Let in the Infinite?
Text by Paul McRandle
Collages by Gregg Simpson
Let in the infinite? What a racket it makes tumbling from the closet like a host of clown-shaped sponges rising in a water jug. The infinite is a porpoise trained by the CIA to attach listening devices and strange boring mechanisms that harvest the words onboard along with every noise—forever. So there isn’t to be more said than what might occur in the hull of a Russian trawler.
I’m sitting on shore sucking a lozenge, pondering the shapes in the waves, the shadows of the surf, rocks, subtle things fleeing out to the horizon. It’s my way of garnering some bit of the world in this hideous present. The sea is a vast personality. A twisting, confused melange of impulses at war with itself and the world on every scale—diatoms having it out with flagella, carcids rising from sandy pits to pinch off angelfish fins, mankind scouting about above like children rubbing their butts against asphalt, dragging their deep-weighted prisons.
It’s a numberless volume of death, energy, chaos, night, and we can do little more than watch its light from the shoreline flashing up towards the infinite from the skin of that denser infinite beneath.