re-imagined inside this new container called Novel Coronavirus-19. 
     If we had, I might have had another beer.
     Alone in my house, nearly a full year later, I pull a box of Hamburger Helper from my pantry. I notice that I can see the back wall of the cupboard in the space it leaves behind. 
     I’m reaching the last of my reserves. 
     “I get so sad when my food’s coming to an end,” Kevin James says in an early episode of The King of Queens. He’s eating a Snack Pack on the couch. Leah Remini sits beside him wrapped in an afghan. A TV drones on in the background, a TV on the TV. “You start seeing the bottom of the container, and you know it’s almost over.” The studio audience laughs—a portrait of civilized life. A portrait of American life, anyway—a life surrounded by little deaths, things that wear out, the objects of mass production. It’s a portrait of a life in which “man is brought home to himself by an irresistible force,” as Alexis de Tocqueville puts it—we don’t deny the bottom of the container, but we do try to hide it somewhere else. Dying is a hot potato. As it does with so much else, Democracy in America predicts that we will open another Snack Pack. It also tells us that that Snack Pack will have a bottom, too.

In 1886, the US government commissioned a series of 7,500 watercolor paintings of every known fruit in the world. Called the Pomological Watercolor Collection, about 65 American artists contributed to this vibrant, colorful, and incredibly detailed body of work, which even today feels much more significant than it does ornamental. But none of that began until about 70 years after the introduction of ‘pomology’ into the world, a word that means—now, as it did then—the science of growing fruit. As the United States’ farmers and government worked together to set up the orchards which would facilitate its emerging fruit markets, they needed a term to identify exactly what it was they were doing. Farmers who engaged in pomology had to be able to talk about it—both with one another, so that they could trade industry secrets, and with the government, so that they could report back on progress. Both ways of talking about it meant making more money. But whether it was you or someone else who was using the word, what gave ‘pomology’ its meaning was the context in which it was being used. 
     “Do you know what a mart is?” Milo Minderbinder, the impossible mess officer, asks the main character Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
     “It’s a place where you buy things, isn’t it?”
     “And sell things,” corrected Milo.
     “And sell things.”
     “All my life I’ve wanted a mart. You can do lots of things if you’ve got a mart. But you’ve got to have a mart.”
     Heller describes Milo as having an “unfortunate” mustache, and “disunited eyes”, which never settle on any one thing at a time. “Milo could see more things that most people, but he could see none of them too distinctly.” Early on in the book, Milo gets a letter ordering him to spare no expense, to give Yossarian as much of the mess hall’s fruit as he asks for, because Yossarian has a liver condition keeping him out of combat. Yossarian’s liver condition is that he doesn’t have a liver condition. But it looks a whole lot like he does, and that’s the only thing keeping him out of combat. It’s a condition that “isn’t easy to come by,” he explains, “and that’s why I never eat any fruit.” It turns out that Yossarian’s just been giving it all to his buddies. 
     Milo doesn’t understand:
     “I have to give you as much as you ask for. Why, the letter doesn’t even say you have to eat all of it yourself.”
     “And it’s a good thing it doesn’t,” Yossarian told him, “because I never eat any of it.”
     At first confused, and then horrified, Milo quickly decides that he should be relieved instead. After all, it means Yossarian is the most trustworthy person he knows—“anyone who would not steal from the country he loved would not steal from anybody.” Since it’s been authorized by Doc Daneeka, Milo reasons, Yossarian’s not technically stealing the mess hall’s fruit. And once it’s Yossarian’s fruit, he can do whatever he likes with it, even if that means giving it away to be sold on the black market. Milo realizes that he could use a few favors himself, and it’s not long before he’s in Germany, fighting on both sides of the second World War. 
     Just like ‘pomology’ offered a language for organizing fruit-growing ideas into a widely-recognized science, the watercolors of the Pomological Watercolor Collection visually represented the mastery we felt we’d developed over the fruit that grew all around us. That we could recreate it meant we’d seen it, had it, experienced it. Through their constellation of beautiful shapes and colors, the watercolors showed us how the fruit looked, how it could be taken apart, how it would decompose. But by also converting an encyclopedic amount of information into the visual format of writing, and then integrating that writing into a painting, the watercolors sought to bridge the gap between ideas—the things inside the mind—and objects—the things inside the world. The Collection was an anxious attempt to capture, in a single moment, the very existence of every fruit being grown, purveyed, bought or sold at any one time. It was trying to get a look at the real picture, to take inventory of the things we put inside ourselves.
     Eating can be a gateway drug. Having eaten is to have aligned things in both worlds, the internal world and the external one. Everything is to be economized in a way that’s considered satisfactory. If we’re “peckish”, we “snack”; if we’re “starving”, we “feast”; if it’s a holiday, we gorge ourselves. In any case, we’re told that context is required about the eating, a standard must be referenced, excuses must be made. Eating develops connections that didn’t exist before between things, moments, ingredients that certainly did. A permanent transformation occurs. But we’re never satisfied with the fullness of yesterday’s meal once we’re hungry again. 

