Sarah Walko
Text
(flight compartment)

If this work fails to take a straight course, it is because it lives in a strange region. There is no map. No table of contents. It walks and works until it is worn away. If this is a book, should be read under a rare form of your imagination. There is a title to this story, however, I cannot say before I know who the listener is. It may seem to be a terribly tall tale. But it is more horizontal than altitudinal. It is more common than outlandish. It is less story and more song. Or sang. Or salutation or salute. Yes, quite. It simply depends on how you see. Or how you hear. It is difficult to say precisely when it takes place. You might presume the 20th or 21st centuries. But it may have begun in the Paleozoic era. I cannot be sure.

I'll begin with bridges.

These bridges were not built of steel or reinforced concrete. These bridges were built with stones excavated from the water, then chewed until they mimicked the tongues of the chewers. They were stacked, one atop of another. The process may have taken a few centuries. I cannot be sure. But each stone stores the metamorphic hymns and hums of the mouths of the builders and the unknowable time it took to build. Each stone stores the surrounding rippling rivers' ramble. Beneath each bridge words are engraved. They ask a question, what was the beginning of water?

Each bridge was first a ruin before it was built.

These bridges link their surrounding landscapes. They are held together by the semicircular canals of the inner ear. There are tiny holes in the canals. When the wind blows a choir of aqueous whistles erupts. The sound holds up the landscape itself when it begins to droop. You will hear it. And then you will hear what I heard.

"Memory, like the mind and time, is unimaginable without physical dimensions. To imagine it as a physical place is to make it into a landscape in which its contents are located, and what has location can be approached. If memory is imagined as a place - a theatre, a library - then the act of remembering is imagined as a physical act; as walking. To walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were fixed objects in a landscape and one need only know how to travel through. Walking is reading, even when both are imaginary and the landscape of memory becomes a text as stable as a garden, a labyrinth, or stations." (-Rebecca Solnit)