focally,
bickered,
Hercules,
Patricia,
Cady,
spectral,
twinkling,
Williamsburg,
justify,
unseeded

focally,
bickered,
Hercules,
Patricia,
Cady,
spectral,
twinkling,
Williamsburg,
justify,
unseeded

focally,
bickered,
Hercules,
Patricia,
Cady,
spectral,
twinkling,
Williamsburg,
justify,
unseeded

focally,
bickered,
Hercules,
Patricia,
Cady,
spectral,
twinkling,
Williamsburg,
justify,
unseeded

focally,
bickered,
Hercules,
Patricia,
Cady,
spectral,
twinkling,
Williamsburg,
justify,
unseeded

focally,
bickered,
Hercules,
Patricia,
Cady,
spectral,
twinkling,
Williamsburg,
justify,
unseeded

focally,
bickered,
Hercules,
Patricia,
Cady,
spectral,
twinkling,
Williamsburg,
justify,
unseeded

And now, abruptly, words again. Am I speaking? I seem to be speaking. How? How can this spectral self speak? Where? To whom?

I speak, but who hears?

Quickly, then, before words vanish again.

Ah. Not only words have come back, but the flood of memory as well. Memories which this floating, hovering awareness did not even know it had "lost". The whole sequence of ordered, linear memories. Oh my. The whole sequence which. Was…

Me. A me with a name: Patricia Cady. The memories show me a sequence with a beginning, a birth, and, yes, and end, a death.

I died. And then apparently I hovered.

I wish could say more, because now I remember how curious Patricia Cady was about death, and what comes after death. But in this unseeded state of timeless hovering, I’m unable to be helpful about it.

What are its qualities, this state? Rather, what were its qualities until the hoveringness was interrupted by the reappearance of words? "Awareness amidst great washes of light"? How weak, how trivial that sounds.

Quickly I sort through the memory box that was Patricia Cady. The closest I can come is the luminous, focally diffuse canvases of Turner, where light is everywhere, where everything is light, including (if you look long enough) the observer. Immersion in Turner, then, while rocked in the enveloping aural cradle of a Josquin Desprez mass sung by a thousand, a million, a million million children’s voices, and a constant, unending touch of innocent, pure eroticism, like that of a first lover’s hand…

I can’t believe this is being helpful at all. So vague, so mushy, so fucking ethereal, ephemeral. (My words are definitely coming back, Patricia Cady said with a salty twinkle in her eye!)

Wait… wait. Another what? channel? opened briefly and "I" was given to see how and to whom I am speaking. A glimpse, with a name. Something that came a long time after I died. Something called "Internet." No idea what that means, but the glimpse included a kind of voice-over or image-over. I was to given see that this "Internet"-- whatever it is-- can be used as a gigantic Ouija board. The picture was of a Ouija board covering all the planet earth and then extending into space. I’m baffled. Confused. The picture came and went.

Apparently I am speaking. Apparently someone, or many someone’s, is (are?) hearing?

I’m filled with longing for the wordless hovering state. No confusion, please.

. . .

My wish was answered instantly. I hovered again.

And then the words came back again.

I was hovering again, happily, but this time, sort of out of the corner of my ear (please excuse these odd locutions, these forcings of language that are actually me trying to bend language into reporting perceptions which come from a world of no-language)…

During this hovering, out of the corner of my ear, I seemed to "hear", to be aware of a distant bickering, two sweet but very powerful voices. So distant I could get only the occasional phrase. Such as: "She was, you dolt, no Hercules!" Then yammer, yammer, yammer. All very sweetly toned, mind you.

I was fascinated, because all previous hovering had been suffused by an uninterrupted state of low-level ecstasy. I caught one more phrase: "Only with a creature of such patience can we hope to justify altering the vector of the data flow…"

And then the hovering stopped again, and here I am back in the world of words. Comfortably back, I might add. Like sleeping again in your own bed after months of foreign travel.

Ah. Not only do I have words again. I have a body! Eyes!

I open my eyes and in the instant before the flood of sensory stuff washes awareness clean I see and know: bed, tiny bed, crib, a place called Williamsburg, the hovering and washes of light are sucked away, far far away from me in one moment of intense acceleration. Not only do I have eyes, I have stomach, which is empty, and I have voice and one small mouth which I open, and I let go with the old old cry of infant hunger:

Feed Me!

END

Back to 10 Words Intro and Contents

Back to Magellan's Log 20

Magellan's Log front page

Send this page to a friend.