a people for an underwater city...

If I invent ten thousand different personalities, maybe you'll find one you like.

"My I's come and go without bothering to consult me."

In love, he morphs wildly from moment to moment, until one day, surprised to discover he no longer recognizes himself in the mirror. Maybe if he'll assume different names and locations, he'll turn into an infinite ocean of depths, entangling every permutation of his other possible
lives – realizing the imaginary, imaginizing the real.
Like someone possessed, his body didn't belong to him alone – he gave it (he couldn't help himself) to whomever he fell for.

"When I grow up, I want to become an archipelago." he said. "Spread out over a flickering sea, I would collect lost and drifting things and pile them into ziggurats on my shifting shores."

Other boys wanted to become firemen when they grew up; he wanted to become a siren; a salamander, a water lily, a sandpiper, a tide pool. If you wanted to know him, you'd have had to meet him at the water's edge.
If you wanted to love him – plunge in.
That last night he dreamt of only speaking Spanish, and everyone else spoke only Russian. They were having a picnic on a breezy hill.
Everybody was laughing as the samovar boiled away on the grass. He was a new embodiment of a Don Quixote, except the wheels of fate he was milling about begun outgrowing the blindnesses of his youth without replacing them
with grown-up habits of unseeing. So he kept on changing blinkers from time to time (glimpsing reality's brilliance during the fleeting transition from one darkness to another), the best he could hope for.

To write..he wanted to reach every nature's imperfection and detour.

"Today I'll be a sunflower stalking the sun. Tomorrow I'll be a telephone sending electric messages across the sea. Next I'll be a hill passing the time as hills do. And then I'll be an antswarm in a rainspangled forest." And then...

"If I were God I'd die laughing."

Voices, always voices – an unsleeping multitude's incessant babble.
He became a virtuoso improviser, composing inarticulated sonatas on the fly, none of which he committed to paper until he was 63. Over the next twenty years, he transcribed 555 sonatas, singing in tongues to fetch himself back from the underworld.

"I don't need an Orpheus – I'll sing my own way out of hell."

Sliding down the slope of night, his music's chromatic delirium uncrumpled the crumpled day crinkling in the bone-tired skull. Skull, tired bone, uncrumpled in crinkling chromatic music, nightslope downsliding. The rippled shimmerings of lacewinged waves washed over his face,
revirginized by violins. Violins revirginized by waves, lacewinged ripples shimmering.
Enfolded in polyphonic pleats – sonorous origami –
he folded into a black swan in love with water.
Waterlove into polyphony.

"Dive in!" he screamed.

His nocturnal wings unfurled into a submarine gamelan – seagarden of echoing gongs, aquatic carnival of furious xylophones. Furious carnival, xylophones unfurled aquatic gongs – submarine nocturnal, seagarden gamelan.
Risingfrom sonic depths, windy trumpets hurled him back into the night's purple mouth where he would explode into a burning tongue luminous with questions. Rising questions exploded into luminous tongueburning trumpets.

Silence.

...and then

555 ways of looking at a harpsichord
555 digital diversions, nimble finger dances
555 kaleidoscopic variations on a theme
555 indefatigable beginnings
555 yes yes yeses
555 sonorous folds in a shimmering fan
555 time machines thrilling through time
555 love letters to a world that will go on without him
555 stained-glass windows of a baroque cathedral
555 unanswered questions
555 gifts to future strangers
555 twittering machines
555 duets of life and death
555 gems of crystallized time
555 maps of a mobile mind
555 odes to joy
555 moving sculptures in sound
555 essays on the unsayable
555 ethereal epitaphs on tombstones of air
555 virtual rendezvous for separated lovers
555 masks for a dancing Proteus
555 mirrors of emotions in motion
555 stars in a singing constellation
555 involuntary memories from an Italian childhood
555 miniature worlds revolving round each other in
infinite time
555 major and minor utopias
555 avatars of a transmigrating bliss
555 rungs in a ladder to silence
555 lucid dreams of an open-eyed dreamer
555 invisible cities of the mind
555 children to take care of him in his old age
555 fluent homages to water
555 radiant hymns to the sun
555 just-because's
555 voyages through oceans of sound in search of undiscovered
archipelagos
555 portraits of possible and impossible selves
555 signatures accepting life's inscrutable terms
555 imaginary arrows shot into a future beyond imagining
555 ways to meet his twin soul.


Curiouser and curiouser as he went on, couldn't resist following each wandering smile to the next wonderland...