Configurations
Feb. 20th, 2017 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sadoeuphemistEverything can be reduced to its physical configurations: love, sorrow, human suffering. Don't talk to me of emotion or ideology. A dog can love as well as a human can, or even better, unencumbered by sapience or culture. A dog is a configuration of its parts: a dangling tongue, a panting mouth, a wagging tail, a set of prancing paws, a warm body curled up against you. A dog cannot understand even a fraction of what you are, it does not understand what you do for a living or what you hope to accomplish with your life, it cannot envision the compromises you will both have to make in your lives together, a dog does not speak your language. A dog only understands you by your posture, by your scent, by the tone of your voice, by the touch of your hand on its head. And yet it loves you, doesn't it, unconditionally? You see it in its eyes, in its tongue, in the motion of its muscles, in the twist of its spine, in all its constituent organs. Blood and flesh and tissue, the heat radiating off another living organism: that's love, in all its depth and simplicity.
Imagine cruelty. Even a rock could be cruel. Imagine a nondescript rock whose only salient feature was that it was placed along a certain heavily-trafficked path in such a position so that people who came along that path would inevitably trip on it and stumble and skin their knees and tear loose their toenails - there's a structure to that, a physical inevitability. A configuration of the world seemingly dedicated to causing pain. What else could that be but cruelty?
It lacks intent, you may say. It takes a human to be cruel. But there's no great intent in cruelty. So much of it is instinctive, unconscious, passionless. A bureaucrat just following protocol, a bigot unthinkingly spouting out a slur, a politician pandering to their constituency. Peel back their eyelids and dig into their brains and ask where the malice is in it, as if malice has any sort of physical properties, as if it can be touched, seen, tasted, smelled, as if it even exists at all. There is no intent to them but gravity, an automatic capitulation to the forces that act upon them. Imagine a rock falling, or a great wheel turning under its own weight. Children starve to death, children die in bombing raids, and they might as well be subject to a massive automated machine for all the malice there is in it. No one aims to starve a child - or a couple of million of them - to death. It just happens, through a certain configuration of events, material economies. A cruelty, like a rock placed upon a path.
You want to believe in humanity, in some vague intangible that transcends our flesh and our skin and hair and blood and bones, you want to believe in evil. Evil must exist, because it repulses you. It twists up your gut to witness, it makes your blood go hot, it elicits a physical response. It must exist, this thing called evil, it must be able to be identified and quantified and fought down and dismantled and scattered to the winds.
You want to believe in things like love and compassion and righteousness and the moral arc of the universe. You want to believe in people. A person is a thing somewhat more than a human, more than the sum of its parts. A person exerts some sort of invisible force, perhaps a form of magnetism that acts upon history. Call it destiny. You want to believe, for example, that two people are inevitably drawn to each other, that there is an end to loneliness and uncertainty. You want to believe that by force of virtue a person will prevail. You have looked upon the world and measured it and quantified it and plotted out its course and found it all insufficient, and so you have come to depend on the intangibles.
You want to believe we were meant for something better.
Take a moment - disassemble it, analyze its configurations. Two bodies intertwined, slick with sweat, heat radiating off a pair of organisms. Mouth, lips, eyes, tongue. Every formalized hierarchy of values - philosophy, morality, practicality, sheer unvarnished honesty - tells you that this cannot be love. You're bad for each other. You both have your own issues to work out, there is a lover you are being unfaithful to. This is lust, probably, or neediness. This is hormones. This is a deluded attempt at passion. And yet -
You are compatible. You are physically compatible. A human being is made to intertwine with another human being. You slot together, you interact. All the magnetic energy burns up as skin contacts skin, burns up in the body heat. Love transcends boundaries, doesn't it? The simple weight of two bodies burning against each other annihilates tradition and propriety and religion and class and caste and all the predestined arcs of the world. You can feel each others' breath like steam coming off your bodies. In this configuration of possibilities, the other person could be anyone in the world.
We are all human, all warmth, all breath, all skin, all fevered intensity. History evaporates. Any human being on the face of the Earth could fit together with you, naked, in the same configuration. Every bigot and monster in the world, every saint and champion. There is the same blood beneath the skin, there is the same bone beneath the flesh. Every variation shifting off into insignificance. There are no intangibles, none that make sense. You could fuck a monster, you could be birthed from one. Kindness can beget cruelty. A stone gets kicked down the road, a child is born into a different configuration of events, and becomes a completely different person. There are several million configurations of events where you starved to death as a child. None of them came to pass. You breathe in another person's scent, and in that moment you are the universal blueprint for humanity, a variation on a theme, and every monster and murderer and saint and sinner and champion and bigot and victim and lover in the world is mapped out onto your body. It's just the weight and heft and warmth of us, lurching against each other, carrying all the horror and potential in the world in our fragile configurations of flesh.
