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Definition work is the work we are always doing.
Marissa W. Chen lives in New York and often visits clumps of weeds in the park. She finds and collects ephemera on IG @marissawchen.
Definition work is the work we are always doing.
Marissa W. Chen lives in New York and often visits clumps of weeds in the park. She finds and collects ephemera on IG @marissawchen.
FAN (DISAMBIGUATION)
MWC-2020:
07-14-2020
07-14-2020
FAN (DISAMBIGUATION)
BY MARISSA W. CHEN
MWC-2020: 07-14-2020
Edward Hopper. Night Windows, 1928, oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, 248.1940
The sound of summer rain was muffled by the low-frequency hum of a standing fan. She liked to sit in the dark half-light on these days. Slough off the albatrosses that clung so tightly around her neck. She wanted to talk about what she liked for a change. To voice her thoughts, dissect and sift through them, turning over the grains and discovering their textures.
She thought about fans, their exact mechanical definition. She was only using fans for the summer, to save on electricity costs. She Googled “fans” and clicked on the Wikipedia article for “Fan (person)”, then “Fan (disambiguation)”, then finally “Fan (machine).” (Wikipedia being the source of all knowledge in the known universe, coming with no specific attribution but also an attribution to the collective everyone. Remember a time when it wasn’t credible? When you looked up definitions in an online dictionary, on a CD-ROM installation of Encyclopedia Brittanica?)
“A fan is a powered machine used to create flow within a fluid, typically a gas, such as air. A fan consists of a rotating arrangement of vanes or blades, which act on the air. The rotating assembly of blades and hub is known as an impeller, rotor, or runner. Usually, it is contained within some form of housing, or case. This may direct the airflow, or increase safety by preventing objects from contacting the fan blades.”
She talked to herself. She talked to herself as if she were two people. She played out scenes of conversations she could be having, drawing each setting around them. These reveries ended with a slow fade, none with the harsh director’s clapboard-slam punctuation. More like fingers of spilled ink bleeding over a blank page, veining outwards in a hundred directions.
Redirected from “Fan (geometry)” she found herself in “Sheaf of planes”, or “the set of all planes through a given line.” From there, “Alluvial fan,” which reminded her that English could be music.
Then:
“Fan (surname) (Chinese character: 范, pinyin: Fàn), a common Chinese surname.”
Fan Qin, she remembered.
“Fan Qin (simplified Chinese): 范钦; traditional Chinese: 范欽; pinyin: Fàn Qīn, 1506 - 1585, courtesy name: Yaoqing (堯卿), pseudonym: Dongming (東明)) was a politician and bibliophile of the Ming Dynasty."
Passive osmosis surfaces the most unexpected data.
The screen pulsed while outside it grew darker, as if turning a knob by degrees. She watched the storm from the window and counted out her heartbeats as they slowed to mimic the thunder. The onslaught of information had created a cacophony inside her, or maybe it drew her into its own vortex, and ceding control was the only way forward.
“The Fan is a river in northern Albania. It is formed by the confluence of two source rivers: the Great Fan (Albanian: Fan i Madh) and the Little Fan (Albanian: Fan i Vogël), that join a few kilometers west of the town.”
She thought of being carried away on an information current, the thrashing rapids smoothing out her rough edges, buffing the flaws in her knowledge into a gleaming polish.
“Winnowing fan, device for winnowing grain. In Greek culture: The winnowing-fan (λίκνον [líknon], also meaning a "cradle") featured in the rites accorded Dionysus and in the Eleusinian Mysteries: "it was a simple agricultural implement taken over and mysticised by the religion of Dionysus," Jane Ellen Harrison remarked.[1] Dionysus Liknites ("Dionysus of the winnowing fan") was wakened by the Dionysian women, in this instance called Thyiades, in a cave on Parnassus high above Delphi; the winnowing-fan links the god connected with the mystery religions to the agricultural cycle, but mortal Greek babies too were laid in a winnowing-fan.[2] In Callimachus' Hymn to Zeus, Adrasteia lays the infant Zeus in a golden líknon, her goat suckles him and he is given honey.”
It was too much, it was too endless.
“Fan district, historic district in Richmond, Virginia.”
What did any of it mean? She’d heard of people from Richmond. She didn’t know anything. In the scheme of millennia, the knowledge she could never know was as vast as it was relentless. Passive osmosis couldn’t save her.
She looked at her phone as a weather update pinged. No, that was wrong. The storm wasn’t coming; the storm was here.
Lightning crackled and everything inside her broke. It came out raw and furious. Propelled by the fan it spilled onto the bed, the covers, seeped through the rug and sluiced down one side of the crack in the floor that exposed a sliver of sub-floor joists. She thought she could hide in there for a while, make herself really small, flatten into a slip of nothing and crumple herself down in a corner.
That’s the thing with fans, they are used to cool but they don’t actually cool the air. She learned that from Wikipedia, but part of her also knew as the information bobbled up to the backs of her eyes.
She opened them and in the draft of the fan she felt cool, she felt safe, but she knew better.
See also:
- Fandom (disambiguation)
- Fanfan (disambiguation)
- Fanning (disambiguation)
- The Fan (disambiguation)