On Ending

& what does not end

“And neither division nor unity

Matters.”

--T S Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”

One had thought to see an end of endings. At least, for the Big Stories: for had not that era of Sizeable Tales itself reached its foreseeable & designated end? Yet here we are, for all that, seemingly smack in the middle of an end of something. Not, i think, “America”—but a version of America.

Wait, what?—that cowboy with a white hat? He’s been dead a long while--. (Someone else says: the story is that, once, people could believe he ever existed.) No, I want the good story, the one where people got together & did something right. Surely that’s still possible? But maybe what’s not possible, is that we are all telling the same story.

Was it only a story that we were telling the same story, maybe? That’s all that makes sense now. Space has a different geometry. No one trusts Walter Cronkite or right angles again. But where i am is not a story, & my lostness admits to different interpretations. I say: we only thought it was Babel before. At least they were all using language!

The Statue of Liberty, broken on a deserted beach: alright. But maybe what matters, are the boundary conditions. The classical language, splintering into vernaculars. Being able to find out things—difficult, then easier, then difficult again. (Quibbles about what it means to “find out”, what those “things” are.) The internet as the Luminiferous Æther. (One can propagate motion through space without it.) And the stories that depend for their life on the existence of an internet—what then?

Little Magazines, & later zines (then “virtual” zines). The poetry that gave life to them & vice versa. So what has Endings is, on the one hand, physical objects (in the wild; in archives), on the other hand a certain discourse. Which does begin & end on dates that can be spelled out. Right now it’s a widespread discourse on America is Over. As, over & over, Books are Over. Poetry is (was) Over. Not the same as: My Life is Over. Your Life is Over.

Now, the need to rebuild trust, that’s not over. That’s just beginning, or maybe entering a new intensity. Are we making bridges that for the moment must be called: “I Don’t Want America to Be Over?”--stories that have to say: “There is One Story and One Story Only”? (In another time, the same story might have been so familiar that it didn’t have to be named anything.) I looked at Philosophy in an entirely different light after reading a Sociology of Philosophizing. There were times more conducive to having this sort of conversation & times that were not. And the reasons for this could be described.

We do know those reasons, or some of us do; & they’re not so lost that they can’t ever be recovered. This word “Ending” is—despite appearances, including how it makes us feel—is something that helps us talk about the conditions for the possibility of discourse. And that is a good thing.