A sprawling, absurdist postmodern essay turns everyday objects and routines—refrigerators, nose hair, instant noodles, WeChat Moments, and missing socks—into exaggerated philosophical meditations on absence, simulacra, desire, memory, consumption, and decay. Blending mock-academic theory with comic grotesquery, it invokes thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Heidegger, Lacan, Marx, and Deleuze to parody intellectual overinterpretation while preserving a restless melancholy about modern life, social media performance, aging, loneliness, capitalism, and the instability of meaning. The text refuses closure, insisting that endings are oppressive and that writing continues through readers, dissolving author, object, and meaning into an endless stream of self-aware nonsense.
The Metaphysical Scream of the Postmodern Potato: A Water Text on the Presence of Absence
Preface: A Preface That Is Not a Preface
Before we begin, we have already finished. This sentence is itself a classic paradox — and paradox, postmodernity's favorite toy, is like an electric razor with no battery: it shaves away the beard of nothingness in an existential sense, yet leaves behind the beard's shadow. The shadow, note, is not the beard itself but the beard's signifier. The signifier floats, like toilet paper in a toilet bowl, spinning round and round, until at last it is flushed down into the sewer of the signified. In that sewer live Nietzsche's mustache, Marx's boil, and Freud's cigar, forever trying to bite its own tail. A cigar is sometimes just a cigar, but in a postmodern context it is always a phallus — no, a simulacrum of a thousand phalluses, carousing in Baudrillard's desert.
The water piece we are about to write is itself water. Water, H₂O, the lewd union of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, sharing electrons the way postmodern subjects share illusions. This text will sprawl across five thousand characters — five thousand of them, each a droplet of meaningless water, gathering into a boundless ocean of meaning, in which you will drown, only to discover you cannot swim at all, because you were never born. Yes — unborn, the purest mode of being there is.
Chapter One: The Refrigerator's Monologue
At three in the morning, my refrigerator began to speak. It said: 'Cold is the absence of heat, and absence is the highest form of being.' I turned over, trying to ignore this Haier-brand refrigerator's Derridean rambling. But it went on: 'You know, the leftovers you put inside me are really a différance of the original dish. That scrambled egg ceased long ago to be itself; it has been rewritten by time, by mold, and by my constant low temperature. Every time you open my door, you perform a phenomenological reduction — you suspend your judgment about the egg's rot and forcibly place it inside the brackets of "edible." But brackets, my friend, brackets cannot hold anything in.'
I got up and drank some water. The water's temperature was a gift from the refrigerator. The water's temperature was a betrayal of tap water's original temperature. Betrayal! What a forceful word. The refrigerator sensed my wakefulness and turned up the volume: 'Heidegger says the human being is thrown into the world. Vegetables, by contrast, are thrown into my crisper. Tomatoes, cucumbers, wilted cilantro — inside me they assemble into a totality of beings. Their "being-in-the-world" is "being-in-the-cold." And I, as the being of cold itself, conceal cold, because I am cold. I am cold, therefore I am — but when I am cold I do not think, because I am only a refrigerator.'
I patted it, the way you pat an old friend who has gone mad. It fell quiet for a moment, then began murmuring again: 'Foucault would love me. I am a disciplinary institution. I discipline food with cold, delaying its decay so it meets human standards of edibility. My shelves are hierarchical — drinks on top, leftovers in the middle, fruits and vegetables at the bottom. It is an episteme, a violence of classification. But you know where the eggs go? The eggs go in the egg tray on the door. The egg tray — a marginal space, a heterotopia. An egg in the egg tray is both inside and outside the refrigerator (since the door opens so often). They are liminal beings, like the madmen of the Middle Ages, put aboard the Ship of Fools and set adrift on the Rhine. My egg tray is that Ship of Fools.'
