On time

It is mid july. the leaves outside this window shimmer like the world’s teeth are swallowed in its glad little head, and with every move they cling, like shells in my pocket from summers past that smelled like klinsor and his young tree. yesterday we drew a clan of things named starcoons—creatures with big tails and a flower in their front pocket and a little solid star on their forehead. why do they have bubbles coming out of their heads he asked because magic i said, they eat fireflies. no they mustn’t eat any other living thing he said. ok fine. they dance in a circle in the forest every early morning and drink the mist of the first flower. he laughed and said yes. my creature is named salt. salt. such a pretty name. i wouldn’t want any living real thing named salt because that physical little inhabitant would taint this name. salt. a young god. it sleeps heavier than the oyster at the noon shore, and even if it hurts me at my bleeding finger tip it’d never know it’s its fault. aww salt is such a baby he said. i named his starcoon macademia with the e because we didn’t know how to spell macadamia. macadamia should marry salt. it’s a game birthed out of boredom: I said do you want to play a game he said sure. let’s i draw one line, you another, then me, then you. but isn’t there something so fundamentally, hm, about drawing like this? (intimate, religious, comforting, addicting, forbidden). past present future all stuffed into a jar of tree tarp. it’s almost like the habitual act of drawing is isolated and enlarged and perfected: what was once the flaw of this physical medium—this interaction with the limited paper and pen, this pyramid of a world—is now imposed in greater part by the drawing hand soul itself and it is sublime because you simply can’t overcome it—i can’t read your mind. do our lines—our contribution, our communication, our cryptic endowing for a meaning, our mere causal output into this dump of a world that is yet idyllic and nascent—live in the past or present or future? what does the act of drawing then become? a manipulation of the past? a suspension of such an act of translation and delimitation in the web of time? time is now dried and crispy at the tip of my fingers. when i usually draw i trace the line i want to draw a million times with my floating pencil but i never know what the actual line will look like—because of trembles in my finger, twitches in my arm, the ink, the paper, the wind, the sudden scratch of chair of my upstairs neighbor—so who’s drawing? well now who’s drawing? i still don’t know. this might be the most insightful experiment i did all summer. i deeply believe that the remedy for this uncertainty in so called drawing lies not so much in each other—there’s nothing social or intellectual about this—but rather in this door used as a whiteboard and these two black markers that smell like markers. in time. in our playing in the name of time. starcoon. salt. we are all mystical creatures dancing to drink the elixir of time. i dreamed of that mug and its sunflowers.