Department of Disappearing
Seymour Black takes a walk to the beach and daydreams about images, meaning, and legacy
…after which Seymour’s size nines took it upon themselves to follow the snaking steps down towards the beach, known colloquially as the Stretch of Desert (S.O.D), which imparts a far grander vision of the awkwardly shaped, gravel-based scenery, than it actually warrants.
The soles of Seymour’s shoes crunch and sink, crunch and sink, as he begins a stroll from left to right along the S.O.D.
As city beaches go, it’s a city beach, so there is a gratefulness merely because there is this edge of land that suddenly ends and connects to the sea, almost always a foreign delight to most mainlanders.
As beaches go though, Seymour believes, it’s not a great one. Tourists don’t flock here, the occasional local family at high summer, but usually it remains barren and pale, it’s loneliness only partially disturbed by dog walkers marching across it during the morning mist, and those individuals in need of a certain type of wandering and wondering.
Seymour tries to recall the last occasion which brought him here, but his musings bleed into a daydream, where he imagines this beach is one in Brighton or maybe Bermuda, before cursing his own thoughts for thinking such nonsense, for rarely ever do many choose to come here.
In fact, if denizens of this place tell you to sod off, along with it naturally inciting a great initial personal offence, it usually means they are recommending you take a hasty hike towards the S.O.D. For in these cases, the nature of the request is driven by the nature of the S.O.D itself; literally being the edge of the world, where no man, women, nay even many brats or beasts, choose to walk upon it.
Seymour recalls the headlines of bodies found washed up on the shore. Some reports hypothesising how the beyond melancholy have jumped from Finnegan’s Point, a dirty red coloured cliff that juts out like Cleopatra’s chin, to be later, if timed correctly, laid to rest on the sand by the invisible hands of the sea. Others have supposedly witnessed characters forgoing the high dive and simply straight-lining it into the water, until they see the horizon no more.
Seymour finds a small rock to sit down on. If ever a rock was shaped to sit down on, it wouldn’t be this one, but it is dry, so no matter. He attempts to recall how many times he has been told to sod off himself and quickly loses count.
Seymour stares out to sea, focusing on a single point of the horizon, until his eyes are forced to squint, water and blur. In this moment, Seymour is unable to distinguish what he is still looking at. The sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, the boats and the birds, disappear into a halo of nothingness. Everything disappears.
Which gets him thinking: even if he was able to have photographed that particular moment, a few moments before this current moment, that particular moment for forever after would never again be repeated.
A hand begins to pick up pebbles and casually toss them a few metres in front of his feet.
With every single image created, bar exception, something has been lost since that exact moment of genesis. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, decades, centuries pass. Seasons change. Waves break. Leaves fall and later grow back. Our skin sheds, grows back also.
Splash, a pebble hits water.
We grow hair, lose some hair. We age, always. It rains. It shines. We love. We hate. We learn. We ignore. We bloom. We fade. We die.
Colours smudge. Another pebble skims one, two, three, four times.
Ripple, ripple, ripple, ripple.
Frames break. Boundaries blur. Voices merge. Secrets become public. Facts slither into fiction.
Splash.
An image becomes a lie in the immediacy of its creation.
Seymour’s gaze is attracted back towards the horizon. As if looking for something, or someone.
A snapshot never to be returned to. Not spatially, not in chronology, nor even in observation, for every set of eyes impact a differing opinion of the scene to the next set. Once anything is given a name, it changes. Concepts are birthed and the truth wobbles.
Seymour is unable to recreate. Clouds, too thick, too fast.
For when we attempt to analyse, to prod and prod at, lift up stones, discuss and chat over, absolutely anything, by the very definition of this mulling over, this categorisation of some thing into something, we push sideways and gradually erase the original aim of what we intended to capture:
a meaning for everything.
His neck cricks, clicks. He starts counting clouds, looking to parse something out of their form. A wheelbarrow, a fox.
In our thirst for knowledge, we thrive to impart value to everything. However, when we begin this process of analysis, by its very definition, thus ‘to analyse’ literally means ‘to dissolve’, we begin a secondary process of dissolution.
He spots a sinking ship. Heavy eyes want to close and Seymour gives in to their weight.
With the forever advancement of technology, potential is simply just a word to describe something before we have done it.
For now technology practically guarantees us the fulfilment of whatever had potential. The journey from analogue to digital has seen the real disappear, in the media, with virtual reality, all the gazillion networks connecting with one another.
The real is really no longer there. It has been reduced to a concept. While our dreams in fact, have now become our reality.
For a moment, Seymour can think of her again. A lazy flock of hair. Her sweet pox mark on her forehead. A favourite scent rubbed behind an ear.
We have become the watchers and the pushers and pullers. Tech has become the active participants; humans mere spectators. We are just another version of an image. We are disappearing.
But what and when is the saturation point, the threshold? Why hasn’t everything already disappeared? When will the need for humans cease to be? When will the rise of robots be simply the norm? When will we reach the final game over screen? When we have platinumed everything? Unlocked God mode? Become Prometheus at every facet of the modern world?
A gull cries, buried within the clouds.
But when something disappears, it leaves a trace. Bodies, bones, dust. Memories, words. Even God left his judgement, after all. We disappear and the subject disappears, too. The world is objective because there is no one left to see it. All is lost in the great disappearance; a mammoth horizon-less desert floating and disembodied, an infinite consciousness.
Eyes open. His, and hers, too. Colours have changed. Light, too. An arm reaches up to scratch his beard.
Can we learn a lesson before there are no more chances for lessons to be learned?
Ask yourself this: do you appreciate the real of now, today, the real we can touch and smell and taste and hear and smile at and talk to and feel something towards?
Or do you worship the disappearance of the real more? Does death and loss grant a greater value to what we have now, simply because something is taken away from us and we no longer can have it?
Her eyes were so blue, to be transparent.
Seymour feels a sudden change in state. An awakening in physical ways. Looks down to his feet, and here is the catalyst.
Scampering off this rock of thoughts with wet toes and drippy shoelaces. His darkened soaked shoes sufficient evidence the tide has surprised him. A glance at his watch. He has been sat at the rock for nearly 45 minutes.
Checking over both shoulders, Seymour is alone on the beach. Nobody there to witness his current embarrassment.
Noting his good luck, he decides to dash across the pebbles, towards and then up the steps. Every step an echo, a link to the past.
Leaving the S.O.D behind him, Seymour begins his walk back through town, leaving a temporary wet trail of size nines in his wake, before the gentle sun steps in and erases his guilt.
