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There were no baby elephant gods to be found in the philodendron. She could've cared less. To her mind it was all non-immanent-there was nothing to anticipate--it would go on as it had gone-always a subject, always some selfhood stalking an object, killing it, dressing it up, consuming it, all just sowing and reaping (not, as I sometimes like to say, stewing, weeping). "A banal project," she called it, life. But she lit the votive candles to make me happy, with closed eyelids, silently appreciating the privacy I sometimes allowed her. I knew her well--had memorized, even, her arms, stained over the years by the yellow-gray smoke of her chemical experiments. Often she dreamed that tiny hands were patting her everywhere --tiny disembodied hands were braiding her hair while she slept--tiny chubby angel-hands were flying away with her soul. She rejected all of my attempts to translate these images. "Isolate flecks" was a phrase she liked, from a William Carlos Williams poem. She saw everything as an isolated fleck and hated the way people were always trying to bring flecks together into coherent systems--- like me and my Ganesh project. We never found him, with his palliative phallic trunk, rolling roundly and peacefully on my plant leaves the way I'd asked for him to appear. I wish he had, just once. It would have been something, in addition to death, she could not have finessed so easily into insignificance. Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.
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