The American manner of eating in this way is akin to the colonizer’s need to recontextualize everything within themselves. This tendency is crystallized in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, in whose “imagination” all kinds of oddities live, co-exist, are penetrated with one another—the imagination is where ideas cut other ideas like a knife. “Having eaten to the full, we must acknowledge our insufficiency since we have not annihilated all food,” he says in Spring and All, which I’m reading at a bar. “However we have annihilated all eating : quite plainly we have no appetite.” 
     “What do you think?” an older guy beside me asks. He gestures toward the book. I’m new here, but somehow I can tell he’s a regular.
     “I like it so far,” I say. He nods.
     “It’s a handful. A slow meal. But you’ll be glad you read it.” I’ll never forget that. It’s the imagination that saves us from the banality of bursting ourselves, Williams says. I’ll go on to become a regular at this bar—a container—by the end of 2020—another container. 
     Back in the present, I rummage through the freezer, producing a Ziploc container of ground turkey for the Hamburger Helper I’ve pulled from my pantry. I bought an oversized package of turkey sometime in the last year for $1.99 a pound. I don’t know when it was, but I remember seeing the price on a sign. If only I’d looked at a calendar while I was at it.
     “You were right about the sales on meat,” I text my father. 
     “You can freeze bread, English muffins, and tortillas,” he texts back. He gives me a call.
     “I’ve been eating a lot of Hamburger Helper,” I tell him over the phone. We’re having a beer together.
     “You can buy the Kroger brand for a third of the price,” he says. “The kids don’t even notice the difference. We tested.” My father is talking about my brother, who’s ten years younger than me, and my sister, who’s two years younger than him. He’s not talking about me, from the other marriage, who—somehow, overnight—isn’t a kid anymore. I can feel beers in the morning.
     When we hang up, I start to make the food I’ve been talking about for the last hour. I look at the anthropomorphized, bleach-white glove on the bright red box—the “Helping Hand”, as he was originally called, or “Lefty” as he was eventually christened. I recognize him as a sign of my childhood, somehow still here after all these years. Lefty’s lived longer than some of my friends. 
     Suddenly I’m considering the weight of my memory. He’s been here all along. Was I thinking about Lefty? Was I thinking about my father? Both had managed to endure somehow, despite all odds. In my early 20s, my father’s declining health was often a topic of concern. In the early 2000s, Hamburger Helper implemented quick decisions to stay ahead of a market on trucker speed. In both cases, the terms of life were renegotiated by exploiting the sign of an animal product—my father went to the Mayo Clinic, Hamburger Helper dropped the word ‘Hamburger’ from its name. But both have exactly the same flaw: neither man nor beast can stop the inevitable.
     “SPEED IS NOT THE NEW NORMAL,” a digital sign screams over a Tennessee state highway. I can no longer be convinced. It’s all speeding up. Now that I’ve arrived in the second quarter-century of my life, my thoughts turn increasingly to the last one, yet I somehow keep generating the next. Karl Ove Knausgaard tells me in a book from 2009 that I’m able to understand everything because I’ve turned it into myself—I can recognize it as instantly as I can my own reflection. “The whole of the physical world,” he says in My Struggle: Book One, “has been incorporated into the immense imaginary realm.” And he’s right: existence has closed in on itself. Because of virtuality—that reality which the ‘real’ world defines by rejecting itself—I can close my eyes and conjure up the faces of people who I’ve never met, who I’ve seen on-screen—which means I can also dream infinite faces when I close my eyes in the other direction. When I think about the face of Lefty, he appears out of nowhere, my memory serving as his only medium. 
     The peculiar thing about Lefty’s eternality is that it was developed in a marketing room. After deconstructing their relationship with the world, if people wanted to keep selling their food, they had to deconstruct their relationship with their own bodies. People made the decision to separate the left hand from the cooking process—a process which people also invented—and then gave it back its identity, now marked forever by its status as an icon. Lefty was one of the first celebrity chefs. But unlike my left hand, which plays an instrumental role in my cooking, Lefty only ever serves, can never be served. Lefty himself never eats Hamburger Helper. And also unlike a hand, Lefty has two eyes just like I do, peering at me here inside my kitchen just like my father used to. A human hand can’t do that. But this isn’t a human hand, it’s Lefty, and he really does have eyes—can you imagine him without them? I seem to have inherited him from my father and stashed him away in my cupboard, just like the parts of myself I’d rather forget. Am I what I eat yet? Have I been brought home to myself?

“Dad wants to know why this was in the laundry room closet,” says Denise, a character in the Jonathan Franzen novel The Corrections, confronting her mother about a check made out to her rapidly deteriorating father. Denise rifles through the closet in the basement, tossing out the “Neolithic cans of hearts of palm and baby shrimps,” “the turbid black liter of Romanian wine whose cork had rotted”. Denise tears out the “quart glass bottle of Vess Diet Cola that had turned the color of plasma” and the “jar of brandied kumquats that was now a fantasia of rock candy and amorphous brown gunk.” Denise extracts every object as though it were an infection from a gaping wound. But each one is wholly recognizable in the text, existing for us as a hyper-specific image which we conjure up at or against our will. Like Denise, we know our food. Denise just knows it a little better—she’s the former manager of a New American restaurant in Manhattan. But as she tries to reassemble one of her esteemed dishes on her mother’s home-grade Kenmore, she remembers suddenly that food is never quite what you think it is. “You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food,” Franzen tells us that she’s thinking, “and how much home there was in homemade.”
     On August 4th, 2020, mass media did it again. This time it was a show called What’s it Worth? Hosted by Jeff Foxworthy—himself a relic of a celebrity class now suspended in time, as though “uploaded” into the oughts—the show was about the secret treasures that lurk within our homes, how much we could sell them for if we had to. It was a painkiller for a depleted American audience. On September 1st, the ninth episode of What’s It Worth? featured the original Lefty muppet from the Hamburger Helper commercials of the 70s and 80s. It was shown from inside the home of the Amazing Azens, who were also shown inside of it. It was the moment the Azens had been waiting for: they were seen on national television, watching Lefty’s authenticity get verified, then watching Lefty get appraised by a professional auctioneer. Whether or not they cashed in, the Amazing Azens had let everyone know that they’d put a price on the Helping Hand. The ephemeral quality of the knick-knack was made concrete in a pop media spectacle—and Jeff Foxworthy was the one showing it to us. If you’re lucky, you might be a redneck, even after all these years.
     “Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public,” says Jean Baudrillard in America, his book about America, “for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other’s food.” Keith Ferrazzi, on the other hand, author of Never Eat Alone, tells us to “[i]dentify the people in your industries who always seem to be out in front,” and then to “[t]ake them to lunch. Read their newsletters. In fact, read everything you can.” In both cases, for very different reasons, we’re told that we must eat in order to belong. It’s a matter of consuming ourselves in our food, in our information, in our work. Meanwhile, I brown the turkey. 
     In 1979, veterans of camp Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell created a short film called “Attack of the Helping Hand”. The scene is simple: a young woman, alone in a dark home, pulls a box of Hamburger Helper from her cupboard. In the short film, just like on TV, Lefty appears. 
     “Hi! I’m Hamburger Helper’s Helping Hand, here to help you out with your meal!” 
     “You’re cute!” laughs one young, patient, Linda Quiroz. Suddenly, she’s defending herself from the left-hand glove clutching at her pearls. She tries drowning him in the sink, and when that doesn’t work, she leaves the kitchen instead. 
     A gloved left hand grabs her by the shoulder in a pitch-black corridor—but as she twirls around, throwing a human body to the floor, we see that it’s only the Milkman.
     “Jesus Murphy, lady!” the Milkman cries. “You must have rocks in your gourd or some damn thing!”

