Someday, Maybe

Umarked solitude absorbing time, bloating to become an environment….

–Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture

The monks at Lodeve, in Gascony, sanctified a mouse who had eaten a consecrated wafer.

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

In his reluctance to embrace any sort of tidy resolution he kept spiraling further and further into disorder and confusion. He couldn’t wrap anything up, couldn’t wrap his brain around things.

When he would say of something, ‘That’s too tidy,’ it was intended as a criticism, and signaled that he regarded whatever it was as a failure. Certainly nothing he ever did could be considered too tidy, or even simply tidy. He wrote and imagined himself into tangled messes that he was incapable of finding his way out of, and as a result would drop whatever he was doing –whatever he was in the middle of; he was always in the middle of something– and lurch right into the next tangled mess on his list of proposed tangled messes. Not, of course, that he actually kept any such list; he was not a list-maker.

He did not have a mind that could embrace order. Or perhaps he was just lazy, a creature of chronic sloth that was constantly at war with unmanageable curiosity. He kept thinking he was going to find a way to bring everything together, to integrate all his mess making into something great and coherent.

He kept hoping, kept looking forward to some triumphant day of revelation that was ever receding before him into a more and more indistinct horizon cluttered with spare parts and heaps of fragments, a mirage in which increasingly he was at a loss to pick out a single detail that made sense. It was becoming nothing but a massive and trembling wall of static and vapor.

Something, surely, was out there all the same –his destiny, perhaps– and he kept right on plodding in its direction. He had no idea anymore what he expected to find were he to someday reach something resembling a destination, but there was really nothing left for him now but to hope that one day eventually he would stumble across some sprawling and improbably elegant design, and would recognize it as entirely his own.