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filled with a feeling of awe, of wonderment,
at the perfection of the emptiness: his fish pots, his fishnet, making up, as they did, his life as he knew it, his life as he could feel it; but his immediate need was for a fish pot full of fish and a fishnet, as it coursed through the seawaters not far from the shore, to ensnare scores of anything living in the shallow waters of the sea. And that one day of fruitlessness, that first day of fish pots and fishnet empty of everything, was repeated again and again; for many days after, Nathaniel Potter found his fish pots and fishnet empty of prey, and this prey was the very thing that sustained his world. And after many days of this particular emptiness, of this particular silence, Nathaniel Potter cursed God. And these were his actions: he cut his fish pots from their anchors, letting them go drifting into the shallow and deep waters of the blue sea, and then, removing his trousers, he caused his bare bottom to face the sky and in an angry cry he asked God to kiss it; and his fishnet yielded nothing, not a single thing was trapped in his fishnet, and this fishnet, each knot in it, each stitch in it, he knew well, for he had made his fishnet himself. And he cursed God, it was not a God with any specific character; the God he cursed had only an all-encompassing character, this God he cursed was capable of boundless amounts of good but all of that goodness had been denied to Nathaniel; and this God was capable of boundless amounts of evil and a great deal of it, an intense
amount of it, had rained down on Nathaniel Potter. And at the moment of the empty fish pots and at the moment of the empty fishnet, the boundless goodness of this God, the vast waters of the sea on which he sailed in his boat and its contents which provided him with his life’s support, was no longer known to him; and at the moment of the empty fish pots and the empty fishnet he was only certain of the boundless amounts of evil that were attached to this God. And Look! was the very word he said to himself. And he looked and on his left side moving right was the world painted in hues of silver and yellow and red and green and blue and white and purple and orange and permutations of all these; and he looked and on his right side moving toward the left was the world and it too was painted in hues of silver and yellow and red and green and blue and white and purple and orange and permutations of these colors. And he looked again, first to one and then to another; and then again to one and then again to the other. And Look! he said to himself again and then again and again and again, he said this word to himself, Look! And he looked outside himself and he looked within himself and it was all the same. And he looked again, but it was always the same: inside and out, it was always the same. The coldness of all that was real, inside and outside; the long, bleak blankness of all that was real, inside and outside; oh, for a day so brand new, Nathaniel Potter
said to himself, for though he could not read and he could not write and did not know that he could make someone who could do that, read and write, his feelings, all bundled up in a mass of confusion, were not too far back from the tip of his tongue. And he looked again into the abyss that was the dawn before day and then into the mystery that was the same day’s end and could not find himself and he looked into his empty fish pots and his empty fishnet and felt how indecipherable was the world, how it could not maintain a pattern of regularity, how uncertainty was attached to everything he knew, how rain could fall beyond necessity, how the sun could shine with such ferociousness that his whole world would long for its cessation. And looking up to the heavens, he cursed the divine being who had made this world of the ground beneath his bare feet—he did not wear shoes—the sky above his bare head, the seas whose bounty had so often been withheld from him.