Hide, cried our friend, the lowly pipefish of the family Syngnathidae, It has been years since you were last here and too much, so much, has changed.
Directed to a ghillie suit, we abide, the pipefish has never betrayed our trust, and who are we to question the one who shepherded our last two forays into memory? The suit serves two purposes we find: that of concealment and that of oxygen exchange.
And we are dragged into this underwater labyrinth that opens like the TARDIS, offering by virtue of tufted processes, of branches, of filaments, more surface area than could ever be imagined by cursory inspection of the outside.
But with such surface area comes anonymity, especially in this place of shifting memory. One by one we lose track of one another, and alone, absent of those to whom we are ordinarily accountable, we become as Wilder Manns.
What to make of this fugue-like state, where with pin-point accuracy we are robbed of memory and nothing else? Where bearing is divined by the coagulation of cheese as we lean on a waffle mix of tufts?
We see Mnemosyne come towards us – she we remember. She parts the fronds of the suit and she touches our eyes. The trance is broken and memory regained, but from what were we hiding?
Curiouser and curiouser.
Written on Monday, 3 June 2013