So here is the long-promised essay. Because it’s so freakishly long, I’m not going to preface it. So… just go for it. Enjoy! (You might try breaking it up if you don’t have time to read it all at once. It really is long… but good. Give me some feedback if you would like.)
“Reverse Constellations”
I am sleep, from which everything falls
as the dream rises up.
You cannot hold me,
not even in your strong arms.
I cannot hold you,
though the story might hold us.
One of us chooses to leave,
or what we are chooses:
we have chosen a world
that splinters and shifts,
from molecule to atom
to particle to quark.
Our substance sinks
into its fractured wealth
while we are left behind
in the poverty of our bodies.
—Wendy Battin, “In the Solar Wind”
Colorize. The word was smeared across billboards from one end of Europe to the next, big bubble letters exploding across the face of a perpetually smiling, Ray-Bans-sporting model in every country from Portugal to Slovenia. Never hide—these words were added in some of the posters, too. Colorize, colorize, colorize. Never hide. Colorize. About the hundredth time I’d seen the advertisement—in Lisbon, in Seville, in Barcelona, in Palermo—I started seeing the technicolor men and women parading across the back of my eyelids when I tried to fall asleep in sleeper cars and hostel beds and city trams.
When I returned from Europe, I printed out four hundred and ninety-nine of the eight thousand eight hundred and twelve pictures saved to the hard drive of my computer. I have been back on American soil two days short of a month and already holding these 4×6 glossy-print photos in my hand creates a wave of homesickness that is not homesickness. I laugh, just a little, not at the picture of the fat grandpa man in his Speedo, but because this is funny, ironic—the rootlessness I feel now, as if I were a Romantic poet just returned from his European wander-year instead of a plain middle-class white college girl just home from a semester abroad.
I think about You Can’t Go Home Again, the Thomas Wolfe book I never read that my grandmother always pestered me about. Why can’t you go home again, Grandmother? I’d ask her, every time. Because your home has changed, she would tell me, words memorized. Because you’ve changed.
Two of the pictures— a close-up on COLORIZE, another of the entire face and NEVER HIDE —sit on my desk now, caddy-corner in two picture frames that are too big for the photos. The brilliant oranges and purples and blues of the handsome face form a stark contrast to the blank, badly patched dorm walls. The world has changed back to its normal colors—shades of grey, shades of brown, shades of tiny Arkansas town with nothing but a rundown movie theater and a Wal-Mart to its name. Occasionally, the red, slashy cursive writing spelling Yarnell’s Ice Cream! on a passing truck, on a good day, maybe.
If I am a lock, then my tumblers are off, or the key has a crooked notch, or the key is lost all together. I think about watching the sun oozing blood-red down the sky, slowly setting behind the Vysoké Tatry mountains in Slovakia as we sat in a dingy little café above the small town of Poprad-Tatry, families walking or riding rusty bicycles down the barely paved road into the fading twilight. The castles of Prague. The thousand waterfalls in Croatia.
Another picture out of the nearly five hundred prints is two words: Why Not. The “y” looks like a martini glass. The words are the name of a ritzy little bar we passed in Barcelona on Ferran Street. When I captioned the image on Facebook, I replied to it, “Because Harding says no.”
Why Not. But I ask another question: Why Am I Here?
I look up from my computer at the two photographs propped drunkenly on the shelf above my desk. From his perch, the man in Ray-Bans smiles. Never hide, he says. Colorize.
. . . . . . . . .
Last minute packing list before Europe
__ Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
__ blanket for plane
__ energy bars for plane since I hate plane food
__ plane tickets
__ passport
__ cellphone
__ iPod
__ plane tickets
__ passport
__ plane tickets
__ passport
DON’T FORGET YOUR PLANE TICKETS AND PASSPORT!
. . . . . . . . .
Dogs form a series of stepping stones through my life. Stepping stones, and all around bottomless water, as clear as if it had just fallen from a flash rainstorm, or a just-filled doggy water bowl.
