The rigging creaks and the bow wave hisses as Homer lies in his hammock looking up at the shadows of ropes crisscrossing the glory of the white sail's glowing spread, the sun behind it. The stories he has been composing float just below the surface of his mind and, blissful, he falls asleep. This is his dream:
Thin light, driftwood, seawrack, black flies aimlessly circling. No one else was on the beach, which surprised me, made me think of the contour of the continent and how much of the coast, at any given time, is empty or nearly empty, of a lone fisherman in waders or a spark of campfire seen at distance from a high coastal road. Something half buried in sand too angular and regular to be kelp. Sweeping away the sand, thinking it might be an old chunk of keel or jetsam from the off-shore refineries. Instead it is a book, the cover cut from some thick hide, salt-swollen, pitted and abrasive. The pages are slick, fibrous, plasticine--not paper. I open it at random and there is a page of neatly spaced symbols, about eleven wide and twenty deep. It is no alphabet I recognize--I wonder if it could be Sanskrit or katakana and, briefly, the letters' gestalts twist themselves to my expectations but I see they are different, in fact not letters at all, but tiny, intricate drawings, no two alike. The contour of each symbol is immensely detailed, what looks like a straight line from a distance revealing itself on close inspection as an elegant welter of hooks and curlicues. Study reveals nothing, just intricate enigmatic shapes that could as well be the scars of a burrowing worm as an accounts ledger as a Confucian classic, no visible order beyond the regular spacing and no symbol ever repeating (unless the ink ran into the grain of the page somehow and I am focused on something irrelevant). Having nothing better to do, I turn the pages as the sun slides across the sky and the tide comes in. The breaking waves make a faint blue light (luciferin and luciferase mixing in the oceanic bacteria, a part of my distracted mind notes) by which I read (if that is the word) the book, poring over each page, wearing away the sense of entropy. Now there is an intuition, an intimation of order, though when I rally myself to articulate it, nothing comes. If I can't put it into words is it real? I wonder. Night now, headlights sliding over high distant coastal cliffs.