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the archive(s):
issue no. 5:
They Are Parts of Him / Daniel Spitzberg
On the long two-lane one-way street, with tall tenement buildings for an eighth of a mile, cars are backed up in standstill traffic. Inevitably, the honking begins close to the back, where they can't see the traffic lights, and sweeps its way to the front, where the drivers just honk out of habit. No rush, really. Just sounds running their natural course. Not here, but where there are large forests and fields, insects do this too when it gets hot and humid. It is an orange-colored afternoon, white shirts and jeans, panting, tanned arms and shoulders. The afternoon sun heats the hoods and the tires, and streets... and the sidewalks.
John is a boy walking along the sidewalk with maps from a National Geographic, imagining the sun setting in the west. The west probably means in Arizona. Maybe in Flagstaff, where they lower the sun each night. He tells himself the sun's desert heat probably turns all the sand to glass.
'You can find bleached cattle skulls all around,' he thinks. 'They would look just like those in O'Keeffe paintings.' He has never seen a real skull, or been out of the city. But he goes to all the museums he wants, where trinkets like skulls are nicely preserved for strangers.
A dozen summers later, John attends City College. At the café far down the block, he works on the occasional order for coffee in the late afternoons. Every so often, he stumbles in to the café with old National Geographics he finds for the shelves. He stumbled in late the day Amelia started working there. She pushed back some of the hair that swept forward at her temple with one hand, and, by way of introduction, meekly offered the other. John promptly spilled his stack of magazines.
With all his pages of imagination, he's constructed a map of countless layers. All the imaginable versions of his world are stitched together with thirsty curiosity, into a useless, hopeless navigation guide. Here's one thing he learned: whales evolved from dogs. Also, dogs evolved from whales. But he's only 20 years old, and this happened millions of years ago, so John tries not to think too hard about it.
In an instructional video about math featuring Donald Duck, the secrets of aesthetics were revealed to him. Chaos and order feed each other; random events increase the chances of survival for some creatures. Tiny swimming beasts in spiral shells mimic the Golden Ratio ad infinitum in their spiral sides, and the blueprints reproduce over and over.
"But this isn't right," he tells Amelia, "how can the fact that a pattern of numbers found in growing sunflowers, in octave scales, in the Parthenon, pry open our eyelids and exhibit perfect design from a perfect series of imperfections?"
This sort of randomly-occurring giddy behaviour makes Amelia remark his Chi is out of balance. Again, John's sense of order is thrown off the edge of his map. As they're going through photos of dogs and whales, skulls and sidewalks, John thinks to himself, 'Oh no, I learned all about Chi and Wu-Wei,' and sure, he's seen it, and felt it, and lived it, but he keeps silent.
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