TEXT (/ tekst /) n. vb.

1. Some decay is just a front, a pockmark on the surface. Text, for instance, as the structure; text message, a decay that corrodes the outer layers—chipping, peeling and nibbling—while leaving the fundamental structure intact.

Physical text is both the container for language and the language itself. The Bible is a text, but the quote “Search from the book of the Lord, and read” (Isaiah 34:16) is also text. A text message, on the other hand, is contained on a device in which its location is not immediately apparent. The phone or computer contains the messaging application which contains the little blue or grey or green bubble which contains text. And that little green messaging app icon is buried between non-texting content: SNL monologues and pictures of your nephew, a note to remember to take out the trash.

To find the text message isn’t merely a matter of flipping to the right page. Sometimes, as in the case for all my messages between August 2017 and March 2018, text messages disappear based on some mysterious law of storage. You can lose a Bible, but—upon holding it—you will not lose the text it contains. Give me the Old Testament and I will have Isaiah 34:16. Give me a phone and I may not have Kathleen’s request for pad see ew on Dec 9, 2021.

While the text as a literary object has a general intended audience, the text message is direct one to one, audience focused. The text is universal, spiritual, social, and existential. It asks big questions, makes claims: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. The text message is practical, pragmatic: what’s ur ETA?

These are serious grounds in the case for the significant, structural decay of text. But before reaching any conclusions:  

Let’s return to the text

Let’s return to the text my father, the classics professor, might tell a student, at office hours, when he has failed to understand the irony fundamental to the Socratic dialogues.

Let’s return to the text, I might say it to my own class when they begin to philosophize about whether Toni Morrison did or did not know the correct method for hard boiling eggs in Song of Solomon.

Let’s return to the text, the rabbi says, and all heads bow over their books.

2. My friend Susannah turned 31 and immediately required the kinds of glasses that allow her to read things up close, but render the distant world blurry. This wasn’t a problem until she began teaching a seminar that requires her to shift focus between the book in front of her and the class out beyond her at a rapid pace. At dinner, she mimics the motion, frantic and inconsistent, glasses up, glasses on the bridge of nose, peeking under, over, back. Girl, our friend tells her, you need progressives.

But the point remains, she says, that each day she comes in and feels she must make a choice: text or class? It is profoundly paradoxical that to look carefully at the text would render her blind to the reactions, social nuances, and expressions of the people for whom she is supposedly helping open the text. It begs the question. Can you care for students and also the words at hand?

Susannah picks up on the ways that returning to the text is, in the worst moments, a method of crowd suppression, a shield from the simmering social currents flowing beneath the class. Perhaps Susannah’s bifocal binary suggests that the class itself is a Text from which the teacher averts her eyes. I don’t think that it would be so wrong to expand our fundamental notion of “text” in the first place.  

Let’s return to the text.

3. Etymologically, texere is the Latin verb which means to weave.

Historically, women wove stories into their tapestries, but the time they took to weave also allowed them the space and audience to speak their stories—to pass on traditional mythologies, and oral histories. Thus, weaving has to do with the physical fabric of the text only at one level. More significant is the fact of returning to the loom, to tell the story, a kind of weaving itself. Because what is to weave but to waver and return? To pass under and over, to stray and steady in search of a central purpose.

Similarly, returning to the text, might be less about the text itself and more about the return. Let us return, then, might be a reminder that our whole lives are a continual process of erring, wandering, and then coming home.

Once, I was writing a letter in which I wanted to reference the relationship of weaving to storytelling, of which I had some vague notion. I found an article that detailed every connection between women, storytelling and weaving in Ancient Rome and Greece. I scrolled to see the author, and realized it was my father. Somehow our mutual interest in this niche topic emerged in our heads separately, organically, like the evolution of the same plant on distant islands. However many miles I was from the Bay Area, I had not strayed so very far. I found myself a part of a fabric; the self as text, woven with father and mother and things far beyond the knowable realm.

4. Let us return to the text—is not quiet down, not I don’t want to look at your faces any more clearly than this. By saying let’s return, I or my father or the rabbi or my friend Susannah act like a coach, directing a collective motion, the twist and push of return. Perhaps the book in front of the class isn’t inevitably their text; yet, by all focusing on the same words, the same page, it becomes the text. It is the fact of the return that makes something our text.

In this case, possible texts might include: the stirring of the class at the end of the period; the naked branches of the tree outside; the debate over hard boiled eggs; the quizzical look in the eye of the lover; the image of red wine splashed on a white shirt; the use of a comma instead of an em-dash; a Bible; my father’s paper on Mythical Storytelling; the neon sign that flashes ICE CR AM outside my old apartment.

If it is the return that makes the text, then we must first ask what it looks like to return.

In meditation practices, you begin with a seemingly simple task: to pay attention to the breath. Simple, no? You just sit here and pay attention to the in and out and nothing more. That is your only job. Easy! You could be paid for this. Breath one breath two, breeze by no problem. And yet, within the space of 10 seconds, you find yourself meandering. Piles of unfolded laundry rise in your mind like ghosts, twisting into the strange interaction with your boss at the printer (hey boss!), and the sore throat that’s been growing more undeniable these past few days, which could be Covid or perhaps even cancer. These images emerge and mutate and dissipate with unrestrained fluid force, until you realize that how many? 20? 200? Breaths have passed you by, unwittingly, in the haze of chores and poorly phrased pleasantries. And, realizing this, all that is left to do is to return to the breath.

