Ancient Jars
“The only thing that stayed within the unbreakable contours of the jar was Elpis [Hope].
It did not fly out.
…
But as for the other things, countless baneful things, they are randomly scattered all over humankind.
Full is the earth of evils, full is the sea.”
—Hesiod, Works and Days
The common refrain is that Pandora opened her jar out of curiosity; yet as of late I’ve had the gnawing suspicion that something else drove her. I was chatting with a friend earlier this year about the claustrophobic mood I get into during the spring, when the budding sense of endless possibility just makes me realize how little I’m exploring all that life has to offer. In the face of this vibrant, hypothetical expanse, my own life seems comparatively so small, banal and fixed. The horizon of possibility crawls inwards, becoming crushing rather than liberating. Some physicists predict that the universe will end in a “big crunch,” expansion reverting into collapse as the nonexistent beyond closes in, reducing us to a point. When I’m suffocating under the pressure of this great nothing, I feel like that’s how I’ll end too. Life’s possibilities narrowed to a single point. Done. Finished. Finito. Kaput. I wonder if Pandora also felt this way when she opened her jar—perhaps she yearned for a big bang to counteract this big crunch.
Claustrophobia is a strange feeling, somewhere at the fold between boredom and dread. Heidegger once spoke about true boredom as a mood that lets us apprehend the totality of being— and then deny it all at once. Dread, on the other hand, is a flight into nothingness (What is it that you dread? Nothing in particular. Instead, a perpetual falling). I see claustrophobia as the point where these two meet, the rejected whole curdling as it contacts the dread borders of the void. This feeling of containment can be unbearable. Whether or not Pandora felt this, we can be sure that Elpis— who was fated to remain sealed away in her jar— certainly must have. Facing eternal confinement, I try to imagine how the spirit of Hope stayed hopeful. Is such a thing even conceivable? Maybe not. But then again, what else could have served as Hope’s first home if not this space between possibility and despair?
My mind has returned to Pandora and Elpis recently in the afterglow of spring. The taste of claustrophobia still lingers, and I want to make sense of what it means to live well with containers and containment. It’s both an impossible task and an unavoidable one. They are stark and oppressive these jars, boxes, storage units, cramped apartments, phones, frames, racial classifications, gender binaries, family units, national borders, and prisons; they reek of of helpless determinism, bloated capitalism, rank fascism, all those -isms we’d rather avoid. Don’t box me in: not for my appearance, background, species. The anthropologist Bruno Latour thought that the big self-deception underlying Western modernity was its unwavering belief that it could create neat classifications that the world could be sorted into— atomized categories like Nature, Culture, Man, Animal, Machine that blinded us to the hybridic state of existence. Donna Haraway similarly called on us to return to humus, back to the dust of creation where we might forget the boundaries that separate us and reunite with our chimeric kin.
Yet as much as we might rail against these containers, they’re also deeply essential. “Universal oneness is a soup,” as Suspended Reason once wrote in this magazine. Here on earth, life is cellular life— and cellular life is life made possible by a membranous container. Otherwise, we’d be nothing more than organic compounds floating adrift in half-light. We need containers, if only to exist with enough solidity to overcome them. Why else do I take so many photos of the people I love— capturing their smiles in frames I might never glance at again— if not to try and keep them close, hold precarious sandcastles together amidst crashing waves. Can you blame me for it; is it really so easy for you to let go?
If ever in doubt of the container’s charismatic appeal, just pilgrimage to The Container Store. Baptize yourself in the promise that every moment might ring with the ecstasy of leftovers fitting just perfectly into a takeout carton. For as many problems as we have with containers, we can’t seem to stop making them, nor can we seem to stop putting ourselves (and each other) in them. Even my boxes come in boxes. Once they’re used, into the bin they go— ferried to landfills that keep all that junk walled off far from view. Containers that promise to help us forget, so that we might fill that newly opened space with more, more, more. Unless of course, you’re one of the 15 million people who have to live in one of these forgotten places; better to repress that horrific fact. One more taped-up box to add to the pile.
Everything we try to helplessly hold, all those constraints we try to break out of, every question of how we might occupy space in this vast world— it leads us back to the container. Stifling, leaking, hermetically sealed, and constantly spilling its guts. Open one, however, and you’re met with another. A Russian doll regress. Maybe there’s no way out. Maybe out’s the only way there is.
