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As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and that something might appear in the spaces between our words if we were not careful.
The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.
Wasps and birds and other nest-builders often used some core, irreplaceable substance or material to create their structures but would also incorporate whatever they could find in their immediate environment. This might explain the seemingly random nature of the words.
I had to leave it there, compartmentalized, until I could write it all down, and seeing it on the page, begin to divine the true meaning.
“I felt as if I could do anything as long as I did not mind being watched.”
Hypnotism? Or emphasis?
But in what had been kitchens or living rooms or bedrooms, I also saw a few peculiar eruptions of moss or lichen, rising four, five, feet tall, misshapen, the vegetative matter forming an approximation of limbs and heads and torsos. As if there had been runoff from the material, too heavy for gravity, that had congregated at the foot of these objects. Or perhaps I imagined this effect.
?
As they slid by, the nearest one rolled slightly to the side, and it stared at me with an eye that did not, in that brief flash, resemble a dolphin eye to me. It was painfully human,
I had the unsettling thought that the natural world around me had become a kind of camouflage.
many needing so much to communicate what amounted to so little.
Parallel to the tower
As I left the landing, I had the peculiar thought that I was not the first to pocket the photo, that someone would always come behind to replace it, to circle the lighthouse keeper again.
Can you really imagine what it was like in those first moments, peering down into that dark space, and seeing that? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you’re staring at it now.
perspective
not just to lose myself in the present moment so utterly but also to have such solitude, which was all I had ever craved during my studies, my practice to reach this point.
Back to the pool
Oh, that’s just the old biologist. She’s been here for ages, going crazy studying those mussels. She talks to herself, mutters to herself at the bar, and if you say a kind word … When I saw those hundreds of journals, I felt for a long moment that I had become that old biologist after all. That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.
I didn’t wear makeup or care about new shoes or the latest music.
written by a man
My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease.
“Silence creates its own violence.” How insightful.
The word “Annihilation” was followed by “help induce immediate suicide.” We had all been given self-destruct buttons, but the only one who could push them was dead.
The eyes were blank, sightless, staring. I felt as if I should recognize these features—that it was very important—but with them disembodied in this way, I could not.
husband? anthropologist?
In glimmers, in shreds of thought, in the aftermath of my reading, I wondered if he kept a journal still, or if the dolphin’s eye had been familiar for a reason other than that it was so human. But soon enough I banished this nonsense; some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.
Think of it as a thorn, perhaps, a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world. Injecting itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation.
