Senseless
A senseless event. The investigation continues.
These profanations are being uttered together everywhere tonight. Another press conference will be called when there is new information, we are assured, by a chief of police. The bland, officialese prevents silence, just as police prevent crime. The arrest creates the crime but this represents its limit. Without this uniform presence, an absence may become real, and, worst of all, be unqualified. The superintendent pronounces his heartbreak, and follows this with announcements that need to be made. We are informed by yet another speaker again that this event is tragic.
The public grave is a bulletin board.
What will this investigation discover? The make, model, serial number? An age, health records, family immigration status, information establishing a reality but locating it in documents? Or emails, blogposts, text messages, recalled conversations and behaviors, tics, drawings, inventories of personal effects, photographs, from a yearbook or a family vacation, pornography, genre fiction, screeds, manifestoes?
What it will discover are the facts. Finally, achieved reality, established in fact, baptism by press. And so again begins the evil circuit of a desire to achieve the sense that is reserved for the factual reality. What is more certain than death? This is a desire that easily purchases its violence, for violence does not appear as fact until its completion. Its horror—we are told it is a tragedy and that it is senseless, a judgment that amounts to saying it is a bad play—is still only a means to a media appearance.
Prayers—the last refuge of meaning. It is the place to put all the desire for sense: best, like incense, to burn them, performing magic on the word, making it too more senseless stuff, a rising plume, a mixed metaphor.
The weary leader steps before us, to offer substitute prayers. He is very tired.
There’s a lot we don’t know yet. There’s a lot we do know.
℟. forever and ever amen
The lord is near to the broken-hearted.
℟. praise be to the lord
We all know in our gut what needs to done.
℟. the glory and the power is yours
I am sick and tired.
℟. amen
The Law. This is what is wrong with us. Or this is what is right. The Law will set things right or give us right or make us right or right the wrongs or right after this quick break from our sponsors, who also call themselves The Law.
The Law will save us from abnormal frequencies, from the lobbies, and it is time to act: tell every elect, every official.
Our prayer tonight is those parents, lying in bed tonight, trying to think, will I sleep again.
℟. amen
But it is not senseless. It is painfully full of sense. The investigation will continue until the sense is drained from the event, another fact of horror. It can now be cited.