Vacuum Cleaner

The scenario is not unique. We’ve seen it elsewhere, and perhaps more concisely stated, drawn in the Eastern European style.  Someone is hoovering. It’s a domestic space. First the hoover does its  job as expected, then the nozzle gets stuck on something too large – perhaps a piece of furniture – which resists for a moment before being swallowed. Next, one by one, the rest of the furniture disappears into the hoover bag. Other things, not least those fixed tightly to the floor and walls are subject to the suck, stretched until their fixings can hold  no longer. Then the pets, then other family members if they happen to be around go the same way. The building’s parts follow, the illustrated background including sky and trees is whisked clean away. Lastly the hoover itself disappears up its own tube, but not before the hooverer has succumbed. Details vary but the culminating moment is usually the same. There is a popping sound and a little puff of smoke – or if it is not smoke then an airborne debris of some other kind. All the image’s parts are gone leaving only a blank expanse of white… or almost so.

The question might be asked what it means that the ultimate disappearance of the hoovering mechanism in which the world is now contained is marked by a sound and a tiny sprinkle of dust. The latter is no ordinary stuff it seems. It does not fall to the floor (there is no floor). It does not even seem to be carried away on the breeze. Instead it simply vanishes as if each particle has grace to follow one last curving arc before crossing into other dimensions.

Maybe the world’s departure reveals something about its arrival, which is to say about the advent of newness. The new comes as dust, the dust of the new another world, a world delivered to us in a speck, in its entirety.