Read This With Your Eyes Closed
The phone rings twice. Ignore it. I am going to lead you into this slowly. Imagine an unknown depth. Enter it. There is a deafening sound. Sirens, computer keys clicking, horns, radio voices, music, a trumpet screams. Like out of a projector, you see a portrait of your senior year in high school. It starts to get quieter. You can make out some recognizable songs, some familiar voices. Pause. Flash. Now a picture of your father holding you against his chest when you were two. You were asleep in his arms. Now you hear only a mumbling static. It fills you, then fades to nothing. You hear the high-pitched hum of your own nervous system. The soft patting of your heart. Now there is silence. Do you think we can hear each inside this place? There are no more echoes. Flash. A still from your mother’s sweet sixteen. You begin to feel as if you’re moving - either rising or falling. There is no orientation inside. Flash. A small, cracked and yellow photo of your great grandfather overlooking a large property. His eyes are dark and serious. His skin is almost illuminated. Flash. Now you see a tattered black and white photograph of a man standing still among walking blurs in a city street. A light goes out. A wire falls. A compass cracks. You are moving in space. You have forgotten something. Imagine blackness. You see a woodcut print in your mind of some colonists purchasing Africans, then the slaughtering of natives – then a renaissance painting with women and babies and carefully placed halos. There are piles of dead bodies. Small stone homes surround a castle. There is a crucifix. A geisha. An African mask. A samurai completing seppuku. Huge kingdoms in the desert. Gold. Jaguar skins. Go further back. There are clay jugs with gladiators. Relief portraits of dog-headed men entombed. A telescope falls from your hand. Maps erase themselves. Buildings collapse into the ground. All the Pyramids across the earth implode. Rows of corn sink back into the soil. Several animals regain their genetic cleanliness and morph into leaner, stronger, and faster creatures before your eyes. They run away from you despite your arrows. Numbers and letters and strange symbols begin to fall away from you in a flurry. Now it’s like a blizzard. They are gone. You have forgotten something. Dolls and sculptures turn to dirt in your hands. Now there are bison and men with spears on cave walls. You blow ink through a grass straw over your hand and onto the wall where it leaves a negative handprint. You are moving more rapidly. Now there are lines in the dirt. Stop. Where are you? What do you see? A creek. A tree. They have no names though. A bird flies overhead. You remember something you never really knew.
Now you can come back. It’s all fake, of course. Textbooks and lectures. Paintings and photographs.
You don’t really know any of it. It is one great sculpture, a movement of rapture where every single thing that has ever happened occurs at once, and then vanishes.