One—a dog named Snarge, a giant stray Labrador that wandered through our neighborhood for two or three weeks when I was in sixth grade. If he liked you, and you pet him in just the right spot below the ears, fingers twisting in the mud-streaked yellow fur, sometimes he would lean his head against your chest, sigh, and blow drool all down your faded Disney World T-shirt. Snarging, we called it. All the kids loved him; all the kids begged their parents to let them keep him.
Then one day, Snarge was just gone.
I think the world, and time, are God’s great canvas, and that the Artist painted over him, new acrylics and new brushstrokes, leaving nothing but a few coarse yellow hairs on the welcome mats of our front porches and stains on our T-shirts.
. . . . . . . . .
The Cliffs of Moher. At their highest point, the megalithic precipices rise to a dizzying seven hundred and two feet above the incessant bashing of the waves below. At the southernmost tip of the cliffs, a crumbling watchtower still crouches poised on the jutting bluff of Hag’s Head, Ceann na Cailleach. A tangible remnant from the early eighteen hundreds, it still seems to wait for Napoleonic ghost ships, ready to light the signal fire for the next watchtower in the Aran Islands thirty miles out at sea, and for the next, and the next. With Ireland’s perpetually low grey sky shifting mercurially overhead and the patchwork scattering of thorny wildflowers and boulder fields underfoot, the cliffs seem not the edge of Ireland but the broken edge of the world—except for the one million estimated tourists who visit every year.
I come as one of these at the end of my European tour, American tourist extraordinaire, hulking SLR camera around my neck like a gangster’s crude semiautomatic. I come, I see, I take pictures. And make metaphors.
As a writer and a photographer, life occurs in plotlines and image files; the people around me are characters and their lives are photo opportunities. To live in this world of two dimensions—black and white cursive on college-ruled notebook paper, photographs blinking in editing programs on computer screens—is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing: you soak in the details, noticing the fascinating spiderweb of wrinkles across the face of an unobtrusive old lady in the streets, the particular turn of phrase in a song or an overheard conversation between two German exchange students practicing their English—you soak up these moments, and you share them, through words, through photos. The curse: the universe rushes on at untold speeds in its infinitely deep, infinitely wide bed while you stand on its banks and record it, the outside observer, the paradoxical witness who captures the experience without experiencing it for herself.
I made the unconscious decision probably eleven or twelve years ago to make this sacrifice. The need to share, to crystallize memory almost always overcomes the need to take hold fully for myself. Something is lost, fluttering away unreachable over the edge of an abyss, but you make do, smiling as you push down the shutter to capture the smiles of other people, to capture other moments, but not yours, not yours.
. . . . . . . . .
When I was around six, Lion King mania swept the nation and like a beachball lying on the sand, I got pulled out to sea by this animated tidal wave just like everyone else. Every week a new toy came out at Burger King and every week my mom loaded my little brother and me into the ancient red Caravan to go to town and buy us a Kid’s Meal apiece. We abandoned French fries and cheeseburgers immediately, of course (and to my mother’s chagrin), to rip open the packaging around the newest plastic Simba or Nala or Scar with jointed legs and occasional wind-up mechanisms. Twist the little knob ten times clockwise and Zazou would do a flip. Twist the one on Timon; he’d fall over after three steps. It was brilliant.
I distinctly remember getting the Mufasa toy—deeper chested and bulkier than his son would ever be, even in Lion King 2 where Simba is grown up with his own cub, and somehow Disney had managed to make this cartoon lion’s eyes look miles-deep and aeons-wise. I remember getting the toy, and I remember losing it.
I remember draping my baby blanket around my shoulders like a cape and parading through all the bedrooms, across the living room, the kitchen, down into the basement and the dusty play area across from the carport that smelled like gasoline and splinters. I remember singing a dramatic six-year-old’s song about my lost toy, my lost Mufasa, my lost emblem of simultaneous commercialism and sacrifice rolled into a miniature plastic lion—nothing that fancy, of course, but the emotion was there.
