Roger Chi | Reading

People weren’t ignorant here, but they were superstitious, and given that the sea could claim lives, who could blame them. What was the harm of a good-luck charm worn on a necklace, or saying a few words in prayer to keep a loved one safe?
“But you’re curious, too,” she said. “Why do you say that?”“You guard the light. And light sees everything.”

Perhaps a copy could also be superior to the original, create a new reality by avoiding old mistakes.

Beyond Reach, BR for short, “Brr”in the winter and “Burr”or sometimes “Bee-arr!”or “Bear!”in the summer. Always “Bar”when you sneak up for drinks after work.

“There’s nothing to this world,” he said, “but what our senses tell us about it, and all I can do is the best I can based on that information.” Even though he didn’t trust the world anymore.

“People make patterns all the time without realizing it,”Ghost Bird said. “An organism can have a purpose and yet also make patterns that have little to do with that purpose.”
Membranes and dimensions. Limitless amounts of space. Limitless amounts of energy. Effortless manipulation of molecules. Continual attempts to transform the human into the non-human. The ability to move an entire biosphere to another place. Right now, if the outside world existed, it would still be sending radio-wave messages into space and monitoring radio-wave frequencies to seek out other intelligent life in the universe. But Ghost Bird didn’t think those messages were being received. Another way people were bound by their own view of consciousness. What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been received, would probably never be received, the message buried in the transformation itself. Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of imagination, because human beings couldn’t even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee.

On impulse he turned and shouted “Hey, Gloria!”at her before she was out of earshot. She turned, balanced with both arms outstretched, waiting. “Don’t forget about me! Take care of yourself!”He tried to make it sound without weight, sentences that could float away into the air. Nothing that mattered. She nodded and waved, and said something he couldn’t hear, and then she was running up the lighthouse lawn and around the curve of the lighthouse wall, out of sight.

I remember you, Saul. I remember the keeper of the light. I never did forget about you; I just took a long time coming back. Love, Gloria (who lived dangerous on the rocks and pestered you true)