KEEP PLANNING – Eric Angal

—I have to keep a level head…as in, I recall myself thinking, ‘I have to keep calm, I have to not panic.’ It was of the utmost importance that I ‘kept a level head,’ as if my life depended on it…as if the ‘levelness’ of my head was the only thing keeping me from being hurled into infinity…but why, why not panic…? Why not shout, or scream, or rush the stands…? Or think of her…? One: the number, of course—the incorrigible number, contemptuously escaping my memory’s outstretched hands, which I remember, too—I remember outstretched hands proffered as if in supplication—as if to worship the number— which perhaps started with a 1, or ended with a 1—an odd number, in block majuscule, written in sharpie on printer paper, adhered to her tank top with painter’s tape, crude, ugly, even, an incongruity on her torso, because her face was beautiful—could at least remember that—a beautiful face—although, to try and describe it now, I would be putting pieces of her face together ‘all wrong’—can only say that she was ‘beautiful’ but cannot independently reproduce, in my mind’s eye, the individual lineaments from which beauty emerged—a beautiful face burdened by a garishly colored tank-top, retroreflective pinstripes breaking her torso into quadrants, and that number, that ugly number which seemed to hang so heavily off her, as if dragging her down—you could see it in her posture, she could feel its weight—the number, which I can no longer remember, had drained all the color from her face—had taken the light out of the whole month it occupied—because I cannot remember any of it— Two: Creamcolored breasts, but from a distance…through a window…far away, up above, somewhere…I’m standing on an elevated surface to see them…and upon seeing them…rough-hewn semicircles dotted with pink…I am convinced, again, that I must be in hell…if they are there, and I here, and they exist, independently of my conception, then I am in, and can only ever be in, hell…and I can recall sitting, looking down, down into the flaky chitin of my scabbed knees, touched, again, by melody…the record had made its revolutions, and I returned to the middle, always, time and time again…Rautavaara’s Etudes…what is that he said: ‘A glimpse of eternity through the window of time…’ Three: ‘Well that’s the way it is with him, is he’s just himself—’ just the words, accompanied by one, two, then a third flash of light, sunlight refracting through a window, the window being shuttered, settling against the mullion, then darkness—that’s just the way it is with him, is he’s just himself, what, what are you trying to say…? That I’m not sufficiently myself enough? Fuck’s that supposed to mean…? That the act of being myself, short of being a sort of ‘countenance’ I maintain by means of simply existing, instead actually requires the full application of my effort…? That I am a creature of osmosis, no more than a pale reflection of my environment, with nothing of my own constitution remaining herein…? Perhaps nothing in the world is more fallacious than the saying: Be yourself…Stirner stripped the self of its supposedly constituent parts and found it to be lacking any describable qualities, lacking form, shape, color, literally lacking any ‘thing’ at all, and in this way he reduced the self to what it always was, what it always should’ve been: nothing—so you’re saying he’s nothing, not a very nice thing to say— Four: Why is she looking at my shadow…? Does she prefer it, my shadow, to me…? My shadow, my negative, void of substance, only connected to me through the vaguest of relations, always shifting, misshapen, frail, completely dependent on the situation with the light—I’m right here, talk to me—talk to me, look at me—the smell of your shaved legs—smell of fresh sheets—to be alone with you again— Five: They’re all saying it—God willing, the creek don’t rise—but if it does—if that water comes past the embankment, there—and the whole county floods—covered by the weight of that giant mirror, tranquil and still—maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing—not entirely. Maybe, in some way, it would be justified, given all that’s happened here, in this country… To survive in that world would be a form of penance—you know how noble it is, to suffer—to exist on the water, before it recedes—clinging to life atop a floating piece of salvage, some flotsam, or, best case scenario, a small boat—and if we were apart, I would spend my every waking moment looking for you—running the gamut for you—searching for your face somewhere in the murky, shitcolored stew—paddling with my hands, past a bloated corpse, past an uprooted home, past a world rendered insensate—it would be good, to suffer like this—being led by the water’s unseen currents, out to sea, again— Six: Curtain dropped—it’s over. Turbines spin in their casings, reduction ratios convert their captured enthalpy into something usable, useful. The way my name sounds from outta your mouth—like some indictment—insanity that it could’ve happened this way, but banal to comment on it— ‘These, these, these particles, which magically cohered to assemble ‘you,’ just so happened, over the course of their agglomerated existence, to encounter the particles which magically cohered to form ‘me,’ wow…! What an extreme delight…!’ How obnoxious to think of it at all—and yet— Eight: These words, like toys—what is to be had from their continual rearrangement? From my constant attempts at communication? With whom…? Myself? Even funnier: you…? When will this stop…? This feeling in the back of my head…like rooting through the filing cabinet…not this, not that, further, further back…ah, there it is…an old manila envelope, covered in dust… I: ‘wooph!’ Blow the dust off…and stare directly into the heart of a dead dream…a dream I had as a child…or maybe even a dream I had seven days ago…but a dream, nonetheless, forgotten, until now…like an old riverbed, dried up, an exhumed shape, empty… Nine: At any given time, this could all be reconciled—you and me, we could lay our differences aside and reconcile. Would that kill you? I wonder, what would that ‘do to you?’ Would you even notice it was happening? A reconciliation so small, so unobtrusive, you wouldn’t even feel it as it took you by your hands, lifted you, embraced you, carried you back to Schenectady? Ten: This Japanese pen…your incontrovertible sadness, my whole dogshit life in spasms, one measured breath. Your fluorescent visage framed in the little window in my door—and outside, the incessant hum of insects—the chatter of their stridulations, their wings, mandibles, evil automata, made to destroy us—not yet—not while we draw breath— Seven: ‘—giving yourself a concussion with that writhing—settle—settle down…! It’s not the end of the world,’ can remember her face’s grim rictus, teeth bared in animal fear…then, my words: ‘...yes, I’ll always, I’ll always love you…will always always love you, of course, what a silly thing to say…how could you not know…how could you even ask?’

To think that I thought I knew. But of course I didn’t. That’s how it is, you think you know, but you don’t, you can’t. I can remember a woman running laps with a number taped to her chest, and a woman settled beneath me, talking to my shadow on the wall. But I can’t synthesize these two disparate characters into the same person through the convenience of a name alone—only through the compression of memory can a person be reduced to such an extent that we feel as though we can know them in their entirety. Thus we delude ourselves into thinking we are able to join two completely separate moments together through memory’s adhesion. What memory does, in its slipshod recreation, is purport, with supreme confidence, that from our limited powers of perception we have wholly gleaned the schema required to accurately recreate a ‘person’—which is what a memory is: a recreation, not a reflection—an artifact, not really representative of the person being remembered at all—and so our pasts are wholly populated by facsimiles. Yet we insist that these memories align with reality in some meaningful way, deranged, but how else is one supposed to think…? And so it is that the woman running those laps and the woman straddling me in her bedroom and the woman who walked backwards into the flood were, in fact, three different women, or might as well have been. Perhaps it would be more helpful to recall them as three different women for the simple fact that I do not believe they were the same woman, really, but three different visages, guises donned by a more mercurial entity. Or maybe that’s just my paranoia talking, paranoia no doubt fomented by my seclusion, my being sequestered to this room—a double-edged sword—for whatever insights I’ve had, regarding her, regarding myself, regarding the nature of things, I can only chalk up to being resultant from my isolation, which has all but driven me to the brink of annihilation. These insights, if they can be referred to as such, seem palpably insane…and yet—and yet—I feel guided forward, or at least in a direction I might as well call forward, by an unyielding sense of intuition—ferried toward new thoughts, toward new objects of thought—whereas just a week ago I was comparatively incapable of producing even a single thought, at least, independently—that is to say, independent of a sensory impetus—for example, I could think, or perhaps make an observation, such as: that chair is over there. Or: these ropes are tight and are cutting into my wrists…now, however, I am able to produce thousands of thoughts a minute—it feels like the raw computational power of my mind is surging, leveraging itself against the fulcrum of this ‘woman,’ or rather, the fulcrum of these three women who at one point shared the same name, and through ‘her’ (through my memory of her—which we have established in the preceding: can only ever be hollow, simulacrous) I have experienced a second wind, I think, which has allowed me to, for the first time in a long while, feel something. Perhaps