A satellite loses altitude, having completed its mission, or simply deciding in the sum of its parts to fail, and we stand on the dirt awaiting its descent. We stand peering up, but what can we do? Step a little to the left, the right? Should we take a boat ride or a hike or a nap? How will this creature of ours come to fall?
At the end of the day, some of us will pick up the pieces and shoot it all back up again.
The only way to build something is, after all, knowing how it falls apart. Clocks were first on my list after Lego towns. One by one, they scattered their parts across my bedroom carpet, unknowing themselves before me. When I moved on to watches, I knew then whole universes lay hidden to behold.
Later, much, there was the rolling and unrolling and rolling of joints. The task took eons, to the chiding of friends, but not until I had unrolled one perfect gift was I able to produce one myself. So it is that I shudder at the numbers it took to find myself unrolled and unknown to myself, again and again, only to be known by another.
It was a practice, this unravelling, merely a gateway to bigger and more complicated undoings; so that as midlife unfolded, mysteries layers deep into my clockwork became more fathomless, more appealing in their muted irresolvabilty. And so it is now that I clink and bang in my shop at pointless little endeavors that reveal in the heart of their pointlessness what may yet be.
