CONCENTRIC MACROSCOPE (EXCERPT)

The instructions are clamped to a clipboard hanging by the door of my trailer.

The objective: we don’t know how to communicate with the unknown: gods; the dead; plants, animals, minerals; inhabitants of other planets or space; the interior and secret mind of the person beside us.

This is an old problem.

Especially the search for the language of god—something so perfectly impenetrable it’d break our senses: the sight of it, it on the tongue, in the ear or air, shattering whatever it touches like glass.

I would like to make something perfect, but to state the goal would be to kill it—make nothing, I’d wait forever, die waiting.

To die waiting is also an old problem.

At the bar, we sit apart from the townspeople; I see them looking; I feel their ears leaning in.

At the theater, we watch a film that documents adults and children working together: baking bread, sawing logs, tilling the land; a small girl hammers nails into a piece of wood and hums to herself; they pile loose stones, make benches out of larger ones.

There’s little speech in the film: the camera pans a room, a flock of chickens, the people draw on paper, they hang laundry, carry things together, take turns working dough.

We’re in the dark theater, quiet except for the crackle of the film, the sounds of the work, a child’s humming.

Afterward, we walk the computer scientists to their apartments, then Jenny and I begin the long walk up the hillside to the site, our headlamps flashing brief spots on forest and ground.

In the dark, on the road, Jenny leans in, cups her hand over my ear and whispers.

—

from Concentric Macroscope–published by Crop Circle Press

Buy it here

—

By Kelly Krumrie 👍