Michael Scott Hand

Category: Mondays

• 09082021

  Posted at 9:24 am by Michael, on August 9, 2021

  Old media surrounds me like old memories. What is less (more) fallible? The video tape or the memory? The cassette tape or the memory? The recordable CD or the memory?

  Like scuff marks on an old CD my memory too seems damaged. Like the tracking lines on an old VHS tape. Like the Siberian Hell Screams of warped cassette tape.

  An old digital photo has a fuzziness and a blur about it that we did not notice at the time. Now the AI wants us to upscale it, to fill in the fuzzy pixels with clarity. Are these false-pixel memories still an accurate photographic record?

  Is a photograph an accurate photographic record?

  Too much light spills into the frame and a picture becomes like a memory, all hazy and glowing and difficult to focus on. Not enough light and we see dreamscapes; a well-lit street becomes a place of horror.

  And in our eyes the sun and shadow still plays tricks. At night we live by the light of the moon. By the light of artificial plastic globes at the end of bent metal sticks that drizzle everything in amber.

  What we see is defined as much by what we do not see. And what we capture in a photograph is the merest fragment of what exists beyond the frame. A 3D panorama attempts to capture a room full of people, but maybe Uncle or Grandma was moving at the time and so their face becomes a blur, a smear, like a slippery memory.

  Is a memory an accurate photographic record? Is a photograph an accurate memographic record? Is memographic even a word? Yes, because if you’ve read this far you comprehended it.

  The gostak distims the doshes.

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• 02082021

  Posted at 9:44 am by Michael, on August 2, 2021

  I feel the cold more with each year that passes and I so I begin to wonder: is this the ultimate state of things–this coldness that saps and slows?

  And so I bundle myself in clothes and blankets and sit beneath the machine that blasts warm air and the warmth returns and fills me up. But the cold persists. It traces down my spine and tingles. It lingers in my joints.

  The cold is always there. You can feel it on a hot day when the wind touches your perspiration and you shiver. This is no “goose on your grave”, though it is a reminder of sorts about the ever-present cold.

  It is pervasive and eternal. It fills empty space such that even the desert at night becomes a frozen wasteland. And the tops of mountains. And the deep, dark forests. And the suburban streets.

  Yet, everywhere, life thrives in defiance of the cold. Creatures drift through icy seas and sing songs (which we do not understand) and others huddle together in burrows beneath the earth, as we huddle together in cities and the homeless linger in the corners between buildings where the cold might not reach them.

  The cold is always there. And yet, there is another thing that is always there as well. Is it as eternal as the cold? Is it as necessary? Did the two arise together and can one exist without the other, or do they somehow birth each other in some quantum dance of warring polarities?

  For your blood is warm, human.

  And so is the radiant centre of your Earth.

  And so is the radiant centre of your solar system.

  However cold it is outside, it is always warm within; remember that and tend to those flames.

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• 26072021

  Posted at 9:41 am by Michael, on July 26, 2021

  We learn the shapes and they are so simple: square, triangle, circle. But the shapes that are not simple: there is a square inside a square, a triangle with a rounded edge and circles of different sizes connect to form a spiral. Eventually, we learn about these too, these combinations-of-shapes, and no matter how many edges or curves, we learn that each silly shape consists of the essence of those basic shapes that we first learned.

  The shapes, no longer content to live within two dimensions begin to pop out from the page. On graph paper they assume new forms, the forms of three dimensions, and as such the square becomes a cube and the triangle a pyramid and the circle a sphere.

  And what of the cube with another cube inside it, the pyramid with a curved edge and the sphere containing spheres that form a spiral?

  As with the primary colours: red, yellow, blue. Not reality but art theory. Not art theory in practice, but colour-mixing. Could it be those hues combined consist of nothing more than those hues we already knew? Is a clock-tower nothing more than a square, extended into three dimensions, a square with another square inside it (the empty space) and a pyramid perched on top?

  Is the clock merely a circle and the hands of the clock mere lines? What of the seconds that pass as we wonder; a second when considered for more than a second rapidly becomes memory and memory becomes history no matter how poorly remembered.

  Is a religious fresco merely shapes and primary colours? Is a bowl of pasta? Is the sky on a clear night, glittering with stars? Is all that we know, and are, reducible to these primary facts? What of these words… they are “shapes” of a fashion. And what of the imagination that takes these words and sets them alight with images described like: red triangle, blue sphere, green square.