•
Archaeologists have long relied on pottery to forensically peer into the past. There’s a few key reasons for this. One is that it is remarkably durable. High heat transforms clay into artificial stone, able to survive millennia under the right conditions like its naturally occurring cousins. The other is that pottery is, as the authors of Pottery Analysis note, informed: the product of an “additive process in which the successive steps are recorded in the final product.” From its material composition and shape to its embellishments and glazes, a jar contains within it an entire cosmology. It is a synecdoche of the maker’s world— their movement, touch, and feeling fossilized in earthen form.
I’ve been meaning to make a jar for an old friend of mine, Joe. I’ve been doing pottery for the past year or so, and I figured it’d be a nice gift to give the next time I’m back in Indiana. But nothing has turned out quite right. The functional vessels feel uninspired, symbolically constrained by their purpose. Meanwhile, those guided not by utility but by an inpouring of self always turn out odd— too short to support flowers or with openings so small they might only hold a tulip or two. It would be a burden to gift something so useless. They can never seem to hold everything I want them to.
If an archeologist were to examine my world through this pottery, maybe they’d notice this. In their notes they’d scribble: some objects seem practical— others too misshapen; perhaps served ceremonial or spiritual purpose? I suppose that wouldn't be too far off. Like some old pharaoh, I want to put pieces of myself into canopic jars. But even the Egyptians had no receptacle for the heart; they knew that that had to remain in the body. It was too large to be contained by anything else.
•
For a long time, it was thought that the first pottery vessels emerged around ten millennia ago at the dawn of the “Neolithic Revolution”— an epoch defined by an explosion of human technics that would set the stage for our worldly dominion (animal domestication, agriculture, the seedlings of industrial conquest). It is in this era, Timothy Morton argues, that our modern “agrilogistics” program was born: a “technical, planned, and perfectly logical approach to built space” that began to organize our relationship with the environment around development and extraction. This system would, in theory, transform the world into a giant container that we could endlessly draw out of and dump into. The proto-imperialist sensibility found within organized containment is, perhaps, what encouraged 19th century scholars mired in a milieu of conquest to see pottery as evidence of a society undergoing a shift from “Upper Savagery” into “Lower Barbarism.” One step up the evolutionary tree towards civilization and all its discontents.
It’s a compelling narrative, in no small part because of how containers have been used since. In the twentieth century, the “Container Revolution” transformed global trade by cutting out transport inefficiencies. Prior to containerization, freight was loaded piece-by-piece on heterogeneously sized pallets and crates onto a ship, and then unloaded in similarly piecemeal fashion onto a railcar or truck. With the popularization of standardized shipping containers—which received mass adoption in large part thanks to the logistical challenges of warmongering in Vietnam— all this changed. Cargo became frictionless, interchangeable, able to be stacked up as high as the office buildings and death tolls they made possible. Now, a sweatshop across the world could deliver clothing to the US at a cumulative cost far cheaper than that of a factory just a few miles away. Global capitalism’s underlying commandments (of unitization, fungibility, abstracted exchange value) were realized architecturally within these corrugated steel walls that transformed a diverse array of fruits, clothing, cars, toys, and guns into pure “stuff.”
We would likely have continued to construe the birth of pottery as the inaugural moment behind this conquesing history had recent research not complicated its place in this neat chronology of containerized standardization. Radiocarbon dating has revealed that pottery vessels can be traced back to the heels of the last Ice Age, around 20,000 years ago in China— prior to the first Neolithic settlements and agricultural developments. If so, it means that our earliest experiments with these ur-containers predate Morton’s agrilogistics program by several millennia. During the long dawn of its invention, pottery existed outside this broader apparatus dedicated to organizing, containing, and extracting the world around it. It’s unsure how they held; perhaps they did so softly, in a way forgotten by our proprietarian disposition to come.
This has led to plenty of speculation about the motivations behind this early pottery— whether they were a “prestige” or “practical” technology, to use archaeologist Brian Hayden’s distinction. Though the truth is lost to the deep reaches of prehistory, I like to think that these earliest containers defied even this basic binary, already so warped by our modern obsession with function and utility. Behind ceremonial bowls and pots warming stews, I imagine a useless jar, placed safely in a cool corner. It’s too short to hold much of anything and too misshapen to bring any clan any prestige; it’s used in neither ritual nor rite. Instead it contains the handprints of the person who took the care to make it. When the owner holds it close, fond memories fall out.
