I’d never considered it would be like to swim through a cloud, but now I know.
They say that the earth’s a water planet. Imagine if it really was, if the ocean had no floor, and sunlight could enter from one side, and exit from the other side. I dream of a transparent globe, a liquid globe, with islands floating like boats on the surface.
This beach is perfect. But is it natural? It’s the purest, whitest beach I:ve ever seen. But upon close inspection, it’s composed of so many multi-colored fragments — a mixture of coral fragements, broken sea shells, and star sand — colors are yellow, red, pink, purple, and orange. And so I wonder why it is that the whole appears to be white?
The water directly in front of me is clear. Eight feet ahead, it’s light blue, and beyond way out there, it’s deep blue. And, across the horizon, the afternoon sun, low in the sky, makes a glistening, gold triangle that reaches me at its apex — but wherever I move, I remain at its apex.
Under the surface, it’s almost whiteout. I swim in the water and it’s scary, because everything is so so white. I lose depth perception. I can see so clearly that I begin to wonder if I’m seeing nothing. I start seeing things that aren’t there, ghostly white shapes. Beyond the surface, I know there’s no one on the beach, no people around, and just beyond where I am two fisherman have died from shark attacks in recent years. But now there’s no fishermen out, so I’m spooked, cause I’m the only food in the area. And then I surface, I look down into the water, and out of the white-blue a pure white fish, the length of a small foot, swims around me.
If there’s a God, I wonder if God designed physical laws in order to create the universe, or if because of physics this is the only universe that God was able to create.
It’s interesting to me how dreams abandon the laws of physics. The imagination works without constraints. Perhaps, physics is a weakness of the heart, a lie that we impose on our imagination (or our imaginations).
What if these colorful fragments of shells around my feet were plastic. That would change everything.
It’s possible to imagine some animals in a mechanical version (and some people, too). But the way a fish moves, how could we duplicate that?
The books I’ve read in the last year mix together, become as one in my mind, their authors closer than they would ever know. It’s a fine thing to read just a little, and let it linger. You need to let things sink in.
This Borges sentence never leaves my mind. If I only wrote it. “Time passed like the sands, and in the darkness, centuries old, love flowed.” But funny thing is, Borges writes in Spanish, so who wrote these words? Does the original have such perfect cadence? Does it roll around in the mind so nicely?
Design the world.
Design a world.
Worlds within worlds.
Worlds within words.
Words within words.
Words within worlds.
Worlds without words.
Worlds without within and without.