The Fragment: What house shaped by builders could enclose the divine form within its enfolding walls?
So here’s the thing about garbage. About the stuff we leave on sidewalks. That dollhouse sitting on the curb, some kid’s entire universe, once upon a time. Rooms where dolls had dinner parties and tucked themselves into beds the size of matchboxes. Where everything was perfect and miniature and controllable.
And now? Now it’s on the pavement. Waiting for the truck. Waiting to become nothing.
We discard shit constantly. Furniture, relationships, dreams, gods. Especially gods. We’re spectacular at throwing away the things we used to worship.
But Euripides, that magnificent bastard, he knew exactly what question to ask: “What house shaped by builders could enclose the divine form within its enfolding walls?”
Look at that dollhouse. Really look at it. Up in the attic, three women. Figures clustered together in that cramped space under the roof, balancing themselves on the wobbly framing of this whole broken structure. They’re not trapped up there. They climbed up there. They chose the highest point, the most precarious perch, the space that was never meant to be the main stage.
Three women. Maybe they’re just dolls. Or maybe they’re the Moirai. The Fates. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. The spinners of destiny, hanging out in a discarded dollhouse attic in Santa Cruz, still doing their work after everyone stopped believing in them. Still spinning, measuring, cutting the threads of human lives from their wobbling perch above the world.
Think about it. Where else would the Fates end up in our disposable culture? Not in some grand temple. Not on Olympus. In the attic of a broken dollhouse on a curb. Still together. Still working. Still deciding who lives and who dies and how long each thread runs, from the most unstable room in the most discarded structure imaginable.
And down on the lower floor, those two-dimensional cutout characters. Flat. Literally flat. Not even pretending to be three-dimensional like the women above. Just paper-thin representations of human forms going through the motions of whatever play they were designed for. Living their lives as pure surface, no depth, no interior. Safe in their prescribed rooms. Stable. Dead. Unaware that above them, three women are literally controlling the universe.
Here’s what strikes me: The three-dimensional women took the attic. The unstable space. The room that’s all angles and wobbling beams and potential collapse. While the flat characters stay below in their neat little rooms with their neat little lives, the Fates above are doing the real work. They’re taking a risk. They’re living on shaky ground. They’re finding freedom in the margins while they measure out destinies.
Where’s the divine in this? Right there. In those three figures. In the possibility that the Moirai never left, they just got pushed to the attic. In the refusal to stay on the ground floor where everything is predetermined and two-dimensional. The divine is in the three women balancing on broken beams, creating their own geometry, their own community, their own precarious heaven in a space that was never supposed to matter, still spinning the threads that control everything below.
The two-dimensional figures on the main floor don’t even know what’s above them. They’re playing it safe. They’re staying in their lanes. They’re performing the roles that got built into them. But those three women in the attic? They’re alive. They’re three-dimensional in a structure that’s falling apart, and they don’t give a damn. They’re not waiting for stability. They’re not waiting for permission. They’re just up there, together, balancing on the wobble, spinning fate itself.
We build these containers. These houses. These lives. We assign rooms and roles and proper places for proper things. And some people stay where they’re put, flat as paper, safe as death. But the Fates? They climbed. They found the cracks in the structure and made them into doorways. They took the attic and turned it into the control room for the entire cosmos.
The divine doesn’t live in the safe rooms. It lives in the wobble. In the three women who chose the highest, most unstable point and decided that’s where they’d do the most important work in the universe. In the refusal to be contained, to be flattened, to be assigned a proper place in someone else’s design. In the knowledge that destiny itself operates from a broken attic in a discarded dollhouse.
Nothing material lasts. Everything material matters. You can’t enclose the divine. But sometimes you can see exactly where it refuses to stay on the ground floor. Where it climbs to the attic, balances on broken beams, and spins the threads of every life that ever was or will be.
That’s the fragment. That’s what Euripides knew. The divine doesn’t need your walls or your stability or your safe rooms. It just needs three women brave enough to take the attic and make it the center of everything. Three Fates in a dollhouse, still working, still mattering, still divine in the ruins.
This piece, this moment, this dollhouse: I incorporated a text fragment from one of Euripides’ lost tragedies to an image of an abandoned dollhouse discovered on a sidewalk. Informally, the piece is called Enclose the Divine. This work is part of a larger project called IOTA that brings to life the remaining textual fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Fragments speaking to fragments. Ruins honoring ruins. The discarded making the discarded sacred again.
This piece, this moment, this dollhouse: I incorporated a text fragment from one of Euripides’ lost tragedies to an image of an abandoned dollhouse discovered on a sidewalk. Informally, the piece is called Enclose the Divine. This work is part of a larger project called IOTA that brings to life the remaining textual fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Fragments speaking to fragments. Ruins honoring ruins. The discarded making the discarded sacred again.