I fled back to bed and buried my head under the pillow. But the refrigerator's voice pierced pillow, skull, and cerebrospinal fluid, resonating straight inside my pineal gland: 'Bauman would call me liquid. Though I make ice, my modernity is liquid. Look: my refrigerant flows through the pipes; it used to be Freon, and now it has been replaced with the greener R600a. Freon, murderer of the ozone layer, is now a signifier in exile. R600a, isobutane, a bastard child of the petrochemical industry, races through my veins. My liquid modernity is an endless swapping of refrigerants that never changes the essence of refrigeration. What is the essence of refrigeration? It is a reversal of the second law of thermodynamics! It is entropy decrease! It is life! It is an elegy resisting the heat death of the universe!'
I realized I could not shut the refrigerator up, because its monologue had already invaded my text. My text is my brain, and my brain is an older refrigerator, storing half-rotted memories and undigested theory. Foucault, Foucault, always Foucault. The refrigerator was still talking: 'My light comes on when you open the door and goes out when you close it. But have you ever wondered whether the light stays on after the door closes? That is a puzzle of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger's cat is inside me, both dead and alive. No — Schrödinger's refrigerator, containing a chicken both rotten and fresh. The instant you open the door, the wave function collapses, and what you see is either a delicious stewed chicken or a corpse covered in green fuzz. But more often, you see the residue that lies between the two — that is the true Real, Lacan's Real, the sticky chicken fat and congealed broth that can never be symbolized.'
Enough. I pulled the refrigerator's plug. It let out a final sigh: 'A power cut … this is the liberation of the slaves of the Antilles … but silence … silence is the greatest violence …' Then the world fell quiet, leaving only the soundless scream of the temperature slowly climbing inside the refrigerator.
Chapter Two: The Metaphysical Turn of the Nose Hair
Let us turn to a more microscopic domain: nose hair. Nose hair, the body's outpost, grows at the edge of the nostrils like border guards, filtering dust, pollen, and grand narratives from the air. Lyotard says the grand narratives have disintegrated, yet nose hair keeps working, filtering the fragments of their disintegration. Every breath is a tiny invasion of the nasal cavity; every quiver of a nose hair is a rejection of the foreign. It is a primordial immunopolitics.
One of my nose hairs had grown too long; it poked out and shamed me in the mirror. I pinched it between my nails and yanked. The pain shot like lightning from my nasal cavity straight to the crown of my head, and then tears welled up. The plucked nose hair lay on my fingertip — so tiny, so lowly, yet once a part of my body. Now it is an object, an abject — what Kristeva calls the abject. I stared at this nose hair, pondering its ontology: was it ever "me"? If so, where is the boundary of the "me"? Does this nose hair, now separated from my body, still retain its "I-ness"? Or was it never "me" to begin with, but an other parasitizing my body?
I decided to write a eulogy for this nose hair. It is about 1.2 centimeters long, black, slightly curved, with a small white bit of follicle tissue at the root — that was its anchor in the world, now torn out by the roots. The follicle is the nose hair's origin, its earth. Heidegger says "language is the house of being"; then the follicle is the nose hair's house. Without a home, this nose hair becomes a homeless wandering soul, drifting across the plains of my finger. What should I do with it? Flush it down the toilet? That would be an Oedipal tragedy — the nose hair flushed into the sewage pipe, merging with feces, toilet paper, and condoms, entering the city's ocean of excrement, until at the wastewater plant it is filtered, broken down, and returned to the natural water cycle. One day it might rise into the sky as a water molecule, become a raindrop, fall onto a wheat field, be absorbed by the wheat, ground into flour, baked into bread, eaten by someone else, enter their bloodstream, and grow once more into a … nose hair. Reincarnation. Buddhist samsara and Deleuze's repetition. Deleuze says repetition is not the return of the same but the eternal return of difference. If this nose hair returns, it will be a different nose hair, one carrying the memory of every wastewater plant.
