On an outdated atlas

The veil enshrouds the treasure of the other. Immense my heart swells, pulsing with the blood of the once was, never was, inescapably impossible, unreachable, distanced by a void of space and time unbridgeable. Records remain and they themselves are legend.



Reading the population of Siam at the turn of the century sends a chill down my spine as I imagine in a split second all those lives here and vanished. Returned from the grave for a glimmering moment they hover before my eyes, barely ghosts, encapsulated in a digit of a number. The potency of these little characters, these apparently harmless shapes. They are sleighs pulled by the horses of imagination across the fields of time. How great the strength of the mind. What a fine artisan, sewing threads across oceans and histories.

I see on a map the nation of Chosen (Korea) and a pinpoint indicating Tai Ku (Daegu). What are the heights of forbidden ecstasy? To find yourself woven inextricably, yet unknown within the fabric of the universe. To discover traces of your footsteps before you had feet, before even your mother or father had feet. Yet, there it is, undeniable, a physical ancestor. The indication of the cartographers hand, wise to geography but blind to time, unknowingly plotting my trail.

I know the farmers in the field of this small village. In my heart I know them. Of course it is impossible, but perhaps at the bottom of the well of my longing, a reservoir runs to other wells in other lands, in other eras.

What a mysterious and magical chest is this book of numbers and maps. What spell has it cast upon me that the bonds of time would dissipate in my mind, yet leave my body in shackles? These yellowed, cracked pages are the same pages of their time, when these maps and numbers represented facts, cold information that had not yet learned the magic that causes them to glow today.



If I had a wish, a single wish, it would be that in death my soul would dissipate into all time and all place and I would no longer long, for the veil between myself and the other would be lifted.