From Illuminated Sound
Remote
One way of seeing is to imagine there from here as a type of possession wherein you domesticate a perpetual elsewhere. View a small island, low dun hills whose voice is the sweeping grass, hiding ground squirrels, snakes, bunkers cowering beneath low scrub, and upon hearing the insistent slap of water on rock, an echoing cry of birds, the cold breath of wind reddening your cheeks, fracture this land to information. The word “converge” creates other islands, other simultaneous, geosynchronous topographies. These are places where we might make a home: skeins of fuzzy space where we can shutter our windows, light a candle for reading, raise four-legged beasts, temporarily escape this life’s continuity. Even when a place is gone from the world’s maps, it is still there, and in this archipelago we will discover continents as palimpsests, lives reduced to politics unfolding as color describing both the arc of hateful stars and the chromatic swerving of peacocks hurtling over our island, screaming their location, their existence. This home, this increasing likelihood, will be equidistant from all else, but will require no invitations or borders. It will always be retreating, it is here now.
“Remote” was written after a friend told me about an event on Angel Island he had developed and led. Angel Island has been used in many ways, and part of his symposium employed “remote viewers” who had been employed by the U.S. government; I was writing a series called Illuminated Sound at the time which deals with perception, unstable locations, and correspondences, and was inspired to begin thinking of places as palimpsests of politics, imagination, memory, and geography.
Trevor Calvert is a librarian living in the East Bay who writes reviews and poetry, and co-edits Spooky Actions Books. He is the author of Rarer & More Wonderful (Scrambler Books), and North gives flesh to wind (Little Red Leaves Textile series). His work has been included in Bay Poetics (Faux Press) and Involuntary Vision: After Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (Avenue B Press) as well as online at the Volta, BlazeVOX, NOO Journal, and others.