  What of the thoughts that toss and tumble and the shapes that are incomplete, or where one line extends beyond the boundaries presumed to be proper, like an untidy triangle that forgot to comb its hair? What of beginnings and endings and molecules and waves and the ocean churning and churning and churning.

  A bubble may appear as a perfect sphere until it pops and then it is little more than myriad tiny spheres too small for the eye to see. And the grains of sand too. And the sun that stains the sea red and then dips below the waves and out of sight.

  Is all that we know, and are, reducible to these primary facts?

  Are we… merely imperfect shapes?

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• 19072021

  Posted at 9:07 am by Michael, on July 19, 2021

  The tall grass in the field sways when the wind goes over it.

  The tall grass in the field sways when a creature passes through it.

  The mountains look on, impassive, peaks cloaked by mist.

  People wear paths where they tread. And generation after generation follow those same footsteps.

  The tall grass in the field sways when the wind goes over it.

  The tall grass in the field sways when a creature passes through it.

  The mountains look on, impassive, peaks cloaked by mist.

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• 12072021

  Posted at 7:39 am by Michael, on July 12, 2021

  Everything is a series of processes set in motion long ago by the first–itself a series of processes–begun when ending not-ever, but overflowing from the first in great milky gusts of star cloud.

  Thus transmuted into inconsequential carbons that comprise me and my fingers tap clumsily at keys that register some runic approximation of my thoughts through processes yet arcane and not understood.

  Brain cells and firing neurons and we know not what they truly are as thought and self, perceived, exist within a slab of meat; cut into thin slices enhance image, enhance, enhance until we eventually find a tiny image of an elephant stored within the brain–except…

  It is no image of an elephant but an elephant, living and breathing and warm and large. And it smells like an elephant and it sounds like an element, but it lives here in this nothing-space between neurons.

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• 05072021

  Posted at 9:26 am by Michael, on July 5, 2021

  We are made of threads like balls of yarn that stretch between bookshelves that are far apart.

  Like knowledge on pages spread like melting butter our thoughts expand beyond the edges that contain us.

  Such as it is we cannot be contained, but rather, continue to expand our thoughts and consciousness beyond that which we thought we knew.

  And like the butter who first thought its destiny was to be only milk, so too are we transformed by the alchemy of existence into something more than gold.

  For gold is a precious metal formed by millions of years of geologic processes; but we are the living thoughts of the universe given form.

  As such any attempts to perceive ourselves become tangled and we know not who, or what, we are.

  For we are born into this clumsy, violent, rapid, empty, busy siren-song of flashing sounds and blaring lights and we are as lost as time-travellers.

  For we are time travellers. That which birthed us so long ago slid (or perhaps did not slide) in ancient pools and oceans beyond our comprehension.

  And so on and so on… until we not only had eyes, but also minds with which to fixate on this strangeness. But still we make no sense of it.

  The oceans that birthed us still rise and fall and the memories of our ancestors linger within us, mostly unremembered.

  Yet we are as much a part of those who came before us as our shadow is part of us. But is a shadow also a part of the ground that it darkens?

  Then, are we also part of the ground upon which our shadow falls?

  Yes.

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• 28062021

  Posted at 8:52 am by Michael, on June 28, 2021

  Old belongings lay scattered like memories and the boxes that held them are empty.

  These objects, once imbued with such power, lie dormant on the floor. They have been reduced to their base components, stripped of memory and context such things become as plastic, metal and paper of no use to anyone at all.

  Pick something up and hold it. How does it make you feel? Do the memories come surging, even now? Do you breathe life into this object as the witch doctor and his fetish?

  No. Today there are no memories. Today there is only the sound of blood rushing in your ears like the ocean. You are alive and yet you are not the same life. You are the result of a constant shedding, not merely of skin and cell, but also memory and emotion and ideas.

  You are a juxtaposition of every mistake you have made and every victory you have celebrated. You are sawdust-shavings of everyone you have lost. You are the very wind itself, the surging storm of memory, all the sadness and the hate and the mistakes–yes, again, the mistakes–and the victories; again, the victories.

  You are a box, emptied. You are the belongings, scattered across the floor. You are none of those things.

