Notes
This is a long digression I wrote at 7:17am Aug 13th for no one in particular but can just as well really only be for you as you’re the only one with any patience for me.
I went to wash my hands and in doing so started the water before pressing down the lever for soap and soaping-my-hands leaving the water running in the process a gesture wasteful and obviously repugnant per the informational videos concerning water usage and waste that one watches in school when they're a child but a gesture that nonetheless goes unpunished and all together unnoticed in the mental drift that always occurs in the act of washing your hands that keeps one's attention furthest from the actual act of washing your hands as if you were to not only would the gesture be exposed but perhaps the whole act itself would come under scrutiny and certain gestures we know can't come under scrutiny without becoming very difficult like walking stairs, positioning one's tongue, and breathing without making one’s hands feel odd and the lathering motions all together unclear yet in this instance the motion of the water flub didn't go unnoticed because after lathering my hands with soap i reflexively made a move to turn on the water in fact turning it back off illuminated backwards the flub of turning it on to start with. In a pause, before starting the water again and proceeding, the flub became apparent and the waste became apparent. maybe the flub indicates that i usually don't make it, that I usually opt to save water and touch the faucet handle with my soapy hand (arguably a different social flub leaving a bit of soap residue on the handle for the next user who I implicitly put below the limiting of my water usage. truthfully the restroom is filled with many of these micro-social-ethical dilemmas like whether one should, in interest of personal and public health, use a paper towel to open the door and turn the sink off or in interest of reduction of towel waste (of which i remember there being a whole ted x talk devoted) one should just face the brunt of the handle with the bareness of hands. Obviously, the foot thing on the bottom of the door is useless and demands a gymnastic comportment of the body not humanly possible). but in the pause, my mind didn't actually go to this mico-ethical-etc.etc. problem at all because why would it? it doesn't matter. who cares? all it went to, and somewhat was ironically exasperated by the pregnant pause, was the economy of motion. the flub was a miscarriage in economy of motion turning the water on then off then on again. In White Noise there's a whole section where the child chastises the father for the way he moves the pitcher from one counter to another just to need to return again for his cup or something. The father is adamant that it doesn't matter at all. How could it matter? how could it be, a few seconds? How could a bungled action of economy of motion so incidentally matter to anyone or any structure of meaning that makes anything mean something? The son insists that these things add up. That this is symptomatic. That in large swaths, hours, days, months, they add up. That when we're talking in scale about a lifetime these must add up. Death is committed, shaving life off without even acknowledging it; without taking even the responsibility of it. In the pause it all opens up. The economy of motion, the economy of gesture, of being there all, of washing my hand, of waking to the bathroom, of walking at all, of sitting, of laying, of being here, of being home, being home again, being home for too long, of being any place for too long, of the radical plasticity of being anywhere for long and never again, of the entirety, of a finite existence suspended acrobatically betwixt a veritable sea of incidental economy of motion, of half started never finished of utterly frivolous and mindless gestures, of it all the whole there in the pause, and the pause there everlasting, water still running, cut it all out cut from top to button from birth to death the frivolous gestures, the bungling of the economy of motion, and take it all up add it on a machine and cut it away trim it from the life like fat and you'll be left with so little, vanishing momentary islands of meaningful motion punctuating a dark sea a black sky. Like how 8 hours in the library equates to 1hr and 20 of concentrated focus so does the whole life like-so. The pause goes on and deepens it, extends it, estranges islands vanishingly far from each other; the waters still running and the soaps started to dry.
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As a story or anecdote or update this means so little and could be necessary because of it.
Maybe this is the pseudo-problem of exclusivity (in the way of why people feel it unequivocally necessary and yet as well seem never quite content with it). Maybe it's an issue of originality. It feels awful to tell stories again to tell them to others. To transplant something you said in the way you said and to make it again to ruin the uniqueness of its original enunciation as nested and held in the moment of and cut it out. make it not what you said to one then and there and in that moment and instead to make it a story you tell. A thing you tell people in a certain way, a thing you pull out in social affairs. This is the gross-ness that comes in telling a story with one there who has already heard it. Don't look at me. I'm sorry I have to do this. But look they’re enjoying it. You don’t want to deprive them of enjoying it. the worst thing someone can really say to your story is half way to say "ohh yes i remember you telling me this one." nothing is more deflationary the original enunciation is, in way of memory, gone for you. I experience this constantly. I can't talk to someone without doing it. It's why the people I talk to most say I'm dementia riddled or if I talk to someone long enough I find myself eventually prefacing everything I do say with "I've said this before but.." or "I know I always say this but..". I feel very bad when this occurs with friends, with love interests, what have you. that they've been crossed over. that I've done something equivocal to grave robbing. tarnishing a relationship after the fact. It instrumentalizes them. it makes them a tool to generate the right reaction that one got before. It feels grotesque. No one really says "i'm sure you tell all the xyz-s that '' unless you say the most egregiously and transparently rehearsed thing. the cartoonish pickup line that unsuccessfully satirizes itself etc. etc. but frankly they should. They'd be right more than wrong.
Maybe this is how it goes. Truthfully, as was said about academics only really reading closely a few books in their life (Althusser if it matters to anyone ever[it really doesn't]), people maybe only say a few things really in their life. Permutated and recycled again and again to the new forms that enter their life. If this is true I'm disgusted. If I had the health of forgetting in a more virulent form I think what I'd like to forget most is the things I've said to people if for no other reason (such as the great embarrassment of having spoken ever) than to be able to say them again without the knowledge that it was recycled to be able to say everything again in originality. I don't actually know if any person has the sort of amnesia where it totally wipes every day and one lives only a life with a mental retention of a waking day (such as i believe was the premise of a My Name is Earl episode) but if it does what a miserable existence of course but also possibly the most virile in way of this health of forgetting. Unaware of his condition, as they are before they're filled in and the trauma of it is made apparent (what a cruel thing to tell someone in the morning but if not then then when!!). Before this is made apparent to them they must be the lightest of the living. What Serres would call "Virginal". All that they went about and said that day would lack the monotony and horror of repetition. Every enunciation of every word. Love, a phrase of sweet affection--if they dared to speak it--would be spoken with a poetic rupture that was originary that was unique and individuated, calling back and referencing none, that was bound entirely unto itself, unto its own most utterance, unto who it was spoken, and from the lips it left contained all upon itself, a self-sufficient bliss that never looks out the window because the thought never even arises.