THE PROXY, ESSAY ON TRANSLATION + you are fascinated by watching a brain move, how it moves, tracking its process of creation from creations its process of processing creation into new such creations, and then, inevitably confusing them. watching how a brain blends with future versions of itself, unanticipated, without consent. your fascination with being the spectator is turning the threshold across which your relation folds into spectacle — the line you cut along to remove yourself, to flirt with the offal over which the difference looms, proffers — that the invisible should have a name for your to sense it. a proxy. + + remember the invisible ball you felt between two magnets when, as a kid, you tried to force them together perfectly into one. no matter how hard you tried, you could not. the magnets would always find a way around the invisible ball they created between them. it confused your logic. you came to realize it could neither be a matter of strength, reason, justice, light, nor dark — none of the forces on which the tensions and resolutions of Disney plots depend. it had to be another thing, if anything. you yearned to control that invisible ball. you eventually found that the magnets imply and accept one another in their respective fields of influence — fields that become reciprocal as soon as each enters the other, making the third. the third is the ball: a synthesis — different in all manners from the conditions of its creation yet completely dependent on them implying the apprehension of the universe, which, too, is only sensible through the proxy of its parts: the justification of the moon the codependence of attraction and aversion the material existence of thresholds the incomplete awareness that there are these unseeable orbs everywhere — between constellations rollercoasters tennis balls sandwiches magnets. between people. in conversation, there is an invisible ball that cannot be reconciled between you and your interlocutor. you are like magnets that can't become one. you can't speak it by virtue of the fact that speech is one of the material sites of your connection. therefore speech is also evidence of severance. speech is what indicates, makes material, your inability to reconcile. your inability to reconcile is more than a fact or condition: it is the context from which facts and conditions arise. intimacy is about the invisible ball too. intimacy excites and reaches insatiability as you begin to feel the invisible ball between you and your companion. your intimacy self-fulfills in a feedback loop like two magnets nearing, each on the threshold of the other's sphere of influence, becoming enactments of severance. seduction. even regular objects are mutual indications of the invisible ball. regular objects like books. in terms of form content and physicality two books have irreconcilable space lodged between them. even when you slammed them together as hard as you could to test this idea, dust flying, pressing them together as though pulping the syntax, the space was there even though you could not see it. the books are not the same yet must be because the space between them can only be there as a direct consequence of teh fact that it is between them and that they are them, even though it is neither of them. + + + with colors it is similar. shirtless, you wear lilac nail polish. you brushed it on yesterday. you're going out so you have to put a shirt on. without a thought toward the nail polish you slip on your darker purple shirt. later, on the train, you look down — palm resting on your purple chest. grounded by the purple of the shirt, your nails are the color of the sky. + + + + you grew up with two methods of understanding — two methods of appealing to the pathos ethos and logos of the portion of the universe you live in. it became clear early on, however, that these were rather two methods of mitigated misunderstanding. something like the phone lines went down and you live alone in your mind at the end of a long, winding dirt road in the Montana wilderness. each of the two magnets are magnets insofar as they are both magnets and separate magnets, but, judging by their source, they had always been and would always be two severed targets. the successions of their geologic lineage along with their molecular structure might be almost identical, but they could only function as if they were one magnet in the imagination. people animals earth water plant matter — they were still out there. between you was signified by the dirt road the invisible ball the wilderness. that your existence depends on theirs would make it seem as if you're practically the same thing. somehow the sense that you are not prevails. the act of saying "the same thing" is itself a proxy of continuity, as all language maybe, maybe especially when misunderstood. a necessary bridge, halted mid-construction, never completed, but that allows you to see the opposite bank, albeit vaguely. + + + + + in Zeno's first paradox of motion, the Dichotomy Paradox, Atalanta's goal is to run to a given, finite point of destination. the destination is out there, sensible by proxy of its distance from Atalanta and vice versa, only insofar as the distance and the time that will elapse can be observed and estimated. the paradox states that to make any sort of ground toward a finite point of destination Atalanta must first reach its halfway point. the halfway point between Atalanta and the finite point of destination becomes its own finite point of destination, whose halfway point must equally be reached in order to make any sort of ground. this pattern regresses