•
Little Boxes
“Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes all the same.
— Malvina Reynolds, Little Boxes
Joe and I grew up in a town of little boxes. He was one of those Midwestern giants— tall in the obvious way that people used to be tall before everyone started insisting that they were 6-foot-something. I don’t know when we first met. He was the neighbor of a family friend I grew up visiting regularly, so he was always a passing body in the celestial motion of life. I couldn’t tell you exactly how we became friends either: lost to the reaches of prehistory. One instance, however, helps me mark our transition into the kind of friendship that comes once an epoch.
On the heels of the last Ice Age, a year when the roads iced over so badly people were skating on them, he came over and we trekked to the nearby grocery store to pick up fried chicken. It steamed up the little box it came in, and we devoured it on the walk back. It became a snow day tradition. From this simple foundation, the rituals and habits accumulated over the years. Going to Maxine’s to clog our arteries with peach butter; running an extension cord into the tool shed to smoke to experimental anime; late night drives into the vast reaches of nowhere country listening to Speak Now. When I moved away, he started driving me from and to the airport: first hellos, last goodbyes.
I want to hold on to that— keep it in a little box and stow it somewhere safe. But life just gets bigger and the little box doesn’t. Things escape through the seams when you’re not looking. All of a sudden there are no more snow days.
•
Our wariness around containers is understandable. Western modernity cut up the vast world into little bits and force-fit them into conceptual containers; digital technologies operate off of a logic of containment through lossy compression; almost every single state in the US incarcerates more people per capita than most democratic countries in the world; everything is a sequel or a remake (trapping us in the MCU, the Metaverse, or whatever new brand-world-cage that’s been built for us); we are constantly told that we can no longer envision futures beyond Capitalism. We’re boxed in, and there’s no way out.
In 1968, not too long after the standardized shipping container was adopted by global trade and warmaking, Tony Smith unveiled his sculpture Die— a steel box six feet in width, length, and height. The dimensions were intentionally chosen to accord with those of the human body. As art critic Michael Fried writes, “one way of describing what Smith was making might be something like a surrogate person.” Hannah Higgins continues this line of thinking, noting that it is “as if the box contained the person: [person], or, rather the presence of the uniform person, […], conceived as normalized to fit into the box’s homogenizing form.” Die realizes the modern human as a box— a unitized abstraction, a vessel to be filled by consumerist desires and wants, a “standing reserve” of energy to be drawn upon at will.
The piece gives literal shape to the growing sense that surviving contemporary life is mainly a matter of successfully conforming to the logic of the container. School admissions require applicants to fit the narrow boxes they use to search for suitable candidates, producing tropes like the infamous sob-story Common App essay. A labor market constantly reconfiguring around the latest trend or bubble demands that workers turn themselves into bullshit job generalists— boxes without distinct forms that can be emptied and refilled to meet whatever is demanded. Be warned though. Fill the wrong boxes and you’re marked as a deviant. Asian bodies become Other because of their association with the mechanical, Black bodies because of their association with the animal. Everywhere you go, there is the demand to justify oneself: Why do you deserve to exist? (Check all boxes that apply).
The situation is asphyxiating. But all is not lost. Look closer and there’s a sliver of light at the seams— a gap that opens up to an unexpected fact: containment is a surprisingly ill-contained phenomenon. This is true even in domains that appear defined by their rigorous boundaries. Take logic and math. In 1902 the English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote to his German colleague Gottlob Frege, who was in the midst of attempting to establish the foundations of arithmetics in logic. Frege longed for a tidy mathematics, contained within axioms and purified of messy dependencies; he also longed for a contained and purified world, free of Jewish people and other “undesirables.” Funny coincidence.
Well, Russell had found a problem. It starts with a container, or in logic, what’s known as a “set”: a conceptual box that houses a designated class of things. The set of all dogs, for example, is a box that contains, well, all the dogs {Old Yeller, Toto, Air Bud, my childhood dog, …}. These sets can contain not only objects, but other sets— a set can even recursively contain itself. All good so far. Then, he asks, what about the set of all sets that doesn’t contain itself— does this box include itself or not? If it didn’t have itself contained in it, then it would meet that condition; yet as soon as that happened, it would fail. Back and forth ad infinitum. This minor paradox nicked a key artery in Frege’s system, Axiom V. The project never recovered, and Frege’s quest for mathematical purity came crashing down.
