Object Relations

The shipwrecked man creates a monarchy of one.

When he sees a footprint, he panics.

He has to keep writing, so he has to build a table, for which he has to make a chair.

He must find dry powder. He wants a fence. He thinks more than ever about the scent of roasting meat.

He thinks about the coins in his pockets. Just a bunch of  heads.

He thinks of his book’s previous authors.

A handful of shells needs another person to establish the magical qualities of exchange, to build the fence that will turn the wilderness into a garden and the garden into a plantation.

He will melt the coins to forge the tracks to move his story along.

He can’t explain why he thinks that all his book’s words—the preface, the conclusion, the acknowledgments, and all the chapters in between—belong to him.

Does the sensation of authorship explain his desire to hold reality together by killing whatever doesn’t build him a bridge to the next episode?

Or vice versa. Did killing turn him into an author?

Whatever he leaves unwritten, whatever he doesn’t have the words for, will not exist.

He calls this a history, as if its perspective were everyone’s. As if  he were writing everybody’s autobiography, a book before its time.

He encounters another man whose status he endlessly tries to clarify.

Anything he doesn’t kill becomes part of his economy.

Everything beyond his wordy mind becomes an object that can be taken or cast away.