The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far

by Quintan Ana Wikswo

  Along the first miles, sodium lights are strung in orderly, looping arcs of wire that say, Here we have command over what’s seen, and what is not.

  Here we mark our way.

  Here we chart our path.

  By deep winter, I was down where wires did not reach—but no matter. At a certain depth, the structure takes on a half-sentient bioluminescence. There is a rise and fall to the light here that suggests a dawn and dusk.

  It comes with a rosy gold of lamplight, like a candle glowing through a lung.

  Let me first tell of how I sleep and wake on my journeys down here, when I lie alone in soft rubber shoes, listening for any sound of her. I have not found her, and yet I feel so close to her I wake singing to her, only to realize the chamber remains empty.

  This love a paradox.

  When I dream it is of her teeth, and the gap between the two that parts like ancient gates, suggesting an arrival that might come tomorrow. Never. Always.

  I dream of her, and my back is worn to aching from arching my spine along this empty shell. I put my hand to my hard places and rub and rub and rub, as though she rides atop me, and I am torn and sore from it.

  Waking, I run my hand against the stone and know it pulls me deeper down.

  Some mornings, I wake down here with bruises that cannot be explained. At times they encircle my body in a logarithmic array.

  As the height of the chambers lowers, I find myself on my hands and knees, and the luster of this shell seems more her skin than stone.

  There is a seashell scent to it, and I dip my mouth to lick its sheen as though the hollows of her hips narrow to define a place where I can extract some nourishment.

  My tongue leaves a trail of saliva along her length, stretching for miles upon miles of endless need.

  The sheen of this place seems a kind of membrane, as though a thin layer of mineral oils lubricates its surface, and now I feel this chamber is instead a corridor, a canal, a means of passage, for what I cannot say.

  Closer to the surface, there were, in places, the delicate droppings of bats against the pale stone, and occasionally a crumpled filigree of bones, all desiccated cartilage and broken wings, encrusted with crystalline prisms of mineral.

  At first, it seemed the sound of crickets followed me here. Cicadas from the meadows dry and cracked above. There are soft sounds and crisp ones, muffled clips and taps and thuds and bangs.

  In the months ahead, as I traced the whorled channel of white rock more deeply into the earth, I realized the sounds did not issue from inside the chamber, but from without.

  Today, I pressed my ear to the flesh of the earth and heard these noises at close distance. These sounds are her breath and footsteps, her harvesting of nourishing salts from the walls, her equipment, her sensors and devices.

  She is in the other helix, the spiraled twin that slips against my own.

  I now sleep with my eyes pressed against the stone, as though I have become a moth, and through these walls I can sense her light.

  Or she, mine.

  But she maps my shadows with her equipment, and then moves on.

  I follow.

  It is more narrow here. I spent the first span of time upright, walking toward her. Then crouched, then crawling.

  Since I heard her breathing in the twin spiral alongside me, I have crept on my belly, letting my flesh scrape against the walls that have gone from tunnels to tubes.

  We are so close that it is no longer cold. The alabaster seems at times to define a nipple.

  A black triangle patch of fur that glides along next to me, as though I could stretch out my red tongue like a serpent and taste her.

  Always, though, there is the wall.

  I have begun to get slimmer, and to faint. I pass out in the tunnel and wake thinking the shell is my skin: I shudder against it with rhythmic seizures of neurological contraction and expansion.

  Her heart beats in her ankles, and at times she sleeps with them pressed to my kidneys and rump.

  The pulse of her quiet and determined, etheric in the depths.

  I whisper my equations to her: they are orderly, and balanced.

  She knows this, and replies with the chemical formulas for salt, for devotion, for intimate confession.

  These are a tapestry of numbers and letters that she wraps around me, and they shine in the darkness: everything can be controlled here, through patterns and structure.

  Now, here, near the base of the spiral, each in our tunnel, I speak to her lips with my lips: we are that close. The shell is thin. I can sense the steam from her breath.

  I ask her why she left me up above.

  She said she never surfaced, she says we never met. She says she has been down here always.

  She said she has dreamed of finding the end of the spiral.

  She said this is the culmination of her theories and research: that at the base, she would make a discovery.

  She would find the other being.