All this is to say that there’s something strange that happens when we try to set up boxes. As soon as we box something in, things start to seep through. Containment is the precondition of rupture and paradox. Russell sensed this. So did Higgins by way of Smith when she noted that to interact with Die is to experience a “fluttering across surface/edge, subject/object, person/thing, now/then boundaries.” And so did the post-structuralists, when they realized that the meaning of a word couldn’t be fixed in place, but was always deferred— pointing to other living and responsive dependencies. Not even atoms are Democritean self-contained unities: physicists suspect that the mass of most protons and neutrons aren’t due to their own quarks, but virtual particles constantly sliding between the gaps of determinate being. Our smallest boxes still leak.
We are bounded, and because of that we are always losing ourselves— one contains the other; necessitates it. It’s a bittersweet state of affairs. Yet it is also this condition that makes relating conceptually possible. As the ethicist Emmanual Levinas intimates, I can only become obligated to another by recognizing their Otherness. It is within the gaps allowed by our boundaries that we find each other. Existence is what the scholar Akira Lippit might call exergual—“from the Greek ex (outside) and ergon (work).” We are works initiated from outside, that demand an outside that “makes possible the work, and remains part of it” while also staying essentially exterior, refusing the “the dialectic of interiority, the privilege of intimacy, and the fantasy of belonging.” Loving a person asks you to fall into the void that sits in between— to leap into the chasmic faith of an outside you cannot know nor hold.
•
Flown Dreams
“You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?”
— Edgar Allen Poe, A Dream Within a Dream
When Hope finally escapes her jar, she becomes a dream. The last time I saw Joe, he apologized. It wasn’t about anything serious. Just the fact that he’s been bad about picking up the phone lately, leaving my texts on “read.” I told him not to worry; there wasn’t enough space to waste any on guilt. Not to mention that I’m also seriously bad at responding to things in about every facet of my life. Let he who is without sin etc etc.
He has never had anything to say sorry for. He’s my friend, simple as that.
Of course I’m not so naive that I’d deny that there are changes that I’m still getting used to. Our relationship, which was once so concrete and spacious has transformed into— what, exactly? Not something smaller per se, but more virtual: an abstract real, a ghostly presence, a positive absence. When we’re together, it’s like the virtual particles between us suddenly phase into being, giving everything mass and letting us pick up where we left off. Then, as soon as we say goodbye and go back to our separate lives, there they go, leaving everything feeling so weightless again.
I’m not sure where these memories and feelings are spirited off to. I’m shocked by how little I can remember of my own volition. When I’m alone, the things I do recall tend to come to me like dreams from across the desert of time. They materialize from the dimensionless space of an outside that, to borrow Foucault’s words “pulls as far away from itself as possible, receding”; the same domain the oracles must have drawn from when they whispered to old gods. Sometimes I text him to ask if I’m remembering correctly: Was it really like that? Am I making this up? I’m worried about the possibility of these virtual particles failing to appear one day— of them refusing my call, leaving me on “read.” Then the dream too might finally fly away.
Maybe this doesn’t matter. He is my friend after all, simple as that.
•
Realizing— capturing, containing, re-presenting— what is outside and unknown. Few tasks serve as a higher aim for an art; few tasks are as hopeless. A year ago, I went to the MoMA in New York to bear witness to a piece that aspired to these lofty heights. “What would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of The Museum of Modern Art,” the museum asked. The response was Unsupervised, Refik Anadol’s monument to mechanic consciousness: a screen that stretched from floor to ceiling in the museum’s Gund lobby displaying a seemingly never-ending flow of images produced by an AI trained on the museum’s collection and responding to site-specific variables like ambient sound, weather, and lighting.
