Start and Startled

What an idiot I was! I bent over trying to pick up the button - it was rolling along, spinning, and I couldn’t catch it, so, in a word, I hardly distinguished myself by my agility, either. Then I felt that my last reputation was lost, I was totally ruined... Eventually I caught the button, straightened up and then, like a fool, just stood there quietly, my arms by my side. But, no - I then started trying to put the button back on the broken threads, as if that would help it stick, and I kept smiling, smiling. At first His Excellency turned away, and then he looked at me..."What is the meaning of this?... Look at the state he’s in!... How is it possible!...How does he manage?"

―Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Poor Folk,” 1846

*********

Dear Alex,

A curiosity about you cannot be overlooked: what draws you to read a fresh crop of 42 books and write till your neck feels “fossilized” (your word) after an overripe work day? Are you imagining, weeping over a prophetic vision obscured from most of our abstractions in a world too broad and fraught with false harvest?

Among us, brothers and sisters in bookstores or brothels, bruised and groping for the past and immediate converging, come to a common thread that stops and starts at a button. A full stop from entry, a knob entreating your coming - the button is a sultry pause, pulls your pleats, plugs your dread. It rides on your ribs, perks up from a pocket, unpacking slabs of flesh you’d otherwise find too unfit for show.

When Dostoyevsky unbuttons the consciousness of his first character in a series of masterpieces to follow, I see my seams and secrets unspooling, nakedness at stake. What is bewildering becomes a button! It pops loose like a baby aloft before roly-poly on ground, clanking its way one cycle in season towards your sole, reimagining with you in this shrunken niche what it means to be a nutcase before a stage of starlets and judges in an evergreen facade.

If you were to peep into my wardrobe, you’d see more buttons and zippers buckling in the dark. I don’t have frayed stitches purposefully loitering in my fabric. The ones tattered are premeditated to look stressed and disheveled, an impression to confound with our contradicting undertones, an excuse to forfeit the grace of a button. The delights and despair of a button, how do we manage?

The next time you unbutton your collar, undo the first line of a book, twist yourself through the wee dim hours too furtive to bear your tears - do yourself a favor and button up the hope and psalms within you for more unraveling in your stops and restarts with us tomorrow.

Yours, Kate