1
Imagine. This scene. A weedy windy barren place, willing its indifference, and wide with vacancy, prime and pristine as the foam before it becomes studded with stubby bristles, the backside of a shadow, or some unused part of the pillow. All air and taciturn vacuity, a thicket of obviousness with only light to hide. Void as the void never quite is. A cellophane insertion, in short, in speechless space. No night rhymes brimming at the rim the way madmen or magic potions gather their lather on mouth’s frontier or mug’s fringe, but fuzzy radiance falling like the palm of a hand, a sleet sheen smeared out like ointment on a forehead (on the flyleaf of his frons, say), displaying the glossy confluence of colors slickly glued together to become that ineffable ground of the tabula rasa. Yes, no more than vaporous ether fixated into a square slab of gummy levity, a tilted tile of treacherous translucence. This is a tract attracting blank gazes with its epoxy patience. A window onto a world yielding nothing.

2
A leaf washed white then, lean and clean. (That empty cabinet with no lock.) Incipient sineity.

3
So stillness destilled. Hence: no words. No, no words, not yet. Rather: the parchy shore before the Phoenician had his black daughters trip on it with tiny wet feet.

4
Then later, after the protean prime of the lather, that bleachy stillness more stainless than steel, thin almost inaudible whisps softly whisper like stockinged legs, movements liquid and lush, stirrings so quiescent they seem humming forth from farther than afar — with the shy bravado of schoolgirls, perhaps, or the smooth hiss of water before it reaches the boil . . . slowly sounding . . . eking . . . out . . .

5
. . . into their arrival. And they are here. As suddenly as old age, a rhyme, or a fit of rage. See how those tiny black engines, lattice-clad agents of restlessness, now shape their shifty crowd of brawl and commotion the way a flotilla of helicopters raises and rumbles above a mountain crest, smudging our take on the horizon. No longer muffled/distant/mute, these swift units of netted mobility mumble their way through the air in the manner of churchgoers ill versed in Writ. But they create their own mix of atmosphere, nonetheless, like the nebulae of soot of which Pliny the Second spoke in passing. Tiny crepitations crackling dryily, evoking the turning of pale page upon piled pages. At first they seem passionless, vaguely vapid and peripheral, quite quietly

- like clouds dissipated having becoming clouds reassembled slowly turn into clouds solid and done. Merely scattered tidbits of tissue, that is, fragments of petal delicacy soaked in inky solution, not yet sure where to take things in this growing tangle of loose ends. So they freckle the wind for a while with aimless attention the way a brush may spray a surface when the last paint is shaken out of it. Or just blur your vision like snow straying on a screen, dust drifting on the retina — as if, when propulsed cylindrically through the ether, they were actually panting some ashen pollen (cinis muscarum, according to Pliny No. 2) that twists perception stealthily but perceptibly, giving rise to some accidental design or the odd figure of foreboding. The seeds, black as tropical wood, beseech the wind with a granular powder reminiscent of dirty dandruff or sable crumbs of bread, shaking the air like a blanket. Specks of mottled spectrality. A thousand points of darkness.

6
Yet though they fan out like nimble digits fingering wide and far, their movement quickly gathers them again, like a fist shut fit and firm around its conviction. As if in their modulations of wiry incessancy there were diffusion indeed, but resilience too, like the black mesh of nylon which extended will encase a limb in finest flimsy, yet when rolled up and clasped in hand may be thrown into the laundry basket with the lump thump of a softball. (Not to mention the elasticity of such gossamer gauze as it wraps, throttles, and does away with the robber whose identity it meant to preserve.) Thus, while the humming gradually looms louder (with the smooth fluency of night seeping into some abandonded evening), it turns tenacious, too, less wayward, it appears, and more . . . well . . . to the point

7
— the point being a dim density of duplicitous persuasion.

