SITU by Steven Seidenberg
Black Sun Lit, March 2018
215 pages / SPD
*
That the last time he took foot into the thatch was the last the sun unfurled its rosy fingers through the slack of cumulous shroud, or that the last sun at his back was the last time that the sun was at his back—the last that he could taste the gleam of sun against his back—seems so markedly implausible that he can’t even tempt himself to ask for such a proof. What’s more, he doesn’t know why he should care or think it matters, or why he has claimed otherwise when he knows the claim is false…
*
It’s the last he can recall, which seems a reason to recall it, so why the first…the last avowal of its status as the first or last it happened? Why the yearning to make sequence in duration mirror order in the throb of his mnemonic throes? What reason for this puerile rage against such glib narration? For making of such wayward dreams a cipherable code? What reason to seek reason…
*
It’s not that what he now recalls was neither first nor last to meet the passing standard he considers its assemblage at this instant—its relevance to resources ready to hand—or that he’s happened onto such a paltry sense of certitude by palpating what’s in it, intrinsic to his recollection of that whilom trail, but that without some grasp of what enticed that single scrap from an infinity of remnants—of similars cast off into dissent, into delay—he can’t be sure of its veracity—of its significance; that deprived of any motive to believe it worth remembering when others were not similarly sanctioned with a place within his ceaseless seriatim of a cryptic fray he doesn’t know he’s lived it, that he didn’t simply make it up from random, disparate fragments, as an endless game…
*
If so many of the world’s best known occurrences can drift into the abject anonymity of absence—the silence of a history in common, and in common lost—then why should the remembrance of the lone, distracted quidnunc have to meet a greater canon, to justify its load as some variety of response? Why is it a problem that he recalls only one moment—whether of that fulgent piquancy or the crisis of some inner bloat—when so much of what’s happened on the stage and scale of history—so much of what is happening right now, behind his back—has been forgotten without wherefore or demonstrable effect? When so much that is happening this instant goes unnoticed? Exempted from all practicable memory, or trace…
*
There’s a difference, he’s concluded, or so he tells himself at least. The world stage he inhabits may be girded by the cosmos, but its modus—its existence—is still verified by sense. Such claim claims no reliance on some postural receptor; it may induce a unity of faculties entranced, but it still outstrips all deference to the charge of the extrinsic by apprehending sense as an accession to the compass of the sensor, a subjugated precinct that one’s faculties acquit. This is only to suggest that what so many take as license to speak freely—even of the history of histories, perhaps—is not so different from his privilege, in that both require reason, not to think the past as extant but to unconceal the grounds on which that portion has been poised as a totality, a fixed result. Such singular prepotency is what in any order of causation serves to supplicate the past life of the seity that’s lived it to the ends that selfsame seity occasions as the one life of the aggregate—of the surface, or the null of place…
*
Why not, he has asked often enough…he asks himself right now, that is, of far greater import…Why not first invert this common folderol of latencies if only for a look at his surrender to surrender—a submission to completion and to task? Why not take the vital force that every nous is given and subject the apprehension that contrives it as duration to the same unyielding standards? Take the prospects and conditions that project the I as singular for the basis of discernment, the foreground of one’s forthcoming arrival…
*
He knows that there are things to which he pays no heed at present—at any present presently regarded as received—things whose very nature is to vanish without notice, to blunder by as though they’ve never happened in the first place or the last. And so within one’s field of view, one’s circumscribing bracket—the scene one can’t preclude, that is, whatever one’s restraint—one can always ascertain too many traits and idle facets, too many…
*
Too many leaves and stones and grazing cracks upon pavement, too many extricated swathes of rot across the turf; too many turns of concrete trowels and puckered interstices, too many bits of crumbled rime and assymetric slough; too many sweeping swirls of air against one’s shirt and trousers, too many languid gusts of rancid breath against one’s skin; too many nerves, too many sighs, too many moments in each sigh…too many things that there are still too many of to name…
