… il avait tué
la marionette. – Paul Valery
So often in the past twenty years – the bla bla era
– I imagine myself, a political animal, in the figure of a fly dying at the
base of a window. The fly keeps bumping against that congealed air that 350
million years of evolution had never warned him against. The fly’s experience
of the world, which is, as is well known, a place divided into 360 spaces, each
space radiating a certain glow, and the edge of each space grading into the
edge of the next space save when the edges parted to make a passage just
exactly equal in width to the width of a fly’s body, seems, for magical
reasons, no longer to work. In addition, something seems to be happening in the
back behind the eyes, the load, as the fly would name it, that it always
carries about and that sometimes gets sexually excited. Something seems to be
squeezing the load. Normally, a pressure like this would prompt the fly to
escape, but lately the 360 spaces seem to be liquefying to such a degree that
they no longer scatter to the fly’s wingbeats. This is not good news. And, as
the fly falls over, there flashes through its mind, absurdly, the first line of
an old joke: “waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.”
I am not dying
of pesticide intoxication, exactly, but of that subset called “news
intoxication”. And as the dying fly figured out, there’s no Cold Turkey option.
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