8
But at this moment of webby expansion, the melee of mites still moves like a misty wobble of numbers, all zeroes and ones, waiting, it seems, to be penciled together in an arrangement which, like a cardiogram, may yield the image of some innate principle. So we would do well to seize the occasion — it is not likely to return — and scrutinize some of the fuzzy coordinates before they have hardened into too invariable a view. After all, their flickering may give us a clue to the tangle of a scene our imagination seems to have caught us in, like crumbling bread in a broth’s heated imbroglio. Let us choose then . . . well, say . . . six of them . . . right, six tottering components of composition, as this ought to establish, above and beyond any lagging reproach of statistical incidentality, the

three

ups

and

three

downs

needed for the pattern of a plot to undulate its

way into a trim trajectory. Or simply consider them, if you wish, to correspond to the number of legs on a road to some bookish, uhm, nowhere. (They are likely to do anyway.) The first frame has already been pulled up for projection, that lean sheen of a screen which sported the color of nothing. That is where it all began, like a focus falling on a forehead, curiously shattered in a broken mirror, before it slides down to encounter a melancholy gaze swimming in the silvery puddle of glazy reflections, then a sliver of the slope of a nose, then the rest of the crest of a chin. Facetious facets of face, blandly blank as crumbled stationary smoothened out by a ghostly hand. Now we may continue by envisioning a motley crew of mobile mammals, slick as saliva or satin, condensing the air into a lair of murmur and susurration. All buzz and business. Then, third, we should phantom-fathom how they approach the gluey gloss of that no-longer-so-shiny sheet of paper — term it Tangle-foot, for example, as this will add dimension to an image soon to be folded like the napkin with which the forehead is deprived of its dewy droplets of perspiration (to be tucked away again in a pocket full of ziltch, but leaving, alas, those lingering stanzas of wrinkled worry). Yes, Tangle-foot it must be, for seizing the source, we will find this particular brand to be approximately 14" long and 8,5" wide, conveniently displaying the proportions of legal-size paper. (A piece of consonance, we murmur, which just may keep us within the boundaries of metaphorical jurisdiction.) After that bit of opportune ogling done, however, we must rush to observe how one rickety singleton — an idem-item, let us say — presently seems to free itself from the nylony flotsam of our lattice-like animation, still as disorderly as a shanty or a sham, itself now an inky fraction of flittering action, a peerless pars pro toto, hovering above that proxy place for repose and rest, before it begins its reticent descent not so much out of avarice, as out of convention, since so many others are there already.


9
To do what, we ask . . . and will we know?

10
Of course. But we should not jump to conclusions in the manner of a skittish stone skidding over water. (Once there, catching up with the momentum and sinking vertically with neck bowed in belated submission, we will deplore any lack of circumspection.) Let us try to interrupt the scene instead, if only for a moment brief as formerly those briefs without flies, issuing ourselves permission to hoist vision a little above a setting now setting too quickly for comfort, like the yolk of an egg in heat. Indeed, let us attempt to lift iris, pupil, lense, and adjacent aids of vision the way a needle is raised from its treck through the narrowing tract of some sinewy vinyl still spinning silently below it. A break is what we need, after all, and the interlude that precedes a denouement, however threadbare in name or nature, should occur where it ought to: two thirds through, like the tongue’s tilting tip between tack and toe. In time we will get to the core of the matter, but for now, wrapped in this time warp like a portion of plasma in its cell, we may mull the situation over. Or so we think. Before we realize that we are not safely decamped in some box above the scene, but merely suspended like the lettered balloon in a comic strip, still attached to the sordid setting it spells out by that thin stroke of a pencil. We should have known: the sayer is always part of the saying, the actor ever an aspect of the action. Remember the project proposed by Seth Brundle in the remake of The Fly? Teleportation, it was called. Bookish scientist believes he may provide the notion of motion to end all concepts of transport. Clean and effective, doing away with the nuisance of having to articulate the body’s movement in tepid space (formaldehydized, more like it), the teletransporter breaks it down into its smallest members of matter. Analyzing molecular make-up and genetic design, the machine ships the body from one telepod to another, first disintegrating it, then building it anew (skipping context the way fast reading may the key chapter). The process does not work as planned, though, since the teletransporter interprets everything put inside it as a single unit of matter. It cannot understand the peculiar discreteness that dictates the limber articulation of a body. Thus Brundle + fly in one telepod = Brundlefly in the other. Hence terror, hence tragedy. Hence colloquies such as: IF SECONDARY ELEMENT IS FLY. WHAT HAPPENED TO FLY? > FUSION. ASSIMILATION? DID BRUNDLE ABSORB FLY? > NEGATIVE. > FUSION OF BRUNDLE AND FLY ON MOLECULAR GENETIC LEVEL. The machine is able to discern and differentiate all right, like a pedant picking his way through a stack of stamps, yet it cannot distinguish properly, deeming matter a matter of matter and not also of form. Imagine a damp lump of stamps instead, sampled and trampled, molded together like a doughnut made of grease. Our bubble is that oily hurricane’s eye slithering in the middle.

