i eat the smallest apple—its ombre lime green into lavender, faded red, and finally maroon—seeds, stem, and all—their sweetness and sourness my first tastes of the day, even now, at the latest morning hour, then try to picture it again:
a blown-out building, mine (or my landlord's): rebar, wooden foundation, electrical wiring, plumbers' pipes: the guts of it exposed after a blast from the hood of my car, just back from the lucky 7 car wash (a surprise gift to myself for lugging the remains of our christmas tree to the mulch yard)—just another one of those catastrophic scenarios that run through my mind when it fixates itself on machines i don't understand—
but the perspective is unreal, calling into question the connection i have long held between my imagination and the visual sense, because if i can conjure language to describe the idea but in doing so am unable to place myself in relation to the corresponding image, it follows that the conjuring is not grounded in a single sense but some combination or something more abstracted, of which shorthand is lacking so i can only call it "a thought"; even so, the only reason that i felt compelled to open this notebook and start writing this letter (though i stumble over its categorization, too, knowing it'll never be sent in the mail but may be instead destined for a life of being read by other people and so can't rightly be called a "journal entry" or "diary" and maybe "essay" is better) was the thinking that ensued—
thinking that, though witnessing a car explode might constitute one of the great catastrophies of a person's life and may result in their bodily injury or even death, assessing the wreckage afterwards could be humblingly beautiful: to see how such incredible energy affects the structures around it: to see into once-hidden compartments, the domestic scenes: clothes scorched to a crisp on half-melted wire hangers, electric oven hanging on the precipice of what's left of the linoleum flooring, the cross-section of floors and ceilings, a framed painting fallen into the atrium; and to compare all this to the untouched houses across the street, power lines swaying in the wind, the serene clouds hanging in the atmosphere; it would be to affirm the notions expressed by the lucky astronauts who first saw the pale blue dot, or carl sagan with his cosmic calendar, or the eames and their powers of ten—precursors writ large and variously—all of which are tied together by a communal picturing of the wreckage from an atomic bomb dropped on new york, moscow, or london—
that the insignificance of our lives is a great blessing—a ticket to a constantly expanding theater of beauty, in which talking amongst the audience members is allowed, even encouraged, and the din of conversation like the sounds of an symphony orchestra tuning, and although it's true that the ticket is only intended for a limited showing and the ushers too busy to guide every attendee to seats with unobstructed views, the play that unfolds before you is so wonderful and varied in its subject matter as to retain your interest, even despite the long running time—
it must be that this is how artists transfigure grief into comedy—imagining a catastrophe while in a receiving state of mind (not hungry, not thirsty, not in need of shelter, willing and able to give themselves a gift and feel as though it were deserved, no matter how meager its value), and leaving ample time for reflection (not to simply see the image as one in a cascading series of meaningless slides of which the viewer is only flipping through to see what's at the end, but to see it as the exact negative of reality, in the likeness of which it was fashioned).