Ship of Theseus

Molly Priest

Molly Priest

It is easter of 2025. I am in the children's corner of a café. There are no children here but to the right of my table there are toys and books, and all of them have been assaulted by tiny shameless hands. Was I allowed to play like this as a child. When I try to remember I see myself handling a single object, attuning to its shape and texture, perplexed by a meaning I do not seek. All the while I know that this object does not belong to me. It is a visitor in my hand.
In those early years when objects had no function, they simply were, and I was an object too. The older I got the more these objects had to do, and the more I had to do with them, and the more I needed them, and it got more and more complicated until the whole world was knotted into a great menacing machine with no set purpose but to conceal purposelessness from itself. And there remains the sense that things would be better if the machine stopped running, and we could all return to that place of ambiguous being. It is difficult to get anything done with this mentality. It is difficult to surrender your function.  
Against the far wall of the café there is a large empty dollhouse. If it were a real house, it might be boarded up and scheduled for demolition. I think that I am very much like this house. That I am making that slow demolition, or rather that I am trying to make the necessary repairs. The more repairs I make the more they keep coming and some days I think it is impossible. I repair a picture frame and affix it to the wall to find the interior of the wall has been eaten by termites. I replace the wall to find the internal structure has rusted through. Theseus would ask how much of us should be replaced before we cease to be at all. So, I think the real difficulty lies in taking the house apart without replacing its components then realising that I was never the house. So, I think the real trip is conscious annihilation.  
0