Acceptance (Southern Reach, #3)

by Jeff Vandermeer

“I’m not an answer,” she said. “I’m a question.” She might also be a message incarnate, a signal in the flesh, even if she hadn’t yet figured out what story she was supposed to tell.

Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn’t see it, because they had no other choice.

Sometimes, too, other people gave you their light, and could seem to flicker, to be hardly visible at all, if no one took care of them. Because they’d given you too much and had nothing left for themselves.

the air trickling out of his mouth like a series of tiny lies about the world that had decided to extinguish him.

‘Would that not be the final humbling of the human condition? That the trees and birds, the fox and the rabbit, the wolf and the deer … reach a point at which they do not even notice us, as we are transformed.’”

At such moments, he felt as if he really did live on the edge of the known world. As if he was alone, in the way he wanted to be alone: when he chose to be and not when the world imposed it on him.

Perhaps, too, hesitance overtakes me because when I think of writing I glimpse the world I left behind. The world beyond, that when my thoughts drift toward it at all, is a hazy, indistinct sphere radiating a weak light, riddled through with discordant voices and images that cut across eyes and minds like a razor blade, and none of us able to even blink. It seems a myth, a kind of mythic tragedy, a lie, that I once lived there or that anyone lives there still. Someday the fish and the falcon, the fox and the owl, will tell tales, in their way, of this disembodied globe of light and what it contained, all the poison and all the grief that leaked out of it. If human language meant anything, I might even recount it to the waves or to the sky, but what’s the point?

But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?

I became resolved not to give in to the brightness, to give up my identity—not yet. I could not come to terms with the possibility that one day I might put aside my vigilance and become the moaning creature in the reeds. Perhaps this was weakness. Perhaps this was just fear.

As a result, pain does not much bother me anymore; it gives me evidence of my ongoing existence, has saved me from those times when, otherwise, I might have stared so long at wind and rain and sea as to become nothing, to just disappear.

Another way people were bound by their own view of consciousness. What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been received, would probably never be received, the message buried in the transformation itself. Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of imagination, because human beings couldn’t even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee.

You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.

In all her glory and monstrosity.

How the biologist coalesced out of the night, her body flickering and stitching its way into existence, in the midst of a shimmering wave that imposed itself on the reality of forested hillside. The vast bulk seething down the hill through the forest with a crack and splinter as trees fell to that gliding yet ponderous and muffled darkness, reduced to kindling by the muscle behind the emerald luminescence that glinted through the black. The smell that presaged the biologist: thick brine and oil and some sharp, crushed herb. The sound that it made: as if the wind and sea had been smashed together and in the aftershock there reverberated that same sonorous moan. A seeking. A questing. A communication or communion. That, Ghost Bird recognized; that, she understood.

This leviathan that has taken the terroir of a place and made it its own.

“The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse.”

We were offered up and we were lost. We were passing through a door of ghosts, into a place of spirits. And asked to deal with that. For the rest of our lives.”

The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit.

In rebellion against that, he rose from his crouch, arms out to the side for balance, teetering there on the edge of the trapdoor, staring down into that swirl of petals until he could resist no more, was falling into the pure white corona of a circle of fire, into a congregation of flames, a burning so pure that turning to ash was a kind of relief, engulfed by light that consecrated not just him but everything around him, anchoring receiver and received.

There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.

The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don’t know if I accept everything even now. I don’t know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there’s defiance in that, too.