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This piece is intended as a “radio play”. For the richest experience, please listen to the audio version.
As reading becomes ever less like reading and ever more like a massively multiplayer online game, many who continue to mistake themselves for readers, who don’t notice they’ve evolved into something new and very different from what that label used to imply, have grown hostile towards any text that does not immediately declare to them what it intends to do. Preferably for them, that declaration will be made in terms so unambiguous that even A.I. will be able to understand it, which will accordingly filter down to them not only those texts they will have no trouble understanding with respect to purpose, but only those texts moreover whose purpose they already know themselves to support. Once this process becomes sufficiently streamlined, the “reading” part may be expected to drop out of the circulatory process altogether, and the descendant of the reader, still called a “reader” only par courtoisie, will remain involved simply as an agent of further circulation of these pseudo-texts through “shares” — though in principle of course even this part of the process may be automated as well.
—Sigrid von Querdurch, “Brief Note on a Troubling Agraphon” (2014)
It’s great to be back here with you, dear readers. I know, I know, I’ve been gone for quite a while! If I recall correctly I haven’t sent you a single word since late August, when I was holed up with Covid at the Radisson Blu in Bucharest. After that, well, let it suffice to say that I really needed some time away, to get my bearings, to figure out what I want to do going forward, both here at The Hinternet and in my life in general. I’ve received regular updates from Hélène Le Goff, and I could not be happier to know that The Hinternet has been in such competent hands during my months of convalescence.
But my, what a beautiful day today, which proclaims as does every day the glory of God through the works of his creation. It is not however every day that features the Sun beaming so proudly, the very emblem and icon of God himself, his principal representative here on Earth, radiating the warmth and light at whose source every rational being knows him to lie — for he is the source of everything. And out in the street below our balcony the autumn leaves are collecting, shed brown and gold from the trees that are themselves as alive as ever, and only passing through the annual cycle that, in accordance with their nature, the Creator arranged for them in his goodness and wisdom. And the dogs on taut leashes are sniffing out invisible familiars from their occult world of smell, and every rational being sees on a day like this that the dogs have their share of reason too, as each of us is enabled to discern, in the dazzling lumen of the morning, the slight emanations of all things.
I descend the elevator and go out into the street and the dogs are still sniffing, the children laughing and struggling to break free, all endimanchés, as their parents drag them to church. I follow them in, not dragged but propelled, as by some human hunger, and by an inborn knowledge of how and where to sate it. And so I cross, alone but together with these good strangers, beneath the stony likeness in bas-relief of the brave St. George slaying the repellent dragon. And the dome above the chancel is painted with golden stars to duplicate those fixed for all time in the celestial vault, and though a mere imitation, a shadow of the world itself, these painted bright bodies are at the same time as great as that world, as they were painted in loving reverence of him who made the heavens. And I genuflect and make the sign of the cross —forehead, diaphragm, left shoulder, then right—, and take my place in my pew among the worshipful. And soon the awaited procession moves down the center aisle with the priest at its tail, and as he passes I see that very same blemish that the immortal Pascal himself feared might have the power to crush a man’s faith altogether: the priest had cut himself shaving! But the wagerer worried in vain, for none ever said that a priest is not human, nor does not bleed.
The service reaches its several crescendi, most gratifyingly when each is invited to extend to all others the peace of Christ, in which gesture you will see such kindness and charity as you would have thought long ago lost from our world; or in the recitation of the “Je confesse à Dieu”, in which I find myself once again getting tripped up and saying “Oui, j’ai vraiment pensé” instead of “Oui, j’ai vraiment péché”, and wondering once again, as I always do, whether these two do not in the end amount to the same thing; or when the greatest mystery known to any of us is demonstrated once more, as predictable as it is miraculous, accident of one substance confused with essence of another, infinitely greater.
Then I come out again, out from underneath the knight with his sword and the flailing viscous serpent at its point, and I see that the clouds have now covered the Sun, casting a pall and announcing that a new part of the day has begun.
One must hurry, of a Sunday, to see to one’s daily provisions before the stores roll down their gates, by some old law or custom, shortly after noon. The fruitier’s wife is already hauling in her crates for the day, as he tries in vain to offload some dented persimmons on passersby, cutting them with a pocketknife downward towards his thumb, almost as if to cut that as well, almost as if this were appetizing. The apples are assorted and mostly over-large: Fuji, Jonah, Granny, Golden, Chanticler, Elstar, Gala, Rubinette, Pirouette. The root vegetables are dirty, like they like them here: the carrots, turnips, parsnips, celeriac, salsify, and beets, all so humble, and just as honest as the working class. The crudites are slug-worn and tired, romaine, rocket, mesclun, oak-leaf, and bib, while the vegetables that may still properly be said to form “heads” repeat themselves either imprecisely, as cauliflower, in the cloudy billows known as their “curds”, or precisely, as Romanesco broccoli, in the infinite recursion of their fractals.
I buy some California almonds, some grape tomatoes on the vine, some lemons and some guariguettes, and I cross the street to the Portuguese fishmongress, who unlike her competitors opens on Sunday to sell the rapidly putrefying remains of the previous day’s catch, hauled in from the North Sea, from the Mediterranean, from the Bay of Biscay. She is saying to someone on the phone: “Você quer as vísceras para quê agora? Tudo bem, mas você vem buscá-las na hora!” She is especially concerned today to showcase her freshwater morsels, the ones she calls écrevisses but I call crawdaddies, still atwitch with the petites perceptions of their fading invertebrate lives; the riverine oysters; and the freaks they call here couteaux, “knives”, those ramen-like white worms encased in a hard, stick-shaped, silicate bark-shell, to be sucked out as an entrée by grotesque French feasters in sinful anticipation of their main dish of tête de veau in its own queer and yellow juices. The fish with proper backbones are by now without their souls, the common carp and catfish and others from the sweet rivers and lakes, but this does not mean they are entirely without vital motion, and you may still expect to see some slight quiver of a tail or anal fin. But the salty ocean fishes are by now perfectly dead, chilled through in their icy display, having been dredged, netted, seine-netted, and trawled, up to 72 hours ago out there, somewhere, in the North Atlantic, the cabillaud, daurade, limande, merlan, bar, and lieu, the splendid salmon in one of its several life-phases, the princely tunny, all flayed and frozen still in the horrified attitude they adopted at the instant of their catching, all displayed in accordance with some European law under both their vulgar name as well as the binomial Latin nomenclature set down by Linnaeus for use among all nations. One sad bottom-dwelling flounder looks as if it would have liked for its wrong-sided eye to have been permitted to migrate more fully towards its destination before this rude interruption. It seems to me I can still hear this flounder’s faint plaint, not angry exactly, but most of all astonished at what must have felt like a betrayal, and wishing to know why its life should have to end in just this way, in such abrupt reversal of the order of things, disappearance of the element it had always moved in, and sudden transit into this greedy vacuum where only greedy creatures thrive, who have no conscious inkling of the cycle of life, as when the mackerel swallows the lanternfish and the marlin the mackerel, in the all-sustaining living water of which we are only congelations, yes, and sieves.