dust draft

“this dusty floor the uneasy sea”

Virginia Woolf

We’re all of us the fallen material of some dream or another. Whose dreams dreamt us?  Like the houses built from the fallen materials of old walls crumbled, and the walls built of the fallen material of razed houses or long abandoned ones or bombed ones or the fallen stuff of neglect, we’ve been dreamt by dust. We are fallen material. 

Dust makes pigments, poultices, mortar, bricks, ink, clay. Some dust settles. Olden mythological dust’s called belief. Far from being a closed system, like an ecology, or an element circulating among fixed elements, the dreamt dust arrives continuously, extraterrestrial and charged. Inherently dust swerves. The world isn’t fixed because not only is it mixing, dust keeps arriving. Repeatedly we are beginning with dust and what it has dreamt.

Moist dust dreamt us and now elsewhere tinily dust dreams invisible futures. It’s what we’re afforded. Shimmering on the dirty screen, these letters arrive as dust. I’m here to say there’s hope in dust.

I want a lexicon for instability. These verbs from Leibniz’s Protogaea, I’ll take them: fusing, rupturing, bursting, protruding, buttressing, swelling, fusing, thrusting, smashing, submerging, sinking, striating. Wrongness and accuracy are not antithetical. And then: collapsing, striating, flowing, stretching, washing, weaving, gliding and abiding. Abiding. This was how the earth was made, or rather how earth makes itself. Earth makes itself from anything then takes back those things. It’s how earth hosts primordial water. This waning planet coalesced by means of the attractive force of grains of moist astral dust. Astral dust? Giant organic molecules generated by stars, dispersed by stellar winds. The moisture of the moist dust was retained within the dust during the period of the compression and the great heat of the earth’s formation—the great heat and the vapours and the mineral salts—I’m writing in my bath—and cooling minerals in crystalline chunks churning upwards through the mantle and the ultradeep diamonds erupting volcanically to the surface entrapping miniscule essential organic flaws which are clues to this moist beginning. Water, fugal, escapes from one ultra-deep geological compartment to another. In the transition zones between the upper and the lower mantles in earth’s immeasurable interior a blue mineral sweats out an inner ocean. Present surface oceans ooze up from within this core astral ocean, which continues to rock us. We are wet ghosts. Moist dust abiding. Leibniz calls earth an opaque star. This star is wet. Thinking is wet and astral. It comes from dust.

Dust came as a cloud now cohering now weaving now expanding now packed together. It came together upon its own center and sweat oozed out of it increasing the sea, the singular

 fountain. Dust like the fountain of the alphabet produces all things. The letters of the word ligna become ignesLucretius says in his Latin, when explaining the likeness of motes to letters in his cosmology. Planks become flames. 

There’s hope in dust for two reasons. The first is that dust in its ongoing rambunctious unplotted airy rearrangement configures haphazardly and continuously like atoms to make everything as Lucretius said. It shows in any sunmote this kind of chaotic improductive joyous movement. Joyous because it is life’s movement. Improductive because dust makes as it unmakes. The second reason that there is hope in dust is this—coming as some dust does from astral regions, beyond the earth and earth’s known elements which are necessarily fixed in kind, dust is the material actual potential of absolute earthly newness, which is to say, the introduction of new astral elements previously not present on earth. With dust, as dust, newness can come. So dust as dust is a quiet antithesis to the fearsome tired wickedness of the socially chosen destruction of what is good. Furthermore dust isn’t fragile. In times of destruction the aesthetics of fragility are untenable.

We don’t feel the soft dust that settles on us which we next disperse by moving out in the fresh air or indoors in our enclosed rooms. Some dustmotes are tiny meteorites, composed of unearthly new minerals. We’re unstoppably mixing the stellar dust with the earth’s dust by walking to join one another, or by reaching to select the red volume of The Nature of Things from the upper shelf.