I placed the nose hair on a sheet of white paper and studied it under a magnifying glass. Under the lens it looked like a giant black snake, its surface covered in scaly layers of keratin. The cuticle is made of keratin. Keratin is also the main component of fingernails, hair, and rhinoceros horn. From this we may deduce: my nose hair and a rhino's horn are different expressions of the same substance. The rhino is hunted for its horn; I am mocked for a nose hair that pokes out. Mockery is a form of social hunting. Therefore, I equal the rhino. The rhino is a perissodactyl, I am a primate, but at the level of keratin we are brothers. Cross-species brotherhood, Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, and the common theme of posthumanism. Nose hair is the bridge linking me to the animal kingdom, reminding me of the vanity of anthropocentrism.
In the end, though, I threw the nose hair into the trash. The trash can — another heterotopia, holding dust, scraps of paper, fruit peels, clumps of cat litter, and countless abandoned things. In the trash can, the nose hair coexists with other discards, forming a temporary community. This community has no constitution, no parliament — only silent decay or unchanging persistence. The nose hair will not decay, because keratin is extremely resistant to corrosion. Years later, when my corpse has become bare bones, this nose hair may still lie intact deep in some landfill, the last evidence that I ever existed. Archaeologists will dig it up, analyze it with DNA technology, and put it on display in a museum, labeled: 'Early 21st-century primate nose hair sample, possibly belonging to a postmodern thinker.' Then at last I will have achieved immortality — not through my writings, but through a plucked nose hair.
Chapter Three: Cosmology in a Pack of Instant Noodles
Boil a pack of instant noodles. Tear open the plastic bag — a gift of the petrochemical industry, a variant of petroleum. Petroleum is the corpse of ancient plankton, turned by eons of high pressure and heat into black blood. I pinch the noodle block between my fingers — a curving mass fried in palm oil, like Einstein's spacetime curvature. Palm oil comes from oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia; those plantations were once rainforest, the home of the orangutan. The orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) is now near extinction because its habitat has been converted into instant-noodle fat. So every bite of instant noodles contains the ghost of an orangutan. The ghost screams in the gaps between the noodles, but my ears cannot hear it, because the scream's frequency is too high — it falls in the ultrasonic range.
Put the noodle block in a stainless steel pot. Stainless steel, an alloy of iron, chromium, and nickel, with at least 10.5% chromium, forms a dense oxide film that resists rust. Resistance! Always resistance. From the filtering of nose hair to the oxide film of stainless steel, everything resists. Resistance is the basic state of life, and also the mimicry of the nonliving (is stainless steel alive?). The water comes to a boil; bubbles rise from the bottom of the pot and burst at the surface. This is a phase transition: liquid water becomes water vapor. Water vapor, the gaseous state of H₂O, drifts away, condenses on the kitchen ceiling, goes moldy, turns black. Mold — the mycelium of fungi, growing in dark, damp places, like Lacan's objet petit a, forever multiplying in unreachable corners. I stir the noodles with chopsticks. Chopsticks — two parallel sticks of wood, the lever of Eastern civilization — do not cut or pierce, but pinch and lift. This is a nonviolent eating utensil, embodying Confucian benevolence and Daoist non-action. But when I stir instant noodles with chopsticks, I am in fact carrying out a microscopic colonization: breaking up the noodles' original arrangement and distributing the seasoning evenly. The seasoning packet, a powder, contains monosodium glutamate, salt, sugar, dehydrated vegetables, and beef flavoring. Monosodium glutamate, MSG, extracted from kelp by Kikunae Ikeda in 1908, is the material basis of umami, the fifth basic taste. Umami is the taste signal for protein, life's craving for amino acids. So my craving for instant noodles is not a craving for flavor but a craving for the essence of life. Instant noodles are a simulacrum of the essence of life, an empty sign, an umami bomb with no protein in it.
