He read it again: Feeding Instructions. It seemed like it said the same thing yesterday, but how could he be sure? If the words kept changing, moving, altering the construction of their underlying meanings, if how we understood them now was a stunted mutation of what they once might have encompassed, how would he know? How could he know? He knocked on his head with his fist until he felt a thrumming like a tuning fork. He thought if he took all the things about him that were bad and shameful and disgusting, the things he did to his own body, the things he imagined doing to other people's bodies, the respective phenotypes of solitude and privacy, he would have a mound of clay out of which to shape femurs and vertebrae, to mold a shape that was the manifestation of his true self, a figure sloped and small and grotesque, shed of all contrivance, the isolated and condensed infection that constituted his soul. He wondered when these became the words he knew, the meanings he understood--if words in books rearranged and cannibalized themselves over time, then this was how knowledge progressed, not towards greater and greater complexity, but towards greater and greater simplicity, by attrition, by absence, by the subtraction of information, entire passages swallowed up by one another when the books were at rest. He couldn't prove it. Though he read his own books over and over, they were familiar only to the degree anything is familiar--the words seemed the same, they seemed to match his memories, but if any words or meanings were missing, so was his knowledge of them, and he had nothing by which to recognize the absence. And if every book continued to shrink, the breadth of its knowledge contracting when he wasn't looking, he was the inevitable result of that terminally devolving interaction. He felt certain he understood the opposite meanings contained in the word "feeding" as it was presented to him now, the way hunger and sickness are the same, certain that he and his figure embodied such an inversion, suspected that he, his body, his walking, waking life was little more than the shadow thrown or the footprints left behind or the whorls in the fingerprints or the mind of the figure, a negative template, the empty space of the groove itself, the memory--and what was memory but a form of hunger?--and he wondered for what felt like the first time if it is in this way that we invent and remember God. He read it again.


####

Mary Kelly most definitely is.