Despite the fact that no explicit rationale is presented, we’re led to believe that this is the home of an unseen nuclear family. Lefty certainly represents an intrusion of that home, as he assaults the woman in the kitchen of the very lifestyle he advertises. Representing the second intrusion, however, is the Milkman from decades before, who somehow still seems to have more in common with the woman than Lefty does.
     The woman breathes a deep sigh of relief. The Milkman is only human, after all. Maybe he can take care of that terrible thing lurking around the corner. But just a moment ago, it didn’t matter who he was—the Milkman was as unwelcome as Lefty in the inner dwelling of her home. The Milkman even has the nerve to tell her, “You scared the bejeezus out of me!”
     Among other things, this short horror signals a deep and domineering change in the way that brands were taking hold of American lives in the late 70s. By then, the Milkman was dead—but the Milkman was only the beginning. When the young woman finally throws Lefty through a food processor, the Pillsbury DoughBoy springs to life right in his place. These things are inside the home now, they’re connected to the things we put inside our bodies, and it feels too late to escape.
     I pull the empty box of Hamburger Helper from the trash can so that I can read the instructions on the back:

  1. BROWN. Brown beef in 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat 6-7 minutes, breaking up and stirring. Drain; return cooked beef to skillet.

  2. STIR. Stir in hot water, milk, Sauce Mix and Pasta. Heat to boiling.

  3. SIMMER. Reduce heat. Cover; simmer about 12 minutes, stirring occasionally, until pasta is tender. If necessary, uncover and cook, while stirring, an additional 1 to 3 minutes to desired consistency.

  4. ADD YOUR OWN TWIST! Add some zip and zest; stir in chopped dill pickles and shredded Cheddar cheese just before serving. Serve with hot sauce.

     I was enamored by the idea of adding in Cheddar cheese, and the dill pickles were a kind of alluring oddity. But I didn’t have either of those onhand. Should I drive back to the store? Should Hamburger Helper cost as much as a meal made from scratch?
     “People face trade-offs,” Greg Mankiew lists as the first principle of economics in Principles of Economics. Greg Mankiew was the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. Some edition of Principles of Economics is perhaps the most seminal text in the American undergraduate Economics 101 classroom. The original edition was published in 1997, and it can still be found for one-third of the price of the newest edition on the internet. Even cheaper still is Principles of Economics, another book altogether, written by a man named Alfred Marshall in 1890.
     17 years after the publication of Marshall’s own economic principles, Henry Adams recalls that, as he had understood it up until now, science itself meant the “economy 
of 
forces.” On the other hand, standing in sheer awe at the combating forces of the World’s Fair in 1900, Adams “
knew
 neither
 the
 formula 
nor
 the 
forces.” Where the eager drive toward scientific understanding had seemed to root out the very question of the unknown, it had also made the understanding itself impenetrable—every discernable quality of the human experience had already been raised to the level of the understanding. Now people did science experiments on science experiments, created energy out of energy. What happened when you stopped being able to tell what identified this thing from that one? What did you eat when you couldn’t sink your teeth into anything? Did you become Yossarian, who couldn’t eat fruit, or did you turn into Milo, who couldn’t eat fruit? 
     In the middle of the twentieth century, home brands like Ball Jars published pocket-sized recipe pamphlets which encouraged consumers to buy their products. The brightly illustrated pamphlets came packed full of tips and opportunities to economize the home, which would, in turn, economize the country. “Can More in ‘44!” reads one slogan. The publications created a vast mythos of gelatin salads, floating islands, jelly braids, hotdishes, bar desserts. One Canadian pamphlet from 1952 called “Family Meals” tells their reader, “You want your children, your husband, and yourself to eat all the foods needed for good health. You must keep within your budget as well. All this takes skill and careful planning.” 

