Desolation

Nothing sounds more like the thing itself than desolation. From Old French desolacion, “desolation, devastation, hopelessness, despair.” Latin desolationem (nominative desolatio), from past-participle stem of desolare, “leave alone, desert. De plus solare, “make lonely,” from solus, alone. How much experience, sweat, desire, hunger, ruin & triumph a single word can contain. As if the word contained the world to which it referred. Like a box. Or a can. Open the guts of the word & find a labyrinth to the past, its layers like mica, a rock flaked away until the tiny bones of a bird appear imprinted in the stone, everything spiraling around itself, desolate.

Is it a mistake to think of words as objects? Is mistake the right word? Is there harm in believing words to have the qualities of three-dimensional objects, or are they more like fourth-dimensional objects? Rod Serling put The Twilight Zone in the fifth dimension. Wasn’t there a singing group in the 60s & 70s that called themselves the Fifth Dimension? A quick Google search reveals that yes, the Fifth Dimension was a popular music vocal group whose repertoire included pop, R&B, soul, jazz, light opera, & Broadway. This mélange was called “Champagne Soul.” I never cared for them much. Too bougie for my seditious appetite. But words. I’ve forgotten about words as objects. Well they’re not. They’re just air. Sound waves. With meanings attached. In French, the word for ‘word’ is mot, & the word for a clump of dirt is motte de terre. And I think of a word as sod, a chunk of earth, & all the roots dangling.

Things are never what they seem. People you’ve known for years turn out one day to be very different. Things to which you once aspired turn out to be hollow or empty. I wonder if Kurt Cobain felt like that after he attained all that wealth & fame. Where does grace come from? I mean, aside from oxycontin & the supernatural. I think of Georges de la Tour & Magdalene with the Smoking Flame. The idea that in this presence, in the apparently immediate instant which constitutes the presence to oneself, there’s a gap, a duration, the equivalent of a wink. History is smoldering out. There remains but the fear of collapse, of the total disappearance of things.

I find it of some significance that Laurence Olivier staged the famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy at the edge of a high castle parapet overlooking the wrathful sea below, crashing into rocks. Just one look tells you that this man has been pushed to the extremity of his soul & is looking for way out. For relief. The kind of balm one expects to find in non-existence. Ay, there’s the rub. Because maybe non-existence isn’t so non-existent. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come? I don’t want to get into that just now. I just like the way that scene unfolded, with the knife – the bodkin – plummeting into the sea. And Hamlet gets up from his perch & gazes into the fog, the void, & moves decisively into the world again. Time to kill the king.