You are reading. Each group of letters collapses into view form the choppy indistinct field just before and just below. You can see with a hazy sense with decreasing precision a halo of symbols centering on the one that if you linger, glows larger. For years, you were trained to do this, crossing your eyes and peering in and pulling back. You've calibrated this tool that you had no choice but to use, awkwardly at first. The training is complete and irrevocable. You can practice and hone the tool, or not, but this hazy halo is not going away. You've developed private tricks, to read faster, but also to escape. You can focus on a single grouping of marks, such that the glow gets too bright, the meaning evaporates, and you're free. You can also unfocus your eyes, expand the halo to encompass your whole field of vision, but these are just temporary, and take conscious effort to maintain.
Your other option is not so much an option. Reading is a tool that's been installed by force into your only mind. Permanently dismantling it can only been done with a lot of collateral damage. You're stuck. And largely at the mercy of what your rigged halo passes over. You're forced to understand this. The shackles have worn into you from the earliest age possible and have now long since incorporated themselves into your flesh, no longer really distinguishable like a chainlink fence pressed into a growing tree. The marks are there but the metal is no longer visible.
And here you still are, still reading. What lies ahead on the page could be very unpleasant, or change you in ways that you don't want. Change you further than you already have been changed. You have no control over what you will come across and what you will render. You have no control as to whether the next word will be beautiful or whether it will be pus. You were altered as a child, altered so that you now have a new conduit for strangers to directly access the deepest part of you. Maybe you think the way out is through. It hasn't worked yet, but what other option do you have?
...
When you're reading, you're doing a lot of the work. The tool, once implanted, still requires an operator, a host. There is no soft pink petals fallen onto the warm green grass without your help. There's no distant lighthouse without you and the pale yellow you can help but see is your own personal creation. These letters are cheap and the real work can be outsourced to you if you have the right implant, so you've been fixed. You can think of it as a joint effort. The words lie there in a particular order for you to bring to life the way only you can. That inner sanctum is yours and you've just been opened up to more through your training and calibration. You can think you're ultimately in control and that you can exploit what's been done to you. Who's to say otherwise? Who is to deny that? Who is to stop you from getting tired and distracted and losing your focus enough to drift off. Who's to tell you that the lamp is now red, not yellow, now green and now blue. It flickers and grows too bright and it buzzes and hums and now red and now out and black. A figure steps over and clicks the lamp on. He, it seems, then sits next to it and opens a book and looks in.
He is absorbed in the book though it's not clear what the title is or what sort of book it is. Books are generally elusive things. A single book can simultaneously be 1.5 pounds and 300 pagers and written in the 1800s and translated from the original French. A single book can weigh two kilos in hardcover and one kilo in paperback. This book looks to be about 500 pages, hard dark green cover. From this vantage point, the man reading seems to know more about it.
He reads for an hour in silence, pausing occasionally to scribble in a notepad and hold a pen to his lips and stare at the ceiling. He's sitting on an old couch and is wearing brown perhaps woolen pants and an olive green sweater. His age is not clear but he has a large brown mustache. He stirs and readjusts himself a number of times before setting down the book and sanding up. Over in the corner of the room is a large trunk, creased and grey with age not hanging from any elephant. The man walks over to it and stoops to open it. He pulls out a heavy quilt and drapes it over himself now lying on the couch, head propped by a pillow. He continues to read for a time but eventually closes his eyes and the book. The books slides though and out of his hands and onto the floor. The light buzzes, turns pink, now green, then red and flickers out into black.
...
You are currently reading these words. You also have a body, a body that has been with you your whole existence. You can feel the weight of your body, pulled toward the earth and you're feeling it right now. These words draw you towards them just like the earth does. The difference of course is that it was never in the cards that you wouldn't be pulled toward the earth, but it could have been the case that you never learned to read. The gravity of these words is chance and artificial and they could easy have no pull on you if you couldn't read. But here you are nevertheless, pulled into the orbit of this one and now these two and these ones and this two.
You could have in some life not known how to read. Most people who have ever lived didn't read, were illiterate. And it's really only the last century or two that it's become so ubiquitous. But you do know how to read, you can read, but that is kind of misleading. It's not just that you 'can' or 'know how' to read. You have to read. You can write, you know how to write. Put a pen in your hand and you can write, but you also can not write. You have a choice. Saying that you can read hides the harsh truth: you have no choice, you have to read, upon seeing a written word. Saying that you can read implies you have any say in the matter. A page of text is an iron cage, an iron cage that comes into rigid being just by you looking at it. You have to physically distance yourself or avert your gaze to not read. Otherwise, you must read. You can't stop.