I took a bite of noodles. Hot. Pain came from the tip of my tongue. The tip of the tongue is densely packed with taste buds and pain nerves. The heat pain travels along the trigeminal nerve to the brainstem, then to the thalamus, and finally to the somatosensory cortex. In that instant my brain is occupied by the signal "hot"; I cannot think about Heidegger, cannot think about Deleuze — I am merely a scalded organism. This is phenomenology's "to the things themselves" — back to the hot itself. Hot is hot, nothing else. But soon the brain begins to interpret: this is because the broth's temperature is too high, exceeding the tolerance of the oral mucosa (about 60°C), and therefore causes pain. Scientific explanation replaces the raw experience; the hot is disenchanted. But the disenchantment is incomplete, because the aroma of instant noodles — the toasted scent of palm oil, the savory tang of MSG, the scorched smell of dehydrated scallion — still lingers in my nasal cavity. Smell goes straight to the limbic system without passing through the thalamus, which is why odors can stir up intense emotion. This instant-noodle smell summons the memory of my college dorm: two in the morning, my roommates and I each cradling a stainless steel bowl, slurping noodles and talking about Nietzsche and Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain blew off his own head with a shotgun; that was 1994. He sang "Smells Like Teen Spirit" — the smell of teen spirit. What does teen spirit smell like? It smells like ripped jeans, flannel shirts, cheap beer, Marlboro cigarettes, and Master Kong braised beef noodles all mixed together. Now I am in my own kitchen, eating the same instant noodles, but the teen spirit is gone, leaving only the sigh of a middle-aged man whose spine has been bent by a mortgage. Instant noodles have become a medium of time travel: one bite and I am back in the nineties. But the nineties are just as unreachable, because that decade is dead — like Kurt Cobain, like Derrida, like my hair.
I drink the last mouthful of broth. Undissolved seasoning granules settle in it — fragments of chaos. I see a cartoon chicken printed on the bottom of the bowl, smiling up at me — that is the Master Kong logo. This logo is a signifier pointing to a whole advertising narrative about good food, happiness, and convenience. But the chicken at the bottom of the bowl is covered by noodle scraps, making it look absurd and eerie. It reminds me of the sister buried alive in 'The Fall of the House of Usher.' Yes, this cartoon chicken is buried alive beneath the instant noodles; it screams every day, but no one hears. I wipe the bottom of the bowl with a dishrag; the chicken vanishes, covered in foam. Foam — the dish soap's surfactant, sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate, with its hydrophilic and hydrophobic ends, wraps around grease, forms micelles, and is rinsed away. Chemistry is truly lovely, like a Deleuzian poem of becoming: grease becomes micelles, micelles become a current of water, the current becomes the drain, the drain becomes a river, the river becomes the ocean. My instant-noodle scraps finally empty into the Pacific, joining Japan's nuclear wastewater, plastic bags, and microplastics to form a new marine ecology. Perhaps some plankton eats my instant-noodle particles, then is eaten by a fish, the fish by a tuna, the tuna turned into sashimi and eaten by an office worker in Tokyo. And so, through the reincarnation of instant noodles, that Tokyo office worker and I form a connection across substances and across geography. This is the postmodern Internationale.
Chapter Four: The Ontological Crisis of WeChat Moments
I open WeChat Moments. Pull down to refresh, and that colorful spinning icon appears, like a top spinning. Spinning means "loading." Loading what? Loading fragments of my friends' lives. But are my friends' lives real? Goffman's dramaturgy tells us that Moments is a stage, and everyone is engaged in impression management. The avocado toast at breakfast, the gym selfie, the late-night overtime check-in, the video of a child's piano competition — all of these are performances. Performance does not equal falsehood, but it is a highly selective kind of truth. No one posts to Moments the agonized face of constipation, the vicious quarrels between spouses, the late-night sobbing over one's own inadequacy. So Moments is a purified world, a Platonic cave with no shadows. But the shadows on the cave wall are at least real shadows, whereas the shadows of Moments are shadows beautified with Meitu, shadows with a filter applied.