Much like the Adams story, in the recipe pamphlets, there was an implied sense that natural forces could be balanced, as well as a deep anxiety over finding that balance. Also like in the Adams, the individual needed a translator if they wanted to tap into it. Henry Adams had Samuel Langley. The homemaker, in turn, had the home economist. But whereas the distance between Adams and Langley had been the space between their bodies, the distance between the home economist and the homemakers was exactly that of a publication. This allowed the home economist to be fictionalized, as in the case of Edith Adams, so that the person telling us about our homes, and by extension about ourselves, was actually a rotating cast of multiple people, a myriad of personalities represented as one single image. If the homemaker was going to be just like Edith Adams, they had some big shoes to fill.
     Meanwhile, on the other side of the pamphlets, there was the same degree of madness. There were company test kitchens, inside of which there were home economists. And inside the home economists was the immutable drive to put their foodstuffs inside the family home, no longer fragmented by a World War. One day in 1955, inside of a Campbell Soup Company test kitchen, Dorcas Reilly invented the green bean casserole. Formally stylized as Green Bean Casserole, it had come to Reilly suddenly, as though from the heavens above, after countless experiments. 
     Green Bean Casserole contained just three main ingredients: green beans, fried onions, and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup. Invented in 1939, Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup had colloquially taken on the nickname of “Lutheran binder”. It provided the specific agency that congealed church dinner casseroles, which in turn binded countless Midwestern bodies together in fellowship within church walls. Not once in recorded history had it occurred to anyone to invite frozen green beans to the party—until one day, when it finally occurred to Dorcas Reilly. In a 2005 interview with the Alternative Press, exactly one half-century later, Dorcas Reilly famously said that she didn’t remember doing that. “Frozen air...had some scale of measurement, no doubt, if somebody could invent a thermometer adequate to the purpose,” Henry Adams says as he grasps for the index of his own soul. “[B]ut X-rays had played no part whatever in a man’s consciousness, and the atom itself had figured only as a fiction of thought.” It seemed conceptually required that an atom couldn’t be inside the imagination, and yet, somehow, we seemed to have proof that it had been there before. Henry Adams stood in puzzlement at the World’s Fair, his “historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”
     When I dump the Hamburger Helper into four separate bowls, a little bit splashes on the stovetop. I’ll clean that up tomorrow. As for tonight, I’m “meal-prepping”—rationing out exact quantities of the food I’ve prepared in order to satisfy my budget, schedule, and dietary requirements. Three of these bowls will live covered up in the fridge, unless I decide to eat seconds. Seconds, reciprocity, duplicity: I made two Green Bean Casseroles in 2020. One was for Thanksgiving, and one was for Christmas. Both times, I was quarantining away from my family. Both times, I used the recipe on a jug of French’s fried onions instead of a can of Campbell’s soup. And both times, I celebrated with a friend who’d contracted COVID-19 right around the same time as I did. Since his job went remote last March instead of disappearing like mine, the two of us have just endured very different years. But somehow we’ve been preserved, and here we are, awaiting the bottom of another container.

originally published in the spring 2021 issue of This Wonderful World Magazine.

Robbie's Pizza

Robbie’s Pizza was originally published in the Winter 2021 issue of This Wonderful World Magazine.

I’m in New York and everything’s blue. It’s sometime after golden hour, I’ve just landed here, and everything seems the same all over, remade in its own image—everything smells of bad news, of cheap herbs and cheese, of the madness of signs. But there’s a calm in the margins. It’s a different kind of desert here.

You’re only a little bit taller than me, and you always will be. I get off the train and you meet me where you said you would. You live here now, so you wear a black jacket with black boots, but otherwise you look the same as always—there’s just one more New Yorker in the world. You’re taller than me, you’re from New York, and you’re 20 years old. You could be anybody.

We walk back towards the dorm that you hang out in with our high school friends, and we laugh, sometimes at ourselves, though we don’t acknowledge it—how different we are, how we’re mostly friends now because we have been at some point. We share in the secret order of friendship, constantly wondering if we’re running somehow behind the other.

“When you see the guys,” you say as I put my phone, my wallet, my car keys into a bin for the metal detector, “it’s gonna be just like old times.”

The old Black man behind the glass waves us through and we get in the elevator, going up, up, up as though back in time. When I get out, it’s depressing—people live like this, and they want to. It’s called an investment: This, too, could be yours.

“It’s the one all the way in the back and to the right,” you say as we walk towards it, already halfway there, as though you’re restoring the contours of your own mind. You know that you do this from time to time. You’ve told me about it.

“Just wait,” you say. “Nothing’s changed.” Together, we stop in front of the door, but already something’s different. For one thing, you’ve seen what’s behind it, and I still belong fully to this side. You knock on it a second time already, and it cracks open on its own. It had been left unlatched. Did you do that when you left for the station?

“Come in,” a voice calls from inside. “We’re just finishing up.”

“What’d I tell you?” You laugh. “Just like old times.”

Denny’s a pop sensation now, an icon, a business major. He’s putting the final touches on a promotional project with Schraeder. There’s a dollar-store disco ball, some studio monitors, an old cup of ramen noodles. Schraeder smells like pot and looks like money, but none of us can see that yet. Denny opens up his gestures and smiles real wide.

“What’s up?” He asks both of us with a grin.

“Oh man, I’m so excited for this trip,” you laugh, rubbing your hands together. It’s cold outside, and you brought it in with you anyway.

“Yeah, I thought it’d be fun to just chill before everybody comes through tonight,” Denny says, rubbing his hands together now, too. It’s cold outside, it’s cold inside, the whole world a snapshot of New York.

“Who all’s coming?”

“TJ, Jonas, Robbie,” Denny started.

“Any girls?”

“Maybe,” Denny says. “I can see if Rebekah can bring some friends.”

Schraeder tears the headphones from his ears in the other room as though he’s had enough, he can’t stand anymore, but he’s just stoned.

“Yo, while I’m bouncing this I’m gonna run to the store.” 

“Word,” you and Denny say, and then Denny says, “I’m gonna go smoke.”

