Three Entries from Jorin Simula, 52006-52112

Editor’s Note: In response to the Call for Submissions from Writing from the Future, this most interesting text arrived in our chronofluid collection box from the writings of Jorin Simula as transcribed by Lauren Lockhart. Happy reading, and for more of these strange and wonderful messages from the future, stay tuned.

Day 14 of 52006, body primary:

It wasn’t understood then just how the mask was worn. Dual meanings of the word linger together here—worn and worn. All things wear thin. We assumed it would always be that way.

The way they teach it in the schools, like a great myth of a strange time. When names were split into two categories. Colors, too. The pleasing shock of discovering an even more ancient predisposition to blue-blindness, in Greek classics the ocean was the color of barreled wine.

I’m, of course, talking about something as mundane as our bodies. It reminds me of learning about another planet, where Greece was, in another solar system in the same galaxy. The planet had only one moon and they called it The Moon. And the people had only one body, which they called “mine.”

About the mask—it was not even understood as a mask. It was understood to be the person themselves. How strange. And how sad. What was dying like then? I told my parent when I was four years old, “I want to go to Greece when I grow up.” And I cried myself to sleep five years later when I found out what happened to that planet.

There is an essential tension in me. I can go a very long time with a tension and not know what it’s about until whatever is missing comes crashing suddenly in. Like the tension of gray sky after gray sky all the winter long. And I am unaware of the tension, I live inside it. Until one of the suns unfurls its light behind the cloud veil, and the tension lifts like a palm. I can see it and name it as it leaves, but not before. It is the shadows I miss the most in the gray winter days, the layering of gradients of light, dimness, deep bruises of shadow which create dimension.

I often think of beauty. What is it? Does it come from the planet? Radiating out of its molten core? Like our second bodies—how can anyone look at theirs and not know their beauty? The beauty of any body. The body of any being is a collection of smaller bodies. The core of beauty is small enough to fit inside a germ and large enough to envelop us all.

✺

Day 211 of 52096, body secondary:

The ocean expands as she contracts.
A noiseless sound emanates like a rope—taught and reaching.
One note going on and on like an insane collapse. Going on and on, like the primordial quiet.
The quiet backdrop on which the ocean spills, outside of Time.

I dream soundlessly. The night is a womb, like Time. When I wake early, things are the clearest. And as light filters in, as the day expands, the clarity wanes like a wood scratch beneath varnish. I dreamed once of a planet where the people had only one body. They lived and died in this body, and there was no more after. When they became very sick, the fracture could sometimes be mended. Often it could not.

I woke with a start, a gesture of grief banking through me like a tall wave, a thought dissolving of some person falling from a great height and remaining very still in pieces on the ground.

There’s telling here of the same horror. People who have had only one life.

This morning the clarity washed a small shell of understanding onto my shore. Joy is movement and exchange. Hell is unmoving—the un-changed.

✺

Day 77 of 52112, body tertiary and final:

I heard the sound retreat from the field.
In its retreating, it was undone.
I un-heard it as if my ears were being covered, one by one, with layers of opaque tape. This is how I knew, finally, what was not true about the field. All the times I had become sick looking at the field, I was only looking to un-hear that sound which now retracted itself from me.

There is nothing more pure than an animal crying its pain into the world. Nothing maybe, aside from a clear stone, which may offer some comfort of color and almost no sound.

I, myself, retreat into the deeply foraging backdrop of silence from which all things creep: a canvas in which the ears and eyes are equally involved. I like to try and contact the canvas, touch it with my listening eyes. And a great shudder of breath comes through my shoulders.

At the field: a plan is essential.
I have had this thought before, preceding events that required a plan. And so this thought occurring again became like a signal that something was approaching.

I looked at the sky.

All the living planets have animals. Even the ones that appear empty. A germ is an animal because it has a plan. Even if that plan is the machinery inside of it. Even if
the plan is to do what it is doing.

Looking at the sky became a symbol of what was yet to come. The sky is an eye that is always looking. I didn’t know it then, but things can come out of an eye that will destroy you.

At the field: the sound finished fading. I gathered my things and imagined the walk home. It is a downhill walk. I imagined telling someone about the animal cry and imagined their reaction. I do not know what kind of animal cried, I only know that I cannot know and I cannot imitate it.

Did I feel pain at the cry?
My heart blocked itself from feeling.

Was the field a difficult place to feel?
Many others had suffered in the field, even though it contained only grasses and wild creatures years after when I assumed my visits.

The memory makes things happen that are not happening. It holograms time into a translucent emotion that is an image covering the present.

Was I afraid to die?
Not then. Only when the machines came and dropped their arms down from the eyes of heaven.