According to Anadol, the aim was to “find ways to connect memories with the future” and “make the invisible visible.” Thin threads strung between the past, present, and all those future tense virtualities: dreams and hopes and not-yet-maybes. To catch lightning in a bottle— or perhaps more appropriately (if we’re basing our judgment off of the imperious scale of the operation) stuff God in a box. Not just any god mind you, but our new techno-deity. Body of data made sacrament to be consumed by fawning audience; just as our bodies are datafied, devoured by the pantheon of corporations and algorithms condemned to endless hunger.
It was a grand task, housed in an even grander installation designed to maximize viral spectacle. For all its ambition, however, I found myself mostly struck by its banality. In her critique of the piece, R.H. Lossin called it “a twenty-four-foot square carbon-intensive screensaver.” She wasn’t far off. Images swirled in and out of view but always fell short of resolving; not so much a dream dissolving in dawnlight, more a half-baked afterimage lingering after an overextended TikTok session. I couldn’t help but think of Unsupervised when I read Jess Rirchardson’s piece for the Cleveland Review’s series on Awe, in which a king engages his subjects to find a suitable container for this feeling:
“On the seventh afternoon, the architect told the king to look out the window, pointing to a gigantic box across the valley. The box towered over the kingdom, enormous. ‘There’s nothing that won’t fit inside,’ the architect said. ‘Even awe.’ Everyone could tell he didn’t believe it.”
Anadol’s installation takes our contemporary obsession with containment to its logical conclusion, constructing a box that we are told is big enough for dreams, memories, futures, awe, and a bag of chips. Does anyone really believe it? The techno-capitalists would convince us of this. Theirs is a promise of comforting containment. Bodies captured and broken down into their constituent parts, “hacked” as if they were simply vessels to be opened and tinkered with. Black boxes replacing the jury box as courts adopt AI to sentence us with inhuman hand (never mind the very human biases these technologies so often reproduce). Desires and histories flattened into algorithmic identities that feed us content with the promise that they know us better than we do: turning us into black boxes too, as if our deepest wants were written in a language only the machine might read. The past captured and tamed— then reassembled into a future absent any possibility beyond what has already come. Everything put in its place.
All these problematic entanglements are, of course, elided in the superficially dense but meaningfully empty content of the artwork itself. Unsupervised was too close to its material to notice this. This was the core of Lossin’s critique: by presuming to capture AI in this sleek cage, Anadol divorced it from its complex death-dealing dimensions. The box doesn’t keep this technology in, it leaves all of its inconvenient baggage out. What remains is little more than the hollow promise of technologically enabled grandeur. A billboard advertisement for AI. I wish I believed that everything that matters could be caught and pinned up like so many butterflies. Yet viewing Unsupervised is to be confronted with the lifelessness that such containment inevitably produces. Our faith in the machine’s ability to retain memory of beauty is belied by the banal forms we see regurgitated before us. When past and future, experience and dream are robbed of the wings that allow them to take flight, the result is emptiness— a box of fading echoes.
•
A Bag of Stars
“Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
At a glance, Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia series, produced during the first half of the 20th Century, isn’t all too dissimilar from Unsupervised. My encounter with Wilfred’s work was serendipitous. It was the spring of my final semester as an undergrad, and I was, unsurprisingly, in a claustrophobic mood. Come May, we’d all be flung out from this place along unseen vectors and I was glooming over the idea of life as a cascade of goodbyes. In search of refuge, I decided to go with a friend to the nearby college art gallery, which happened to be putting on an exhibition of Wilfred’s work (the first in more than four decades, the writeup proudly proclaimed).
The exhibit took place in a darkened room populated by a series of what looked like midcentury TV boxes and projection screens of varying sizes. Undergirding each was a mechanical complex of lighting instruments, reflective panels, and glass panes that produced a show of prismatic light slow dancing across the surface. Portals into a world of light. These diaphanous spectra floated in a suspension of viscous darkness, immediately recalling the northern lights or distant nebulae rippling and arcing across the firmament. Placquards indicated the runtime of each “composition.” Some ran for minutes, while others went for years up to the limit of eternity.
