Drifter

Like continents, our facial features are adrift. They move across the bone plates of our heads. How we look to others, this special arrangement of eyes and ears, nose and mouth, is therefore only a momentary glimpse at a continually adjusting object. An object that on occasion arranges itself in such a way as to be judged beautiful and worthy of praise. Some faces are considered so marvelous that they are collected, like money.

Furthermore, the eyes are not moving capriciously but are slowly working their way toward the ears to form a “seat” for the gathering of perceptual information. In a similar way, although for different reasons, thousands of years ago the toes--once dispersed, functionless, albeit adorable, appendages--drifted to the ends of the feet in an attempt to flee the body.

The movement of the eyes is the physical result of the psychological or mystical craving to see everything and do everything, at times simultaneously, and to leave no object, event or concept virginal. How horrible to be new, a child, and to learn that everything has already been done! When children are first confronted by a library, they hate their parents. This persists until the moment, years later, when they discover that new concepts, objects and events are continually being invented. Some children learn this and retain their infantile and precise despair, expressed in the obvious question “Why was I born into this world, when there is nothing left for me to do?” Imagination is an important aspect of human development, almost as important as forgetting, which is the primary way new objects, events and concepts are invented.

Human beings want to know everything without turning their heads. We are afraid that if we turn to the left we will miss something of the right. Turn your head now; look to your left. At once, you notice at the other corner of your vision a sudden, potentially threatening blur. Possibly something has escaped from a dream, something frightening. Quickly you turn to confront the invader, to kill it with attention. A cigarette burn on the table dissolves under your gaze. Exhausted, you turn back to regain the previous moment, confident that events have remained frozen in your absence. But everything has changed. Her position has shifted on the couch, a shoe covers her foot. (You remember that it was naked.) All that is left of the world is memory. Bravely you continue to caress her hair, pretending she is not a stranger. And she, for an instant, notices, then dismisses the fact that while you were gone your eyes drifted ever so slightly apart.

An unpleasant odor enters through the kitchen door. Somehow it contains noise. Without speaking, you both laugh and in so doing erase everything. You start again, reconstructing a new history from your laughter.