  Again, I have fainted. When I wake, it is to the sound of tapping. Everything is darkness, and there is the sound of seagulls. The tunnels are full of salt water, and I cannot breathe.

  I see her on the other side. She is long and narrow, like me, with eyes made enormous by the dark. We are smiling. We have lost our clothes in the higher chambers.

  Our nails have grown long as claws.

  She has a bone in her finger—it is her finger bone.

  She is tapping at the shell.

  The barrier is so thin. I am clawing at the shell. I strike it with my forehead—the broad expanse of pale skull from which my dark hair recedes and now I know why: it was needed for this, for this breaking.

  We have reached the point at the base of the whorl. The two nautiluses meet at the aperture of us. We are below the sea, below everything. We are subterranean tunnel lovers, and the single shell now contains us both, with no membrane in between. The divergent boundary, reversed. Self-congruent.

  She says this has been here all this time. That we merely needed the strength to go deep enough.

  This, then, is the formula for happiness:

  To start at the same plane of axis and wrap around that point in a circular pattern. To follow a curve on a slope. To wind with it, lost and alone, around a fixed center point at a continuously increasing distance from the point.

  To feel you are at all times in error.

  To turn back. To retrace your steps. To seek decreasing distance from the point of her. To become dizzy and lose consciousness from lack of air and light and heat.

  To take off all your clothes and lie there, crying.

  Believe that she does not exist. That you have become a madman.

  And then arrive at that point, at the binding site, and find her there.

  NOTES ON METHODOLOGY

  All the pieces in this collection were created at sites in the Baltic, New York, and California that have held unique histories during many wars. At these sites, I worked with salvaged military typewriters and broken film cameras manufactured by slave labor during fascist dictatorships.

  Everything in the photographs is achieved in-camera, through old-fashioned mechanical and optical and chemical means—the colors, textures, shapes, and multiple layers in the photographs are all created using only the unique aberrations of the cameras’ optics and the chemistry of the film. The negatives are scanned and printed without digital manipulation. When working with an 80- or 100-year-old camera filled with rust, dirt, cracks, and battlefield detritus, each responds uniquely to the film, light, and lenses—most of their calibrations aren’t standardized. It takes a tremendous amount of time to build a sufficient working relationship with each camera to produce even one image. This level of obsession is a good way to learn how to watch how the world glows.

  The Cartographer’s Khorovod

  The khorovod is an incantatory, ritual story, song, and dance that unfolds in a round or spiral form. Typically led by women, its origin lies in ancient pagan rituals of courtship, at
traction, and romantic negotiation. The dancers stand in a circle that represents the solar disk and move from east to west following the sun’s path across the sky. As Vadim Prokhorov wrote, “Structurally, the melodies of khorovod songs . . . most often consist of two dissimilar, contrasting, question-and-answer-type phrases, creating different types of the binary form.” The photographs for this story were created at two sites: the coastal forests of the Baltic and Germany, where Nazi tank fortifications and mass graves still remain, and the Adirondack forest battlegrounds of the Revolutionary War, where a group of Hessian mercenaries suddenly switched sides to fight for the revolutionaries. Special thanks to Niklas Derouche.

  Aurora and the Storm

  This story was written while stranded at a remote Hudson Valley inn during Hurricane Irene and during a physics conference at a former Nazi resort hotel in northern Norway. The photographs were created at the Overlook Mountain House—a luxurious, ruined pleasure palace that was built during the nineteenth century and later burned nearly to the ground. Special thanks to Megan Cump and Stacey Steers.

  The Anguillidae Eater

  The Anguillidae Eater inhabits the Curonian Spit of Lithuania—a tiny spit of land in the Baltic Sea where ancient and ferocious female deities are still known to roam. Over the centuries, their mystical, cryptic seaside has been invaded by Vikings, Russians, Catholics, and Nazis—each wanting to plunder, subdue, and control this disconcertingly female-ensorcelled slice of earth. Yet, the Anguillidae eels journey for ten long years from the Sargasso Sea just to mate in these icy, enchanted waters. I became very intrigued by the line between erotic exploitation and erotic satisfaction: what pleasures and pains emerge within the complex power negotiations between woman and man, human and animal, hunting and harvest, giving and taking. The photographs for this story were created at the Cormorants Colony of on the Curonian Spit, at sites of mass animal slaughter along California’s Point Dume/Paradise Cove (where thousands of California gray whales were harpooned, lanced to death, and flensed into oil), and at New York’s Barren Island bone heaps (where the bodies of New York City’s carriage horses were rendered into glues and fertilizers). Special thanks to Eimutis , Veronika Krausas, Nora Maynard, and Patrick Horner.