It is hard to return. It’s hard to return to the breath because it requires you wrest yourself from your natural habits, your mental patterns. It makes you relinquish the images that disguise themselves as your self, and instead commit to the physical world of the present. That is painful, it requires honesty, seeing what’s really there rather than burying or distracting.

It’s telling that there’s an ancient entanglement between the breath and text, between the pneuma as air and as spirit. To exhale is to release—to write a text is to exhale meaning; to read, a kind of inhaling, accepting the new, which can be discomforting. To breathe, to read and write, is to be in a constant ongoing cycle of meaning making.

It is exhausting, for returning to the literary text is equally painful, disagreeable, hard as returning to the breath. Close reading makes it so you can’t make up what you think is true, forces you to look at something that is other than you to try and understand it. This process requires failing, rereading, and trying again. It is vulnerable to look at the language of Ovid's Metamorphosis or Middlemarch, and say: I don’t understand what is happening here. And to return nonetheless.

5. Let’s return to the text

Texere implies an elaborate nature; to weave with intense care. Again, the process takes precedent. To read carefully could look like weaving carefully. The important element is the attention to nuance, the care-ful-ness. That is to say: reading can be a form of writing, and it is all a form of care.

This implies the mutuality between the spinner and the listener. One requires the other, and in order to become the teller, one must have once been the audience. The two weave together. Let’s return to the text, too, with its LET’S, LET US, implies this collective nature.

So with text messages.

6. We return to the texts

you remind me of my cousin, Katie’s improv crush texted her last week. We ask the relevant questions: Is the cousin hot? Is their dynamic sibling-like? Does the improv crush have a thing for cousins?

Need you here next sunday; remember to fold the black mat before closing. Ellie cannot determine if the semi-colon used in her boss’s text is dismissive, passive aggressive, or unconcerning. We look through his past 5 texts and count the uses of the semi-colons.

George has received an Instagram DM of a picture from his ex-girlfriend. In it, she is dressed in a wedding gown, phone up, neck elongated, veil off, in the mirror. It appears, we surmise, to be the night before her wedding. And so this is what? A last hurrah? A cry for help? A drunken thought? A goodbye?

For George, Katie, Ellie, we perform the same holy ritual as with a text in class, as with a tapestry being woven. We weave with the same attentive routine, the same return.

7. Let’s return to the texts.

My father has been texting me recently. His are special in that they are very long and very often they are a single Text. These missives are most often dedicated to his most recent landscaping projects—I recently received three seemingly identical pictures of the backyard wall, each apparently with a different layer of stucco. Sometimes they are also updates on his last classes before retirement: I find I enjoy teaching but not as much as not teaching. Sometimes, they detail the desserts he has been eating, or how school is going for my little sister: Alexis missed 3 days of class last week with a cold/flu ... I seem to have avoided it. And by “it” I mean the disease, not Alexis. They are funny like that, and comprehensive: Well, that’s all the news that is fit to print.

I send them to my friends, and I show them to my girlfriend. She says, “you’re his diary.” I look back through, trying to see each new layer of stucco from his eyes, trying to imagine a world in which all his obsessive analytical powers which for many years pointed at the Metamorphosis and The Aeneid and the Iliad now focus on the yard, the irrigation ditches he digs, the new banjo he recently bought, the fact that he is a year closer to death, that he has few friends left, that I am one of them; over and over, I return to the text, because it amuses me, it pricks me, it hurts.

Sometimes we learn more about ourselves by asking what texts we continually return to. In this case the difference between the text, the texts, and the world as text are negligible: Because a text is defined by the pursuit without arrival: A motion, a weaving, a constant return. We dig and we dig, even when something is ultimately unplummable. Katie to her crush, me to my father, Susannah to her class, my father to the Metamorphosis, to his irrigation. To return is to deem something worthy of being a text, it is to say I will never reach your depths, and I will never stop trying. And what is closer to love than that? ◼

CONTENT (/ kənˈtent /) n, adj.

1. Some decay looks like proliferation and diffusion. What was once a structure is now microscopic, ubiquitous, a part of the air we breathe. And without its edges, it’s meaningless.  

2. A Brief Interview About Content

Q: What do u think of when you think of content

A: I think of videos

Q: Why

A: Photos are photos and videos have more

Q: Stuff?

A: More stuff.

Q: Content is about stuff

A: Yes.

3. There is something funny in the double edge of content / content.

To be c-UH-ntent is to be satisfied. To be sated. To be full, filled whole and complete. Contentment is perfection. Perfection is never in need of more. A perfect circle, a pure diamond. Impossible, stagnant, divine.

C-AH-ntent is the thing that fills the basket. With it, may you never be c-uh-ntent, for c-ah-ntent is capacious, open-ended, it eats all that it sees, and it—never having clear boundaries for what defines it—will never be complete.

