Breadcrumb #553

GEORGE FRAGOPOULOS

One version of this story begins, 

The sea is a taut sheet of blue parchment under a cloudless sky, as though the spring had erased any trace of tempests from the landscape’s memory and her own. It was midday, bright, and unusually warm for the end of April, or so they had been told by the hotel’s staff as they headed out to find something to eat. Our brows are crowned with sweat, she thought. It was a few weeks into their escape from the slate-gray sky of London, and the sun shone as if for first time in existence, its intensity reminding her of why an earlier iteration of this culture insisted on the existence of a divinity to explain the source of that light; perhaps there are things only a metaphysics can make sense of. Here, in the Ionian, summer had arrived early, and her consciousness swayed in the day’s heat. Our brows are crowned with sweat, she repeated to herself, and her memory brought her back, if briefly, to sights now unfamiliar: city streets aglow with the aftermath of rain; a dusting of dusk descending on roofs and terraces; the sting of winter air; smoke from a chimney coiling towards the cloudy sky. But now, somewhere out there, between the etched line of the horizon and the taverna on the promontory on which they sat, her mind, when not fully engrossed in the task of deboning the fish on her plate, scudded on that blue sheet, like the tip of a pen etching a language on a blank surface. The sea’s surface, in turn, made an impression on her waking mind. Queer, she thought, that word impression, as if she were hearing it for the first time. She mulled the word over for another second or two, what was once familiar now turned strange, and it felt like a sharp thorn of difference in her all too familiar constellation of words, the constant Greek spoken around her day and night for weeks now making her aware, like never before, of how her own thoughts were also tourists in this country. 

“Queer, she thought, that word impression, as if she were hearing it for the first time.”

She knew the Greek word for thorn, άκανθα, and its blistering sound echoed with portent, its foreignness burrowing into her ear. But we are all tourists, visitors, our perpetual state of being one of visitation in this world to which we don’t truly belong; until we are no longer here and we are elsewhere, not truly gone, but displaced and other to who and what we normally are. Beneath the table, cats ran the gantlet of their calves and ankles, occasionally crying for scraps, for water, for anything, even for the random moment of human affection, just something to satiate their creaturely needs. Are we, she thought, all that different from these unfortunate quadrupeds? Are they not, in certain ways, much better off than us, should we not envy them? Do they not have an easier, less-burdened relationship with the universe? She pinched a wedge of white fish-flesh from the branzino and tossed it to the floor towards the gaping mouth of a meowing calico. It flinched at first, being suspicious of the incoming projectile, before pouncing on the white flesh in order to get to it before one of her companions did. Her mind, if only for a brief second, snared the image of that cat’s mouth and she thought of the Greek Omega, the Ω, now both the last letter of this ancient alphabet and the mouth of this unfortunate animal. The landscape, she was aware, began to replicate her cursory knowledge of the language, and the fact moved her. Every single thing, she reminded herself, was a hieroglyph, a gnomon, a fragment of the hidden but still present world behind what is glimpsed. This immaterial continent was not simply a shadow to what could be seen, but rather its hidden substance, its soul, perhaps. She would bear witness to it again, she was certain. It was not simply ghosts she believed in, but, rather, in the idea that nothing ever really leaves us, that everything, besides evidence to the contrary, somehow manages to go on, to manage an existence beyond what our limited senses can glimpse. Meanwhile, the Ω took another bite of white fish flesh. She simply knew it was all real because she had experienced it directly. The voices she heard and the images she saw were no fictions, even if we are, she thought, visionless tourists in the kingdom of the senses, groping in the darkness of our waking hours to glimpse something real. Even her fingers, speckled with thyme and glowing with olive oil, seemed strange to her, like the legs of some crab-like creature. 

Bryher often told her that her bones and sinews were tuned to frequencies few could listen to and this seemingly inconsequential April day seemed evidence of that fact, replete as it was with signals that something was arriving from just beyond her vision’s horizons. It was early afternoon and the sea moved as if being pulled by the light’s strings. She looked at Bryher’s face and noticed that, while young, it had already changed in the little amount of time they had been together. They were both already changed by this pilgrimage. Their faces, slightly burned from the sun and salted from previous days of swimming, were details that remained subordinated to the demands of the landscape. The entire picture took on a grammar of abstraction, as if each and every sight was simply a layer painted on top of another layer, the canvas itself impossible to see, buried as it was beneath color after color, image after image, sight after sight. All she saw was beholden to the power of metaphor. She even imagined her lover, at that moment, as a kind of heliotrope, bending her languid stem of a neck towards the light. They were seated in the cradle of the canopy's shade, shielded from the worst of the midday sun, the heat remaining stubbornly pervasive, impossible to escape. It tattooed itself on the nerves, making one both jittery and languorous in almost equal measure. The summer, if they were still there to see it, would bring about an insufferable heat. She had read and heard stories of the Greek landscape, tales of a kind of solar metaphysics that gives the entire countryside a whitewashed glow, with everything taking on the sheen of bone; but this was not what she had found during her stay. In fact, it seemed to be the very opposite: as if the light made it all that much more difficult to see everything for what it was. The sun, that halo of fire in the sky, was a terrible aporia that took more than it gave. The supposed clarity of the Mediterranean light was a ruse, an elaborate theatre of dream-like obfuscation, but one acted out during waking hours, and they both its actors and audience. She was more than aware of the irony of it all: that the stillness of the summer day betrayed the apocalypse behind her eyes, the chiaroscuro of her soul that few were aware of. She could never forget that the world could, if given but the slightest push, collapse into the barbarism of trenches, gun fire, and poisoned air. Lifting the veils that covered the most mundane moments of her life, she always found fires, earthquakes, and tidal waves laying siege to it all. This was not pessimism but simple awareness of how Manichean the universe could be. Poetry’s purpose, she thought, as was the purpose of all art, was to gather enough of the wreckage in order to stem the impossible tide. Bryher, also working aggressively on the corpse of a fish, another branzino, was not in the category of the uninitiated, of the unaware. If anything she was too aware, too intimate with the cacophony she was constantly trying to silence, to suppress. One thing that had brought them together so instantaneously was this deep rolling pain of hers that she could finally share. A suffering that was dull but constant, and that she often equated with the abyssal current of a quake—unseen, quiet, but calamitous, a real threat. 

Bryher’s voice lifted her from her heat-induced torpor: Shall we go for a swim soon? Beneath that thin sheet of parchment, leviathans make their home. I’ll join you later, she heard herself say, and watched as her companion slowly wandered from their table and into the water, only twenty or so yards from where they sat. She remembered her Wordsworth, his fear and love of nature in equal measure, something that she truly felt as well and which she often tried to replicate in her own poetry. Bryher was now cutting across the water’s surface, distancing herself from the shore, transforming with every moment and every movement into an abstraction. She was just now far out enough that she looked completely unlike herself. What remained was a dark figure bobbing up and down to the ocean’s whims. Above Bryher’s metamorphosing figure lay the horizon, that austere charcoal line that made possible the continuous dialectic between sky and sea. The horizon was, she imagined, the gesture of an artist, of a human, if godlike, intelligence, evidence, perhaps, of the first act of creation: the simple mark that divided heaven and earth.

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