Xeroxed
When did I see you last? And what gives me the right to even ask such a question? Clearly, I did not know that you are phased, that you would be here in one instant and then gone the next. You disappeared and I love you for that. The suddenness, I admit, is mine — for I did not witness what happened to you until it happened to you. That it felt quick is on me. You are a spaceship that never left that ground. What does that make you? For even I have left the ground.
Here’s what you are: a copy.
But of what kind? I see that you both preserve and destroy. Preservation is your destruction and I can hardly believe it. Before you preserved yourself, I did not care for you — at least not as much. But now that you are there as you were, I care for you a lot. If you were to come back, to restore yourself, I would love you more than ever, but only because I know what you can become.
And the question is, would I ask you to do it again? Would I want to witness it or would I want to be surprised? But I can no longer be surprised. “Doing it again” would no longer be a step toward the future. but a reassertion of the past and I loved you for the future you had within you, not for your past. That was only admiration. My love, that version of it that I didn’t know I had within me, that was for your future, the one I did not yet know existed.
And the question is, did you know it existed? I only ask because you are gone. You had to vanish in order to make it happen. You exist, surely, but not anywhere that I can see you. Did you know that when you moved to preserve yourself that you were destroying yourself? Did you know that you could travel in time and that the time you chose to visit is now, this very moment. You sacrificed the present so that we could see it (the present) more fully. You would fly away if it weren’t for a quarter. I pull closer because I want to see you, want to be you.
There, now I see you. And I wonder, is that dried blood with which you’re surrounded? Had there been a struggle to take you away? Maybe there had been a struggle to put you inside? I want to ask, but I won’t. And besides, I can see that it is not blood but only the possibility of blood; for me, that’s enough.
And then a little more time passed and the synchronicities began to pile up.
That I should even call them synchronicities…
It’s my individuality that does this, that makes meaning where there is nothing. It happens before I am even aware and though I loathe it, I wonder if it doesn’t keep me alive, keep me talking. It’s the same thing that made me feel the suddenness of your departure and then characterize that suddenness as surprise. Could I have even said that I was shocked, that what you did shocked me? Was it obvious, I wonder, to everybody else except me? Was I at once the referent and the fool? Is this on camera? What in the hell is going on?
First, you were a corporation, then you were a verb. But I ask the same question as before — did you know you would become a verb before you became a corporation? Did you know the people would do the thing by which you said you should be called? And is that an American thing, like Kleenex and Sharpie are American things?
You call Stamford, Connecticut your home. So then we come from the same state. I wasn’t born there, but I grew up there. Maybe it’s the same with you? And then there were the years my mother worked there, in Stamford. Those were my early teenage years. That connection feels even more special. But here we are, in Berlin. I see you in a station that goes by the name of “Health Fountain,” but it’s dirty and gross. Has a bad reputation. And the rumors say that the fountain never existed or, if it did, that the supposed healthy properties of the water were indeed toxic properties. It’s another reversal that I love more than my life, even though it is my life.
And then yesterday, when I put off writing you, I read instead, feeling guilty that I should put off writing you, doing again what I had done so many times before and so more deeply became the thing I do not want to be. At least that’s how I felt until I came across your name in my reading. It was in this boring sounding book — The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality. Chapter 6.
What did it say?
It said Ursula M. Burns was the first black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company and that that company was Xerox, the company that made you and the thing that you do. And I…well I have to read this book, not only because I signed up to read this book (a choice, I suppose) but because I am trying to figure out how it is I came to be where it is that I am, looking at you, doting on you, putting you off — finding you there in the thing I am doing to avoid the thing I am now doing, which is doting upon you.
It was just a fact. For some, a very significant fact.
But it was you — you — that made that fact soar!
What about me? Can I be made to soar? Can I be made to fly?
I know I will be replicated. I will destroy myself for however many years all in an effort to preserve myself. The very movements that prove I exist will be the very movements that take me away. Every day I travel back in time to find traces of myself in the present. There being there creates a conflict, a conflict that makes such travel possible. I will learn to accept it. After all, I saw my face push its way through the clay to reveal a resemblance. I expected something new and instead got a dose of the old. That, too, is a conflict. It’s resolution will be my acceptance of it, not my pulling the two sides apart. After all, it is this struggle that produces time.
I am not the first to see it. A man named Marker saw it. And what he did was travel within time instead of trying to travel outside of it. He did this by embracing the repetition of the past instead of trying to flee from it. By doing so, he found the future — a future that contained the past. A permanence.
But Sharpie didn’t exist until 1964.
La Jetée already in 1962.
The former by the Sanford Ink Company. That’s mighty close to Stamford.
What does it mean? Why do you do things like this? What are these vibrations? Is their purpose only to make me feel good? Are they simply a way to pass the time they produce? Grammar tries to tell me you are singular when I know that you are plural. They are a line of pigs marking the ever-moving line of repression. It pushes on you whenever you push on it.
I must learn the secret of travel, only then I can learn the secret of time. I do so by rejecting what is given. It has nothing to do with speeding up, but everything to do with slowing down, with making stillness visible.
The procedure involves carrying a picture. A picture of myself. Then, one day, I am gone. I have disappeared. Somebody has taken me away. Maybe there are signs of a struggle. Maybe they are just signs. I am gone, but the picture remains. That’s it. It’s a trick that doesn’t try too much. It simply shows what was there before in the instant that it is gone. The picture attests to its Creator, it is a reproduction of the thing that created it. It sees the future in the past in order to assert a very strong sense of the present.
But it’s a phony! For it has been carrying this picture. It has created this picture and then went on living. The human machine reproduces and then admires. It knows nothing of time. It tries to exist outside of it! It tries to flee from it! It makes a copy and then feels proud, knowing full well it’s only a copy! You fool! You have only fooled yourself!
Imagine, I tell it, if the instant of your preservation was the instant of your destruction! That might tell you something about time. For in that way you would be it — a self-sacrificing machine forever giving itself to the present.
But we are human. We referents can hardly believe it. That’s how fragile is its position. That’s how easily it is blown away by the wind.
But I saw it.
And now you can see it too.
But remember!!!
It’s only a copy.
Kept in place by a quarter.
Which is,
after all,
just a quarter.
