(For Reid)
[περὶ μεγέθους ἡλίου] εὖρος ποδὸς ἀνθρωπείου
[Concerning the size of the sun: it is] the width of a human foot.
-Heraclitus, fragment DK B3
Diogenes Laertius (IX, 7) says that Heraclitus said, ‘The sun is the size that it appears.’
-T.M. Robinson, Heraclitus: Fragments
What if the world is a room; what if the room is as large as the world?
What, then, of departures from the world, when being-with transforms, in a shock, into was-with, or having-been-with? What of a room that, once left, can no longer be re-joined?
We have scriptures for this room, where mattering is met by expiration: to value the mattering of what happens in the room means to witness the eventuality of, and to rehearse for, one’s own death. To breathe in that room, as in the world, is work. To watch as others breathe: this counts as work, too. Mattering means to move ineffably toward departure. Mattering together, as a case of being-with, means to dwell in a mood dreamt up between the subjunctive and the future-perfect: a grounded “if,” a will-have-been. This is the room’s domain; this is how the room craves its own heft.
The sun is the width of a human foot in every way that matters. The sun is also the swell of presence, its mass the weight of a life. The sun is the heat of loss, and the flame of grief, and the sear of debt. The sun foretells an end. But while it burns, it makes sense of itself and of us: “In these dark times […] where the light falls / Makes a kind of meaning, / Which is being, by another word.” The room gleams, bright as a welder’s torch, fierce and untamed in its slow transformations, urgent in its resounding call as it dreams of its own demise.
It is possible to imagine this room, because you have been in it before.
Even if that ‘before’ were long ago in the days of school pageants and counting sheep.
The contours of the room are familiar.
Even if what once was a curtain has fallen away in the tide of recent history.
You remember it, and it fills you with a sense of warmth
And perhaps too a sense of dread.
Because what you remember about this room
Is that it asked something of you,
Something you did not expect,
Something that you did not entirely wish to give,
And it also sometimes made you angry, bored, and restless –
And sometimes too filled you with such longing
That tears would fall despite your best efforts to stop them.
This room is quiet most the time, but it is also full of noise.
‘Good noise,’ because sometimes noise is good,
And it draws you in
Even when you say to yourself ‘this will be the last time.’
At first you think it is the darkness of the room
That calls to you,
But only after you have been in it a while
Do you realize it is something else –
Something perhaps that has nothing to do with the room itself,
Because really, it is not a room at all,
That is just a word, a term, a way to describe it to others
When you don’t know what else to call it –
Or when you do not wish to call attention to it too much –
Because if you were to really tell, well,
It might just fill the world –
And then what would you do?
So, for now, you say ‘this room,
And ‘this darkness’
Because people understand what these words mean
Most the time
And something in you craves meaning,
Despite the fact that you know
Meaning is something shared;
But, hey, it’s good to pretend, right?
Sometimes in this room and this darkness
Pretense is all you have, and you revel in it,
Though
In these dark times,
In this dark theatre,
Perhaps revelling in pretend
Is really not what you should be doing,
Not at all,
Really, you should be out in the streets,
Doing things,
Real things,
Things that matter…
But here’s the thing,
And you can be lowercase about this if you want,
But this,
This work of pretend,
This revelling,
And sometimes just being with,
Matters,
And it matters because it matters
To those that remember the room
And those in the room
And those that will walk into the room someday
And even those that never even go into the room
It matters
Because it is a game of matter –
Atoms and particles and such –
And this game of pretense holds truths
As much as it holds what some call ‘lies’
And it matters because
What gets said in the room
And how things move in the room
And where the light falls
Makes a kind of meaning,
Which is being, by another word,
And this being
Reminds you of the possible
And the impossible
And also too of the small-minded ones
That would rather this room be held by four walls
And be grounded into its own groundedness,
Than see this room for what it is
For what it has always been
For what some of us,
You and I, here under the canopy of stars,
Know to be true
Even here, in the dark theatre,
Battling its own darkness,
A field,
of light.