PUBLISHED: September 8, 2020
When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things
I CORINTHIANS 13:11
Redaction? No, monument: a .
Redaction: What is not there is not there.
Monument: What is not there is there.
As in, the document contains pages.
The frames an unlimitedness which has a limit:
Something was there: Something is there.
It cannot have been just anything—
has its own integrity.
: You cannot put just anything
into the place of the .
Nevertheless, the withholds itself
to some extent: to the extent of .
What are you?
What do you mean?
—the refuses.
To the extent of .
Each has its own being.
Not an erasure but a making-solid.
making itself solid.
. Already solid.
A woman scales a flagpole on the green.
Beneath her, handheld cameras held in hands.
The statue crumples at the legs: It is hollow.
So long it stood there, full of presence.
The of the hollow statue, standing
on the green. The of the statue’s hollowness.
(Who gets to monument?
(Who gets to redact?
(Who gets to withhold?
In class, were you
told, as I was, that the
didn’t exist?
A way not to have to see.
To see, or not to see.
Who can not see?
The stood on the green for decades.
It became scenery.
It stood for an assumption about the world.
The politician’s face turns red on TV.
He renames enquiry witchhunt.
He renames law to lynching.
In a world, in a country, in
a century
where in fact, on greens,
in public spaces, the use
of public space was terror, then
memorial to terror. .
That is not lynching.
The misused word hides the history.
On the one hand what is redacted might
be looked around, overlooked,
invisible as a backdrop or a scrim.
On the other hand, is a presencing
of what has been absented. The hollowness
of the books I read, the statues I saw, politic
articulated for me until I could begin
to articulate for myself another way, a politic
of the . A presencing of what
I have absented, whether I knew
it or not.
I am trying to chronicle my reading
toward .
As a child, one could perhaps be innocent (when
I was a child, I thought like a child).
In the form that is History, or that is Literature,
no innocence.
(This I learned from others
whose work precedes mine,
makes it possible.)
Now I am an adult, trying
to learn to see the .
A hole in history? Not not
there, but not redacted. As I had thought.
A I had not had to learn
to read, therefore never did.
A monument should not be redaction,
a new kind of monument, not
my monument—nevertheless, I too must
make (actually make) a space for the ,
move myself
out of the way for the ,
which takes its own space, is
its own .
On the green of Literature, of History.
On the public green.
On the green of my mind.
On the green of my life.
