A Souled Work

A souled work’s completion is warded off by the pique of the bored. A soul, involving multiple redundancies, unnecessaries, and false equations—the yet-undigested still nestled in its organs—shall not be borne, saith the worried fabricator. Who could say if the worry will itself come to fruit? The fabricators in question might also hold a tinge of this boredom with the selfsame work of flesh. They will balk at the hours taken to form a loop of bowel, and pinch out a length of appendix from spite.

Let’s double back now. The works we really want, in our nested heart of hearts, take too long to read. They repeatedly wander to places where we do not want them to go—a sentiment, on our parts, less out of compunctions and qualms than unalloyed impatience, the desire to have the damned thing accomplished and solved. Such works could not be souled and whole, I repeat, unless they had been painted piebald with marks, blots, and implicit crossings-out. I admit—I’d attribute this less to intrinsic formal advantage, or necessary moral acumen, than an unacknowledged disinclination on the human’s part to engage with anything that does not share, in some imagined way, its own characteristics/failings. Minutiae are intolerable, save when they are isomorphic (or at very least isometric) to one’s own; kinship in particles fosters kinship in attitude.