Insular

 

Insiders propose that their island holds them and cannot lose them. It is the seeming simplicity of here and now. Their hand around the bottle, the hand good at mending fences, good at dealing cards and names, hand pointing inward at the known signs, this hand has strength for a circumscribed round. Known signs take on the value and meaning of the heart, the limbs, the genitals, all the organs and senses. The certain sorts of hill, the set style of buildings, the sensible contoured layout of autochthonous museum roads, have constituted their own law, unsayable except in whisper breaths and the local laconicisms. Law is written in these voices and leaves and stones. No amount of shipping or telecasting can alter the law that is not written. It exists in the hand, the townscape, the unique toponyms, the temperature at this sunny time of the day, the climate on skin, the curve of bird flight. It is the island each one carries inside who lives on the island. It says, give us the elasticity of new tasks and regular tasks, give us a distraction to supplement the distraction of drink and poker, even a place that is beyond the shoreline that we may look at the shape of our own place like an earthrise. The hell of the typical rock and the typical hill and typical bright-eyed bird is better than the hell of rock changed beyond recognition and of hill razed to serve an alien port. There is an urge to rediscover, an urge to uncover the old and new. The body stays still, the body meets a body, the body moves to the climatic times, dances casually at walking pace in the space allowed, within a set circle roughened by sea and erosion, a circle in the shape of an island which is a shape surely contained in our craniums. Outsiders maintain the islands cannot hold them, not the deeper half. The world is large enough to accommodate all manner of life and speculation, small enough to leave aside what is peripheral and of small moments. We could spend a great time in the shadows of trees settling our sight towards the rising blue. Islands bear our intrusion. They have us, and though the welcomes are genuine on both sides, we must both make do. The cones, the shells, the fish spines, everything here is a beautiful object and beautiful, the imperilling waves, the abandoned bus. Walking around here is like growing used to the shape of our body for the first time and the shape of our lover’s body. Out there is horizon. From it come terrific noises we do not even hear in our dreams. We love the noises and laconicisms here, at least the ones we think we understand, but we are wanton and selfish, factoring in time. Nothing can equal those noises, the desires they set up inside, that continue ever after we have returned home. Soon all the fond connections will stay out of reach, for days after weeks later, asking what to make of the island now and how was beauty like that, before going away finally.