A Parallel Essay Inspired by the Work of Maxine Hench

Well first, before we start, we’ll have to get everything right? Really understand what language, and all the semiotic structures are. Try to grasp whether there is any difference between psychology and biology — whether or not “humans” occupy a special place or whatever. And while we’re doing these few introductory transcendental clarifications we must also be developing the ability to stand completely outside of ourselves, that is not only outside our race, gender, financial bracket, etc. but outside the human and the terrestrial altogether. Beyond gravity and our familiar physics. Beyond our dimensional fences so to speak. Really get out there. Out to look back and see the bias of directional bodies moving through what they don’t understand to be Bergsonian time, or whatever. But then not to just get “outside” or “further” and “look back” because of course directionality is quite human and bias-ridden and lane-locking too. But perhaps to be everywhere at once. To simultaneously understand all the dramas and banalities of both the Andromeda and MACS0647-JD galaxies as well as all of the dramas and banalities of the sub-nucleonic structures inside all the pamphlet guides at the front desk of the National Museum of Tanzania, as well as all the other museum pamphlets and everything else. Everything. And lastly, ha, if there could be such a thing, returning to our earlier semiotic clarifications — lets strip away beginnings and endings, all borders — so we can see clearly ya know? Like understand where like the finger ends and the hand begins, and hand ends and the arm begins, and the arm ends and the torso begins, and the torso ends and the body begins, and the body ends and the family begins, and the family ends and the race begins, and the race ends and general life begins, and general life ends and other stuff begins, and other stuff ends and other non-stuff begins… Well yea, we’re going to need to get rid of all that stuff too. Oh and then there’s the other direction to clear up.

But first,
        how
            are
                you?

I’m fine.

He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. […] They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment

From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce, 1916. 

A Personal Musing

In East Louisville, Kentucky, spectacle wearing, lifetime drifter, Avery Mann, accepts a ride from a pickup truck. He is told to climb in the trucks bed; he sits looking backwards. On his lap is a box of cheap antique watches (all with Roman numerals, most not ticking — none have the correct time). The truck is headed west around midnight on the first Sunday of November (Louisville straddles the “Central” and “East” US time zones if you don’t know). The box of watches was left curbside by some county workers who had cleaned out the house of recently deceased nonagenarian Maxim Qualunquecosa. Quite some miles away, a Foureye Butterflyfish (the ones with those faux-eye colorations close to their tail to deceive predators) is swimming against the Western Atlantic current, a direction in concert with a violent and large waterspout that is gyring counter clockwise on the surface above. On the nearest landfall, on a bluff in Providence, Rhode Island, the effect of said nor’easter is causing some stormy and icy conditions. An archaeologist named Aurora Qualunquecosa (estranged from father Maxim) has fallen unconscious after slipping on an ice patch on the edge of her dig. Yesterday Professor Aurora had discovered a mummified Cro-Magnon man preserved in peat for nearly 30,000 years. The professor, lying horizontal on a gurney, is being pulled vertically by a winch toward the National Guard helicopter. The stretcher, because of the spinning blades is slowly rotating clock wise. Outside the downwash of the rotors the wind is blowing hard from the north.