5 July, 2024
Cratylus’ Pinky in 2022
What does it mean to be lying on my bed
and feel nothing belongs to me? The world is…—
Detached? /
/ Simulacrum??
—have we finally reached the place where the movie
I’m watching is more real than reality? The irony: the movie
is The General, from 1926—the movie is silent, is black
and white, is the kind of thing made when morals
were loose and people noticed because reality was still
a thing that existed, a green light’s flashing, if distant.
It is December 2022—here is Pennsylvania—I am Lizzy,
now a poet and a wife. These should be my anchors,
but I could just as easily write: it is April 1865—here is
Washington D.C.—I am Dolley Madison, once a First
Lady, now a painting. Maybe it’s not that things
are less real, it’s that we’re noticing how categories
always have been just that: categories, nothing more,
nothing less. The words that stood for something
have always been ink on a page. The land we stole
to give our noble ideas a home, a real place
we could defend … — In China, people are
waving blank sheets: the thing Kaminsky
said he must write upon over and over, to keep the dead
from waving flags of their surrender. The dead in Urumqi
are still dead, turned to black ash, while white paper
protests catch wind. Over and over. Maybe simulacrum
means this: not that reality ceases to exist,
but reality has always been a place beyond what’s left to say.