Pascal Petherick

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You Won’t Pass in Obscurity; I Know Who You Are


I found myself once like a thing in a rock. Just some weight and some space, only there’s water flowing inside, churning, bumping, pulsing, there’s winds blowing, and there’s this incessant, indefatigable-forever whirring. A rock doesn’t have whirring between its ears. But I got the impression being around them that we have something in common anyway. Somewhere away in a secret place, there’s a footbridge you can eat your lunch under. There’s a happy creek running underneath with a short waterfall about a foot high, and plenty of big marvelous rocks. I can tell you all the colours of moss on them, and where the lichen sits, and a geometric sketch of their shapes, and which ones have cracks like Piet Mondrian paintings that might tickle your mind like they do for me. But. The appearance is not what gives it that quality, the thing which we share. That’s in the place you go where all the whirring stops; and after a visit to that place, the sight of the rock only reminds me. Like I know its name, and its name is a feeling.

I used to spend a lot of time reaching my hands through my body. I was trying to pull out something so the eyes could see, so I could make the whirring stop. It still hurts sometimes. (These days, I know it’s all I have to do just to say so.) But I’m really quite stubborn, and crazy enough to believe that I could find some new magic words– and through our perceptions, they could make me a god– just like the one I dream of, just like a song, a vision, a shape in the window, something that helps me breathe and sets me free. Something arbitrary which carries the power of everything. Seems silly. Little impressions have us at their mercy. They can bury you alive, or send you sailing, weightless, up towards the sun. How often do you wonder at the way your flesh encloses you?

Actually, there were pre-existing magic words for these things all along, if you believe that. I knew them from the start. If I said them now, you might see something that passes in and out of my skin. It’s precious to me, but so subversive. It might as well have been written on the surface of the table, under the tablecloth, under the dinner that’s already served. What right have I to ruin a family meal? I won’t say the words now. I’ve learned there’s freedom in silence; in choosing not to explain. I’ve learned from creek water and stones, sunlight and silence, and other wordless free things. They say nothing, yet have allowed me their intimacy. They can grant me some way of understanding their nature; a human translation of their truth. That way seems close to that god. That way, my spinal column could be like a rainbow road, an earth’s connection to stars, and I could be gone, gone, very far away from here… the thing I want to tell you, I want to paint in many colours; I want to say in many words and ways. But maybe you are rather supposed to hear it in the silence. Maybe you can see it with your eyes closed. Maybe one day… one day, the sound and sight of me will only serve as little reminders to you.

So here is my attempt at a tasteful translation.

I knew I would write this one night while reading your book, my friend– “A Room of One’s Own” – in my little single-person dormitory. I think you would have appreciated that. All the sunlit hours of the day I had spent so diligently reigning in my artist’s compulsions. I had chemistry lab that day. I have scientifically determined that chemistry lab makes me want to kick things, and throw beakers, and start breakdancing. So I was sat in the impending doom beforehand when I opened your book, and I got my face working up and contorting to illustrate to anyone who looked that there’s a whole big-top circus of thoughts in my head. But I have worthy excuses, because I had found myself right there on that stupid bench to be a miner in the darkness extracting an ancient marvel from the earth, some great elder among Australian opals–how it pulsed with fire, how it reflected my soul back to me like a mirror! It was just something you said that got me thinking, a connotation, something like the line about– thinking of the sexes as distinct from one another interferes with the unity of the mind.

Then, very abruptly, my supernovic mind explosion was paused, and I marched wide-eyed up concrete flights of stairs to man my post.

You can see, now, how the day prepared in me the perfect corporeal host for creative possession. I was in my room when I read your line about the superiority of the androgynous mind. You really got me with that one. Suddenly from under the door and through the vent, a gale of howling ghosts rushed in. They lifted me out of bed and we started to dance. It was like all the prisoners of Plato’s cave were gathered and unshackled in my room, and we were collectively losing our minds at the pure unfiltered glory of the sun for the first time. I paced, I painted the walls and ceiling in words, I emoted in a righteous fit until I felt I might free one-hundred years of intelligent souls from fear; the fear of losing themselves to the invisible suffering.

Yes, I am experienced with this: my signature brand of cognitive spiral all the way down (or up, or sideways..?) into Candy Land. That day a perfect storm was brewed. Now I know that mania is probably unwarranted– much of it was only catharsis– but I also know there was something important at the heart of it all, and it goes something like this: I’ve read prayers in the silence between your words, Virginia– and they’ve come to life in me. In my lifetime I’ve played dress-up with god-words. I’ve felt them fall naturally from the lips of others, and they’ve set me free. And anyway, I made a promise to you that night. I promised I would tell them: I think you were like me. In English, they say non-binary.

The freedom of my language looks good on you. I’ll place the word in the bronze hand of your statue. It’s the shield forged for you by all those seeking souls who’ve spoken it. That’s what these words are to we the living, they’re things to hold onto. They’re links that bind us wrist to ankle when we form our floating human raft out on the sea that says, we are here! They’re the lampposts we cling to when we make our stand alone in the lashing of our own personal hurricane. I hear your voice coming through a storm that screams. So deep they tried to bury you, yet I hear you. Beneath the pain you sound like crystal bells. Your heart has found its way here. The rocks are saying so. They say, the avatar is not the soul; the word is not the thing itself. It is a sidewalk-chalk outline drawn around the shape of god. We are sorcerers of the written word; we can sing to each other through spacetime; we speak our names in silent ways, and transfigure god-realms to the page, or to the hollow of the human mouth. That was how you lived your life. Now it is me who’s alive. So what are all the ways, then, I could tell you?

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Banner Art:
from Jalais Hill, Pontoise, Camille Pissarro, 1867