“Ah, word,” you say again before we pile into the elevator. You, Denny, and I are squeezed together tightly, but Schraeder is big, takes up most of the tiny car. He’s oblivious. The world stops and starts, and sometimes he’s lucky enough to see it. He reeks of marijuana. It’s beautiful, in its way.

“You look like you found yourself,” Denny tells me as we reach the ground floor, and I hold my breath until the door slides open and we all squeeze out of it. I peer at myself in a small window that adorns a secret door as we walk outside. I look like I’m visiting New York. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. 

“Aight, I’ll be back in a few,” Schraeder says recklessly as he hoists the headphones back onto his ears and marches onward. The bodega run, that most blessed sacrament. 

“Word,” Denny says. He takes a cigarette from the pristine pack he brought down with him and flips it into his mouth.

“Hey, can I get one of those?” You ask him excitedly. You’re fiending.

“Dude, how do you never have cigarettes?” Denny laughs. “You smoke more than I do.” It’s the same conversation every time I see you both in the same place. He fingers around the inside of the cardboard and lures one out, hands it off to you, and the two of you take turns fumbling with the lighter, your hands shaking. You’re both underdressed.

“I just buy loosies,” you say between puffs, providing pauses for words to materialize themselves in. It’s a gamble, but you know the risks. “I’m trying to quit.” You pause again. “Oh yeah,” you finally turn to me, “if you take any pictures of me smoking, just don’t tag me. My mom doesn’t know.”

“Your mom’s friends with all of us on Facebook,” I laugh, now rubbing my hands together, too. I’ve bought into the ritual, 15 stories down—as above, so below.

“Yeah, just tell us not to take pictures,” Denny laughs, and then he shivers. He stands on his tiptoes atop the brick perimeter of the building’s bad shrubbery. He smokes, exhales, takes a deep breath. You do the same, like a race to the bottom, an endlessly addictive call-and-response. I don’t smoke. I’m 20 years old, I’m in New York, I’m a little bit shorter than both of you. My whole life’s ahead of me, the world my oyster. 

“I’m so excited about this trip,” you repeat.

“I thought you quit,” someone suddenly says behind Denny.

“Robbie!” A grin breaks across my face like hot water boiling over. Finally, someone dressed for the weather. Robbie gives me a hug and asks, “Are you going to ask me if I got new glasses?” The joke is that I didn’t.

“We were taking a break from a song,” Denny says. He looks at the cigarette before casting it down. “I’m gonna quit after this project’s over.”

A wry smile begins to spread over Robbie’s face, slowly hijacking all of his features, until finally he’s in a full-blown smirk. “I don’t care if you smoke or not.” Robbie holds up a camera to take a picture of you without looking at you. It’s an old film camera, wrapped around his neck. I haven’t seen this one before. You look from Robbie to me, then back to Denny. There’s a permanent smile etched into your face. You were smiling when God made you.

Schraeder returns to the dorm after us and disappears into his room with an Arizona iced tea and a hot sandwich that smells like vomit.

“They sell those everywhere here,” Denny says. He cuts through the group, lowering his eyes on me, as though he’s letting me in on a magnanimous secret, as though this information belongs to me alone.

“They have those at home, too,” I say about the tea. Denny was talking about the sandwich.

“Man, how’ve you been?” You ask Robbie. “I think it’s been as long since I’ve seen Robbie as you.” You look at me with a goofy grin, then you look back at him. This world is so big, we might never grow into it.

“I’ve been good,” Robbie says in his mellow way. “Working on music,” he says, and he means it. Asking anything more of Robbie feels like a shakedown. He’s a natural presence. It becomes too easy to forget he doesn’t even live here—every time you see him, he’s always just gotten off a four-hour train ride from Boston. He’s got a life there, a real job, a girlfriend.

Suddenly the door flings open and people spill across its threshold in an intoxicated jumble—a short, lanky blond man wearing a secondhand peacoat carries a tall, ruby-lipped young woman in one arm and leads a lace-ruffled young woman in the other. One laughs, then another one, and then finally another one, so that the entire spectacle is doing its best just to keep up with itself.

“What’s up, K,” Denny murmurs beneath the racket. He shoots a glance to those of us who don’t know what’s going on—all of us, we realize at the same time—and then nods, as if to say, Give it a second. Denny lets us all in at once. K and the girls stumble into one of the bedrooms attached to the foyer, and the door slams shut. When one opens, one closes.

“He doesn’t really speak English,” Denny says. Denny pulls the cork from a half-empty bottle of wine and takes a sip, then offers it to Robbie and me. You take it from him and guzzle down at least a glass like you’re doing shots. There’s a YouTube video playing on somebody’s laptop.

“Well he smells like shit,” you say, and then you croak. You’re drunk already—it doesn’t take much—but you’re right. The distinct smell of body odor lingers in the air behind him. 

“We don’t know much yet,” Denny says. “He just showed up this semester.” We all look into K’s bedroom through the gap in the door frame, but we can’t see inside. We think about getting closer when suddenly it swings open and the women burst into the foyer. They look back into K’s room as he struts out of it. You, me, Denny, and Robbie all look at each other. The three of them speak French for a little bit. 

“Can somebody take our picture?” K suddenly asks in a thick accent, sticks out his phone.

“I’ll take your picture.” I take the phone—they’ve got better cameras up here—and K kisses the first girl on the lips, then the second. Laughter is a messy thing. They both run out the door, as though they’d been waiting for this moment all night, and all of us watch as K finally pulls a chair from beneath the table and collapses into it, his hair a tousled field of straw, a stupid grin lathered on both of his cheeks like it’s made out of butter.

“French girls.” 

Denny shoots another glance in our direction. This is Denny’s language, language which speaks of language. It’s only real when he lets you know it is, or else if he doesn’t.

