These are old notes from a messy, chaotic pocket Moleskine. Last winter, I wrote a piece weaving together several missing person cases and questions, forensic photo analysis, Lucretius' theories of light (and other ancient theories of how we see), and questions about what I would do, given certain circumstances. Now that I have been writing a meditation on why I write about missing people, some of these rough notes (raw, messy, unordered, unstructured) have taken on new meanings. The notes are more polished in the actual essay, of course.
But I thought, why not post some of them? (I also posted them on my personal blog devoted to writing explorations, called anti:freeze)
Thus for the idealist as for the realist, one conclusion is imposed: Due to the fact that the other is revealed to us in a spatial world, we are separated from the other by a real or ideal space. - Sartre
Ideal meaning: constituting or existing only in the form of an idea or mental image or conception. (Though I cannot help but also think of perfection.)
Does missing mean that you can no longer plot my point on a map? Or is that you have the wrong map - that I have wandered past the boundaries of our charted territories, into places you cannot find?
Or does it mean that the ideal space we always felt - always suspected would force us apart - has simply transformed into something real? (lots of messy cursive I cannot read - this continues for several paragraphs)
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I cannot stop thinking of Tara Calico, who went missing in 1988 while riding her bicycle in New Mexico. Detectives found the cracked window of her Sony Walkman near a campground several miles away, and her mother immediately knew: Tara had left breadcrumbs for police to follow.
Detectives never found Tara's pink Huffy, but they did discover tire tracks along NM 47. But the tracks led nowhere, and the trail went cold.
Six months later, a Polaroid turned up outside a convenience store in Port St. Joe, Florida. In the picture: a young woman, bound and gagged; a paperback copy of My Sweet Audrina beside her hip; a boy to her left, his mouth taped, his head resting on a blue-and-white striped pillow.
Tara loved VC Andrews. Was My Sweet Audrina a sign? Some kind of code? And what about the little boy? He resembled a missing child from the same state as Tara - New Mexico. It seemed this could not possibly be coincidence, two people in the same bizarre shot, both resembling missing persons from the same state.
Tara's parents hired an expert in ear identification, and he positively identified the woman as Tara. Police disagreed.
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Lucretius. Imagine: if light could adhere, if two bodies could touch - leave traces - across a distance, just by being seen. (And what if they were not seen? Would those atoms still travel? Would they still touch?) Imagine a camera: the shutter opens, and your face touches the lens, touches the photo paper, so that it leaves actual bits of the skin, not just the image. Not just an image, but something you might extract, like DNA. Proof.
And you would never have to compare ears, never have to cut an image to pieces.
Lucretius:
Now will I undertake an argument- One for these matters of supreme concern- That there exist those somewhats which we call The images of things: these, like to films Scaled off the utmost outside of the things, Flit hither and thither through the atmosphere, And the same terrify our intellects, Coming upon us waking or in sleep, When oft we peer at wonderful strange shapes And images of people lorn of light, Which oft have horribly roused us when we lay In slumber- that haply nevermore may we Suppose that souls get loose from Acheron, Or shades go floating in among the living, Or aught of us is left behind at death, When body and mind, destroyed together, each Back to its own primordials goes away.
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Over the next couple of years, more photos appeared - each one more puzzling, each one trumping the others, like an ace. The strangest one shows a woman - Tara? - bound in gauze while seated on an Amtrak train. The man sitting next to her grabs her neck and pulls back her head. Every detail seems theatrical: the woman's oversized glasses; the man's gaping mouth; the setting. How could that possibly be real? On a public train?
If the Polaroids were real, Tara was on the move - nowhere in particular, no place you could plot on the map. She was always in a truck or a train, always leaving or arriving, living in the space between spaces. The empty spaces on maps, with no dots.
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You can walk to the end of the earth and never once touch the vanishing point. It wraps around the horizon and comes back to kiss your heels, like a latitude line. The vanishing point, it turns out, is you.