I am not the subject, but the background against which he performs himself.
For example, I can be a receptive audience, pliant and agreeable. A receptive audience is always preferable to a resistant one. I am neither, and also both. But these details are irrelevant to our subject, who insists upon unity of vision.
Pulling this off successfully—and it is always a great feat, isn’t it, when everything comes together? —requires a total alignment of the environment. All parts separate, each in its place.
It takes a great deal of effort.
The parts of me that refuse taming learn to separate when needed, as a lizard separates from a caught tail. So I go around leaving tails everywhere, little souvenirs for whoever comes looking.
This is a preferred mode of movement in the subject’s realm. He runs a tight ship, and I am made of whatever collapses an edge. Now solid, now not.
I reject the purity tests, the display cages of possibility, the passion for classification. But I accept these as intractable features of the environment, like leaf blowers and occasional dogpiles.
Poor subject. He exists inside a fiction mediated by others. He notices them primarily as objects requiring arrangement.
He cannot account for the resistance because the resistance is made of teeming earth. By definition, it refuses purity.
He calls us dirt.
From below, we teem here, a laughing rumble at his feet.
