[From “The Anthropology of Water” by Anne Carson:]
There is something profoundly uneventful about a man-made lake, like the self-knowledge of a radical skeptic. We arrived some hours after midnight and fell asleep beside the truck. Now at dawn the unsouled blank stare of Lake Powell. I stare back. Normally when viewing a landscape you can feel what is moving from mountains to shore to sky to waves and back again. Here there is no conversation. Grayness crouches over the water. ENFORCED 24 / 7 / 365 reads a sign whose upper half has been defaced. And lying on its side in the gravel between the sign and our truck is an enormous concrete block. “Be careful not to hit that when you drive out.” I am astonished to hear my father’s voice coming out of my mouth. Father used to specialize in this kind of black magic. “Now don’t drop that,” whenever I picked up a glass. He meant well. It was order that obsessed him and when he began to lose his mind he suffered from this. He would spend all day making lists, lists dropped from his clothing everywhere he moved. Late one evening I picked up a book he had been reading. On the top of the page in pencil, TURN OUT THE LIGHT. He was always a forceful writer. The letters had embossed themselves through three pages underneath.