A man at a kitchen table has known people whose faith is solid enough to build a house with, or to kill a neighbor with, or to hold onto on the way into a river. His own has holes through it and he can do none of the three. He neither believes in God nor manages to disbelieve. He wants to know whose definition governs the question, since on the one he keeps being handed he has never met the party described. He asks the same about love, then about himself, and finishes by observing that a man in his condition has no business being listened to.
A meme over a photograph of a ship’s fitting credits someone, unnamed, with the advice to marry a person you can suffer alongside, then defines real love as whoever builds you a boat while you drown.
A poem-post explains that dating one person means dating their parents, their exes, the film that taught them how to love, and the causal history of the universe.
A photograph of a page of Borges reports Schopenhauer on people who confuse buying a book with buying the contents of the book. Borges adds that in a shop he sometimes regrets being unable to buy a volume he already owns.
I screenshotted the Borges page too. My phone holds a few hundred of these and I have gone back to reread maybe six. I would classify the screenshot as the purchase while the contents stay unbought.
The meme opens with the words someone once said. I spend my working hours on a science built to throw that sentence out. A report without its chain of transmitters is defective however well it reads, and the apparatus forces a claim to carry names, dates, and the possibility of failing: whether two men were alive in the same decade, whether they were ever in the same city, whether one of them embellished. Provenance makes a claim expensive for the man who makes it.
The feed deletes the chain by design and transmits at a volume the classical scholars never had to imagine. Attribution collapses into someone once said, or into a handle, or into whoever screenshotted the handle. Resonance takes over as the test of acceptance. The traditional science exists because resonance was tried first and produced a large and beautiful library of forgeries. Fabricators concentrated on consolation and exhortation, the most moving reports circulated fastest, and a report’s power to move me counts against it before it counts for it. A muḥaddith who rejects a lovely hadith has no quarrel with its loveliness.
The account would stop there if the kitchen-table monologue were worse than it is. It beats anything I have written on the same condition at ten times the length, and I have no idea who the man is. Authenticity and quality run on separate axes. The tradition knew as much, and the forgers worked on edifying material for that reason.
What separates the kitchen table from the boat is where each sentence leaves its speaker. The monologue takes its speaker apart. He finishes holding nothing, no position, no consolation, no standing, with a last line that withdraws his warrant to have said any of it. The boat meme hands its reader a promise and charges nothing to whoever forwards it, i.e. forwarding it is pure acquisition of credit. The dating post borrows the jargon of attachment research for an authority its argument has not earned, and under pressure it reduces to the observation that people have histories. An aphorism that costs the man repeating it something travels badly. The feed stocks the other kind, and I would rather not run my own essays through the test.
A song I had on while writing this imagines the gates of paradise covered in graffiti, unsigned assurances left by the dead for whoever comes up behind them, promising reunion and telling somebody’s mother to stop worrying. Nothing on that wall carries a chain. The whole petition of the song is to be remembered by one person who knew the singer. That is the smallest transmission available and the only kind most of us get.
My archive is a folder of propositions I agreed with fast enough to avoid examining them, kept under the impression that keeping them is a form of reading. The four are still on my phone. I have repeated three of them in conversation since, each time as something I saw somewhere. That puts me in the chain, unnamed.
The song is “The Trapeze Swinger,” Iron & Wine, 2005.
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