Prompted

From May 22, 2007

I am a button. More accurately I am the rendering of a button, an imperfect circle closed end to end, another circle enclosed within that and within that, four more tiny circles that would appear to make a square.

I feel my parts are more than my whole and spend my time contemplating the nature of the circle and how its shape and form coincides with the zero.

I sit on the page, a shaky series of lines, indentations of ink, a promise of an object, a whisper, a fragrance to jog your memory of the button you had like me, somewhere in your past.

I must feel like complaining, probably brought on by all my imperfect circles binding me to the page, but what is a button without a bit of cloth to be stitched to, and then the pattern and the thread. A lovely circle lying in the gutter, an object sitting at the bottom of a junk box that hapless fingers stumble across now and then, lifting out of the rubble of other discarded things that have not yet been thrown away, lingering like a cough, flecks of blood speckling pale lips, dry and textured with dead flakes of skin, a mountain range of decay.

A button on its own can be and usually is a sad thing. Its nature is to slide through a hole and, in combination with the thread, bind the cloth to itself, fasten two ends together. An act of enclosure.

Quite unlike a zipper or velcro, more dignified I like to think, the simple act of slipping through a hole and laying humbly on the stretch of cloth that is bound end to end. The zipper binds, its so industrial in its machinations, its teeth grinding and metal binding and the sound it makes, like a bowel movement, sloppy and loose and coming out in long tiny threads.

They have to hide the zipper since it’s so damned ugly, hide it beneath a flap of fabric like skin grafted to hide the wound, diminish the scar. This is not to mention the pain it causes, eagerly nipping a bit of skin, dragging hair into its hungry greedy mouth. Zippers are smiles with so many teeth, even they can’t keep track of all of them; inevitably, it stumbles over itself, leaving a tooth out. And then you’re just fucked.

Buttons don’t fail like that. Actually, we don’t fail at all, though sometimes the thread comes undone, sick of our company, worn thin by our movement. And maybe the hole we slide through becomes too elastic, fitting around us loosely. But it is not our fault that we outlast our counterparts and end up, useless, waiting at the bottom of the junk drawer, suffocated and sifting through to the bottom because that’s, in part, our nature. Unassuming, a pleasant discreet mechanism to hold together those pieces of fabric.

Velcro is just space-aged bullshit, sounding adhesive, binding, screaming when it gets ripped apart. You’ll never hear a button scream.

You could argue that I’m not a button at all, that I am an imperfect rendering of a button, slightly lopsided in the speedy casualness with which I was drawn and therefore have no right to spout on and on about the numerous and wonderful qualities of real buttons in contrast to the detrimental aspects of those snaps, zippers and velcro.

Fine. Have it your way. I am not a button. But I am six circles, one outer, one laying within that, like a nesting doll, and at my heart are four tiny circles that seem to form a square. However imperfectly, we form the semblance of a button, dividing the blank space on the page and fastening it by circle.