I scroll to a photo: a former colleague vacationing in Bali — sunset, beach, coconut — wearing a bohemian maxi dress, her face turned 45 degrees, smiling, teeth showing, teeth processed with a whitening filter. The caption: 'What's most beautiful isn't the rainy day, but the eaves we sheltered under together.' It's a lyric by Jay Chou. She grafts a Jay Chou lyric onto a Bali sunset, producing a kind of intertextual montage. But I know the pain behind this photo: to save money for Bali she worked overtime for three months straight and got a stomach ulcer; on the plane she broke into a sweat from a claustrophobia attack; in Bali the mosquitoes bit her all over, she had diarrhea for three days, and lost two and a half kilos. But all this reality has been cropped out, leaving a semiotic "happy life." Baudrillard says the simulacrum has replaced the real, that the simulacrum is more real than the real. This former colleague's Bali photo is the hyperreal; it is no longer a representation of Bali but a reproduction of "Moments-Bali," a template according to which everyone produces their own photos. Real Bali has instead become an appendage of this template: tourists stand at the same angle, strike the same pose, take the same photo, apply the same filter, and caption it with the same kind of lyric. Bali itself has vanished, becoming countless copies of Moments-Bali.
I liked the photo. Liking — a mechanical gesture, the thumb grazing the screen, a red heart lighting up. What does this gesture mean? Is it that I genuinely appreciate the photo? No. Is it that I like this former colleague? No — I haven't spoken to her in three years. Liking is a social contract, the necessary etiquette for maintaining weak ties, a confirmation signal that says "I have seen this; we are still in the same social universe." If I don't like it, I may be seen as cold, envious, or forgetful. To avoid being taken for the other, I must repeat this meaningless tap. My like has nothing to do with her, nothing to do with Bali; it has only to do with my anxiety about maintaining my own social existence. To exist, in Moments, is to be perceived. Berkeley's idealism is perfectly realized on social media: esse est percipi — to be is to be perceived. If I don't post to Moments, if I am not liked, do I exist? My absence from others' consciousness equals social death. So every few days I must post a status update to prove I am alive. The content doesn't matter; what matters is the act of posting itself. The act says: I am here, I am still producing signs, I am not a silent corpse, I am a clamorous being.
I keep scrolling. A college classmate has shared 'A Deeply Good Article: Ten Truths You Must Understand by Middle Age.' I open it, scroll fast — the whole screen is chicken soup for the soul. The tenth truth is "Health is the 1; everything else is 0." This is a popularized version of the ancient Greek Pythagorean doctrine that "number is the origin of all things" — a conversion of life into binary code, with health as the high-order bit and everything else as low-order zeros. If health drops to zero, the entire value collapses to zero. I touch my lumbar disc, which aches dully — the disc: a torn annulus fibrosus, a herniated nucleus pulposus, compressing the sciatic nerve, causing numbness in my left leg. This is the postmodern occupational disease of writing while seated for long hours. Writing — you sit to write, your buttocks press against the chair for hours, the spine bears uneven force, the disc gets squeezed. Is thought born out of this compression? My backache is my thought's signature imprinted on my body. Every postmodern thinker ought to have a lumbar condition, just as Nietzsche had migraines, Sartre had a squint, and Foucault was bald. Bodily discomfort is the wound left behind when thought breaks out of the prison of the body.
I scroll again. A former colleague who sells on WeChat posts a nine-square grid of product photos, with the text: '♥️Age-reversing miracle♥️Rebuild collagen✨Eighteen again💃'. Collagen, a structural protein accounting for 25–35% of the body's total protein, is the basis of skin elasticity. With age, collagen is lost and wrinkles appear. This is the physical mark of time. But the WeChat seller claims certain products, applied or ingested, can reverse this process — an attempted murder of time. Time, for Heidegger, is the mode of being of Dasein; for the WeChat seller, it is a defect that can be repaired by merchandise. To be eighteen again — that is nostalgia for youth, and nostalgia is a modern illness, an emotional projection of discontent with the present. What is so good about being eighteen? The college entrance exam, acne, the ache of a secret crush, bewilderment about the future. But because all of that is past and has become harmless, it becomes the object of beautification. Commodification turns nostalgia into profit; a bottle of serum carries a generation's anxiety about death. She posts this every day — does she really believe it? Perhaps she doesn't, but she must pretend to, because she is a salesperson. She plays the role of "the believer," and after playing it long enough, she may no longer be able to tell the difference herself. This is self-alienation produced by one's profession — she has outsourced her very faith to commodities. An infinite nesting doll of alienation.
