– journal entry, circa 2000
Went to fix the alternator today. It was the old, original problem raising its gnarled head again. The shoe-goo solution: make it off-beat, to keep the groove running smooth.
See, if we weren’t gendered, the balanced center would start to wobble off course eventually: because there is no such thing in nature as perfection, whether of circle, center or balance. Neither focus or direction stays unperturbed. Time is the wild link, the errant vector, the unstoppable agent of change. Therefore to claim a higher ground in abstract abstinence from any formed opinion or inclination, whether sexual, political or journalistic, is to court at best irrelevancy, and at worst imagined glory: The Ideal.
Meanwhile the preachers fall to more earth-taunted rhythms; rhymesters fall back to prose; and the pelton wheel maker tells me the vibrations will harmonize better with the jet slightly off-line, the aluminum plate baffled with wormy shoe-goo to break up the chatter of too-regular spray. Better to lean one way into this fair wind, or the sails will shred going this way and that undecided, wobbling, careening crazily over.
My ex wanted to split all our childcare fifty percent. Then share our house even after we split up. Not a stable situation: it finally gave way to my purchase, renters aboard now to grumble over grinding from the hydro. Fixing things up—a rusty screw or two, a wooden stay in the wheelrace—allowed me, I’m now afraid, to set things a little too tidy.
There’s no choppy knocking about, as before, but instead a steady, throaty hoarseness to the tone: trying to be too perfect, against an onslaught of slightly divergent spray. Holding the center is all very well if there’s no interplay required with life, nature, the future. But of course outside the philosophic mind, there is no such condition: not even in the so-called void: imagine it and, like the polluting scientist, you stain the sample, like the mirror it is, with your own image.
I will be what the energy of my sex determines: beyond hormones, beyond possibly DNA, to a principle of one-ness, individuality, dismounting the dicey razor for earth-or-sky country, beginningless creation or fertile womb.
Chaos is not what it seems; neither is objective neutrality. Each may start with its own definition as we imagine it, but quickly departs for the opposite condition. All dualisms tend to resolve to oneness, while oneness inevitably splits, asexually, into two. Once two, back again to union: and hence new life, oneness again, a single slant on a mutual idea.
Chaos seems chaotic, without pattern, anarchic and getting more and more out of control. But chaos theory teaches the opposite of this conventional sense of chaos. The mathematical, geometric art of chaos is actually finally, if not bilateral in its symmetry, patterned. The circle, however, is not the creature of this geometry. Rather the spiral defines the form of its evolution, incorporating a linear accumulation of defining events that go to make up the life of the formula, the pelton wheel, the human, the sun. The straight fastball is not a very effective pitch. Better the curve, with its one-sided or screwball spin and arc. Or the random knuckler, that floats homeward with an aura of minor movement about its path. The water jet on the cusp between the two cups will wobble randomly but fixedly, rumbling forever caught in the core of the spray with no way out: but if the spray is decidedly, yet ever-so-slightly offset, the wheel on its shaft may stabilize its rotation with a certain leaning-in or leaning-out pressure, giving to the shaft’s rotation its own support: full sail driving mast, woman and man in glad movement.
