Charlie Bertsch (cbertsch) wrote,
Charlie Bertsch
cbertsch

Overdetermined

I'm trying to figure out whether the sublation of the base-superstructure distinction was premature. There's much to be said for James Carville's much quoted marxim: "It's the economy, stupid." And yet the set delimited by the 'what' of that reflexively posed question -- "What's the matter?" -- is capacious enough to fit a whole staff of lines, from bottom to top. No matter how necessary, a new deal can only address the cards in the deck you're playing with. Games without rules stumble drunkenly off the sidewalk and into the path of oncoming traffic. But how many different ones can a person keep track of at the same time?

Give me a hand full of hearts and I'll still have the hanged man to contend with. So the only reasonable response, if you ask, would be a list poem in which hierarchy is stretched so thin that it doubles back on itself. I started reading I Am a Cat Today. I added too much flour and had to rue my etiolated gravy. It didn't rain. I had so many reasons not to communicate that I covered myself with aluminum foil. When our hot, spiny walk finally brought us to Circle K, I only had enough cash for one ice cream. I kept running my hand over the spot, feeling for the bone that had gone missing. The circles under your eyes darkened like the water when I mop the floor. I made myself ill writing "although" and "indeed." This is the paradox of the present conjuncture. The 'what' annexes new territory faster than a satellite of Phoenix, but there is no place to hide in those new folds of explanation. Did you know that the word originally meant "household"? It's the absence, stupid.
Tags: autobiography, everyday, health, theory
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