K asks if he might have some of the wine. Denny passes the bottle. I’m not drinking, Robbie’s not drinking, you’re already close to the edge.

“We’re gonna have to go get more,” Denny says to K. He looks at Robbie and me.

“I’ll drink if you do,” Robbie tells me, bracing his camera with both hands. He looks down into it as though he’s just used it to take a mental image. “It’s a special occasion.”

“We can get that halal I was telling you about, too,” Denny tells us, then pivots, “How’s the wine, K?”

“Do you want my real opinion?” K mutters back hazily, resting the bottle on the table. K cocks a grin, looks at me, mouths, “Utter shit.” He’s pulled one over on everybody. 

“Did you text Rebekah?” You ask Denny. Your hair is messy from running your hands through it, your eyes are glassy, your face is flushed—you’re warming up. 

“She said she got drunk at brunch,” Denny laughs. The conversation’s over now, he makes it that way. “We going?”

It’s even colder outside now. First Denny has to get money from the ATM, and we all pile into the little glass booth with him. We’re doing the same thing that homeless people do, but they won’t kick us out. You, me, Robbie, Denny, and K. Schraeder came with us this time, too. 

“Weak ass crew!” somebody yells as they go past. They bang on the glass. You laugh. You always laugh first. You laughed at God when he was making you. We all look at ourselves with the same critical eye, thinking how different we are from one another, and then we laugh. We laugh loud in the little glass booth, and then we laugh loud outside of it. We’re not even a crew.

We walk towards the liquor store in a line—it’s easier that way—and K tells Robbie and me that he’s 27, a French language student, just here for the semester. He looks like David Spade from “Just Shoot Me,” except in a fedora, and Robbie tells him that. You wouldn’t think that K cared, except that he knows exactly what Robbie’s talking about. He gives us a dazed grin. He’s drunk. I would be, too, if it were my third degree.

You walk up ahead of us with Denny and Schraeder. “I love this city,” you say over and over again. We finally get to the liquor store, but through the window it looks like it’s being held up. Some people inside peer at us with terror in their eyes as they motion for us to go away. 

“I think we should go to another one,” Denny says. “I know another one.”

“Can we get some food?” You ask. 

“We’re gonna get halal, dude,” Denny says candidly. We’re all wondering whether it was a robbery.

“Is that Marcel?” I shout suddenly as Marcel walks past us in the opposite direction. Everybody looks at me, even the people on the other side of the street. None of you know Marcel, but you all seem excited for me as he takes out one of his earphones. I’m smiling at Marcel, and Marcel smiles at me. “How long are you in the city?” He asks me. 

We stop and get dollar pizza. You don’t want to wait in front of one of the gyro carts with an empty stomach, and you drop a slice of it on the sidewalk. You pick it up and eat it. “If I’m gonna do it, I’d rather do it while I’m drunk,” you say, as though if you don’t do it now, someone might make you later. We all stand around and watch you, like we’re watching something at the zoo, like we’re watching one another watch you. 

The pizzeria sign is a big full moon cut into 8 slices like a pizza pie. In the middle, all it says is “Robbie’s Pizza.” 

“You think you can get a picture of me in front of this sign?” Robbie asks, giving me the camera. I look through the viewfinder. Robbie smiles subtly as I take the picture and the flash goes off. People walk in and out of it. The film rolls itself back. Somewhere in the world, there’s a picture of Robbie in front of a sign that says “Robbie’s Pizza” where there wasn’t before. 

“Two Brothers is better,” you say. The madness of signs.

repetition V

“Then what gives the objects of knowledge their truth and the mind the power of knowing is the Form of the Good. It is the cause of knowledge and truth, and you will be right to think of it as being itself known, and yet as being something other than, and even higher than, knowledge and truth. And just as it was right to think of light and sight as being like the sun, but wrong to think of them as being the sun itself, so here again it is right to think of knowledge and truth as being like the Good, but wrong to think of either of them as being the Good, which must be given a still higher place of honor.”

In Plato’s Republic, the Good illuminates both Truth and Knowledge, so that not only can Truth come to be known, but Knowledge can come to resonate as true. Yet this also makes the Good the illumination by which Truth is not Knowledge and Knowledge is not Truth. By participating in the Good, Truth, Knowledge, and myself—to the extent that human beings have a form—raise it to a universal which cannot be synthesized as a moment within existence. The Good exists only abstractly in the ‘out there’, where it belongs and which is its home. 

Conceptually, Christ’s emergence into the world as both fully God and fully man bankrupts the categorical distinction between the two. It ruptures our knowledge of what’s true, and it also fragments the knowable quality of truth. But by doing so, it serves as a connection or a point of reference between them, preserving both categories in the interim. It changes the way that we understand ourselves or relate to ourselves as human beings, as now being somehow fundamentally related to or relatable with God, even if we choose to believe that we’re not. It causes us to forge a sense of ourselves as having the capacity for spirituality through God’s representation as man, man’s representation as God, and the material representation of this relationship to itself through historical procession. 

John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” 

God exists both as and through the Word which says that God exists, and God is said to exist both as and through the Word which says it. God exists with the Word, the Word exists with God, and they have coexisted since early on—since the beginning, in fact, since before time itself had been spoken into existence to judge the distinction between the two. All meaning, all distinctions, all sense, therefore, is contingent upon the spokenness or expression by which we are able to identify it. Existence exists, and in its existence, it repeats itself in the existing subject for whom it has existed.

