Preview of “Something Else”, an excerpt from The Ocean Container as published in Peculiar Mormyrid:
As further evidence the world is changing, I hear (I’m not sure where, but I know it’s true) that somewhere another internet is under construction. On this fledgling internet, ideas are traded without third party permission. Alternative currencies circumvent transit hubs. I’m thinking about how this might affect the current regime, and I’m moving toward a possible answer. I think something is about to change.
Through the ocean container, I travel down a spiral tunnel to the bottom of something like a very deep boat or a floating city—something self-contained. I follow the tunnel without turning back, and come up next to the same point at which I entered. I think the path down might be the same as the path up: the tunnel’s descending and ascending segments seem to be interlocked—like the shared yet divided home of fraternal twin gastropods. Perhaps anywhere along the route I can push through and cross over.
I take this image, and now I think…what I’m thinking now is not an interlocking path, or an interlocking world. This time I’m thinking of liquid—liquid filling a mould cavity. Not because it wants to mimic the shape of the mould cavity—a medium with its own currents and transmissions—but to circumvent these currents and transmissions. Like an insulating substance filling the spaces of an electrified metal mould cavity. Ceramic, perhaps, waiting patiently for the metal to rust away. In the meantime, it becomes something else that—while it cannot destroy the barriers in which it is caught—can exist undetected…
Click here to read the full excerpt.
Image by Ulisse Aldrovandi.
Patrik Sampler 