cracks and infinity

i am very convinced, and have been since i was a little girl and my parents made me sweep under the refrigerator, that all of the most difficult filth in the world results from everything being split up into pieces.

if we could manufacture a seamless kitchen it would be so much easier to keep spotless.

but then, would it function the same way? i don't know. i'm not an electrician or a plumber. but surely the thing is possible. for all i know someone's already thought of it and tried it and the result is sitting in a museum someplace, functionless and sterile.

i realize and admit that life is messy. life = messy. there's no changing that, i suppose. we as humans are uncooperative and fractured and full of ever-accumulating dirt, and i guess therefore so are our kitchens.

i was talking to a now better friend today about relationships and individuality, and how the one might so easily compromise the other. it's the idea of islands. no man is one. but we all are. (paradoxically) i wrote a poem about that once. wind and ocean and loneliness compounded by the encompassing nature of other people.

anyways. I wonder if all the other kinds of filth--worse kinds than toast crumbs and spilled milk--are a result of the chasms of individuality that separate you from me. in those gaps, maybe, is where all the worst mistakes accumulate and fester. the bit of the cabinet that just doesn't quite reach all the way to the tile. the edge of the sink where the caulking has peeled up. that everso thin space between the door frame and the wall. all the things you just don't feel like telling your mother. the fragments of gossip that you carelessly share with some people but not your best friend. the polite silence that forbids you from saying what you really think.

or is it oversimplifying to say that from these spring selfishness, ignorance, enmity, jealousy, and every other societal ill? probably. is it ridiculously idealistic to say that reaching out to each other could solve them all? probably. i not only have little optimism for such a grand dream as true unity, but am almost afraid of it, deep within. what self-respecting human could not be afriad of the bland whiteness implied by the word?

i'm sure (as sure as i can be, which is not all that sure) that i can write my fear off as ignorance of what real unity means. maybe it's like pears and tuna fish, and they go together in a weird and separate kind of way, not one thing by any means, but one thing because you eat them together and they sit in the same bowl. i don't know. that metaphor probably makes no sense to most of you.

I was reading today and somehow this guy's thoughts nestled in with all of these of mine, above and below. he says, in a sectioned monologue about inferiority complexes,

"But there is no original thought, no change, just shifting perceptions along parallel plains of thought."

this was in the middle of that conversation about me vs. we and thinking about how you always walk so much faster through crowded halls when you're alone, with nobody holding your hand. this was in the middle of me telling a friend: 'the world is sucking your individuality out of you every minute anyway. why worry about some girl doing it if you get too close?' and thinking about interview with a vampire with brad pitt.

I suppose it's silly of me to be a pessimist on both sides of the fence... despairing of unity while whitewashing everyone into one big continental mush. that's not fair.

but even if you smooth over all the gaps, so even the hinges on your refrigerator door are enveloped in some synthetic plastic, there will still be corners. the world isn't flat, after all.