Quiddity Arrives at Midnight
Sometimes a person dies and all the air goes out of your lungs and the room and the world. Other times the news hits and it’s like you already knew – that the day had been coming and it was just (as they say) a matter of time. What is not a matter of time, though? it strikes me to ask. All matters eventually reduce to a matter of time. But this isn’t about watches, minutes, and hours, or amor fati.
It is about a drunk man, hired to take pictures of young boys who play baseball in primary-colored uniforms purchased by local business. I did not know this man well, but enough to recognize him on sight. Eventually. And I heard about the incident years ago when he was unable to stand still long enough to look through the viewfinder of his camera.
This is about the evaporation of embarrassment and the onset of premature spoliation. About the dialing back of expectations until getting out of bed in the morning to consume enough booze to make the walk to the liquor store to buy enough booze to get you through the day and still have enough the next morning to do it all over again embodies aspiration itself. The delamination of self is no easy thing to countenance.
Suffice it to say that there exists a certain kind of conspiracy with the universe where self-destruction isn’t so much a byproduct of the underlying scheme, as its animating engine. And the spectacle of public drunkenness – of holy fools who are not yet emancipated from their unholy demons – is always more than a trace element of that conspiracy.
I admit to not knowing what to do with obituaries that read: the end was near, and now it’s come. But I know a sad clown when I see one. Not to get all French modernist on you (e.g. "The stones striking the wooden coffin made that awesome sound which seems to us the reverberation of eternity."), but it should not be controversial to recognize that a pauper’s grave is but one instance of the way in which spiraling down becomes emptying out. Nihil magis cavendum est senectute. Or something like that.