unrelated strangers. six people, three men and three women, sat in a closed room deep under ground. how deep, they did not know. why they were there as a group, they did not know though every one of them had a reason. the door was oddly like a person: it had character. looks like a submarine door, one of the men said. really, said a woman. you been on a submarine then. only to visit as a boy, he said. somehow she knew that he lied. – the room had a square shape and it was painted in a color that almost wasn’t a color: you might describe it as dark green, another might call it grey, yet another one may find it was a reddish brown. it was too bad in a way that later none of them would say the same thing about that room because it would sound as if they’d all been in different places. if this sounds familiar then welcome to the human condition: no two perceptions of the same situation are the same, many don’t even sound vaguely alike. it is as if god had put us in one place but punished us to live our lives with everyone inhabiting his own personal parallel universe. sometimes, our perceptions cross so that we almost believe we might reach agreement, even unanimity. but these are moments and they make the whole affair almost more painful than if there had never been a meeting of minds. only music, stories, art exist in a common place for all of us, which is why we must get back to them whenever we can. even those among us who don’t know that this is where they’re headed, apart from death’s door, the certain point of final convergence.
#14. Photo by Tracy Lucas. Text by Marcus Speh published in Wilderness House Literary Review 6.3.
6 notes |#