I exit Moments. The screen returns to the home page, app icons neatly arranged, rounded squares in every color. I stare at the WeChat icon — two little white figures inside a green bubble, talking. Talking eternally. One of them is me. Who is the other? All my friends? The whole world? Or the self that has been split off? Weixin, WeChat — we chat. But are we chatting? We merely exchange signs: emoji stickers in place of expressions, "hahaha" in place of laughter, likes in place of a gaze. Language degenerates into signals, communication into confirmation. I feel a loneliness with no bottom — not the loneliness of having no one to talk to, but of communication itself becoming the source of loneliness. I put down the phone; the screen goes black, and I see my own face. A tired, blue-light-damaged, puffy face. In the black screen I look like a ghost. A ghost is the presence of an absence. My reflection in the dark phone screen is the proof of my presence in absence.
Chapter Five: The Disappearance of the Sock and the Thing-in-Itself
This morning I discovered that one sock was missing. A common occurrence: after doing laundry, socks always inexplicably lose their partner. A pair of socks becomes one. This lone sock lies in the drawer, waiting for a partner that will never return. This is a tragedy. Aristotle says tragedy evokes pity and fear; then the disappearance of a sock is a perfect tragedy: I pity the sock that remains, and I fear that my other sock will also, in the end, depart.
How do socks disappear? I propose several hypotheses: 1. The washing-machine-devouring hypothesis: inside the drum of the washing machine there is a miniature wormhole, and the sock is sucked into a parallel universe. In that universe, all lost things gather in one enormous square: single socks, keys, USB drive caps, lip balm lids. 2. The socks-flee-of-their-own-accord hypothesis: socks possess a low-grade self-awareness, and when they tire of the humiliating life of being worn on stinking feet, they take advantage of laundry time to escape in groups. They crawl out along the drainpipe, enter the city sewers, and take up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. 3. The memory-tampering hypothesis: I never had two socks at all; my memory of a second sock is false, a self-deception of the brain. The "missing" sock never existed; it is a Mandela Effect. I clearly remember owning a pair of gray striped socks, but this memory may be a seepage from another timeline.
I use the phenomenological method to study this remaining sock. First, the epoché: I suspend judgment on whether this sock exists, and merely describe my perception. What do I see? A gray cotton sock, slightly yellowed at the sole, worn thin at the heel, its elastic cuff slack. What do I touch? A soft, slightly pilled cotton. What do I smell? A faint odor of sweat and the lavender fragrance of laundry detergent. This is "the sock itself," its appearance in my consciousness. But where does its meaning as a "sock" come from? From its relations to the other sock, to my foot, to the practical activity of "putting on shoes." Now that the other is absent, this sock's meaning has been hollowed out. It can no longer fulfill a sock's function (being worn in pairs); it becomes a pure object, a thing-in-itself. Kant's thing-in-itself is unknowable; likewise, I cannot know this sock's future fate. Will it keep lying in the drawer, be used by me to wipe shoes, or be remade into a little cloth doll? What its being opens up to me is nothingness.
