something meta about nothing

[Jeremy Hight]

Rob stares hard at the Grand Canyon as a boy that one dying storm horizoned summer hour.  There is a sort of mouth, not in the rocks,  not in the sand.  He looks up at the sun briefly behind a thin high cloud once the brave and glorious anvil of a thunderstorm from somewhere and then back down again several times.  Once he sees it there is no breaking it away, no collusion between wishing and that internal erosion found within in time and falling away on purpose,  No.  The mouth of nothing was there. 

He has not yet taken that future art class with the kind old man who spoke so quickly when the itch of an idea so excited him by a blackboard, the old man who later passed away to a funeral full of students the way birds flock, the way bees cling,  the glue of something unspoken.  He has not yet learned of the sublime, of nature being so massive and beyond the pale fingers of words,  beyond the net of measure, the way of sunrises and canyons.   This will all come later.

The mouth is along canyons seemingly infinite and the space of oceans, the calculus of the distance to galaxies at night,  the collected open mouths of afternoons,  of things unsaid, 

Young Rob stares here at nothing.  Nothing at all. It is mesmerizing.   It is timeless in a way he almost understands and this holds him like gravity here , mouth open, wordless,  a canyon in miniature.   

[Rob Wittig]

Future Rob crawls into a large wicker basket after the art class, clad in a blousey shirt, renaissance wig and sword. The students are staring deep into the mouth of rehearsals for the show they're producing. Rob is to play Benny Profane opposite Hayley Steele's Mistress Page in William Shakespynchon's "Something Meta About Nothing."

[Jeremy Hight]

Future Rob is convection like text.   Future Rob will rise with the currents of the fall of that boy to memory.

Past is the breath of last rains, the artifacts left behind.  

Future Rob will eat an apple.  Future Rob will sleep and dream.   Future Rob will rise in iterations, some of this present, some of things we are yet to dare imagine.