Here’s the thing: It isn’t just that what has been done can be undone. It’s also that an undoing can reconstitute. Dead matter can gather itself together. The knitting of hair or bramble or sand breathes life into the inanimate. These bunches, these groupings, these tangles of nothing that turn into something—sandcastles, tumbleweed, dustbunnies—have always disgusted me. Why should lifeless particles join like this into discrete forms? What do they want from us? To my mind, they are needy creatures, grotesquely dependent.