A heart beats. That's love, isn't it? That's love.
Imagine cruelty. Even a rock could be cruel. Imagine a nondescript rock whose only salient feature was that it was placed along a certain heavily-trafficked path in such a position so that people who came along that path would inevitably trip on it and stumble and skin their knees and tear loose their toenails - there's a structure to that, a physical inevitability. A configuration of the world seemingly dedicated to causing pain. What else could that be but cruelty?
It lacks intent, you may say. It takes a human to be cruel. But there's no great intent in cruelty. So much of it is instinctive, unconscious, passionless. A bureaucrat just following protocol, a bigot unthinkingly spouting out a slur, a politician pandering to their constituency. Peel back their eyelids and dig into their brains and ask where the malice is in it, as if malice has any sort of physical properties, as if it can be touched, seen, tasted, smelled, as if it even exists at all. There is no intent to them but gravity, an automatic capitulation to the forces that act upon them. Imagine a rock falling, or a great wheel turning under its own weight. Children starve to death, children die in bombing raids, and they might as well be subject to a massive automated machine for all the malice there is in it. No one aims to starve a child - or a couple of million of them - to death. It just happens, through a certain configuration of events, material economies. A cruelty, like a rock placed upon a path.
You want to believe in humanity, in some vague intangible that transcends our flesh and our skin and hair and blood and bones, you want to believe in evil. Evil must exist, because it repulses you. It twists up your gut to witness, it makes your blood go hot, it elicits a physical response. It must exist, this thing called evil, it must be able to be identified and quantified and fought down and dismantled and scattered to the winds.
You want to believe in things like love and compassion and righteousness and the moral arc of the universe. You want to believe in people. A person is a thing somewhat more than a human, more than the sum of its parts. A person exerts some sort of invisible force, perhaps a form of magnetism that acts upon history. Call it destiny. You want to believe, for example, that two people are inevitably drawn to each other, that there is an end to loneliness and uncertainty. You want to believe that by force of virtue a person will prevail. You have looked upon the world and measured it and quantified it and plotted out its course and found it all insufficient, and so you have come to depend on the intangibles.
You want to believe we were meant for something better.
Take a moment - disassemble it, analyze its configurations. Two bodies intertwined, slick with sweat, heat radiating off a pair of organisms. Mouth, lips, eyes, tongue. Every formalized hierarchy of values - philosophy, morality, practicality, sheer unvarnished honesty - tells you that this cannot be love. You're bad for each other. You both have your own issues to work out, there is a lover you are being unfaithful to. This is lust, probably, or neediness. This is hormones. This is a deluded attempt at passion. And yet -
You are compatible. You are physically compatible. A human being is made to intertwine with another human being. You slot together, you interact. All the magnetic energy burns up as skin contacts skin, burns up in the body heat. Love transcends boundaries, doesn't it? The simple weight of two bodies burning against each other annihilates tradition and propriety and religion and class and caste and all the predestined arcs of the world. You can feel each others' breath like steam coming off your bodies. In this configuration of possibilities, the other person could be anyone in the world.
We are all human, all warmth, all breath, all skin, all fevered intensity. History evaporates. Any human being on the face of the Earth could fit together with you, naked, in the same configuration. Every bigot and monster in the world, every saint and champion. There is the same blood beneath the skin, there is the same bone beneath the flesh. Every variation shifting off into insignificance. There are no intangibles, none that make sense. You could fuck a monster, you could be birthed from one. Kindness can beget cruelty. A stone gets kicked down the road, a child is born into a different configuration of events, and becomes a completely different person. There are several million configurations of events where you starved to death as a child. None of them came to pass. You breathe in another person's scent, and in that moment you are the universal blueprint for humanity, a variation on a theme, and every monster and murderer and saint and sinner and champion and bigot and victim and lover in the world is mapped out onto your body. It's just the weight and heft and warmth of us, lurching against each other, carrying all the horror and potential in the world in our fragile configurations of flesh.
A heart beats. That's love, isn't it? That's love.