infinitely, as all distances can be infinitely halved. to commit to the paradox all the way to its logical extreme as Zeno does is to commit to the theory that motion is impossible — an illusion. from an unhalved distance, you appear completely still. at least you would appear still if you were to watch yourself from that distance with your own eyes. earth is not a big place. the exchange rate between earth's estimated space-time frame and estimated space-time frames in the gravitational field of other embarrassingly large objects is too volatile to be managed with your given apparatus. according to what measure, apart from your own, then, is motion therefore apparent? if motion is impossible then the destination is unreachable, despite the enduring fact that space and time continue, challenging whether it is practical to consider it a destination at all. as in an asymptote, where as x values increase y values infinitely approach zero and vice versa, if Atalanta moves, she necessarily remains infinitely closer to where she is. she is her own asymptote, her own point of disappearance at once one with and isolated from herself. each destination that occurs infinitely between the starting point and the destination is both an invisible ball and a point of her disappearance. they are unintentionally yet irrevocably there. if all distances halve and Atalanta is not moving then she must not be doing so backwards at some point. she is both all distances halved and all distances wholed as it is only motion that consists of halving. the dichotomy of the paradox inverts: she is one of her destination's infinite points of disappearance. she and the world vanish into her. it follows as well that all other points disappear her into them, and all else. it is even more infuriating because it can only be sensed by proxy of the paradox, because everything appears, for all intents and purposes, to be the same thing. + + + + + + you realized that your presence is necessary to discover the proof of the invisible ball's presence. it is a presence that arises mutually. when you had this thought, that the invisible ball was there, in your space and time, thanks to you, you immediately tried to force them together again. pain. the thought went away as before. another attempt. gone again. there was an awful simplicity lumbering into your peripherals. you began to associate the desire to cancel the magnets' duality with the desire to null your awareness. so, despite your efforts to cancel a duality, you haphazardly created a triad in the following order: magnet you magnet. + + + + + + + you decided on some ground rules. before deciding on them you decided that they could not be decided on without committing to their potential to fall apart in the future. that became the first ground rule. you decided it is no one's business to judge whether any of this is true, especially not yours, but it can be spoken about. speaking about it is a different practice from skirmishing for truth so long as it is accepted from the get-go that discourse does not arrive at universal truth. this is a factor you decided to consider a benevolence. you decided that truth cannot be an interest unless first establishing that its transcendent existence is not an interest, that is, its existence independent of things that may run contrary to it. with these ground rules and some others you then decided that things can start to happen. + + + + + + + + on doing some exceedingly basic research to supplement your thoughts, you find that the force between two magnets has been described in physics as the "magnetic moment." you were not as enchanted by the meaning of this name as by the sound of it. the meaning of "magnetic moment" gracefully obscures once the lexicon of physics gets involved. a "magnetic moment" can be seen in a magnetic field as the two concurrent ideas that obscurity attracts and commonality repels. a "magnetic moment" seems to occur when you encounter the phrase "magnetic moment." + + + + + + + + + in the case of the above, it seemed like thoughts couldn't be all that accurate. a question had to follow as to what are the things that thoughts can't be all that accurate about. it's exactly the point of the first statement that this question had to follow it. it was difficult to say what they are since in order to say what they are you had to think about them first. if thoughts weren't all that accurate and you would have to think about it before saying what they are inaccurate about, you would never be able to be accurate about what they are. the more you tried to think of and say what they are inaccurate about the less and less coherent your thoughts and statements became, regardless of what they were about. in order to know that you know something it's important that you would have been able to express it to someone else coherently. you saw this as the only way knowledge could become a reliable source of communal resilience. if not, the knowledge is just bunched up in the head like a wet wad of paper towels. it stopped feeling like knowledge and started feeling like isolation. many misunderstandings could and did build into collective means of understanding which is necessary, though misunderstanding is very easily domesticated and abused. misunderstanding necessarily structured any sense of understanding. this is only the case if coherence is the ideal you would always strive for when describing reality, an experience of it, or the experience of an experience of it, despite the realization that reality could have no more sympathy for your ideals than your ideals could for it.