The Cloud Factory
Consider the philodendron — the one by my bedside, its arm has made contact with a blue jar.
The lid on the jar is suspended above invented space. The clay was baked into shape and now it stays there and its preservation makes preservation possible.
You can put something inside of the jar and place the lid on top and because centimeters were carved out of the brim, the lid will hover and not disturb the empty space below. In fact,
the something inside of the jar will experience a temporary safety
from a significant chunk of the material world.
I wonder about what will break it — will it be
seismic waves from the Juan de Fuca plate subducting into the North American plate’s molten underbelly?
at the hands of yours truly?
or the arm of the philodendron, stuck between a rock and a hard place but the rock is a wooden stool beneath and the hard place is the side of a small ceramic jar sitting at the edge of that aforementioned stool; the philodendron by my bed that’s been growing like nobody’s business.
If the house doesn’t fall on it first, the arm will keep reaching. It will push the jar with space inside it and ironically, the jar will fall into that which it contained and pass through empty air.
Maybe it won’t break, but the philodendron won’t blink twice. My money’s always on the tortoise.
We wage wars over how to take up space;
argue about abstractions whilst we dissect the word enough so we can fantasize about something more important than the baby
crying or not sleeping or not doing what we want it to.
Meanwhile, a philodendron takes one more millimeter and a jar moves nearer to its potential destruction. I mean, what else is new?
I think this is how history works. I wonder about the seeds we have planted — the ones that are planted in great big laboratories under controlled conditions then watched and cared for to varying degrees; the ones that hitch rides on cotton crew socks covering human feet that carry them to who knows where but it could be a lint trap, where they’ll take communion with particular residue that used to shine on a gum stick wrapper. Where does the lint take them? And what about plastic seeds that can’t grow the same way?
It takes nothing to notice the flick of the switch, the lights on. It’s easy to forget the philodendron’s gaining ground.
Excerpts from Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 40.