Civilization falls

 

I strip. I get in the shower, normally after I’ve left the hot water run. Then I wash with the various gels and shampoos. A friend of mine, a German, once told me that she always turned the shower to cold for a final minute, since this coating of cold was good for the skin. Myself, I’m just not that Lutheran. I sometimes stand around, in our shower, while the hot water beats down on my back, and try to recollect the fragments of the plans that I devised yesterday for today, and sometime this actually works and other times, most times, I find myself thinking about something else: the news, a story I am working on, the words to a song that got caught in my ear from going to the grocery store yesterday and hearing it over the P.A. system, all the miscellania. I sometimes do think about showering cold, and I think that I would definitely do it if I lived in New Delhi and it was 112 Fahrenheit out but I’m not and I won’t. So I finish up with the hot water and turn it off and emerge to peer at myself in the mirror, and sometimes I see myself and sometimes the mirror is all misted up. The image in the mirror looks back at me, I would like to write, save for the fact that that image and those eyes don’t see. Unless I lend them a persona, unless I am poeticizing. But no, they don’t see, I see me, though, so after wiping off the mist if there is any I proceed to the grooming part, the toothpaste and toothbrush, the deodorant, hair. The last part is brushing my hair, sometimes using a bit of gel, which is something I’ve learned from barbers.

There.

Everything so far has followed the civilizing process. Agriculture is developed, writing systems are invented, the dark ages fall, enlightenment and science are emerging splendidly. And my hair is brushed.
But that is when, looking at myself, I think that this won’t do at all, and pass a hand through my hair and undo the combing.
Aqueducts fall, museums burn, traffic jams, airplane on runways fail to talk off. The civilizing process goes into reverse. Or so this gesture indicates.
In Alain Jouffroy’s essay on the sculptor Germaine Richer, he catches this gesture.
“’When I find a form, I destroy it”. I have seen her comb her hair carefully, and then, unmake her hair in order to make it something for the wind, for life, her policed hair, which in any case will be thrown off by her movements. She gets a jump on time in her work by picking it apart; she wants to become herself and consciously become her own time. All her sculptures are already what they could be in a thousand years, in the measure in which they survive fire and the pressures of inevitable cataclysms.”

That small gesture, that disturbance in the field of the mirror, is not simply an emancipation-let on the granular level, but as well, a form of longer term control. If I can get the jump on disaster (and isn’t disaster always the ambassador of death?) I can live through my death my own way. Hopelessness is my only real hope.

I have a taste for this little gesture, this little attack on closure, in the arts.