On The Spectrum Of Possible Deaths - Plot & Excerpts
JOHN BERGER, The Sense of Sight In 2006, in Ohio, Joseph Clark raised his head in the middle of his execution to say, “It’s not working.” The salmon corpses clog the creek without sufficient room to spin: see, even the fish want to kill themselves this time of year the therapist jokes. Her remedy is to record three gratitudes a day— so let the fish count for one, make two the glaucous gulls who pluck the eyes before they fill with the cloudy juice of vanishing. But don’t these monuments to there-ness feel a little ostentatious? Not just the gratitudes, but also what they used to call a hardware store where you hike for hours underneath the ether between the ceiling and the dropped-down lighting tubes, muttering I need a lock-washer for my lawnmower shroud— huh? You know you should feel like Walt Whitman, celebrating everything, but instead you feel like Pope Julius II commanding Michelangelo to carve forty statues for his tomb. When even one giant marble Moses feels like a bit too much.
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