I.
I don’t know who has passed. But there is a memorial; a velvet image of her standing still in black, framed against the violent waters of the steel Pacific. I have forgiven her lapse in memory. I cannot help it. If the periphery is the only space there is for me, I will take it. Better inside the iron gates of her mind than outside them.
II.
The advent has come and gone; the remains of a new year ribboning into black silk roads. I won’t read into what has not been written. But I will go back to a time when I momentarily donned the feathers of a skeptic; a time before I believed in freedom. Look for a letter: it’ll tell you a future truth in the past. Counterfactuals can change an entire story.
art: allison moore
III.
Emmanuel Levinas once said metaphysics was to die for the invisible.
I wish I could ask him what to do once you’ve given your life over; once you’ve crossed the veil of the phenomenal world. I wish I could ask him what else metaphysics was– is. Could it be a keeping of the heart? An acceptance of the silence of the Other? Possibility dancing in the ballroom of the present? A transfiguration? Could metaphysics be tied up in war? Bound by the logical limits of an imaginary love?
Tell Levinas I am the architect of the terminus: an analytic dark magician conjuring signs, sighs, and sins in the dead of night.
Tell Levinas I am a dreamer in the underworld: paying the price for Lady Philosophy’s strange charm.