  Holdfast Crowbiter

  On the Curonian Spit of Lithuania, the constantly shifting sand dunes made agriculture a perilous occupation—entire villages would sometimes vanish under the dunes, where they would be lost forever. The land itself was under constant occupation and invasion by Vikings, Nazis, and Russians, and war brought further famine and hunger. Any source of food was precious. Until the twentieth century, men would trap crows with nets and kill them with a single bite to the neck. But invasion and war took many of these men far from home. For the women who had to step up and make a sacrifice of the sacred crows, the taste of salt in the mouth is not unlike that of blood. Photographs were created at Nerida, Lithuania, and Barren Island, Brooklyn.

  My Nebulae, My Antilles

  This story was written in the Antilles, in between travels to Latvia, as a study in time travel inspired by the ideologically based travel constrictions of the Communist era and the timespace-based travel constrictions of Newtonian physics. The lonely, existential liberties of airmail unfolded within an apocryphal story I was told about mail being dumped in the rivers and oceans of Latvia during Soviet times, alongside the migratory paths of the Anguillidae eels, which are born in the Sargasso Sea, migrate to the Baltic, and follow a deep-water trench back to the Sargasso, where they arrive to spawn. It took thousands of years for humans to realize that the eels of the Baltic and those of the Sargasso were the same creatures a lifetime apart. The photographs were created at a decommissioned Soviet-era paper factory in Latvia on the coastal road outside Riga.

  The Kholodnaya Voina Club for Lt. Kent Edward Koontz

  A. K. A. “The Cold War Club.” The photographs were created at Floyd Bennett Airfield in Brooklyn, where salvaged military warplanes are rehabilitated by a team of volunteers with the HARP project. Special thanks to Matthew Contos.

  On the Sofa in Vilnius

  I once met an elderly Jewish Lithuanian woman who spoke of her life in Lithuania before the war and the Shoah. As a young woman of twenty, she trained as a seamstress and opened her own shop, selling what she described as “menswear for women.” These were for informal, private gatherings of women who did not wish to wear dresses or skirts. They loved her clothing. She said that as a result, she became socially unacceptable and was encouraged to move to Paris—the arrival of war merely hastened her departure. But, she said, there was a woman, beloved, closer to her than a sister, who at the last moment did not join her. She had been a cleaning lady at a synagogue, and she did not survive. In Paris, after the war, she opened her own atelier, where she continued her line of clothing for women who wished to dress as men.

  The Delicate Architecture of Our Galaxy for Julia and John Wikswo

  My Lithuanian grandfather was a chemist for the Manhattan Project, as well as an avid pickle maker. In his later years working in rural Virginia, his habit expanded to include traditional Southern delicacies like pickled watermelon. After he died, we began to empty his farmhouse and came upon many large pickle containers with broken lids—in the summer heat, their stench confirmed what we suspected. All manner of small and furry creatures had gone hunting in the pickle jar and, inadvertently, had become pickles themselves. I’ve been making these photographs through experiments with blue-glass optics, which is to say, photographing through the surface and contents of old blue mason jars. The photographs for this project were created at the lakes of Yaddo, which Katrina Trask named after her dead children and used as sites for ritual, pilgrimage, and meditation on love.

  Cap Arcona for Paetrick Schmidt

  The Cap Arcona was a German luxury cruise liner that sailed the Baltic Sea in the 1930s. In April 1945, the final days of WWII, the Germans requisitioned the ship and filled it with escaping Nazi war criminals and prisoners from evacuated concentration camps. It set sail for Helsinki, where the Nazis planned to disembark and then dynamite the vessel, killing all the prisoners. On May 3, it was bombed and sunk by the British Royal Air Force (RAF), and the majority aboard drowned. Bones from the concentration-camp prisoners washed up on the Baltic shore well into the 1970s. The RAF officer who gave the bombing orders later disappeared while flying an alleged Nazi ratline over the Bermuda Triangle. The photographs were taken at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—where the bodies of Revolutionary War patriots were buried after dying on British prison ships anchored in the East River—and at Floyd Bennett Airfield in Brooklyn, where warplanes embarked on bombing missions across the Atlantic throughout WWII. Special thanks to Paetrick Schmidt and Matthew Contos.

