O curas hominum! O quantum est in rebus inane! — Persius, maybe
“O the cares of man, how much of everything is futile?”
Unlike my non-dominant hand project, where I was infused with self-confidence and otherness, unlike my poetry project, where sending words out to others created an unfamiliar comfort, my self-portrait project had me drowning in disappearance, disfiguration, nothingness. After fifty days, I turned the lens outward and began to feel myself in the world. But feeling is not enough. I want a thread — something to stitch the days together.
Today is Day 89. I am still following the scent.
Is following a scent too capricious? Have I given up the perception of choice to chance? Must I make some sort of plan to better navigate my time here?
My dad used to call me a fish. Like so many kids, I’d stay in water until my flesh was shriveled and my lips were blue. I am asking if I should make a plan whilst remembering when time didn’t matter. This week has been so hot. I found refuge in ungardening our pond, in pulling up the algae with hands and feet and swirling it like cotton candy around four limbs.
I leave the trance of words and thoughts and water to help Silas with breakfast before he disappears into a building for seven hours. The building we sat in last night listening to brief, well-meaning messages about each senior member of the track team, and where they are going to college. We reduce lives to the most repetitive and uninteresting facts.
I am sitting now, in my studio with goosebumps and itchy red bites. Strangely, I am thrilled to have been so lost that I didn’t feel it happening. Though I itch. I’ve been pruned by wetness — in the pond, in my sweat, in the sauna, and finally a cold well-water shower. Was it me that beckoned the biters the night I sat naked here, in the doorway on the floor, with a small lamp on the desk’s edge, illuminating me and my scribblings? Or are the nibblers from the pond?
The string algae has created a new landscape. Small and slimy chartreuse clumps, vast spring green blankets, and beneath all that, brown and leafy, coarse and smelly layers that hold the coldness of winter. When I disrupt these layers, when I roll it into manageable but heavy clumps out of the water, I cannot see even with goggles. I close my eyes and surrender to the strangeness and silence of this new world.
I emerge and feel the sun but not its heat. It takes only moments for the algae to begin its indifferent work of return. More plants. More creatures. More balance. More education. More reading. I smell the foulness set free from the darkest, coldest, most fibrous algae and I shall continue to follow the scent — into a world already busy with its own living, mostly oblivious to mine, and more beautiful for it.
Here I am, ungardener. Underwater.
oh amen to "we reduce life to the most repetitive uninteresting facts." 10/10 agree
I could smell this post while reading it.