  You are the thought that perceives these words. You are a vibrant living thread, even now forging towards a future that is yours alone.

  Again, you will make mistakes. Again, you will be victorious.

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• 21062021

  Posted at 5:36 am by Michael, on June 21, 2021

  A coin flipped and thrown in the air, not caught but forever falling through the mutable atoms of the floor and the soil and the stone, and so on it falls directly through the Centre of the Earth where it melts and becomes a sphere of impure metal.

  A sphere of impure metal passing through the Centre of the Earth and rising through rock and soil and floor on the other side rises above the hand of one who flipped a coin in a different currency and lands on an outstretched palm.

  Is this the story of a coin, or of two coins, or of a sphere of impure metal? Is this some rational explanation of the working of things, or a parable, or some hidden wisdom disguised in tiny letters like an engraving on a coin that tells which year it was made?

  Is this the story of a man flipping a coin, or his mirror on the opposite side of the earth who still searches for the coin he flipped and that now he cannot find? Or is it the story of a child in the forest who witnesses a strange coin suddenly leap up from the ground and then fall to the dirt?

  Is this the story of the coin or a sphere or a man, or the tiny letters on a coin, or the face on a coin, or does it say something about currency and exchange, or luck or the mutability of atoms, or the unique perspective one has when standing on one particular side (or another) of a sphere spinning through space?

  Is this an improbable story about probability, or a story about hope, or a story about absurdity? Is this the crystalised moment that the coin was thrown and an exploration of the myriad possibilities that it contains as it turns in the air?

  Or, perhaps, it is none of these and it is only a coin, flipped, and we will never know which way up it lands.

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• 14062021

  Posted at 10:16 am by Michael, on June 14, 2021

  Slowly walk through vaulted halls where the floor is painted so that it reflects the cavernous valleys of the ceilings above. Your footsteps fall lightly in this place where no-one is but you, and all about the place is gilt and gilded.

  There is music playing, but you can’t say from where. The tune is familiar but you cannot name it. There are no words, only an orchestra. There is no orchestra only a record, spinning somewhere, piped through wires sounding from hidden speakers.

  There are paintings on the walls and they are both very old and very large. The lights do not come on until you stand in front of each picture, so as not to cause the paintings to fade. There are too many details to take them in at once.

  One of the paintings shows a boat cast about by mighty waves. The tiny shapes of faces peer through windows in the sides of the boat and above it a darkly baroque sky churns and salt water sprays and for a moment you can almost taste it.

  Shuffle along, the classical music is still playing. What is this place? A museum or a tomb? From where did you come and how did you get here? Those memories seem fleeting now, like a dream already falling away from you. Wipe your eyes, you’re awake, this is real. How did you get here? I brought you.

  Another painting. In this one people are wailing and carrying the body of a man draped in cloth. Another painting. A woman on a bed surrounded by demons who cannot cross the threshold of the cube defined by the four posts at each corner of her mattress. Another painting. A man wearing a strangely shaped hat confers a blessing upon a believer.

  Behind the paintings are plastic boxes each containing an illuminated relic. There is an old book in one. There is a finger bone in another. Is this building some giant reliquary?

  No, it is not a building. There is no outside. There is only the inside and the polished floors and the vaulted ceilings and the paintings and the boxes containing pieces of long-dead saints and, I suppose, there is you, although of course that makes no sense because you did not know this place existed until I brought you here.

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• 07062021

  Posted at 8:58 am by Michael, on June 7, 2021

  Hiatus.

  The word itself sounds like an exhaled breath; a moment-between-moments before we inhale and keep living.

  Keep living.

  It is the moment when Sisyphus–at last reaching the top of the hill–pauses for breath. And the moment that his boulder teeters at the edge but has not yet rolled back down the hill.

  Hiatus.

  There’s not much in the sound of the thing.

  You might say it’s barely a word at all.

  And what good is a moment-between-moments…

  If the boulder’s still waiting to fall?

  Hiatus.

  Does the Universe pause between breaths? Not yet–the Universe is yet to finish its very first exhalation.

  We are borne forth on the tide of space-time and if the Universe does not yet pause to take a breath, perhaps it is our job to do so.

  Hiatus.

  The moment between breaths. A moment of singular clarity. A moment before the decision is made to keep going.

  Just a moment.

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