First Person
fragment:daydream
There is a slight incident I must relate, a story that could be a film, if not for the frustrating limitations of frame and focus. Instead it will be like a memory of an image, a slip of events that seeps out between breaths.
I have no other reason for telling it, except that I can’t seem to get rid of it any other way. The theme is confession, if there must be one, and the hero lives in the third person, as usual.
What happened was that the person in the third person made the great, grand mistake of believing that there was nothing miraculous left in the world. Especially the mystery expanding and heaving upon his body, which wasn’t used to breathing the air of the sublime event. Not that the body didn’t simply need to be reminded in the very last instant and shocked into memory, but the possibility of the miracle, when realized, could itself induce a kind of transcendental nausea.
In these moments — which can and by nature must repeat themselves infinitely until the possibility of impossibility recognizes itself and swallows its own tail — the central figure here would always stop whatever he was doing, stare into an invisible space located in the plane just below the level of his eyes (whether he was sitting or standing) and brace against the conspicuous silence to hear the source of the odd hum rising from his bowels.
All sound became instrument in that moment, either manifest by nature or conformed to the purpose; that is, to accompany the instant buried in the rising onrush of two halves, stretching apart in cadence with the main valve in the human heart. He was frozen into form, dreamed about in advance, statuesque.
In that brief time, he was himself the embodiment of the miracle, and then…a twitch, an odd pitch piercing his composed inner silence, the remembrance of desire, and he would be jarred into merely the presence of the sublime, which in turn became nostalgia with faith, then a loss of that faith, and reverting eventually, and inevitably, back into it’s latent incubus, words.
Afterwards, he would, of course, be fooled into believing that the moment had been something vaguely “spiritual,” and this his body would accept as a necessary illusion.
None of this apparent to the onlooker, of course, or plurality of them, in the role of the passive witness. The only important factor for the audience — who, it must be noted, were constantly present — was the change in the angle from which he was seen.
If viewed incidentally from the angle of a surveillance camera, for example, he was the central figure, standing in the approximate center of a supermarket somewhere in the city, bathed in neon and cooled incubator oxygen. He was framed by the long rectangular blocks which make up the primary furniture of a grocery store. In his arms he carried groceries, several items, enough to have required the use of a carry basket — which he could not locate upon entry — but not enough to necessitate the use of a cart, which always made him feel overtly obtrusive while pushing it around a store. So he balanced the items awkwardly in his arms, as if carrying three infants at once. He made the mistake of going into the store on an empty stomach. He was only going to buy milk and cereal, but several other foodstuffs leapt into his path as he traversed the aisles and now he found himself waiting behind the painfully slow-moving traffic at the check out line, his arms cramping from the bottle of juice clenched in his armpit, and his middle finger strangling blue from the sack of red potatoes dangling there.
Snapshot. One grainy still taken from the cool tinted stream on a dusty monitor. Epiphanic, and yet forgotten. Clearly that was someone else. I know this because I exist in the first person.
