I walked south along Lake Michigan one day. Though I walked for over two hours, the overcast sky remained almost unchanged. Stepping onto the sand, time felt slow and heavy—or perhaps it was my body. Exhausted and hungry, I stopped at a bakery near home. Our sense of time often comes through bodily and external signals: growth, decay, sunrise to dusk. Walking along the lakeside, distant skyscrapers resembled grass in shallow water. The path broke; I turned. A sharp, uncanny sound—like a bird, yet not—lingered, as if something between wood, metal, and water had briefly torn the space. Runners passed; a seagull cut the sky; unseen cars shaped space through sound. My dog grew still beneath the bench—like a mossed stone. For a moment, it felt as if we were no longer by the lake, but already within water.

This is why I am so drawn to the philosophy of Anne Conway, to Paul Celan and Frank O’Hara’s poetry, and to many other works within Romanticism and Modernism. It is because I keep noticing and attempting to understand that within this fluid and indeterminate essence, there exist countless possibilities—possibilities to become and, at the same time, to dissolve the self within an established system.

These possibilities may appear fragmented, yet they are composed of love, the self, doubt, pain, limitation, and freedom, as well as certain burdensome destinies humanity has always carried. They are constantly intertwined, continuously shifting—being there in ways that cannot be conveyed through ordinary, formulaic communication—and are fractured and shattered regarding human emotion and perception. They resemble something like a fiber, a suspended substance, or perhaps a sediment—something that exists beyond the language we use to describe human experience. Everything mentioned almost leads people to believe their lives are from immeasurable eons and that they are just drifting through cycles of these humanistic moments in the experience of living.