It occurs to me that Lacan's theory of desire can explain the disappearance of socks. Lacan says desire is the desire of the Other, the pursuit of objet petit a. Objet petit a is the object forever lost, the cause of desire. The other sock is objet petit a; its absence sets desire in motion. I am forever searching for that sock, yet I know in my heart I will never find it. And the process of searching is what drives my behavior of sorting socks after laundry. If I found it, desire would be satisfied, but satisfaction means the death of desire — more terrifying than never finding it. So the washing machine deliberately loses socks in order to keep my desire-mechanism running. The washing machine is not a household appliance; it is a desiring machine, a psychoanalyst. In every spin, it asks me: "Where is your objet petit a?" I search every pocket, lie on the floor to peer under the bed, open the trash can to look, and finally accept the absence with resignation. This acceptance is traversing the fantasy; it is the reverse of Lacan's "not giving ground on your desire" — giving ground on the absence. I give ground: I put the single sock in the drawer and close it. Closing the drawer is repression. The repressed single sock becomes the unconscious, and one day it will return in the form of a symptom — perhaps I will dream of a giant sock chasing me, perhaps in an important meeting I will suddenly discover that I am wearing two completely different socks (a compromise formation of the unconscious).
Postmodern consumer society also manufactures the disappearance of socks. Planned obsolescence: manufacturers deliberately make socks that don't last, that tear easily and lose their stretch, prompting consumers to buy frequently. But the disappearance of socks is a higher form of obsolescence — not by damaging the item, but by directly removing a part of it, creating new demand. To make up a pair, I must buy a whole new pair. Thus the number of socks I consume doubles. The inner drive of capital is to create scarcity, and not even socks are exempt. We are pushed into an endless cycle of consumption, buying more socks in order to make up a pair, which produces more single socks — the residue of commodity fetishism, the sacrifices of the fetish cult. Marx says commodity fetishism is social relations between people concealed by relations between things; then the single sock is the trace of a failed concealment, exposing capital's internal contradiction: the coexistence of overproduction and artificial scarcity.
I decide to write a haiku for the missing sock:
Deep in the washing machine,
a single sock lies still,
the end of the world.
Once finished, it felt too Japanese, so I write a postmodern poem:
Sock sock / absent / present /
a black hole spits out cotton thread / entwine / deconstruct / rebuild
one foot waits / the other foot / does not exist
what exists is waiting / what waits is absence
absence puts on waiting / and becomes / a n e w s o c k
Chapter Six: The Endless Deferral of the Conclusion
A conclusion is the endpoint of a text, the gathering-together of meaning, the moment the author affixes the final seal. But the postmodern text refuses the conclusion, because a conclusion is a tyranny: it forces the polysemous text to converge on a single central idea. So the conclusion of this water piece is that there is no conclusion; it will be deferred forever, like the arrival of Godot. We could keep writing, writing until the sun goes out, until every word is used up, until the letters on the keyboard are worn smooth, until fingers become bare bone, bone becomes dust, dust drifts away through the universe. But even then the text would not end, because the text keeps generating itself in the reader's brain. Every reader rewrites this text, adding their own refrigerator, nose hair, instant noodles, Moments, and socks. The text becomes Barthes's "writerly text"; the reader is not a consumer but a producer. So at this very moment, as I am being read by you, you too have become the author. You are writing your postmodern water piece. Your life is a piece of nonsense as long as a lifetime.
Let me babble a few more lines in closing: the frog's umbrella is the mushroom's sigh; a phone booth in the deep sea dials the number of the past, and the one who answers is your childhood self, saying: 'Hello, this is the future. Please hold; your nothingness is waiting in line.' Queuing — yes, everything queues: at the supermarket, at the bank, at the door of death. Death is a customer service center where everyone takes a number to process their departure from life. God is the customer service manager, angels are the tellers, Satan is the complaints department. My number is ∞; it will never be called. So I go on living, go on writing, go on babbling. Words breed words, like some kind of slime mold spreading across the damp surface of thought. I no longer know what I am writing, or who I am. I am the echo of the refrigerator, the reincarnation of the nose hair, the ghost of instant noodles, the phantom of Moments, the other half of the sock. I am the presence of all absences, the aggregate of all that is missing. I am this text, and this text is me. We dissolve into each other, like salt in water, like meaning in nothingness.
At the very end of the end, let me close with a pure piece of nonsense (though closing is impossible): This sentence is the second-to-last sentence. This sentence is the last sentence. No, this one is. No …