Existence is its own repetition, is the manufacturing of its own meaning, so that, as Adorno puts it, “Reality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by its faithful duplication.” Existence is the divergence of unity into parts, the chasm which ruptures between them emerging as its own presence, as the spell which reality casts. Christ, the Word, is God as discernible form, or that form in which God’s formlessness has formed itself. Jean-Luc Nancy tells us that all of existence is perpetual creation, is “the delight of consciousness in its own rebirth.” All of existence is the telling of a joke, the formation of connections between qualities which aren’t thought to go together—at least not yet. Existence is derivative genesis, existence is radiance.

Hebrews 1:3: “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.”

Revelation 1:12-13: “And I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone like a son of man, dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest.”

There’s a golden radiance which I see, a spell which is cast, which allows me now to see the lampstand—the lampstand, that structure through which the oil has manifested as the very radiance that illuminates the lampstand. The oil requires my participation in its materialization; the radiance requires my participation in its representation; the structure of the lampstand requires my participation in its identification.

The golden radiance by which I see the lampstand, and as which the oil is manifest, is a representation unto me, and again within me to myself when I realize it as an experience. The structure of the lampstand presents the radiance by which it is seen; the oil, which I put into the structure, is transmuted into the radiance by which I see it; and radiance appears to me as the illumination of the lampstand, which I oil as necessary. 

The lampstands can be walked among, as Christ does in Revelation 1, and each is experienced differently—each is in relation to ourselves, constituted in relation to the others. They, like us, can also be removed. (Rev. 2:5) As I see the radiance of each lampstand, so also I see the Christ within and among them.

Plato’s Good, on the other hand, cannot be walked among or removed, because it can’t be experienced in any way other than in its totality, which itself cannot be experienced. But neither can the Good instead be said to dwell within us—it must first imbibe itself from our vision of Truth and Knowledge. The Ancient Greek manner of knowing and understanding of truth exist in their singularity, which makes their representation an impossibility; conversely, the manners of knowing and understandings of truth forged by Christ’s existence are representational, which makes their singularity untenable. In either one, there is always something left over.

repetition IV

when we have an idea, we first consider it a complete thing because of its ability to be identified. it’s a thing which exists, it’s a thing which is finished, and therefore it’s a thing which is other than myself, which is not finished. in a narrative sense, we position ourselves after it—the self which has identified the idea as other than itself is a self which already contains the idea within itself, so that it can declare: “i have an idea”.

to say the same thing: when we have an idea, we identify it because it can be identified.

an idea comes from within, and yet it’s a part of me that’s not me. it seems to suggest that there’s a part of myself that i don’t have access to. but how did it get there? why is this shadow, this ghost, this representation of myself haunting me?

what is a haunting? it is an internal misalignment, or a rupture within, so that not only can we say, “that man [he/subject] is haunted,” but also, “that house [it/object] is haunted.” it seems to come from within us, to the extent that we understand ourselves as being constituted in part by spirit, and therefore capable of being haunted. but it also seems to exist inside of contexts or structures within which we as spiritual selves aesthetically qualify an instance of spirit as being a haunted one—the haunting always happens inside the house, inside the cornfield, inside the forest, for example.

what we fear most about the haunting is above all that part of our own selves which threatens to succumb to the haunting represented through spirit, which is also in our own selves, before our very eyes. there’s a part of the ghost inside us all.

repetition III

i think. i am thinking. i am having an idea. i have had an idea. “i have an idea,” i declare to the world, and as it was in me, so i am now in the world among it.

whenever we have an idea, we first consider it to be complete because of its very ability to be identified: it’s a thing which exists, it’s a thing which is finished, and therefore it’s a thing which is other than myself, which is not finished. in a narrative sense, we position ourselves after it—the self which has identified the idea as other than itself is a self which already contains it within itself. but how did it get there?

whenever we say, “i have an idea,” what we’re really saying is that the idea has ended, and therefore that i persist. we say that we understand ourselves as being in a relation with ideas. but being oriented towards existence in this way means that the idea is that to which the self is immediately related, that towards which it is immediately oriented, and that through which it is immediately understood. it means that we can’t exist without also understanding ourselves as a story—the story of the unfolding of the ideal, which we present to ourselves as snapshots in ideas.

but it also means that whenever we think, speak, or act, whenever we dream, whenever we live, we’re always doing so in terms of something else—we’re always doing so in terms of the idea. we’d probably already be at the ideal’s doorstep if only all these ideas would get off our back. experience becomes experience of ourselves—as though we were observing ourselves captured in an image—from the lofty, all-seeing vantage point of the ideal. in this mode of consciousness, we understand ourselves only aesthetically.

søren kierkegaard, in his 1843 work “repetition”, seems to suggest that the very ability of the ideal to be thought as an idea is also the reason why it can be so easily deconstructed. understood as a completed idea, the ideal is a set of ideas which have been constituted with the ideal as their basis—it’s an idea about nothing but its own content. to the extent that the ideal is so bankrupt of context, it’s also bankrupt of applicability—the idea that ideas are things we have is so concrete that it becomes abstract.

what it does invariably seem to mean is that, in understanding ourselves as ideas qualified by the ideal, we become a completed story. in the grand scheme of things, we’re already dead. yet we’re painfully aware that we need to keep a clean nose, need to work, need, above all, to move. if we can, we’d like to enjoy some of that while we’re doing it. we’re required to re-evaluate how we’re oriented toward the world; we need fresh eyes, a new way of looking at things.

where do we start? all we can say for certain is that there’s actuality. there’s stuff.

stuff is different than the form which contains the content, or the idea which is contained in the material. in reality, separating one from the other is impossible. it’s just stuff. when we have the concrete experience of love, for example, we have it concurrently with the idea of love by which we identify it and to which we compare it. it’s an idea we’ve received from books, from movies, even from our own experiences as we represent them to ourselves. what happened last time? the scene rolls back, we let the feelings wash over us, we bask in the poignant, in the radiant, in the truth, the warmth, the frigidity. we’ve identified the idea with the experience.

