Weaving Sand

For the first posting of slightly emendated un-posted material from this winter, a mildly overwrought bit of prose from February of this year, inspired by Pace Bus’s Transit TV (perhaps the only thing Transit TV has ever inspired, besides annoyance):

“Genius has no taste for weaving sand.” So stated Ralph Waldo Emerson, or so he did if Transit TV, whose slogan is “Moving Entertainment,” is to be believed. I have no reason to disbelieve Transit TV, the collators of whose quotation quiz show are apparently enamored of Emerson, for according to my desultory observations of their product, he supplies what must be a good fifty percent of their quotations. Perhaps they’re just going through that section of Bartlett’s.

The image grabbed my mind: weaving sand. I thought briefly of Borges’s book of sand, but that mythical book is an embodiment of history and all we cannot know. Emerson seems, absent context, to be imagining the mind that has no effect on the world. Grasp the strands of the world and braid them or weave them, warp them and woof them into one another, and if their fibers simply dissolve one into the other, if no texture or structure is formed beyond a temporary and miniature dune about your feet, you are weaving sand. Think of all the helpless endeavors of man: think of a boy who cannot shoot a basket or defend against a layup running for all he is worth from key to key on a basketball court only to do nothing when he arrives; think of the grains of digital sand, all the pretty pixels of Facebook and Civilization IV, unread blogs and Super Mario Bros., Ms. Pacman and the seventh and last episode of some forgotten sitcom; think of the dissolved wealth of a generation, the first of five digital numbers simply dark, winked out with the wealth it represented, on the giant and tiny screens we use to follow our finances; think of seven Troys buried, of Ozymandias ground to sand, of the ashes of the library of Alexandria, of the Celtic culture and the Gothic languages; think of six million Jews and a mixed six million more, of tens of millions of Russian and Chinese peasants and their forgotten tribes; think of all the Reichs, of the British Empire, and of twin towers that, lasting only forty years, seem now to have been built only to be a monumental pyre of concrete, jet fuel, and copier paper on which three thousand would be immolated.

“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” We have been reminded many times of the words of Ecclesiastes. Pace Emerson, genius indeed has no taste for weaving sand, but contra Emerson, it is what genius must endure, whether he live to understand it or no.