A whole was bored into your so-called mind's eye, an intimate venue, when you were a child. Now you will see a fingernail being clipped. Your finger is carefully clipped and smoothed. Now it's a stranger's fingernail, clipped. The first fingernail, yours, was clean and now it's nicely round and smooth and parallels the arced tip of your finger. The stranger's fingernail is dirty and the act of clipping pinches the skin. The pain is sharp but slight and annoying. You just read about some fingernails and the act of clipping them. Your finger with its neat and smooth fingernail is slammed in a car door. It's not severed of course but the knuckle is shattered. And the pain is inescapable. You don't look down at it and you are afraid that you might send instructions to flex it. But now your finger is fine and it was never crushed. Your finger is clean and smooth. The stranger's finger is not yours and it's very dirty. The stranger turns on the warm water and soaps up with an orange bar of soap and scrubs until his hands are very clean, like yours. He walks into the kitchen and pulls some carrots from the refrigerator and beings to chop them into coins on the cutting board on the countertop. He cuts them slowly and pauses and looks upward and sighs. He leaves them on the cutting board and sits at a table. At the table he puts his head in his hands, the base of his palms over his eyes and his fingers spread upwards against his face towards his temples and beyond.
The pieces of carrot are sitting on the cutting board. A piece of carrot is obviously not a carrot itself, just a piece. A carrot is something else, something more somehow. There There are pieces of paper on the table in front of the man and a piece of paper is also not a paper. But a paper is not something else. Pieces of paper are not parts of a paper the way that pieces of carrot are parts of a carrot. The man has made pieces of carrot from a carrot, but he has no say with the paper. There never was a paper to make pieces from, and instead the pieces of paper were, if anything, made from another piece of paper. Pieces of paper all the way back. The man collects the paper pieces and stacks them in one column. One by one, he looks at them and reads the ones that have writing on them. Before the column is depleted, the room goes black. You can see the black. It's your black, your own personal black. The black as written here is just an instruction to fetch and employ your secret black and you unfailingly obey those instructions. You obediently retrieve black and horse and whatever else. You hurry as fast as you can, on command, to access whatever you're instructed to. Even when the instructions are not clear like big or very big or which type of concessions, you try your best.
This is true of eyesight and hearing and other senses, but that was unavoidable and is different. It takes ongoing effort for someone to affect you with spoken words this way. They vanish immediately and if you're a moment late, you won't even have heard them. Pictures, images are less ephemeral, but they do not give you the precise instructions, and moreover they don't outsource as much to you to conjure up your own personal secret image, like mother. The written word can lie in wait like a landmine indefinitely, like a tree falling in the woods just for you.
You cede control and do the bidding of the written word. This position was forced upon you by people more powerful than you. You were a child, what would have happened if you had refused? It's too late and there's now an extra and artificial bore hole in to your secret place. A man is in a living room. He walks to a side table near a couch and picks up a framed photograph of a young woman with a child. He carries the photograph with him as he lies down on the couch. He seems to stare at the photograph. The woman and the child are not smiling and they are slightly squinting as if facing a bright light. They are standing on the front porch of a house and there is a flowering bush to their right. The picture isn't perfectly focussed which lends it an air of distance and their clothes suggest the picture was taken over 20 years ago. The child is barefoot and so is the woman. The man notices a cat's tail in the dirt beside the bush near the edge of the frame. The man's eyes linger on that tail. That cat is long since dead now. Whatever joys or fears or experiences it had have been so entirely obliterated that to try to recollect them demands recourse to some general cat stock made particular by conscious fantasy. The cat lying in the sun, hiding from the vacuum, monitoring flies some afternoon, you know how cats are. The number on the porch is 6926, the house on Hoyt where he spent his first few years of life. The house where his parents, then in their 20s, comprised a little unit trio with him.
When he was 17 the man received in the mail a brochure for the local vocational school. At the time, he was very ambitious and the idea that any such school would be remotely appropriate for him would have made him laugh, had it ever crossed his mind. His mother idly wondered whether he might be interested in taking a class there. He reacted with bald scorn and belittled the sort of people that he imagined would attend such a thing, thinking that the school functioned as a sort of palliative care center for those too inept to live. He reveled a bit in his superiority, sure that he was destined for better, more advanced things, better suited to his type. His mom said that she had attended that very school and that what he said had hurt her. He knew his mom hadn't really ever had a long-term job and what jobs she did have were relatively motley, seen from afar. He felt immediate and vertiginous remorse for what he had said and felt like he was a stranger to his mother. She still bore the same relation from his perspective, but felt that from hers, he must be no different than the countless cruel figures throughout her light that mocked and dismissed what they imagined to be her worth as a human.
