text || Noel Canlas

small stone

Assume this is indeed a stone set apart from all others. (Lawrence Fixel)

     Imagine you’re holding a small stone in your hand. Imagination being fertile, you start having some thoughts. You come up with the following.

Like this small stone in the hand
holding secrets, you imagine,
just a cold object, uselessly,
lying around, this faceless sea.

     You hesitate about those commas, and the capital letter at the beginning, and the period at the end, elements that contribute to the idea that this is a sentence, which is true, and have the advantage of suggesting circularity and closure. But you want to replicate the act of imagining, and the kind of ambiguities it creates, for your reader, and to put the reader in the same bind that you find yourself in. So you do away with the comma, and relax the bond of syntax by putting spaces around the lines. Thus,

Like this small stone in the hand
holding secrets you imagine
just a cold object uselessly
lying around this faceless sea.

     Not content, feeling the syntax is still too strong that the ambiguities you wanted might not come off very well, you decide to get rid of this line altogether, and say:

Like this
small stone 
in the hand
holding secrets 
you imagine
just a cold object
uselessly
lying around
this faceless sea.

     You also think of running a permutation of this series to dramatize the irresolvable dialectic you were imagining, pushing the eye around so that it won’t settle in a fulcrum, or find an Archimedean point of reading. However, this is feeding everything to the fish, and it would have been probably better to let the syntax of a first glance dominate, and hope that succeeding glances would loosen the bonds, but at the same time, entrap the eye deeper and deeper into the Endless Bind, with or without the presence of syntax. (Or, probably it’s even enough just to say, “This faceless sea.”) 

     At any rate, that’s how you imagine it would be like.