His mind runs riot. Lost in thought, scrutinising his rug, Ocean starts imagining five, six, twenty-six distinct visual combinations, absorbing but also insubstantial, as though an artist's rough drafts but of what?— that, possibly, which a psychiatrist would call Jungian slips, an infinity of dark, mystic, anonymous portraits flitting through his brain, as it burrows for solitary, global signal that might satisfy his natural human lust for signification both instant and lasting, a signal that might commandingly stand out from this chain of discontinuous links, this miasma of shadowy tracings, all of which, or so you would think, ought to knit up to form a kind of paradigmatic configuration, of which such partial motifs can furnish only anagrams and insipid approximations:
a body crumpling up, a hoodlum, a portrait of an artist as a young dog;
a bullock, a Bogartian falcon, a brooding blackbird;
an arthritic old man;
a sigh;
or a giant grampus, baiting Iris, trapping Marco, haunting Ahab: all avatars of that vital quiddity which no ocular straining will pull into focus, all ambiguous substitutions for a Grail of wisdom and authority which is now lost— now and, alas, for always—but which, lost as it is, our protagonist will not abandon.
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Mysteries of Ocean
FanfictionOcean is someone you'd be terrified of if you came across him late at night. He is 6'10, taller than the average man you could say. He has the palest skin, though he's not albino, and he has the blackest eyes you could ever imagine. Ocean always has...
