The Things That Make Sense

It’s as if certain things only make sense

in hiding. It takes place in secret sense factories,

where all the components of sense are imported in the night. While we dream.

 

Then at day the things we run into as we walk around slink away afterward, while our attention is somewhere else, and keep to the ground. If they have to, they crawl in the grass, because attention, known to stray, could shift in an eyeblink from somewhere else to that thing that just happened, and the thing doesn’t want to be spotted after the fact.

But with enough time, all things seep into the soil, and through the rock, and drop down into deep caverns underground, which is where the factories are hidden. Sense-components are stored in shelves along the walls, where the things can grab them, as long as they sign their names on a list, because someone has to keep track – or sign with some other identifier if they don’t yet have names, which the new ones do not. Names are for things that has already made sense for some time.

It’s as if you can hear them toil, all the things, in their very deep caverns, knocking components together with complex tools that break easily, tools that some say could all be replaced with a really heavy hammer. And maybe some pliers.

Metal against metal, metal against wood, wood against stone, the stink of sulfur, of ash, and sweat and despondency – sense making is hard and thankless work …

and for what? Just because we humans demand it? Because some law of the human mind decrees: Things have to make sense?

It’s a wonder they haven’t unionized, long ago – gone to strike – or even quit, stopped making sense altogether …

I for one am grateful they have not. I know I should have more solidarity, but my sensory budget has always been tight, I waste too much of it simply absorbing, there’s the raw stuff of sense all around and I don’t know how to put it together …

and sometimes things make sense for me. Out of charity. In hiding. I appreciate that.

 

I have thought about applying for an apprenticeship, if I can find a sense making thing that would take me. Would I make a hopeless case, I wonder, or, experienced as I am in this disoriented state, a promising student? It’s not the sense making in itself that appeals, and certainly not the long hours – it’s the time I’d get to spend underground. Out of the sun. Away from the stars. Making common cause with the moon, itself a rock, and in prehistory probably part of the Earth.

And the time I’d get to spend off the clock, when humans sleep. When humans dream. When the substrate of sense is siphoned away by some other agent, certainly not by us things …

… then we get to explore the caves. Observe colors that can only be where no light reaches down. Dip our toes in the coolest of underground pools. Smell chilled moisture on the air. Play with sightless fish. Sing in the dark.

Some things are at their happiest when they stop making sense altogether, and I wish I could be one of those.

 

But that is one wish I only

 

have the courage to entertain

 

in hiding