by Josh Delman
I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"
If you're interested, there's an RSS feed. For your auditory pleasure: my Last.fm. Some jd87 highlights: Live at Westgate, Haikus, Pt. 1.
This site might be a blog, it might be a a repository for fiction, or it might be something else altogether. Please enjoy.
2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September
© 2009 and beyond
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August 2009
Some thoughts on an orange cup FICTION #
The orange cup sat in front of me, a motionless, unconscious object. The cup was perfectly content sitting there. It expressed no feelings of discontent or unease. It refrained completely from engaging in awkward small talk. It just gently sat there, barely even oscillating, hardly even vibrating. The cup had no intentions. It was perfectly intentionless. It’s a perfect thing, really, to neither want nor be wanted. But that’s the business of objects, not of living men.
Objects are also in the business of having tendencies. They are guided by forces beyond their control, and they move along lines as if moved by willful things. Picture the raindrop on the window. It can be still. It can be self-contained, insular, content in itself, the drop clinging to the window not out of desperation or hope, but simply by its tendency. Then the wind will blow or another drop, moving on its own path, will collide with that first drop. The drop will follow a path down the window, not quite straight, leaving a trace of its path behind, bending slightly as it reaches tiny imperfections in the deceivingly smooth surface of the glass. As it falls, the drop builds in speed, moving quicker towards the ground, where it will finally rest and take form as a circular puddle. You tell me what caused the drop to do that. You may say it was gravity, and that is fine, but to attribute nothing to the drop itself seems to rob of it of something that is equally imaginative and useful. It is easy to say that mere objects have neither will nor agency. But it would be a lie to say that objects have no tendencies, and in that quality alone they seem to have their own lives.
The cup was itself sitting upon a windowsill, whose window opened up west towards the city, and let gentle bars of sunlight that escaped past the leaves on the trees and rested on my red pillows. ♦
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