card.
1:59–2:04
Close-up, wooden floor. A decaying hand slaps down in the center of shot. It lifts away and a foot replaces it, on collapsing toes, then hauls out of shot.
They leave a wet stain and crumbs of flesh behind.
Voice-over, new voice, guttural whisper: “… And the Crawl.”
WATCHING GOD
Nailed to the top of the tower over our town hall entrance is an iron sign that reads EVERY MAN’S WISH . Below it the high stone step looks down a long cut of rock over the edge of the cliff into the bay and the sea beyond it, and consequently at the ships when they come.
Our town hall has two floors and the tower extends to the height of a third; it is by some way our biggest and tallest building. Every three days in the main hall we hold the market where we exchange clothes we have made or into which we no longer fit, vegetables we have grown and animals we have caught, any small fish we might have netted and the shellfish we have prized off rocks in the rock pools at low tide. In its other rooms the hall is also our hospital and our library. It is our school and our gallery.
Though most of the frames on the walls of the gallery room contain images, a few have quotations within them—some attributed, some not. They are handwritten in fading ink, or typewritten with a blocky typeface that does not match that of any of the machines on the isthmus, or torn, it looks like, from books, with half-finished phrases at either end where the page continued. Many of the older books in the library room have torn pages within them of course, no matter how vigilant Howie the librarian is, but these have not been taken from any of them.
Like most of us, I had a period in my youth when I became deeply interested in the quotations, you might say obsessed. I read them all many times and considered which were my favorites. I liked “I must deliver a small car to a rich Baghdadi.” I liked “choosing the fauna of his next life.” One day I found, as do we all, a small gilt frame below a window onto the woodpile in which in small smudged print I read, “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” and below it in smaller slanted letters, “Their Eyes Were Watching God . ”
Adults do not mention this artifact to children but let them find it according to their own investigations. As is presumably intended by that restraint, I recognized within it the words of my town’s battered metal flag with the tremendous excitement of discovery. For a short breathless time, I believed I was the only person who had made this connection.
I came to understand that it is from the assertion in that frame that stems our traditional attitude to the vessels that visit our waters. Certainly it is a metaphor, but we have tended nonetheless to regard the ships as arriving at just the right moment to load up on those hopes and aspirations we have been accreting and nurturing over the days of their absence, with which we have just (we allow ourselves to think) reached a surfeit when the ships reappear, though many of which we’d find it hard to state. When the ships come into sight beyond the bay we feel our inner loads lighten and become aware how freighted we had become with jostling thoughts.
The vessels usually sit motionless in the waters beyond the edge of the bay for two or three days, lit up from within, their portholes glowing. When—it has seemed to us—their holds are full, they move again, up anchors and sail with our wishes out over the horizon.
To the disappointment of my mother and my friend Gam, both intellectuals, I am not much of a reader. But though the library room was never one of my secret monarchdoms (what I liked most was to climb the bleached trees at the edge of the forest and take birds’ eggs and empty them carefully and paint the shells, or to build hides with fallen branches and old nails), when I found that framed clause I did spend hours over many days hunting the spines in the library room. In vain:
1:59–2:04
Close-up, wooden floor. A decaying hand slaps down in the center of shot. It lifts away and a foot replaces it, on collapsing toes, then hauls out of shot.
They leave a wet stain and crumbs of flesh behind.
Voice-over, new voice, guttural whisper: “… And the Crawl.”
WATCHING GOD
Nailed to the top of the tower over our town hall entrance is an iron sign that reads EVERY MAN’S WISH . Below it the high stone step looks down a long cut of rock over the edge of the cliff into the bay and the sea beyond it, and consequently at the ships when they come.
Our town hall has two floors and the tower extends to the height of a third; it is by some way our biggest and tallest building. Every three days in the main hall we hold the market where we exchange clothes we have made or into which we no longer fit, vegetables we have grown and animals we have caught, any small fish we might have netted and the shellfish we have prized off rocks in the rock pools at low tide. In its other rooms the hall is also our hospital and our library. It is our school and our gallery.
Though most of the frames on the walls of the gallery room contain images, a few have quotations within them—some attributed, some not. They are handwritten in fading ink, or typewritten with a blocky typeface that does not match that of any of the machines on the isthmus, or torn, it looks like, from books, with half-finished phrases at either end where the page continued. Many of the older books in the library room have torn pages within them of course, no matter how vigilant Howie the librarian is, but these have not been taken from any of them.
Like most of us, I had a period in my youth when I became deeply interested in the quotations, you might say obsessed. I read them all many times and considered which were my favorites. I liked “I must deliver a small car to a rich Baghdadi.” I liked “choosing the fauna of his next life.” One day I found, as do we all, a small gilt frame below a window onto the woodpile in which in small smudged print I read, “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” and below it in smaller slanted letters, “Their Eyes Were Watching God . ”
Adults do not mention this artifact to children but let them find it according to their own investigations. As is presumably intended by that restraint, I recognized within it the words of my town’s battered metal flag with the tremendous excitement of discovery. For a short breathless time, I believed I was the only person who had made this connection.
I came to understand that it is from the assertion in that frame that stems our traditional attitude to the vessels that visit our waters. Certainly it is a metaphor, but we have tended nonetheless to regard the ships as arriving at just the right moment to load up on those hopes and aspirations we have been accreting and nurturing over the days of their absence, with which we have just (we allow ourselves to think) reached a surfeit when the ships reappear, though many of which we’d find it hard to state. When the ships come into sight beyond the bay we feel our inner loads lighten and become aware how freighted we had become with jostling thoughts.
The vessels usually sit motionless in the waters beyond the edge of the bay for two or three days, lit up from within, their portholes glowing. When—it has seemed to us—their holds are full, they move again, up anchors and sail with our wishes out over the horizon.
To the disappointment of my mother and my friend Gam, both intellectuals, I am not much of a reader. But though the library room was never one of my secret monarchdoms (what I liked most was to climb the bleached trees at the edge of the forest and take birds’ eggs and empty them carefully and paint the shells, or to build hides with fallen branches and old nails), when I found that framed clause I did spend hours over many days hunting the spines in the library room. In vain:
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