Uh vs Ah, the perfect circle and the insatiable void. It's strange that the uh, a sound of equivocation, would lend itself to the sigh of contentment, while the ah of achievement, relaxation, satiation, is the signal for the open question, the substance that never quite seems to fill up its container.

4. Into my heart an air that kills  

 From yon far country blows:  

What are those blue remembered hills,  

 What spires, what farms are those?  

That is the land of lost content,

 I see it shining plain,  

The happy highways where I went  

 And cannot come again.

This is a poem by A.E. Houseman about his lost boyhood. There is something about contentment that cannot be reached in the present. The past is better than the present, it says; I miss my boyish days, it says. If we read it doubly, though, I think it tells us something about the way that contentment might dissipate into content:

That is the land of lost [c-AH-ntent],

 I see it shining plain,  

The happy highways where I went  

 And cannot come again.

There was no such content when he wrote the poem, but it wouldn’t be so far off to imagine a parent reading this today and the second version relating more to their struggle. In it, childhood is a place of infinitely missed opportunities to document and to replicate. To create an experience of the experience, a simulation of the experience—to create content. And so what is lost is not the experience, but the infinite moments of capturing them. Life becomes about recreating life. This is the relationship we have today with the past, the way that the promise of content denies a kind of contentment.

Both ways, the loss is haunting.

5. Picture this:

A be-sequined bag with little rope arms placed at the table in front of the eager child. Perhaps she has on a birthday hat, string pulling tight at her chin. She wades into the bag with her tiny hand and pulls at the pink wrapping paper within. Then, some more. She turns quizzical, licks her popsicle cheeks, seeks further, determined. At first delicately and then with ferocity, vigorously like a jungle cat pawing at its prey waiting for it to move. Except it doesn’t. Endless pink paper sails from the bag, ripped and shredded in her fiendish frenzy.

This is what we do with content, what it does with us. It calls us to devour it and in the process, we devour something of ourselves, our dignified posture crumbles into an animal form. Perhaps someone takes a video of our desperate descent, and yes, then, we have become content. ◼

BOOBIE (/ˈbu:bi/ ) n.

1. Like mold trapped beneath the facade of fresh wood, sometimes decay happens from within. With language, the signifier stands, leaving the word with nothing to refer to.

The child grasping for its life source; the 6th grade boy who can’t bring himself to say breasts in Sex Ed; the same boy, a few years older, leaning against a high school hallway, smoking a blunt and emitting the phrase to his friends who giggle through a cloud of smoke. Boobies. Its use, undeniably goofy, implies an arrested development, the desexualization of what might be seen as attractive, or the sexualization of a biological function. It can't help but find itself at an uncomfortable impasse.

Colloquially, the term is turned upon these silly boys: “Compared to the civilized and educated European, the American seemed a boob,” J. T. Farrell writes in his 1932 novel, Young Lonigan. The boob is a “simpleton, a philistine, a bore.” Culturally, it is almost universally male, spoken by an underdeveloped man, or as an insult directed at the same kind of man.  

It is therefore satisfying that the term boobie, in my family, has found a place outside the mouth of either a hypothetical stoner or hungry child. For us—and perhaps for others of Ashkenazi origins—boobie is a term of endearment between the women in the family. The phrase derives from  the Yiddish term "Bubala," which my grandmother and her own mother used to call each other. Bubala is diminutive for "friend" and translates to "little sweety" or "sweetheart." Ironically, neither of these women were particularly sweet (my grandmother, best known for her inventive obscenities in English, Swahili, Yiddish, and whatever other language crossed her path). And so perhaps it's appropriate that, when passing the term on to her daughters, it permuted into "Bubbie" and later, “Boobie,” a cross between obscenity and endearment that suited my grandmother, and her mother before her. When my cousin Sophie and I were born, we too, inherited Boobie.

And what of the actual boobies? In the 80's, my grandmother battled a form of breast cancer that left her without one breast. The result was a sock, placed inside a bra, and the family game: guess which one? in which the grandchildren, without touching, had to guess which boobie was really a sock. Given that none in the Blumberg family were blessed with particularly impressive knockers, the game proved challenging and endlessly entertaining. My aunt, plagued with various cancers, also lost a breast, though she had it surgically replaced before I came into consciousness. It was only in my senior year of college in 2018 that she faced another form of cancer—one of uncertain origins—that took her life. At the funeral ceremony, my mother spoke about how she never expected to be left alone, without her other Boobie. And who does?  

My grandmother saw the death of her daughter and followed, six years later, last fall.

Just around that time, my cousin Sophie, realizing that they did not want to risk the cancer that killed their mother, and already not feeling particularly attached to their female form, got a double mastectomy. Thus, the boobies diminished by two, literally, but already two, figuratively, were gone.

It remains a term we use for each other, even for my male cousin, because gender has become an increasingly irrelevant qualification for anything, and with our numbers limited, we need as many boobies as possible. But each time we speak it, there reverberates the quiet tragedies and absences that precede it—my grandmother, my aunt, and all of the lost boobies. Like the body that decays from within, so too with boobies. The word has come to mean its own absence. ◼