Memory and imagination are one in the same for storymaking
but sight depends. Did you know that birds see ultraviolet light?
Something about a fourth cone. There’s science and there’s
knowledge and there’s utility but then there’s how things seem
when we’re only looking at the surface, now and past, the
ocean’s always deeper. The first tophat caused pandemonium
on its maiden voyage atop its inventor’s head, women fainting
in the street, kids dropping ice cream cones cone side up on the
cobblestones, men driven to duels and brawling, dogs to
hawling, cats to birds and birds to snakes. Here’s to looking back
and incoherence. Put an image to an idea and call it awe-making
because you need it, my selfie says, knowingly—you need to call
it something before you “figure it out” and peel it apart and
wonder what held you so fast in the first fast place, “sight” or
thought. I don’t really believe it but I play along, writing because
I can’t talk, or don’t want to, I beam back in ultraviolet back
from the cave back behind the waterfall where it’s all and only
objects and possibility, no image, no idea, where we (selfie and
I) come together to remember imagination is a whole lot of
nothing without the web of narrative to catch innumerable
delectable identities for dinner—strength’s not in numbers
anyway but in narrative so fuck word count and structure and
let’s make some sense of this: I’m in the cave right now, holding
a wiggling headless fish in my cupped hands till a gaping little
mouth and bulging eyes on the wet stone floor several paces
away catch my eye and I walk over, reach down, and make the
reconnection, pressing the silvery parts together again, and the
whole I give one last look before tossing it out through the
plummeting stream, more as a birth than a return. I don’t
watch, don’t even wait for the splash somewhere out there in
the sea down below in case it sprouts wings and soars off
silently, I only move along in the dimness searching for the next
sparkling synapse to rescue.