  The Double Nautilus for Matthew Contos

  My mathematician grandmother and her geologist sister both worked on the Manhattan Project in New York, where they explored one of the great mysteries. For the first five years of my life, I played above, alongside, and within the tunnels of the Stanford linear particle accelerator; in later years, I spent time at CERN during the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, where dark-matter physicists introduced me to the emerging corridors and tunnels beneath the Alps. Special thanks to Matthew Contos.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A coast is a site where sea meets shore, and both are transformed by the encounter. The creation of this book occurred over many thousands of miles of coastline in the Baltic, New York, and California. There were many seas and many shores, and I am grateful for the many ineffable transmutations along the way.

  I am profoundly indebted to the timespace of Yaddo, especially Elaina Richardson, Candace Wait, Sean Marshall, Michael Hazard, and all the errant troublemakers with whom I lived and worked. Without Yaddo, this book would not exist. A deep bow to my transmogrifying Creative Capital family, including Ruby Lerner, Sean Elwood, Merle Augustin, Lisa Dent, and Ethan Nosowsky. To my tender, lionhearted agent, Kent Wol
f, at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin, and to the ferocious shepherds of my work at Coffee House Press: Anitra Budd, Chris Fischbach, Molly Fuller, Caroline Casey, Amelia Foster, and the wondrous Allan Kornblum. May his memory be a blessing.

  I would like to thank my family for their intrepid laboratory partnership on this enigmatic experiment: Julia Wikswo, John Wikswo, Stacy Flood, Eric Grush, William Gross, Susan Martin, Leonora Wikswo, Spydre and Rü, Mukanday-if-by-Sea, Avishai-the-Sublime, and the wee daemon Onophría Ixtlan.

  The book itself wishes to acknowledge the n-dimensional involvement of Niklas Derouche, Katrina Trask (May 30, 1853–January 8, 1922), Jacobus Barhydt (February 9, 1753–December 22, 1841), Matthew Contos, Nicky Giesler, Lieutenant Kent Edward Koontz, U.S. Navy (October 28, 1968–March 6, 1998), and Dr. Robin Kilson (May 31, 1953–April 29, 2009), who instructed me to leave Texas, write a book, and always keep a case of champagne in the trunk of the car.

  I am grateful for the constellation of bright stars on the navigational team who, in nine different countries, collaborated with, assisted, advised, and contributed to the projects in fieldwork, studio work, performances, and to the fabrication of this book. An infinitely extending gratitude to Eimitus , Paetrick Schmidt, Veronika Krausas, Zachary Levine, Nora Maynard, and Kristofor Giordano. Deep appreciation to Joost Baars, Grayling Bauer, Astrid Beigel, Amber Berman, Alessandra Castellanos, G. K. Callahan, Maxine Chernoff, Mike Chou, Sarah Clark, Andrea Clearfield, Matthew Contos, Megan Cump, Sarah Dohrmann, Craig Foltz, Lynn Freed, Bailey Grey, Eric Grush, Heather Harstad, Dorothea Herreiner, Patrick Horner, James Ilgenfritz, Jaime de la Jara, Mitch Kamin, Arthur Kell, Dan Kern, Anne Le Berge, Daniel Levenstein, Rafael Liebich, Velinda Mackey, Pamela Madsen, Risa Mickenberg, Terrell Moore, Tomáš Panyrek, Alexx Shilling, Guru Singh Khalsa, Ranbir Singh Sidhu, Susan Silas, Stacey Steers, Samantha Stiers, Mackerrow Talcott, Alys Venable, Shelton Walsmith, Helen Wan, John Wikswo, Erin Wilcox, Mike Wiley, and to the many denizens of Cabaret Q in San Francisco, Comrade Truebridge’s and Flashpoint in New York City, and Catalysis Projects and Fieldshift Further in Los Angeles. Lastly but not leastly, a tip of the helmet to Bob Riggins, who painstakingly fabricated all of the airplanes for this book from deep in the heart of Texas.