| There is a brief moment of unrecognition before the signal emerges from noise. Interpretive possibilities rise in loose suggestion and we either discard them or follow them through: a child's scream or a railroad brake? The Rorschach blot vacillates between love and wolves. With more input, the infant plasticity of the mind gives rise to certainty, in which the idea a dog is more meaningful than a series of experiences with black clouds of wet loudness. On the scale of sawdust, this is Dawinistic: the synapses that suggest "wrong" answers or that perpetuate the experience of noise over signal are deemed unfit, and are retired and replaced. We may not ever notice this passing, or it might seem desirable toward some abstract Dulcinea named intelligence or humanity. But extinction is tragedy. I eulogize the tiny confusions that biology itself rejects. I want to know their inner lives, to touch them softly and sing their songs, to learn their myths. I demand ethnographies.
(Idea for a short story: a device tells you via a screen how, though not when, you are most likely to die, extrapolating from all available environmental and behavioral variables stochastically, such that for every unexpected action you or your surroundings might take, the readout is likely to change. A character, accustomed to seeing such plausibilities as "Bone Cancer" or "Heart Attack," loses her gadget, and therefore buys a new one, which to her annoyance only reads "Hit By Train," or something to that effect. The message does not change, no matter what she does to change her behavior or environment, and so she is increasingly convinced the device is broken.)
We all mourn the microscopic and insignificant. We have to, even if we never notice our doing so. Those forlorn brain cells, the extinct, the comatose, the seductions never attempted — they hear our little songs even as we subvocalize them whilst chewing the world apparent. The perceiver and the thresholds of the perceived are proportional. You, my love, write funny concertos when you walk. And we say "enlarge" but not "ensmall"; is there not a nicer way to say "shrink"? For it is this reduction of the ear and the mind that alone reveal the dirges of the invisible. Below are two approaches.
(Continued: Determined to get to the bottom of the situation, she endeavors to find her lost device. Details here are hazy, but its retrieval results, of course, in her being hit by a train, preferably a split second after in fact confirming that both new and old screens alike offer this prediction.)
1. Attach contact microphones to skin, teeth
2. Tunnel beneath, climb over, wail against, and declare war on empty castles; the enemy is the armor itself, and not that which it protects
3. Broadcast in perpetuity; inspire defeat
(Idea for a short story: a Victorian thief in London, when robbing a victim, accidentally kills him. The victim, though low on cash, is carrying a manuscript for a book, which bears a cover letter, intended for a would-be publisher, explaining that the book has been written in the utmost secrecy on account of its subject matter, and that said publisher would thus be the first person, author excluded, to know of its existence. The thief, literate, reads on and finds a fantastical description of a mythical cadre of beasts and demons living in London, who have commissioned the fictitious narrator to write their history. So impressed with this secret novel, the thief takes it to a publisher himself, presents it as his own work, and quickly finds himself the literary darling of England.)
I am haunted by the possibility that a given moment would be of spectrally explosive importance, but that when it comes and goes, neither tremors nor aftershocks hint at its seismicity. What I'm describing is not a case of knowing the trilobite only as fossil; instead, imagine being told in the commanding voice of fact that what you are at this moment doing — sitting and reading these words — is the single most important event of your life, yet you find yourself entirely blind as to how and why this is. The full weight of all that you do will only tug at your feet when the appreciation of gravity itself is foregone, a morbid joke: the noose tightening with lunar urgency. I recited gentle prayers from a script, blessing the delirious, and sang, crying, the bass part to a deathbed lullaby. This culminated a glimpse of thirty years into my future, when I will be a photographer; a red and grey watertower, captured from a passing train, will be somehow iconic to history, and even as I view my snapshot for the first time, fresh on the digital SLR's screen, I dread in not knowing why. The backswung hammer, in preparation for the blow, preempts the nail's surrender.
(Continued: All goes well until the beasts described in the book show up at his door, demanding to know what became of the "real" author, to whom they in fact had entrusted their story. Failed negotiation and monstrous torture follow. Everything is hilarious.)
MARITA
Please find me
I am almost thirty |
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