KEEP PLANNING time / space / about #016 Will Dempsey Shell Game

and there were three forested territories, from which one had to be selected as the day’s stomping ground, and, although it was not necessary that a single area should be chosen exclusively, the events as they occurred determined that such a fate did obtain, which is to say that they only spent time in a single one of the three locations which had been considered seriously as legitimate options, which was a decision that had been made early on in the day, or actually the day before, as the relevant territory had been scouted in advance in order to ensure two things, the first of which having been that the area in question would manifest to them, or at least one of them, as sufficiently bounteous, metaphysically speaking, as sufficiently splendid and sublime, and the second having been that the place did not foretell of any inherent dangers, beyond the ordinary and typical dangers posed by undomesticated, natural terrain, although none of the territories that had been considered as objects of choice were genuinely natural, in the sense of not having been settled and not having been subjected to regulation, and while it was apparent that none of the three potential territories, whose disjunction had been, as stated, a preponderant subject of deliberation and a decision to make and set in stone, which had consequently been made, were truly wild, as all were relatively diminutive, surrounded by the surgical automata of civilization, and affixed to widely recognized proper nouns which should be considered rigid designators, it was nonetheless important, critical even, to investigate into the possibility of any unforeseen circumstances which could prove confusing or dangerous, in this case confusing meaning the same as dangerous, on the momentous day at hand, but as it had been established the day prior that nothing was out of the ordinary in such a manner that it could not be accommodated with minimally rational spontaneous judgement, and moreover that there was some natural grandeur to be found there, such as a field of golden grass wherein each individual plant appeared to mirror all of its neighbors, generating for the area a fractalic holism, or a peculiar vignette of an abandoned construction machine, which was probably not actually permanently abandoned, bathed in sacral light from a hole in the overhanging canopy such that the vehicle seemed to have been granted its own aureole, both of which, ironically, were sights gathered during the prior day, when reconnaissance had been performed in lieu of the fact that the desired cognitive situation did not yet obtain, and had been fully intended for revisitation the following day, when things would appear brighter, as a rule, and more significant, but were in fact never beheld again, the forested territory under present consideration, selected from the three total options, was deemed a good choice, meaning that the next morning they were there, having delved into the forest after leaving the little parking lot which had been their point of entrance, where someone had cruelly, but not so cruelly as to have been wholeheartedly malicious, had startled, or upset another who was in the car, who was not in his right mind as a result of something he had eaten, by setting off the car’s blaring alarm, but once the natural surround had enveloped them there were no more treasons, and the act was quickly forgotten, or put aside, and they had sweetly ventured on, tip-toeing over the wet backs of small stones which revealed themselves out of the moving surface of the tributary, which led to the river that they were traveling toward, as had been their predetermined mission, which in fact had likely been the predetermined mission of everyone in the area, at some point or another, because going to the river was so to speak the thing to do, or rather to see, although these ones in particular were observing additional rules of conduct, one of which was to avoid strangers, those unfathomable, lurching, striding goblinoids, the escape of which would remain a hidden premise for the remainder of the day, and perhaps longer than that, at all costs, and to generally practice solitariness, as a collective, an intent that was for the most part realized, with the instances where they neared certain others, who surely heard the sounds they were producing and allowing to pierce and rebound the invisible air, being momentary and forgettable as desired, and the winding paths of the forest floor both having allowed them to pursue alternative, emptier offshoots when they appeared and justifying their direction, the only time they stopped having been when they stopped to consume their prepared meals in an alcove at the bottom of a vine-threaded cliffside, on the side of the river, at near equal level to the water itself, where they unfurled their packs and fed themselves, while looking over the water, and the trees rippling infinitely on the other side of the river, either individually or as individual instantiations of a subsisting fundamental spiral, the machinations of which could only be incompletely perceived in the forms of echoes or facets, were fully appreciable, paramount in their distance, and where someone tried to wrestle down paranoia, and engaged in theatricality for that very purpose, and discussed ideas such as machinic desire, the constitution of a story, assorted whatnot, and things that cannot be reported here with the others, some of whom made jokes that were at the time comprehensible to him in tone but not in content, to which he was motivated to respond with uncertain laughter, and conceived of the idea of starting a journal, just for this day, which could be used, in its own inane, presumptuous way, to capture and reflect and tame and preserve, in some attenuated sense, the surrounding world, a world which was brimming with molten essence to an alarming degree, just behind every surface and border, with the sound of the river encountering with the sky and seeming to explode right beside the ears deafeningly, though nobody else could hear it, and despite the fact that it could have been reasoned that this was illusory, the inferential habit of the mind was in this state becoming all too easy to shed in favor of an unhinged, mute, associative awareness, and the borders of things began to become immaterial or seem unnecessary, and the fear grew that someone would not be able to communicate to the others, either because someone was not able to convey properly through language as had previously been possible to communicate, or, perhaps even worse, that one had nothing substantive or comprehensible to convey at all, despite certain thoughts purporting otherwise, and that the journal would mean nothing, which perhaps it did, and all of these emotions seemed to heighten in tandem with the auditory and visual and the haptic and the swirling of sense (behold, pulchracatastrophe!), and the entities themselves, screaming through solidity, and there was the migrainous throbbing underneath it all, a prying open of the brain, inducing retreat to the self-reassurance that the tongue could still be felt and had not gone numb, proving that no fatal mistakes had been made, that what had seemed to be what was consumed was in fact what had been consumed, and that this had not all been the product of a captivating error, and the realization and subsequent recollection some time later that there were cicadas in the walls, and the fear that things would never be as they once had been, even if existence would continue steadily, even if the days to come were not of different substance to the days that had come before, while they, or at least one of them, told themselves all the while that everything would be alright, ultimately, and then the helicopter came.

*** Will Dempsey is a founding editor of Propagule, a literary magazine. 13 July 2025