On my desk in front of me, below the picture frames, I have two student IDs, one with an 05 at the end of the pin number the other with an 07. The picture is identical—fake-smiling me wearing a grey scoop-neck blouse that I abandoned somewhere between Florence and the Czech Republic. Since my arrival at school three weeks ago, I have had three student IDs. I lost the first one and got a new one. I lost the new one, and got a newer one. And then found the first one. So now I have two: H01453906 05 and H01453906 07.
What happened to 06? If there is a Land of Lost Objects—that mystical place to which our high school French teacher said our test papers traveled whenever she couldn’t find them, to which all of my aunt and uncle’s dogs eventually disappeared—then at least a quarter of its contents must have once belonged to me. ID cards. Credit cards. Earrings, borrowed books, packs of gum, friends’ Christmas presents that never got given. Plastic Burger King Kid’s Meal toys.
Murphy’s law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Kellum’s law: Anything that can get lost will get lost.
. . . . . . . . .
Another dog—a half-grown girl pup named Lola, half-grown at the Birmingham Humane Society and already a heartbreaker. My friend Gavin and I volunteered there for a summer; we swooned over her, this gorgeous, long-legged little fool with gold-brown eyes like the sun reflecting off a hot spring in high summer. We trilled her name like the most lovely word to ever touch human tongues; we serenaded her with the chorus of her namesake song. We would have sworn the multitude yelps and howls and barks echoing off the concrete walls of the kennel were the other dogs coming like the Magi to pay homage to the ragamuffin queen of the animal shelter, doggy biscuits laid at her feet in place of frankincense and myrrh.
. . . . . . . . .
As I flip through the four hundred and ninety-nine pictures, trying to ignore the block of semi-good-natured angst grousing around the back of my brain, I reach Sicily. The pictures of Sicily, that is. For a moment, I remember Mona Shackelford, the program director’s beloved wife, telling us Greco-Roman myths as our tour bus jounced for three days from the northeastern Straits of Messina to southwestern Agrigento to northwestern Palermo. She tells us the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops (mythologists theorize that the origin of this myth springs from the deadly, fiery red eye of Mount Etna and its once violent eruptions), Saturn cutting off the testes his father Uranus and throwing them into the sea (we all giggle the stifled snickers of half-teenager-half-adults), the story of Hades kidnapping Persephone and carrying her off to the underworld. I swallow at the last. The story has always caught in my mind, a stubborn burr on a wool sweater.
Our first afternoon in Sicily, the Shackelfords decide to give us the afternoon off from note-taking and cathedral-viewing and we all hit the rocky little beach below our hotel. Some of us immediately run straight to the spit of jumbled stone protruding into the crystalline blue-green water and spend the next five hours climbing up and jumping off, climbing up and jumping off. Others prefer to enjoy Taormina Mare, the cove in which our hotel nestles, from the relative safety of the five-euro tanning chairs where they spend the next five hours turning anywhere from honey brown to Coca-Cola can red. I am about as fond of heights with my lack of balance as I am of sunshine with my lack of melanin, so I saturate myself with sunscreen and decide to go for a swim instead.
Perhaps somewhere in the world exists water clearer than here, but I have never seen it. The eleventh grade vocabulary word that leaps to my thoughts is “limpid,” and I do not throw around such uppity words for just any kind of water. Fish, small and large, and hermit crabs, anemones, strange brightly colored spiny creatures all swarm right below the surface, brushing against my feet and legs—all, Mona has informed us, a result of the fertility ensured by the presence of Uranus’ tests somewhere deep, deep in the silt of the seabed.
I look down into the water. Below me, huge boulders crowd the water floor of the cove like the broken building blocks of some incredibly ancient city. I guesstimate how deep they are; no deeper than ten feet, surely, easily reachable if I shoot myself pencil-like down towards them. I take a deep breath and propel myself downwards, arms windmilling above my head, toes reaching, stretching….
And I feel nothing. I am out of air. Lungs suddenly burning, I claw my way clumsily back to the surface. Inhaling raggedly, I look down again, unbelieving.
And abruptly, I felt something. The earth shifting on its axis, a rogue gravitron, a string-theory hadron careening off its path. Past my own snowy skin and the deeper school of iridescent minnows, the colossal boulders look blindly, impassively, back up at me. How far below are those huge stones? Twenty-five feet? Twenty-five hundred? The clarity of the water gives no indication of its depth.