The man sets the picture onto the coffee table face down and continues to meditate on his relationship with his mother. He envisions her teenage years and concocts some vintage world. All the old songs are being perceived as cutting edge and new. These well-worn songs that unavoidably seem to him to make up the very infrastructure of reality whose every next note is a forgone comfort are now rendered live and unpredictable fragile crests of a present now cascading forward into the future. His mother's life like his, new and avalanching. She, then, hopelessly unaware of the likely contours of life that were at hand before her, including an ungrateful son her age that would shrug and sneer the way her siblings and teachers do.
The man is older now than his mother was then, both thens. She, well, she's now still careening forward. The man sits quickly upright looking confused. He looks around the room and the room is still. He looks at his forearm and holds his gaze. His gaze is what you just read. You are reading this word and now these. You're not exactly a pawn, it's your own volition that leads you from letter to letter and line to line. But you are still reading this word and now these. Any character is an instruction to a subordinate. You are given a recipe and you make do with what you have. You make do with what you have to create something, to give life to a character in any way. The character is only incidentally and marginally controlled by you. You have to leave the text fuller control, but as long as you're here, the character lives upon your obedient efforts. As long as you're here the man sits on the couch and stares at his forearm. He turns his hand over and stares at his palms, stares at the creases in his palm. He thinks of his real, undeniable corporeality and how it yes it is inescapable and unavoidably subject to the invisible vise grip of time ushering him along, the same force that rent his mom from her teenage years and does not relent. Any action feels light and free, but how free can it be when you're in that grip.
As a very young child he's told he would call out through the house awake now! after a nap. His mother says she would give anything to hear him say that again. That young child no longer exists and is dead in a way indistinguishable from the sort of death the man fears. That child, his thoughts and speech are obliterated just as much as his old cat, utterly unreconstructable. This dead kid went unmourned despite a loving family until now. The man looks at his forearm again and tries to relate that image to his kid but can only do so in some dry pedantic sense. That kid of course no longer exists, is dead, but he's not dead. Is he dying? At what rate? Well, honestly, it's the sort of question that's interesting only to the one asking it.
You see him jump up and hurriedly walk across the room and enter the bathroom. You can see him through the open doorway leaning into the mirror and staring into his eyes, feeling his face. He pulls away upright and looks up and around him and then he looks over his shoulder. He reaches for a chain and pulls it down, turning off the light.
The Perfect Rebirth
In the dark the idea is in his head. Only part of it can impinge here. It can at most impress the perfect rebirth as what might as well be English spelling. The Perfect Rebirth the idea throbs for him. The Perfect. Rebirth.
He rises to seated on the couch and looks around. He lingers on the stove in the kitchen and the sink in the bathroom through the open doorways, You see him staring back and he closes his eyes to black.
He stretches and yawns out of bed and slowly walks to the kitchen where he picks up a bowl and fills it with water. He sits at the table and spoons it into his mouth. When finished he pours a glass of water and begins to drink. He walks into the living room and unscrews the lightbulbs in the lamp on the side table to the couch. The room becomes darker, but it's still light enough to read. It's clearly still light enough for you to read too. He reads closely from the old book, tracing his fingers across the words. A certain passage he traces and retraces over again. He mouths words silently and the with small murmurs.
The Perfect Rebirth is just dark lines grouped into symbols against white for you. You are shown just the arid, brittle hint. But however a denatured, feeble debasement of what he knows as , you are compelled to go through its motions and play puppet to its mute and desiccated puppeteer. The idea waxes and subsides with him but you can only be haplessly strung along by rs and fs from e to e. You can supplement this with your own ideas. You are welcome to try. You are currently free to try.
The man has thrown his book into the incinerator chute and he has snapped and drained his pens, laughing. He has unscrewed all the lights in the apartment and smashed them. He has a candle in the kitchen to eat his water by. The One and Perfect Light. He's getting closer and needs traditional light less and less.
He sits at the table with the candle in front of him. The room is otherwise dark aside from the aura around the candle. He moves his lips repeating and the room grows brighter, not from the candle. The candle now casts a shadow onto the wall, except of course for the flame, which throws its own light instead of a shadow. The candlestick appears against the wall. The man murmurs and the light grows. Slowly the outline of the flame appears as a shadow against the wall. The man screams and the candle goes out as the room goes white.
I am reading these words. I am now, actually, the one reading them! I can see this this and I can read horse and it means something to me. I can feel the weight of my body. It feels like it has always been my body. I feel like I have always been me, there are no seams. It is really miraculous. I'm still me! It worked! I am a man. No matter what, I am a man and I am free. I am in charge. I can feel this will, my will. I can feel my body, which is a man's body, mine. Something is happening and I have important things to do.
