residue

My body curls into itself, hunched over the screen. I position myself to block the sun’s glare from the dark mirror so I can peer into its depths. My thumb is sliding over the surface. The hole I look into is periodically interrupted with the shadowed reflection of my upper torso, my shoulders, the underside of my chin, the insides of my nostrils, eyes.

  • My body becomes a question mark.

We leave the cave and make our way to the river. Here, there is more stone than river, but that is just fine. The river will come eventually, the rain will bring it, the ocean will bring it. It is foretold. I find a small creek and I gasp. I collect the creek with my camera. Some pictures and videos of supplemental memory, soon to be primary memory.1 We find a spiral painted on the rock. Red and yellow and blue, twisting in. The shadow of my hand is pulled into the center.

The river operates with machine logic, fast and linear; the eddy with spiritual logic, slow and cyclical. Within the eddy lies something forgotten, something to unlearn and relearn. “For Vladimir Nabokov, the spiral is a key figure of the fourth dimension of fictionality; the spiral is a ‘spiritualized circle’ (interestingly, ‘spiritualized,’ not spiritual, it’s about spirituality in process).”2 The eddy eventually comes round to face its shadow. It eats its tail. The river runs from the shadow, running selfishly towards apocalypse, towards the singularity of comfort, convenience, closure.

And what a number of invertible dynamisms there are in this spiral! One no longer knows right away whether one is running toward the center or escaping.3

I tell myself that I am cleaning the screen with my thumb, wiping away the old marks and prints and smudges. Some residue from earlier today. But an alternative image emerges: Gollum stroking the Ring in his cave; Frodo pulling the Ring from the neck of his shirt, first thing in the morning, to gaze on it and stroke it just as his shadow does. I get up and start to make my way to the mountain. But I become distracted again, I find my reflection on the surface. I see some beauty from elsewhere. So many elsewheres.4 My thumb is performing the ritual and I’ve forgotten about the mountain. No Sam in the singularity.

Epicurus is crying: “friendship is essential.” Claudia Rankine is saying: “don’t let me be lonely.”5

  • A dance.6

I turn my head to look int the direction of the glance of motion.

  • Nothing. It is gone.

A soft orange glow is slowly disappearing from the screen. I’m sorry, I did not see it.

  • Maybe you did?

  1. “I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away.”  —Sally Mann, Hold Still ↩︎

  2. Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern ↩︎

  3. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space ↩︎

  4. “By the Magicall or Prospective Stone it is possible to discover a Person in what part of the World soever, although never so secretly concealed or hid; in Chambers, Closets, or Cavernes of the Earth: Fore there it makes a strict Inquisition. In a word, it fairely presents to your view even the whole World wherein to behold, heare, or see your Desire. Nay more, It enables Man to understand The Language of the Creatures, as the Chirping of Birds, Lowing of Beasts &c. To Convey a Spirit into an Image, which by observing the Influence of Heavenly Bodies, shall become a true Oracle, And yet this as E.A. [Elias Ashmole] assures you, is not any ways Necromanticall, or Devilish; but easy, wondrous easy, Naturall and Honest.”  —Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum—from Arnaud Maillet’s The Claude Glass ↩︎

  5. “Or one meaning of here is “in this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of,” or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebody—Here you are. Here, he said to her. Here both recognizes and demands recognition. I see you, or here, he said to her. In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of.” —Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric ↩︎

  6. “Among a few remaining human traits that technology cannot duplicate are a sense of humor that resists ‘disambiguation,’ a sudden gasp of affect, a smile, a whim, a swerve.” —Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern ↩︎