I woke to the sound a cat makes when it is about to sink its teeth and its claws into flesh. My reaction to that noise was a growl or a scream or some other audible expression of fear. That was hours ago. The sound could have been real. More likely, though, it was artificial; an imitation designed and built in insulated acoustic laboratories. Those same laboratories extracted the volume from those sounds, leaving nothing but empty echoes in its place. You may be, like so many others, allergic to absolute silence. Absolute silence feels like sandpaper made from tiny misshapen clumps of razor-sharp steel embedded in soft, white, alcohol-laden linen. You’ve seen it; surgeons use the stuff to scrub their scalpels after long drunken nights of amateur surgery.
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Peace exists only in places that lack the ingredients of pain; that is to say, somewhere else. Somewhere that has no skin, no icicles, no knives so sharp they can carve a molecule like a potato. And no evidence; peace cannot exist in the presence of evidence. Evidence spoils peace the way mold spoils bread.
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The purple-red mark on the “top of my left hand” (the dorsum, in case you’re interested) appeared after I inadvertently slammed my hand against a doorknob for the umpteenth time. Always the same hand, the same spot, the same injury. I noticed the mark for the first time when I was literally months younger than I am today. Even before the injury healed, I added an insult to the mix.
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Memories, buried beneath years of vindictive inattention, sometimes surface unexpectedly—like coffins in a flooded graveyard. That surprise came at me suddenly this morning, when I glanced at an online map that showed Stockholm, Sweden in relation to Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia. I spent a full day in Helsinki several years ago, after spending a few days in and around Stockholm. But I have never been to Tallinn; nor anyplace else in Estonia. But seeing their locations on a map triggered a tumble of vague memories. And those memories sparked even more, finally coaxing diaphanous recollections of a guy with whom I occasionally worked during time I spent orchestrating the production of technical papers concerning corrosion. The guy’s name was (and may be still) Jüri Kolts. He was an Estonian engineer who specialized in corrosion control. As far as i know, Jüri is/was the only Estonian I have ever met. I doubt I have thought of him even once since I left that job in 1979, until I looked at that map this morning. As I recall, Jüri was a fairly young guy—closer in age to me at the time than to most of the other people with whom he worked. His hair was cropped fairly short…maybe he wore it in a flat-top? Seeing the map this morning caused memories of the days I spent in Stockholm and Helsinki to surface, along with memories of Jüri. I have never associated Jüri with Stockholm or Helsinki; only with Estonia, where I have never been, and with Houston, Texas, where I was working at the time I knew Jüri. Only after remembering “that guy from Estonia” did I finally recall his name. Once that happened, I started recalling other names from that period of my early work-life. Don Burns was a metallurgist, an expert on matters concerning hydrogen sulfide corrosion of oilfield equipment. Bill Neil was an arrogant, self-important jerk, an unfriendly, socially-inept pariah from…New Jersey, I think. A few other names came to mind, but now I can remember only some faces; not who they are or were. Neither their names nor their faces matter now, of course. And they did not matter at the time I knew them, either. Why, I wonder, do irrelevant memories intrude on otherwise pointless treks down memory lane? And why, once they encroach on one’s thoughts, do they refuse to leave for hours…or, sometimes, days? Maybe I have mentioned Jüri Kolts before; but why would I have done that? He may have been a reasonably nice guy (but my memories are not sufficiently clear to say whether he was or not), but simply because he “may have been a reasonably nice guy” does not qualify as reason enough for him and his pals to pop up in my memory. When one’s memories are fuzzy or incomplete, we may fill in their blanks with imaginary experiences and burnish their dull surfaces to a mirror-like smoothness. As a whole, I do not trust my memories to feed me facts. Instead, they fill me with delusions and abstractions. And they retell stories told, originally, by imposters.
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There’s a photo, somewhere, that is so appealing I would risk prison or everlasting torture for an opportunity to glance at it for a moment, just once. Photographs of that photo are inadequate. The original print is the only image that will satisfy my desire; copies—no matter their form nor how precisely they adhere to every pixel of the original—will never do. If I could replicate the photo, though, by enlarging the image and painting it on the side of a barn in the far reaches of somewhere utterly inaccessible, I would do it. Satisfaction seldom has a place in the quest for perfection. But I would take a sabbatical from sanity, in the right circumstances.
