Pome
Tom Squires
I
The story begins with the Apple: at the beginning of everything, there is an apple, and this apple, when spoken of, is spoken as a fruit-not-to.[1]
Biting into an apple is like forming a corner in its surface, an edge made, a point of no possible return to a state of never been, never happened, as like the coming of life, the coming of its awareness, the bead of light that is its seed, its tasted corner negative, remained, now here in its absence.
Each time that we come to know something, in reality it is a step. Then we have to strike out for the un-known, to make our way along in the dark, with an “apple in our hand” like a candle.[2]
[1] Helene Cixous, “The Author in Truth,” in “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, p. 150-151
[2] Helene Cixous, p. 161
II
The moth has forgotten the bead of light that sits inside itself, she is only aware of the absence where which she would seem to remember something at some time had been.
The night sky is an all-encompassing black, there is no moon, and no stars to be seen.
There is nothing amongst to allow her to navigate through this dark.
She is left to zigzag aimlessly, without a trace of direction or sense of place.
In the state of a hopeless impossibility, she imagines, invents, and projects, a character, a body, an other, that would be herself before and outside of this flight, who is, a hungry caterpillar.
She selects and maps out a section of the blank black sky, that where which is presently at hand.
She places the caterpillar behind this section, and says to it, this is a leaf.
The caterpillar begins to eat, and, as it happens, where through the negative that it leaves behind, a light is left to shine.
As more of this light is come about, she finds herself drawn in to it, until she is left zigzagging aimlessly, over and across its surface.