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I am here.
The default explanation for the homonymic meaning "Eye am hear" is coincidence and nothing more. It just works out that way. Sounds are limited and as you approach the upper limits of the human capacity for novel sound there's going to be overlap.
But these are very basic units of meaning. The "I" especially. The essential the "one" the irreducible self-symbol.
I am hearing things.
With both of my eyes.still here
 12:28 PM
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"What do you see?"
A square, a large rectangle of paper, landscape-oriented, white, aligned with the bottom edge of the table, no pencils or pens, blocks, children's wooden blocks up above it on the desk, how many? 26. With letters on them in faded primary colors, and pictograms - a duck, a ball, an apple, a monkey, a sailboat, a giraffe. Ink pads, two of them, closed, off to the side.
The letters aren't right though - they're reversed.
The teacher opens one of the metal trays of ink and takes a block and presses it down on the pad. Then the block in turn gets pressed against the far left edge of the paper, a two-block margin down from the top. The ink is a dark lavender color, near black where it's thickest.
"Now, what do you see?"
"A." "An A."
Again, with another block.
"Now?"
"B."
On through the alphabet until all 26 letters are there. After he's done there's a row of letters stretching a little over halfway across the page.
"We're looking for symmetry, correspondence; maps, keys, symbols. What do you notice first?"
Nothing. The echoes of the Palmer cards from the top of the blackboard, the smudged lined newsprint from the second grade. Nothing. Symmetry. Fulcrum, balance, half.
"The N? And the Z? They're the same."
"Yes, and?"
"Half. The N comes halfway through, it divides it. There's a kind of motion there, it spins. But not in the first half. The A and the M don't move that way. But they make a word. Am."
"Yes. Find some other words there."
"No. NO. I. And U? Is that a word?"
"Well. That's where we begin taking it apart. Your mind will go with it if you aren't careful. And you have to remember there are levels all the way through this, each with its adherents and zealous believers, clinging to the truth they've found that makes them central to the mystery.
Central. What's there?"
"M. N. If there was an A there it would say man, or men if it was an E. Backwards it would be name, if there was an A and an E."
"The question is, first, is it random? It isn't easy to answer that, if you follow it it goes out forever. Is anything ever random? An article of faith that there's an accident at the start of things. An inevitable accident but as simple as that. Or everything's intentional.
Where did it start? We don't know exactly. Egypt. Phoenicia. Greece. Rome. The Mediterranean is the most accurate locus for it."
"Double-U. That means something doesn't it? Why would it be there? You. Why. And the S, it's like the N and the Z but softer."
"What we're looking for is evidence of intent, and a presence. Get rid of that timeline they gave you. Imagine something outside that, something that can talk to itself across time in both directions - or all at once.
Something else that can't, but almost can. That's the riddle in the stories. Echoes from it all that way. Something lived."
The teacher picks a paper sack up off the floor and takes out some more blocks, sets them in a row on the desk above the lettered blocks. These are smaller, about half the size of the alphabet ones. Each of them with one face that's a number. Again reversed.
He presses them into the other pad and into the paper above the letters. The ink is blue, dark, again almost black where it's thickest.
"Now you do it. This time space the letters out so they cross the whole page. Leave enough room at the top for numbers, and number them - A, 1; B,2; C,3: like that."
He starts in the middle of the page with the M. Then at the left margin with the A. Then the Z at the right. The N. The F. The S. G. T. C. X. D. W. H. R... A little unevenly spaced by the end. Then the numbers above them. 13. 23. 9. 15. Something tugging at his attention, not exactly from the letters and numbers but more through them, coming from within them. And something else, a chorus or a crowd, almost jeering, a taste in it like the smug faces of boy scouts and cops when he was on the street and vulnerable to them - confused and shelterless - priests, the rich boys at the country club dances when he was only "with the band" not in it, a dog in a yard well-fed and alert as he walks by late at night - all those images flutter but don't stick, near it, close, but that's not what it is; mosquitoes, blackflies, demons, an audience, a grand jury, something judgmental and yet other.
A pull like a vacuum now, recognition, or what would be if it was conscious, it still isn't quite. Pattern.
Be. Are. Am. The verbs of being all there. And be is secondary. Two. To. Double you.
But is isn't there.
Almost.
I - 9.
S - 19.
Was.
Double-you. Two of us. I and I.
Eyes. The E and the M and the W. All the same really.
And the 3, the C. Another verb.
See. The D and the C, the C and the D making a circle together.
The line of the I, the 1.
No sideways lines. No, there it is. The A. There, and in the G, and up the ladder of the E the A a ladder too - the F imbalanced and incomplete, no lower rung and it won't stand up on its own.
The grades in school, A B C D, then no E, then F. Why?
He asks it out loud.
"Why wasn't there an E? In school, the grades - they skipped that, added it back sometimes as "effort" but not with the finality...."
But the teacher's not in the room anymore, the door to the hall partway open, no sound from inside the school now, traffic in the distance, evening light through the blinds.
Final. That's what he meant, you start taking them apart and it doesn't stop and you can't talk the way you could before, or read.
Like those pictures of two people in profile that make a vase, the woman at her dressing table that becomes a skull.
There's something sick there, a trap; a reflection of sickness already there?
Sick. Psych. The number 6. The number of the beast. The F.
And so, yes of course. When it wasn't common, things weren't numbered so high, they didn't have thousands of things, it wouldn't come up; but as soon as the manufacturing, the institutions, got complicated and big enough, the numbering and the sameness - once that started they'd count things into the thousands, and each time the superstitious would balk - they could train you to it, for it, with it.
A map. A trap. A spell.
A little shock to the back of his neck.
Spell.
The letters.
Them. Me.
Nothing.
No one.
O. N. M.
One.
I.
Spell that.still here
4:22 PM
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matter-rockets still here
5:05 PM
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