«Insects are evil thoughts thought of by selfish men
It nearly drives me crazy»
Ocean, Lou Reed

Sometimes you have to know how to wait for the right moment. To sharpen your senses. If we concentrate hard enough we can hear the sounds that come out. See through the shadows and the darkness. Feel the flicker of an insect, or catch a glimpse of the island disappearing, moving in a new direction.

You stare at a fixed point for as long as possible, concentrating on not blinking, and everything else begins to disappear. All your senses become focused. Everything else becomes empty. Like when you look at the screen in the cinema and you feel that the auditorium and the other spectators disappear.

There are several ways to disappear. You can disappear like insects that go unnoticed, that are omitted. The unspoken subject, the details. They are there but we don’t see them, they are camouflaged by the environment. They can see us, but we can’t see them. It happens all the time, things that escape our senses. Suddenly someone mentions to you how many broken mirrors are lying in the street and you start to see them everywhere.
You had never paid attention to them before. Like those insects that fill the room.
If all at once they all disappeared it would take you a while to know what was missing, but you would instantly notice their absence.

You can disappear as the island disappears the moment you look for it. In this case you don’t know for sure if it’s your eyes, a mirage, or if it’s the island that moves, that drifts. You know that islands don’t disappear, that they are fixed, but still it’s not there. It is curious to write about imaginary islands for La Nave Imaginable. Perhaps it is easier easier than it looks: if everything is fiction, everything is imagined. The island becomes part of the ship.
Another way is to disappear physically. A few weeks ago we visited Finisterre, in search of the Great Sun and the site where Bas Jan Ader’s drifting sailboat was found.

Bas also disappeared, no one ever heard from him again, and today he is presumed dead.
His sailboat suffered the same fate. Although it had been left in police custody in a port in A Coruña, it disappeared from one day to the next, as if by magic. It is easy to disappear at sea and there is no shortage of examples of this. That infinite, dark mass, which extends beyond the horizon.

There are those who say that we don’t die, that we don’t finish disappearing, until we are completely forgotten by the living. In that memory remains our ghost, which continues to move among things. Just as retinal persistence keeps images alive beyond the screen, and gives meaning to cinema. With this act we can relive constantly, even if only for one, two, or three blinks.

Text: Santiago Colombo Migliorero