11
We better return to the scene, then, in order to quickly complete the last two legs on a trip that is increasingly taking on the trappings of . . . well . . . a trap. Bring the ideation needle back on track. Fifth, then, we must recreate on the front of our vision that solitary bundle of silken darkness and daring which we brusquely abandoned before the intermission, and notice again how it lowers itself toward that smooth mucous loam cutting a square deal beneath it. Sixth and finally, we may now pose the question that ought to disclose the scene’s secret sense: It lowers itself, fine . . . but to do what? And. The. Answer? Plainly to get stuck, as we now observe. Stuck and made stiff by strangeness, like some too-independent-minded capo in a bucket full of rapid concrete (and a life about to end the way his name has insisted on doing all along its short-cut span: vowelily). There it is now, our hapless hirsute hum-slinger, still standing tall among peers, though tense and trembling too, as if it desired to dissipate our doubt about its dorsal rectitude without too much conviction. A few moves to avail lesser than the amount of motion still available and its resources are wearing thin as quickly as the excuses of a child caught with its hand jammed in a jar. Sinking two-times-three ankles, then as many knee caps, a pair of wings, and one waist into that white and viscious viscosity, a ground shifting quicker than sand, it soon has only resignation left to mine. Sss . . . tuck. What a finale.

12
Perhaps a bundle of standstill stanzas, scattered like applause, before the curtain is clemently lowered? Those that love the world serve it in action, it has been said,

      Grow rich, popular and full of influence,
      And should they paint or write, still it is action:
      The struggle of the fly in marmalade.

A nice waft of verse, with rhythms catching us like sleep on a pillow.

13
But hold. Catching us like sleep . . . like a tan, like a cold . . . or like an afterthought? Hush, rush, think back, we whisper with drama, head absorbed into whitish cushion, forthwith trying to rock and raise it — just to realize that it has become heavy as a shoe sunk in mud. With whatever motion is still left in its sagging motor we survey the surroundings before the final nap will nip our nodding in the bud. Squalid whiteness all around, we observe, contracting age the way the forehead does its wrinkles. Wonder we do, now, as we feel that sluggish tug pulling imagination deeper into the description, what act is action if action is impeeded. When the rig of motion and moil becomes a rigmarole of useless toil, stiff and strangling like a starched collar, is it not the rigor of mors doing us in?

14
So it seems. Still it is action . . . well, neither painting nor writing is either panting or ranting. Yet their acts are actions of sorts. But while the former may display volume and color, creating that pigmented depth in which eyes get lost (lustfully spinning into the ethereal void the way we all must), and thus is able to simulate vivacity even if it be merely a tableau said to be vivant, all the latter can claim is a face more hollow than a coat hanger, and a stance typically as leaden and dull as the lungs of a dead. It may be breathed into its kind of proxy existence, of course, the way a wave of electrons will shock even a carcass into some approximation of life. But whatever intimation of animation is found in writing resides alone in the images it may trigger or induce. That is where the action is. In the reenactor. So the waft of white width we thought would provide an intriguing surface for imagination to hit on translates the transit between two telepods into the flat and final truth: the entities transacted through a kind of interdimensional shimmer, like flies and letters, for example, are likely to come out neither as discrete nor discreetly, but having acquired another meaning, having sired a mutant being. So the seventh thing to focus on, neither to disengage from, nor to disregard, is that backhanded gloss to which imagination is thus actively attached.

15
Such is the Cadmian catch.

Quotations taken from: Ausonius, Decimi Magni Ausonii Burdigalensis, ed. Rudolph Peiper (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1976); The Fly, 1986, directed by David Cronenberg; James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, new ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1980 [1939]); John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975); Robert Musil, “Das Fliegenpapier,” in Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957); Plinius Secundus, Naturalis historiae (Munich: Artemis, 1966); and W. B. Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” in The Variorum Edition of the Poems, ed. Peter Alt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957).

© Sulphur Review and Aris Fioretos