the idea of love tells us what love is, what love does, how it feels. by allowing the experience of love to draw its life from the idea, we allow it to draw its life from itself. we’ve constituted it on itself as its own standard, as completed. we’ve ended love, this love, which once made us so happy, this love which has now grown old, which has long outlived its purpose, which we mourn like the passing of a dear and lifelong friend.

repetition, kierkegaard suggests, restores our ability to experience the world, rather than to experience ourselves in it as though in portraits. it begins with actuality, which already contains the experiencing subject within it. to repeat is to posit that which is repeated, but also to mark it as something new in the repetition. actuality both is and has been, actuality is both idea and material, actuality is both today and tomorrow—the distinction becomes resolved in the generative process of repetition. the subject both maintains the embrace of aesthetic beauty and answers the demands of ethical commitment; their love never grows old.

in this way, repetition is akin to ancient greek recollection, which claims that all knowledge is a kind of remembering. in recollection, there’s order, and there’s the absence of order—what is has been lost. recollection is the process which resolves the tension between them. moving backwards restoratively, it moves in the opposite direction of repetition. repetition is its own genesis, repetition creates. repetition is busy gaining the whole world; recollection has already lost it.

On Hauntings

What is a haunting? It is an internal misalignment, or a rupture within, so that not only can we say, “That man [he/subject] is haunted,” but also, “That house [it/object] is haunted.” It seems to come from within spirit, as spirit is understood—that is to say, as man understands himself as spirit—but it also seems to exist inside contexts or structures within which an aesthetic qualification of the spiritual as haunted occurs—houses, cornfields, forests. A haunting signifies a symbolic instability, or a snag in the order within which man has understood himself as spirit. There’s motion in the haunted. “A spirit, an apparition, is a reproduction,” writes Søren Kierkegaard in part I of his book Either/Or. “This is the secret implicit in the coming again” (113, Hong & Hong). There’s a breakdown of meaning in spirit’s ‘unfinished business’, in that which is left over by that which is complete—or, to say the same thing, in the haunting, the unfinished becomes the distinctive character of the finished.

This very symbolic instability is also the reason for the double-meaning of the word ‘haunted’. To the extent that it takes part in a haunting, the haunted belongs primarily to the realm of consciousness. But the haunted also belongs to that site of the haunting within which consciousness locates itself, and which consciousness therefore synthesizes as an aesthetic quality in a subjective moment. A haunting requires spirit’s being there; but it also requires that spirit be within a sort of dwelling. There is no way to think a haunting as apart from its dwelling place.

In the the Book of John, John the Baptist writes about the Word of God as a sort of dwelling of spirit. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning” (New International Version, John 1:1-2). God is manifest in the world—or can be said to dwell within it—in the Word, or through the Word’s having been spoken. The Word has been with God since the beginning, and therefore through the Word has God spoken all of existence: “Through [the Word] all things were made; without [the Word] nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:4). Where there is spirit, spirit experiences it as representation. Yet spirit and spokenness have been linked since before the creation of time, and therefore before a distinction was ever made between them. There is no difference between the spirit that speaks and the spirit that is spoken.

The collapsed relationship between spirit and spokenness, between God and the Word, is again reflected in the Gospel by the relationship between Christ and John the Baptist. Christ, whose arrival John the Baptist anticipates, has symbolically “surpassed” John by His having come before him; and John, who “make[s] the path straight for the Lord”, is rendered symbolically unstable by Christ’s having already come (John 1:23). In other words, the Christ whom John the Baptist formulates himself in terms of is the very Christ which erodes John the Baptist’s understanding of himself.

These fleeting, spectral reflections and doubles represent the elusive character of representation itself. Where there is the Word, it is always there in the context of God, who is spoken in and by it; where John is the Baptist, John is always the Baptist in the context of Christ, in terms of whom John is the Baptist; and where language is understood, it is always understood in the context of consciousness, which understands it as that through which it understands itself.

In understanding itself as a reproduction, then, spirit marks itself as different wherever it understands itself. This is what gives spirit its narrative structure, or the existential framework within which it understands itself. Where spirit understands itself, it has always already done so in a relation; it has always already reflected; and it has always already recognized its placement within its own unfinishedness. This applies not only to spirit’s recognition of its abstract form as a concept, or to its concrete form as that ghost which it encounters, but also to that same spirit which it runs into, that same spirit by and which it constitutes itself. When we say that “That man is haunted by something,” we are really indicating the tension between the unified whole which he understands himself to be and the unfinished symbolic relation which he has discovered within himself.

It’s in this very irreducibility that the haunted dwells, the same experience of which cannot be had twice, because spirit has already represented it to itself as within itself. It’s what makes the question of the haunting a haunted one; as spirit dwells within the world, the unfinished dwells within us—just as we dwell within the house which is storied to have a dark, unfinished past. Spirit exists that it may finally be freed of its spokenness, that what is experienced may be negated, but never forgotten: every soul shall be set free, all business shall be finished, each sin shall be forgiven.

pygmalion

henry higgins kicks over the stupid milk crate he usually sits on for his smoke breaks. “i hate this stupid job,” henry higgins says, but he knows all his luck's run out, slipped through his fingers like stone into sand. henry higgins rights the milk crate and materializes a pack of cigarettes from his deli uniform. henry higgins looks at a statue of hamlet at the university across the street. that damned statue. he can't stand it. he thinks about it when he shaves the cold cuts. hamlet. what the hell ever happened? henry higgins takes the first long drag from his cigarette. shit’s gone downhill in a hurry.