Michael Scott Hand

2020 is like a year on pause. Like a year that’s been left on pause on a dusty VCR in a dusty basement. Like a year on pause on an old VCR where the tracking line rolls up and down and the screen and the picture is fuzzy.

2020 is like a VHS tape on pause. You can’t remember what’s on the tape. You can barely make out the shapes of the actors on the screen. The audio from an old, barely remembered commercial hisses and you hiss back like a startled cat.

2020 is like a startled cat hissing at a VHS tape on pause on a dusty VCR in a dusty basement. The tracking line rolls up and down the screen. The picture wobbles. The tape is so fragile. It’s so old now. It’s worn down.

We’ve recorded over the tape so many times that the pictures merge, old images overlap with the new. Faces become other faces. Dark doppelgangers stare out from the screen. The tracking line scrolls up and down. The cat hisses.

A hand reaches for the remote and presses play. The tape grinds and tangles in the machine. The picture is mangled. The half-formed images are lost forever.

2020 is a basement with a dark TV screen and a useless remote control. The cat is purring. We don’t know how the movie ends.

Reality is an apple. We eat around the core; we throw it away.

We endure the skin, even though it is fibrous and sometimes gets stuck in our teeth, so that we can gorge ourselves the sweet flesh that is life: that is experience and feeling and sensation.

Reality is an apple in a grocery store, spritzed and polished. We inspect the skin for bruises, we admire the way the skin catches and reflects the light. We pick a few, the “best” ones, even though we know there’s no real way of telling which ones have already turned rotten inside.

We delude ourselves with this false choice: do not choose an apple for its skin.

And although we do not eat them, don’t ignore the seeds or the core:

For the core held the apple to the tree, and apple seeds–though poisonous–are the way that we make more.

I ponder the primordial forces of creation. Was I made for this: to ponder?

Four forces churn within the Sphere, encircled by Love and Strife.

Is love the reflection of the sunlight on the sphere? Is Love the dancing reflection of vision?

Is Strife the shadow of the Sphere cast wherever it dwells?

Space is the Void and the Void is so, so vast. There is so much space between Us and Everything, there is so much Strife.

And yet, forced together by Fate or Gravity: we discover Love.

Is war Love? Is space Strife?

Perhaps they believe the world is flat not because the world is flat, but because… “the world is flat”. An atlas lies open on a table and I stab at the page with my finger:

Fort Nelson.