Every day my wife leaves me a word on a sticky note. For good or ill, I give myself half an hour to write on that word.
The detection of metal is serious business. Once I met a man at a Christian retreat in Bermuda who had done nothing but search for bits of metal in playgrounds and parks ever since his retirement in the mid-eighties. He was old and inhabiting a sagging mass of body whose faculties were deserting him. His eyes would drift as he spoke, tremble in place and drift again, as if the daily facts of his life demanded deep rumination, as if simple recounting were an act of analysis. They were watery eyes, in the sense that they seemed unmoored and floating, that he was quietly drifting out to sea even as he picked at the ham on his plate and talked about how difficult �Uncle Sam� had made it to go metal detecting on public parkland. His wife had skin like foxed parchment stretched over bone and topped with frizzy hair the colour of ketchup chips.
Metal detection will eventually ruin you because you are not detecting metal at all but points of congruence to the real world, which is a vast dump, a trash heap, a midden of slag and crap, cheap plastic artifacts and rusted car bodies. What we think of as trash and decay is the inevitable spillover from that other world, a communion between realities in which dead things coexist. It is, of course, where we go when we die. Because nothing can live there, our bodies do not decay but are preserved in the unbreathable air. Everything that has existed or will exist in our world is already there, already beyond repair and sitting in a corner somewhere or left outside in a backyard.
Because the real world, which dwarfs our universe a whale dwarfs its krill, is so full of unused materials, it has been wrongly considered as a potential material resource and forensic window into the eternity. Imagine Plato considering a rusted out Ford Galaxie or a dented Chuck E. Cheese sign. Imagine yourself examining the body of Plato.
The original metal detector, built by Alexander Graham Bell in 1881, was first used to detect a lead bullet lodged in the body of President Garfield. What Bell discovered was not the bullet but the coexistence of Garfield�s dying body and his already-present corpse, occupying the same space on different planes. Bell spent the next forty years attempting to exploit these points of congruence before he died in 1922 a frustrated and bitter man.
