Christopher Kondrich
Together for Eternity
Listen. There is no one waiting up for you
coned in the glow of television static
you can see through the window
from where you’re standing on the sidewalk,
lingering amidst the equidistant lights
that line the street. The neighborhood has passed
the hour of noticing. You continue walking
in your wool sweater and boots,
a weighted blanket knotted around your waist,
to where you left the boat, down the stairs
to the narrow shore, shell pieces
and desiccated cord grass not a nuisance
for a change. You row into the ocean
until you can’t see land. Enter the water
over the side of the boat. And allow the weight
of what you are wearing to pull you down
without an oxygen tank. When you settle,
you rest your chin on the ocean floor
on purpose. Position yourself so that you see
a glass sponge commonly referred to
as a Venus’ flower basket and a mating pair
of spongicolid shrimp trapped inside
its skeleton, within its lattice of silica rods,
but only in your peripheral vision,
out of the corner of your eye. The corner
the sponge and shrimp are backed into
when seen not as they are, but as a metaphor
for commitment, an enduring vow. Having been
swept as larvae into the central atrium
of the sponge, the shrimp grow too large
to ever leave, though their offspring will.
A gust of water will sweep them out
as it courses through. A course is anything
you have to stay. Once you start seeing
something as a metaphor you keep seeing it
that way. In Japan, the skeletons of glass sponges
are gifted to couples on their wedding day.
The name of one species, Kairou-Douketsu,
translates as “together for eternity,”
which is the idea, the wish for the couple
to whom a skeleton is given. Delicate,
frangible. The color of the ghost of a bone.
When they hold it, the couple imagines
that they are the shrimp that once lived inside,
but recast as captives of their love
for one another, willingly confined by devotion.
The skeleton becomes a symbol of their vow
that they can hold in either hand
or mind, though the mind has hands as well
and they’re stronger than we realize.
Beliefs are deeply held. Assumptions
are clung to without hands ever needing
to be imagined. When you first learned
of the metaphor, the hands of your mind
grasped it so tightly you were unable
to grasp the sponge and shrimp as anything else.
The metaphor pooled in you and never
dispersed, like the seawater that collected
in the impressions Ana Mendieta left
of her body in sand. For the images that comprise
Untitled (from the Silueta Series), she photographed
the seawater in place. Her silhouette a place
embodied by actuality. The seawater itself.
Though, as you see it, the photographs
are not about seeking externally what is
absent inside, but about the seawater rising
to meet the seawater within her,
which couldn’t be depicted with her body
present. Often we’re implored to live
in the present, but it is the present that is
the problem. The prevailing assumption
that the future will be exactly how the present
is now. Astonishing and ordinary
how we continue to know too little
and too much, how the world doesn’t include us
in a way we understand. You understand
perfectly. This close to drowning, to expelling
the metaphor from every cell of your body,
there is still the matter of words, their associations.
How shrimp calls to mind smallness, how sponge
calls to mind absorption. Just thinking
of these associations pains you. A sponge
does not soak up the ocean in which it is
submerged. A shrimp is not lesser, not lowly.
Scale as an arbiter of value is bullshit.
As for Venus, it calls to mind the second planet,
the second track of Marquee Moon, as well as
an image of the Venus of Willendorf,
whose exaggerated breasts and facelessness
look nothing like the flower basket,
its elegant cylinder gradually widening
near the top, over which even more
silica rods are stretched, like fingers over
a yawning mouth. Does it know how tired
it looks? How tired you are of asking
such questions? You had hoped by now
you would have deprived yourself of enough
oxygen that you would fail to assign
the sponge human qualities, you’d forget
the metaphor, and your body would lighten.
You had hoped the lack would lift you
and pull you back up, but it isn’t happening.
You have no choice but to untie
the blanket, remove the boots, the sweater,
and watch the slight indentation your body made
in the ocean floor disperse. Not because
it isn’t deep enough, but because you made it
where the seawater already was.
Not in a separate place into which it could be
invited. Pressing yourself into or against it
is not the same as extending your hand.
I have extended the time you are alive underwater
to tell you this, and to give you enough
oxygen to reach the surface. The seawater has
become warmer, more acidic even than when you
drifted down, but now that you are rising
it is becoming the seawater up through which
you rise. It becomes this without you
realizing it, but it does, as you continue rising,
it changes, takes on this additional import,
the just-now-changed seawater following you
closely, trailing behind you like a zipper
that pulls the teeth of becoming
together. And though it is the same surface
glaciers are melting their freshwater into,
the less salty water not heavy enough
to sink so that the colder, more nutrient-dense
seawater is upwelled from the depths
along with the remnants of what had died
down there for the fish to feed on,
it is becoming now the surface you break
from below, it becomes this as soon as you take
a breath again and you can finally draw in
another long breath of. This world
is not going anywhere. It just won’t be
the world anymore.