A wave hits me full in the face, and I am Odysseus, shipwrecked, reeling.
A friend comes up behind me and pulls me underwater in a rather specacular dunk, and the world crashes back into its rightful orientation. I try not to gasp.
“Come jump off the cliffs!” she says. “They’re terrifying! It’s absolutely incredible!”
“No,” I say immediately, shaking my head vehemently. “That’s okay—you go.”
. . . . . . . . .
I have a friend named Lisa who, I swear, is the incarnation of a summer day so filled with dazzling sunshine and ice-cold multicolored popsicles that it teeters on the edge of exploding with sticky fingers and joy. On bad days, I always make a point of seeing her—she could make even dead puppies a more tolerable circumstance.
Along with her fascination with snails and all things of the color pink, Lisa loves sheep. Once, her brother told her she would make a terrible mother because she would brainwash her children to worship sheep. This is not true. However, her dorm room is so filled with sheep—stuffed animals, cards, posters, keychains—that you almost expect to see a sign above her bed reading PLEASE BE SILENT: SHEEP SHRINE.
“Why do you like sheep so much?” I ask her one day as I sat amid the sheep collection. Fluffy sheep, shorn sheep, cute sheep, ugly sheep, white sheep, black sheep.
“Because they are wonderful,” she replies, laughing, hugging one of the stuffed ones. “And they’re in the Bible. ‘The Lord is my shepherd.’ ‘We are the sheep of his pasture.’” She pauses for a moment, tugging on the ribbon around its neck. “The parable of the lost sheep, too. That’s a good one.”
Another time, Lisa reaches over and boings one of my two million curls, awry around my head like a parody of a strawberry-blonde halo.
“You know one reason I like you, Kellum? It’s because you remind me of a sheep.”
I do not ask if this is because of my hair or because of the parable. I just smile and say, “Thanks.”
. . . . . . . . .
Persephone. Daughter of Demeter, carried off by Hades to become his wife, to become queen of the underworld from the jaws of Cerberus to the dimmest reaches of shadowy memory. Sometimes I think about her when I cannot sleep, or when I’m driving, or on those strange days when the world seems utterly deserted apart from you and the few zombie-faces you pass on the sidewalks. Goddess divine of the dead, whose departure brought cold and ice and death and whose return signified heat and greenery and rebirth.
I wonder, vaguely, what paths she took to make the transworld journey. Did she follow some vast network of caves, now long forgotten, or did she seep straight down like the last unfrozen raindrops from an autumn deluge? Did she ever become confused, forget if it was a right at the subterranean waterfall or a left at the stalactite that looked like Scilla’s third head? Would Hades come to find her if she lost her way, or would she have to find the path again on her own?
One night in Sicily, I run straight up a mountain until smoking Mount Etna is slumbering to the west and the Strait of Messina is poured out beneath me. A ship like one of Jason’s fleet drifted lazily across the passageway; I blink, and there is no Jason, and it’s just a glittering party boat, all lights and expensive dresses I cannot see from here.
I look up at the sky, but not at the stars—at the spaces between, the reverse constellations in the blankness. I know next to nothing about the map of legends crossing the night sky, but I think if Persephone holds a place up there, she must be one of the enigmatic dark places, unfathomable and utterly necessary simultaneously.
. . . . . . . . .
And more dogs—the twin dogs of Pompeii. The first is a somber, dirty puppy Chelsie names Sid after obsidian, a type of volcanic glass produced when the lava flows cool. Sid follows us around the dead city all day, silent while the tour guide rambles on under her wide parasol, silent while we mumble words of passionate hatred towards the over-educated jerk for flaunting her shade while the rest of us boil in our sunburned skins.
