Meditation in one-dimension

Archimedes' latest devil sits torqued into my wall, its one-dimensioned brilliance clutching the plaster with all the friction necessary to grant my copy of Claude Monet the appearance of levitation. A brilliant Greek! that man, who, with force and turn and tourniquet wrenched a solid blade of steel into a single-sided screw.

They say he saved a sieged city, back then, by festering his brain until it created (ex nihilo, perhaps) some megolithic mechanism that (who knows?) blew oily flames all over Spartan invaders or catapulted dogs with ringworm into the enemy's tents until they had to go back home to resupply their stock of Preparation H.

Like Archimedes, Ben Folds has a fascination with Preparation H, which can only mean that he, too, is beginning to experience the toils of middle age, where the insides and outsides want to exchange relative positions. That sort of evisceration (people tell me that this isn't the real cause of the typical haemorrhoid, but what does WebMD know, anyway?) is unnatural, but is also to be expected, leaving us in the pickly spot of a "natural unnaturality."

This is an observation which will probably give us some "cognitive dissonance" at first (a term that teachers use when they want to justify the explosion of their students' worldviews), but, unfortunately, this is pretty much the condition of reality. After all, all of us expect to be surprised at some point in our lives, and even though this mindset is paradoxical at root, not too many people are altogether flummoxed by the logic-garbling fact that they're expecting the unexpected.

Chesterton (the real one, not that quibbling politician in the 1830s) has said something somewhere (Orthodoxy, to be precise) to the effect that people should really be utterly pessimistic and wildly optimistic simultaneously. For him, it's a functional paradox that we should do our utmost in the belief that Right will prevail, even while recognizing that everything we humans do will fall short, in the final analysis. The "natural unnaturality" here is that badness is not only unnatural, but entirely a matter of course.

Archimedes again to the rescue (we, too, are Greeks in a battered polis). Though wrapped round a hollow steel barrel, the screw itself has only one side. With each turn of the socket wrench or Phillips-head, the single-side cuts a single groove and slides itself inside it, slashing to support instead of cutting to destroy, and eventually ends ensconced and useful by virtue of the very thing that resisted its forward movement.

Moreover, this gnarl of steel driven into toughness belies my sense that a diasporic adventure-life brings color and vivacity. The logic of one-dimension means not that the screw remains flat and motionless, but instead that it progresses deeper and deeper without ending, its head forced ever closer and closer to its final home.

The only worry is that it finds a stud, so that sudden weight won't rip it from the plaster.