Michael Scott Hand

I am not my aches and pains, though they are part of me. I am not the limitations that life and physics handed down to me. I am not broken, sad or happy, although these are states I swim through like eddies in the ocean.

I am not the first to feel like this; nor am I the last. I am not the only one who ponders. I am not the only one who seeks. I am not alone, nor am I a fish, nor am I a skeleton; though my bones do ache.

I am not asleep, I am most definitely awake. This is not some dream state. Or if it is, it is a dream state so inseparable from the illusion of reality that it does not matter.

I am not quantum uncertainty. I am not Schrödinger’s cat.

I am not a brick in the wall; I am not a sturdy foundation. I am not the branch that bends in the wind, or the mind that bends on a whim.

So then, if I am not the bend or the whim or the mind or the branch or the brick; if I am not a cat in a box, or a mathematical theorem, or a skeleton, or an emotion, or pain. If I am truly none of those things then what am I?

Maybe I am wrong.

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.

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.

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?

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.