Towards the light

...A dispatch from bewilderness

In a book I read called I-don’t remember-what, a young woman named I- forget-what, was raised on an island I-forget-where.

Her father injected her with a genetic code that allowed her to access the entire internet and also all his memories.

Then she was in a prison, awaiting judgment by algorithm for a crime she did not commit.

While she waited, she wrote a lengthy self-defense addressed to the Shareholders of the mega-corporation that had replaced the U.S. government. Also “Shareholder” with a capital “s” had replaced the word “citizen.”

Meanwhile, climate collapse is extinguishing human lives and likely all life on Earth. But this is too big and scary for anyone to deal with, so they don’t.

In another book called I-forget-what, the reader has to figure out if a female character who cooks at a nouveller-than-thou restaurant, will end up in bed with (a) her financial backer, (b) his wife or (c) both? In another book, a depressed college dropout lives in a depressed town called East Gladness, Connecticut.

There are no direct routes

To link pieces of me

To pieces of me.

I mean, pieces of the person I am

With pieces of the person I was

And the things I saw, and read and knew.

Trollope wrote that men and women ought to grow upward, “towards the light” like trees. Somehow I remember that. And, too, I remember there still are trees and light.

collage and paint by Judith Hannah Weiss