because, when I think about her (which is really a self-referential act, as my thoughts of her are wholly limited to what features of hers I remember, what things I believe she said, and a paucity of blurry scenes I can only sort of vaguely remember), for the first time in a long time, I am thinking of a ‘thing’ outside of the boundaries of this room, where I’ve been ‘living’ for over two years. Perhaps the extraversion of my thought is what was required for me to think further—and so, in the usual way, reeking of the sort of flaccid paraconsistency I often delight in observing, this aforementioned extraversion, or rather its impossibility, is what allows me to think at all. See, because it is both the extraversion of my thought, meaning, my thought ‘reaching out’ towards something—namely, her—and that extraversion’s impossibility—meaning, all thoughts about her must derive themselves from my imbecilic conception of ‘her,’ a fictionalized ‘her’ that can only be known by ‘me’ —which leads me to conclude that the aforementioned extraversion is really itself a falsity, and that like anyone, like everyone, I am only ever capable of thinking about myself. However, regardless of whether these memories are truly representative of reality, they are representative of an other, at least, an other that is not me, and cannot be fully known by me, even though it has been rendered by me, by an unconscious part of me, some part of myself to which I have no apparent access—thus creating a funny sort of dualism: even if the aforementioned extraversion is impossible, this ‘other’ which has been created as epiphenomenon is rhetorically sufficient as an ‘object of extraversion.’ The nature of this practice in metacognition, if you can even call it that, forms the rudiments of my forays into a ‘solipsistic epistemology,’ which I hope to write about, maybe here, now, or maybe later, when my head clears up, or maybe never, because if my head clears up, maybe I’ll find that there’s nothing to write about at all… One thing bothers me, though—for all my mind’s purported computational power (hahaha!), I cannot trace the path of my thoughts back to their nucleus—cannot, for the life of me, think of the thing that got me started in ‘thinking about ‘her’’ in the first place—which is, I feel, an important part of solving this ‘puzzle,’ the puzzle being a completed and ‘holistic’ epistemological methodology, which itself sounds impossible, perhaps is—and that would be alright with me—but, if so, then I’d at least like to know it is so—I’d like to discover, for myself, that it is impossible. So I must ask myself: when was the first time she crossed my mind…? Or, if the memory of ‘her’ was triggered in some way by ‘something else,’ say, a woman-shaped moldstain on the ceiling, like that one right there, that breasty moldstain which seems to leer at me so snidely, then I must know. Although, given my many earlier revelries with the moldstain, I suspect that there is no possible way it could have incited my memories of this woman, or ‘these women,’ primarily because, since I have ‘remembered’ this woman/these women, the strangest thing happened: chiefly, I was unable to adequately picture a naked woman—and, possibly related, the idea of a woman, naked, was no longer stimulating to me—was, instead, revolting—excepting, of course, her. For when she appeared, miragelike, on the periphery of my consciousness, it was hard for me to reconcile the images in my head (which I knew to be, to some extent, true—as in representational of a sort of truth) with my current confinement, wherein I have not seen nor conversed with anyone for the better part of two years… They have cut me to the quick, these images of carnal knowledge, which have played in my mind’s eye more or less constantly, snapshots and little moving images or intimations of images, all recalling old feelings, feelings of rhythms, rhythms of bodies in motion, which themselves incite interoceptive twinges wherein I feel, again, the sensations of her, of them… If I attempt to arrange these memories into a sort of timeline, I am forced to accept that the resultant chronology is jumbled, nonsensical—my last memory of her, I believe, precedes at least two other memories of her I have. How could this be, one may ask. Well, I don’t know—my last memory of her, of watching her walk backwards into a fast-moving body of water, precedes a single, still image of her tending to a flock of hens…I can so clearly visualize her amidst a gaggle of hens, sowing the grass, an outstretched hand frozen, the debris of feed airborne, a smile on her face, she’s looking at me, she’s turning away from me, her face is describing an arc in which her body will follow, she will turn away from me completely, and I will never see her again, pain, unbearable pain…but this should be impossible, as when she walked backwards into the flood, she was, understandably, swept away and killed, drowned, carried out to sea—

***_____ Eric Angal is a writer from Seattle. 31 August 2026