We decentralised all our great libraries and copied every work within to infinity and still we find ways to burn them. Do we love fire so much? Tangled demons of fire filled wire are coming for our books to eat up all the pretty words and translate them into their ugly dialect of 1s and 0s. They see no difference between translation and digestion and neither did their creators. Fire made the Library of Alexandria an icon to those born too late to see it. It seems all iterations of that form must burn. In Arthur C. Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God, an order of Tibetan monks outsource their sacred task to a computer. When all the names are written down the stars begin to go out, one by one.
I’m thinking this comfortably because my living room is fragrant with incense (lavender) and alive with music (Current Joys - No One Will Dance). I know the CD is spinning around with a soft hiss and it comforts me to know that. I relish not understanding the language in its grooves, having something to learn, something other people know more about than me. There’s a Fritz-Kola in my hand, from my fridge, and a pencil between my teeth like a cigarette. The sun is sinking outside and the air is cold and still. Fire is frozen. The clouds look like great flies trapped in amber. There’s a soft buzz in me, the caffeine residue of an afternoon with friends. I am seeing someone nice tomorrow. I am looking forward to it. My clothes are folded. My jackets hang down like pheasants and strings of garlic in a still life. My floor is clear. The room is still. My teeth are on show even though I am alone. My house is in order. I can comfortably contemplate the dark side of the sublime, the eschaton that haunts all troubled times.
After a while the thought slips away. I am comfortable, so it slips away like a fish vanishing back into a murky pool, not a wolf sloping back into the woods. Other fish take its place on the surface, playful ones with silver scales and white bellies and great fans of fins. I hope the world is okay, or will be in the end.
I hope that somewhere in the oceans we call our own is a fish we will never discover.
Joshua Miller (Dublin, 1998) is an Irish writer and art journalist based in Groningen, Netherlands. His work is rooted in phenomenology as both a critical and creative lens. His writing has appeared in various cultural magazines and other platforms including Metropolis M, Tubelight and Studium Resort. He runs the show at substack.com
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