There are obvious formal similarities between Unsupervised and the Lumia series. Like Anadol’s work, Wilfrid’s compositions are boxed-up mechanisms that produce a stream of abstract images on a screen (though the inner workings of these pieces are orders of magnitude “simpler” than the black box systems Anadol traffics in). More significantly, the Lumia “Opuses,” as Wilfrid liked to call them, also responded to the techno-cultural milieu of their day. In the 1800s, the double slit experiment discovered that light behaves as both a wave and a particle, ushering us into an indeterminate quantum world. Then, in the early 20th Century, Einstein demonstrated that within this world of flux, lightspeed was a universal constant; this, however, required us to reimagine the empty and discrete container of space as a unified field of “spacetime.” Astronomical imagery of bent starlight further nuanced this picture by indicating that spacetime wasn’t a static Euclidean form, but a dynamically curving topology. By working with light, Wilfrid engaged with the medium around which our entire understanding of the cosmos was reorienting.
Yet these parallels obscure the radically divergent sensibilities of these pieces. While Unsupervised betrays a desire to retain and hold— a Euclidean decomposition of information space into machine-readable bits— Lumia operates off of a topological logic of constant transformation. For Wilfrid, light was “part of the universe of flux.” Try to capture light, and it escapes: shifting, emanating, receding, decaying. Rather than fight this entropic fact, Lumia leans into it. If we feel small or insignificant facing this display, it’s not because we’re confronted with some grand mechanical intelligence incomprehensibly greater than us (many, if not most of the pieces were human scale after all); it’s because we realize that we too are always spilling outwards. The accompanying notes about various runtimes don’t so much comfort us with promises of recurrent constancy as much as they urge us to consider all those differences across repetition. By the time the mechanism resets, the actual light that appeared before you will be gone, traversing through spacetime along its own unseen vectors. What comes back around won’t be what you left.
In spite of all this, Lumia lets us find comfort in that brief moment between arrival and departure. It was hard not to feel lucky viewing these pieces. Only we would witness the glow of that particular light on that particular afternoon; life and artwork would carry on, but our trajectories would be forever altered, warped by their mutual passage through these minute curvatures of feeling and presence. Sooner than I’d like to admit, it’ll be a decade since I last spoke to the friend I went to that show with. Having met too late in college, our friendship was also made of brief overlaps and growing distances. Still, I’m grateful to have existed alongside her for that moment. As with light, what is gone continues to give. Our sky is illuminated by long dead stars.
•
The commute to the Indianapolis airport takes around 40 minutes. My flight back to New York is usually scheduled pretty early, so Joe will show up in the dew-lit morning hours to drive me there. I’m not sure how he got to be so kind. Small cruelties come easily to kids and teens, but they never did to him. We're older now, and he’s still kind, still driving me to say goodbye. God knows I don’t deserve it, though I’ll gladly take this kindness and run. The ride itself is generally smooth, a long glide under the big sky that I’ll soon disappear into. We’ll listen to music and shoot the shit, saying nothing of consequence and meaning everything by it. These moments have become the most cherished parts of my visits. I often find myself wishing that we’d run into traffic to stretch out the little time we have.
The anthropologist Marc Augé spoke of highways as paradigmatic “non-places”: anonymizing spaces absent history, genuine social relations, “there to be passed through.” The feeling of absentminded passage looms over more and more over my life these days; the sense that I’m moving from non-place to non-place having forgotten where I’m meant to be heading. Augé was right to connect this condition to solitude. Yet, ironically, I don’t feel it on these highways. Augé clearly didn’t grow up in the Midwestern suburbs, because he didn’t know that these roads hold something else in them. Not “place” as traditionally conceived (it is still transitory, all present-tense, a passing through) but a someplace where you’re not alone— where a friend sees you off on this passage.
What does a non-place turn into with company; what can a story mean when they all end the same way; what does a container hold when filled with light? Nothing, everything. Hope’s first home.
We get to the airport too soon as always. Unlike me, Joe’s an efficient driver. The conversation tapers off. Only a few more words remain, so it's best to choose them carefully. Ursula K. Le Guin saw writing as an act of collecting and holding. “A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings." I’m better at making these sorts of containers than clay jars. In defiance of lost time, I started this piece to try to contain the memories and gratitude I knew my pottery couldn’t: a carrier bag for all those little seeds and stars I’ve collected for him over the years. Yet I still can’t get it all. Even this turned out too odd and misshapen. Things fall through the cracks, or overflow; they fail to capture how cramped and expansive it all is; how I want to hold it all together, and learn to let it go. The only hope is to leave plenty of space in between, to let the gaps do the hard work— to say it in as few words as possible.
Love you; See you soon.