An Epidemic of Forgotten Vanity
A review of The Museum of Human History, by Rebekah Bergman.
Forget all the rest, and come in, to an entire self-contained world that holds up waysigns at its edges for the contained infinite beyond. Is there a word for the infinity of a globe? The only edges we draw on our sphere are artificialities, cartographic and geological constructs for orientation. The poles are signifiers of a rotational axis relative to an ever-expanding cosmos that affects the very nature of time. Time itself only one of a multitude of dimensions by which we humans and all atoms, ours and not-ours, and all matter, both the ordinary and the dark, interact. The ever-expansion a form of dying, universal, but in its tautological way, the self-same shape of being alive. Life, itself a moment-to-moment endless differential of instinctual essence, activated as in opposing inertness. Take the sum along the length of any threaded fatal line of a confabulation of such atoms temporally coalesced in defiance of their entropic destiny to make body, make brain, make love, make memory.