Eventually, we stop in a tucked-away courtyard empty of other tourists. A few olive trees provide a semblance of shade where we cluster in little puddles; in the ground, an amoeba-shape of plaster shows where archeologists made a cast of the hole the roots of an ancient olive tree had left behind upon incineration, two thousand years ago. The Garden of Fugitives, the tour guide tells us, that is the name of the courtyard. Behind a glass partition lie other plaster casts. A man, covering his face to block out the noxious gas. A slave girl, whose golden bracelet we saw in the Naples Archeological Museum two days before. I feel my stomach twist as the tour guide indicates the two lovers, thinking of the hollow spaces their bodies left behind, their impressions in the ash still entwined two millennia later.
Sid brushes against my leg, his eyes pooling with the tiredness of strays as though he notices the last plaster cast, his brother from another age, another empire. The mud-colored dog-shape behind the glass could have been curled up in front of its master’s fireplace were it not made from plaster.
Looking up out of the courtyard, over the houses and temples and marketplaces of Pompeii, I give Vesuvius a wary glance. I wonder if Sid ever notices the hulking, double-peaked giant in the near distance, if when he sleeps in this ghost-town’s alleyways under the Italian stars if he dreams of it, always there, blocking the horizon.
. . . . . . . . .
Seven hundred feet below me, twenty-foot waves smashing themselves into spray against the rock face are dwarfed by the almost incomprehensible height of their foe. I raise my camera to my face, telephoto lens at the ready. Another wave explodes in a bombshell froth of salt water—click. Two horses turn at just the right angle to frame the countryside and adjacent bay behind the craggy Aillte an Mhothair—click, and I capture the fields and hamlets spackled with faint, watery light filtering down from dense cloud cover ahead. I barely even see what I photograph; there will be time for that later, when I review the pictures on my computer screen and print them out once I get home.
Suicide signs dot the cliff edge, almost as numerous as the wildflowers, or Asian tourists. By the fourth one, a plot began running itself out in my head. American woman, thirty-two, jumps off the cliffs in a suicide attempt and somehow miraculously manages to survive; goes to therapy and has to work with Irish AIDS patients as part of her therapy… or should it be a teenage pregnancy clinic? The main symbol of the story could be the cliffs—where she met her husband, who died in the car accident, who was the reason she tried to commit suicide… or should it be because of losing three children to miscarriages?
I move in a haze. The world is a raging river, seething with the incessant hum of insects and telephone wires and the wind through Irish wildflowers and a thousand different languages spoken by a billion different voices, foaming with fish and volcanoes and mountaintops and cathedrals and weddings and human beings and a hundred shades of colored sunglasses.
Words and photos; photos and words. Something is lost.
I raise my lens over the side of the cliff towards the unruly blue of the ocean. Fiddling with the exposure and the aperture, I want to capture that exact storm-blown blue, steely grey and whipped into a froth. I frown, trying to decide how to compose the shot, against the wildflowers at my feet or the pinnacle of cliff projecting out from the rest of the cliff face. A few metaphors drift across my mind, a few thoughts about how the character would feel as she prepared to leap—and then it all cut off abruptly.
In Ireland, the skies are almost perpetually a shifting miasma of fog and mist and oftentimes rain. It happens occasionally, however, that the heat of the sun shears through the everlasting cloud banks and a shaft of pale white sunlight tentatively reaches down to touch the earth, like a child to touch a dimly remembered dog whose friendliness he cannot be certain of.
Perhaps twenty miles out into the ocean, the sun spilled down through the woolen haze above the cascade across the water, the gentlest caress of a lover, light meeting liquid, an interface of two utterly different planes merging to birth something entirely other. A gust of wind stole the breath I tried to take, and for an indeterminable amount of time, my body echoed and reverberated with my own heartbeat, with the heartbeats of the people meandering past me, with the pounding of the ages-old surf hundreds of feet below me. I stepped into the river and felt the pulse of the universe rip through my veins.
Ocean, light, girl, wind. That was all.
Then the wind shifted, and oxygen flooded my lungs. My eyes blinked rapidly, streaming from the wind, as I tried to raise my camera in time, but already the wind that had stolen my breath had whirled closed the gate into the heavens and again the ocean was just the ocean. Somewhere high above, the sunlight was just the sunlight.
