Monday, December 10, 2012

The effect is of holes on parchment, material interrupted in its attempt to go without borders, to go without purpose. We attempt to align the holes through the liberal application of ink and hypnosis and the subsequent vertigo catches us off guard. We suppose the voices we hear then belong to those on the other side, but when we turn it over, we see little more than a window and beyond that a hillside covered in scrub. The sun beats down on it uninterruptedly for several minutes at a time and then layers of sound replace the sun gleefully. It is as if they had been waiting in nearby passageways, in the pockets of discarded coats. I try for a while to live without placing my feet on any convenient surface – the rocks like axioms strewn about in such a way as to impede the progress of others, the baby grand piano given as a gift. But my every effort is thwarted by that part of my mind that doesn’t believe the other parts exist. That insists it is the sole occupant and as such deserving of respect like that given the royalty of the Sandwich Islands when they were still called that and not something else. An hour later, someone is lying in the street, bleeding from a wound that doesn’t appear serious, and yet, he will not answer any questions. He seems to believe that the wound corresponds to the holes in the parchment we started with in some deep and  meaningful way, but by that time we have sent the parchment away to be examined by experts and have little faith that it will be returned. Maybe our only option is to create a similar object ourselves and pass it around until the second object becomes as enigmatic, and ultimately threadbare, as the first. You can imagine the outcry, the jumping up and down on boxes that are rumored to contain explosives but are probably just empty. They have that appearance. And besides, when was the last time we discovered gold coins buried in the soil? Or buried them ourselves and returned to find that they had not been dug up? I like to think the legend placed underneath the object, the parchment, when they eventually hang it on a wall will reference those of us who spent so much of our lives attempting to decode it, attempting to fit it into conceptions we already hold. I like to think too the legend will be a mild peach in color, reminding one of childhood at precisely that point when childhood is furthest away, when it is covered over in something very like concrete and very like vines.        

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