50 Love Notes to the Abyss

Abstract

50 Love Notes to the Abyss Giuliana Eggleston (bio) 1. The abyss sticks its hand through the gap in the fence, wiggling fingers playfully. When you look away the hand is gone, and while you remember it as inviting, a child asking you to come play, you don't dare peek through the gap. Only big enough for a slight ephemeral hand to beckon, you know it's wide enough for you to fall through to the other side. 2. In the Book of Genesis, it is written that into a void of black waters God breathed out, and in that divine breath all creation was made.1 In the Book of Ecclesiastes, it is written that God will someday breath in again, and all that was made will be undone.2 For the moment we live in the space between the exhale and the inhale. Tell me, how long is the pause between breaths? 3. Can each moment, if lived right, be eternal? If each moment echoes, how do we create enough sound that it never ends? My biggest fear is that my life will be like a stone in the water, thrown to skip but sinking on the first touch. 4. There is a voice in my head that tells me when to look. A mute roaring in my ears, the sound of my blood moving below the surface of my face, picking up speed. Then a voice that chants looklooklook. I look up to see the red tail of a fox weaving deeper into the forest beyond my balcony. 5. The voice that tells me when to look is the same voice that tells me when my camera is lined up perfectly. Ghost hands grip my throat and press down on my air-passage, mimicking my finger on the shutter. 6. I have lived in this apartment for seven months, but only recently have I heard the sound of trains. When they started, I [End Page 77] don't know, but I know they have not stopped. For days I've lived with the clunking metallic roll of the tracks, so that even now as I sit and write I can feel the world moving away from me. 7. In the daylight I can see the empty space eaten up by darkness in the night. It is all depth and movement and color now. But I'm not worried that I've only imagined it. I can still feel it when I hold my breath, when I close my eyes, when I wake from a dream. It is a weight, sunk just below the surface. 8. In Italo Calvino's memo on "Visibility," from the collection of lectures he was to give at Harvard before his death, titled posthumously Six Memos for the Next Millennium, he includes his fear that we are in danger of losing the ability to "bring visions into focus with our eyes closed, to cause colors and shapes to spring forth from an array of black characters on a white page, to think through images."3 I wish I could tell him his fear is unfounded. The millennium has begun, and every time I close my eyes, I see crests of color bobbing to the surface. 9. It has been said that the color black is the absence of color. It has also been said that in the beginning, God contracted his infinite light, and darkness flooded in. Black matter, the event horizon. Tzimtzum, if you read the Lurianic Kabbalah (I haven't). The negative space from which all creation is born. In the absence of eternal light, there is roiling darkness. 10. If black is the absence of color, then what is true cyan? 11. How do we see color more clearly with eyes closed? We stare into an image like a flag, pledging our allegiance to what we haven't seen but long for. Then we close our eyes and conjure from that inky black well the amorphous circle of color. True cyan. 12. I am a lover of true cyan (it is the same as loving the abyss). I pledge my soul to the conjuring creation. True cyan waits like...