beyond the floating bridge

Michael T. Stowers

"It's these modalities which hook me. That's how it feels, like hooks with those little barbs on them that prevent the fish from unhooking itself, those 'hads' and 'shoulds' and 'woulds'. Life is, as you know, woven out of a million threads, 999,999 of which end in one of those hooks.

...

Time. Such issues with time. To me, you see, your assertion that the past is unredeemable is the opposite to my reality. For me, the future is the only unredeemable thing. The present is the persistence of evanescence. The past, though, is the only part we can change. And we do, all of us, all of the time. Memory is around seventy to eighty percent fabrication; we know this now. Add the rose-tinted glasses and the exponential fall off of memory and you get a situation where the past becomes more story-like than any myth."


Michael T. Stowers




We would often fight about the all-time-is-unredeemable-motto of the Bridge, whose constant and passionate supporter he had been ever since he first came here, in march 2011. It deeply irritated him and time and again he would try to convince me of the contrary. His sudden death, on the 29th of August, has left this debate open (or closed it forever, it depends on how one wants to look at it). Perhaps it is exactly through this shocking disappearance that he has been proved right: the future may be the only unreedemable thing, and my memory has already begun to fashion the story of him, of our close friendship into a myth, an ever-shifting tale which has become part of my ever-shifting self.


I would like to say more, but words fail me.

those childhood summers

The fair in the month of August brought me many other sadnesses and exaltations. The full spectacle swelled like a symphony, from the prelude of isolated attractions that arrived much before the others and that indicated the general tone of the fair, like the prolonged stray notes that announce the entire theme of the composition at the beginning of the concert, to the grandiose conclusion, bursting forth with shouts, shots and fanfare on the culminating day, followed by the immense silence of the field, deserted once again. 

The few attractions that came early encompassed, in essence, the whole fair and represented it exactly. It was enough that only the first of them were set up, for all the colors, all the brilliance and all the carbide smell of the whole fair to descend into town.

In the obscurity of the boulevard a tiara of colored glass would light up toward evening, like the earth’s first constellation. Soon others would follow and the boulevard became a luminous corridor, along which I would wander, speechless, as I had once seen, in an illustrated edition of Jules Verne, a boy my age, leaning against the porthole of a submarine, looking out into the suboceanic darkness, at the wonderful and mysterious marine phosphorescences.

from:

MAX BLECHER,
Adventures in Immediate Unreality 

translated by Jeanie Han 

the journey

the Belogradchik rocks

where sleeping beauty softly whispers in her sleep