The Elephants

I was told it matters through what ground one comes, through what ground one is born. It is not arbitrary, coincidental, patriotic or easy. There are keys in that place, I was told, and certain doors that can only be opened there. I do not mean to make this transcendent, though we are so transcendent at core it terrifies. We are so faint and ubiquitous that when I enter a room I am implicated, like a root system that is affected by the water shortage across twelve meadows.

It is difficult to remain lucid, my beautiful infantile world. What I notice most in this summer are the streets of Berlin that are sheets upon terror upon crumbs upon flattened pigeon bodies upon tree roots upon sand upon children's voices upon rubble upon rubble upon echoes upon silence.

Walking the streets of my first city, time appears as its own creature full of song and verse and purpose. This time-being may not be in accord with what our bodies decide to do, which is to live and then to die, and this time-being may also not be interested in our lauded and laurelled notion of past and future. When war (the supposed first) blew down Europe's alleys and coronations, some hundred years or so ago, it began a new track in the veins of this world, a new track of existence, that never fully disappeared and never actually ended; but rumbles along many other tracks carved through space, markings that throb into our bedrooms, our bodies, storehouses of delight and illness, and the time-being entangles here and there.

We live, as my father was told by a random encounter over breakfast in an Austrian pension en route to Croatia, in entropic times. "The degradation of matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity." Although this is not the definition the professor gave to my father over soft-boiled eggs.



She tells me a story. I watch the lizard perfectly still, while its broken off tail twitches close to the planters. The lizard, after being attacked by an ant, moves further away the tail still twitching. The Nobel Prize for Physics this year is just being announced. The three researchers, so the Swedish Nobel Academy is being quoted, "opened a door to an unknown world, in which matter can take on strange forms."

When a story is told, I seem to be, momentarily, carried away from my body, its physical location. There are carriers (dreams, music, illness) of the eternal tracks of world hum.


Sometimes I am obsessed or afflicted with the idea that we actually never did die, and have simply become mutants of memory, unable to recall our previous iterations, our former lives that only occasionally, like a dream, flare up in our books, scribbles, vague longings.

In other words, I am wondering how the simultaneity of the world is affecting my orientation.

Entropy is equalization to the maximum. Example: cold glass of water gradually adapting to room temperature and room temperature absorbing some of the colder elements from icy water until the temperature is more or less the same. The implication is that the arrow of entropy follows the arrow of time and is therefore irreversible. Energy is expended as waste, heat, limiting a system's output more and more as it reaches its entropic climax. Of course, entropy is more complicated then this little exploration, it is thermodynamics after all, and I failed physics repeatedly at school, so what do I know.

In the year 2016, this is how one evolves: thick-skinned, cone-shaped, bottled up. Then life throws up a violence. A few meters in front of one's feet. An unforeseeable act and one is driven to causes, its details and particular fantasy. So one remains, on some level, an eel and eyeless and on another slumbers restlessly in this lunar sleep. I watch my world run by, too preoccupied with watching and feeling it come toward me, or, alternatively, run away from me. Boundaries of contact I measure and retract. The cities I have lived in vanquished from my own territory, that is, my own memory. Nelly Sachs's Flucht und Verwandlung stares at me from the wall.

Entropy encapsulates two failures: the extreme disorder that it is conditioned by, and the gradual equalization which results in no more "useful work" by a given system. The Nobel Prize is not given to entropy research. I am not sure how I landed here, considering the beginning. The lizard's tail is no longer twitching, and I am not in Berlin. Though I continue to walk up Bundesstrasse, as my grandmother did 70 years ago (it was called Kaiserstrasse then). We keep passing without recognizing each other.

I find old letters, so beautiful and long, of people who no longer exist, not in my eye light. The sticky residue of many nights, of hours, somewhere else that remain part of a growing pain body no longer to be reached. Don't try to find me here.

Walking now and reaching back or reaching back and walking, it occurs to me that the year 2016, in the shadow light of the new moon crossing the sky, marks the year of a return, a beginning of a backward crawl across landscapes and fiery moods. I cross in reverse and bend a little, burrow half-blindly into tunnels beneath the surface. It is 1916 and war. The various cities disentangle and shrink, the populated crowded alleys empty. What is that terrible notion to not look back so as to forego turning into pillars of stone? I will stare at you with my neck twisted doubly and loveless, then I will look again, this time when you expect it least. The molecules begin to fly toward each other, cooling and mingling. Is the disorder before equilibrium more desirable than the equilibrium itself? Back then, back now, iridescent and maligned, failure collides between time. This backward stare, this return song, is not a nostalgia for origin, not a mourning for a burning city, for all of our cities are burning. It is, it must be, a tracing of what on that first spur, roving forward storming ahead, was overlooked, and which, through surreptitious circumstances, may still lie wayside waiting to be seen.