Reading Andrew Kozma’s Strange Postcards in the Northern Appalachians
It’s winter in the northern Appalachians and it’s cold and the wind is blowing and I’m holding a thin stack of postcards. I brought them with me to try to make sense of this place I’ve found myself in. The town is named State College (literally, and yes, the state college is located here) and it sits in a valley between two mountain ridges that you can see from pretty much anywhere you go.
I’ve been here about a year. I work at the university, but not in a permanent position, so I’ll only be here for another year or so, and at this moment I’m looking at the mountains in the distance, and the postcards I’m holding, and I’m trying to understand the transient nature of my presence here.
The postcards are from Andrew Kozma’s “The Air We Breathe” project. I’ve been thinking about them for a while now. Each one contains a piece of “strange and weird and nonsensical” flash fiction that Kozma apparently uses to explore themes of literary weirdness. But in them I’ve found things that seem to dissolve narrative boundaries and I’m taking them with me today to become my own narrator, or to bring a new narrative into this one, or to remove the distinctions altogether. I’m not sure which.
Trail
The first place I go to is a trail that shoots off from Sunset Park and then heads northward, turning into a gravel bike trail that leads out of town. The portion I’m on cuts through a meadow but is surrounded by mulberry and black cherry trees on both sides and on the other side of the meadow is a hillside lined with more trees, mostly oaks and a few pines.
The first of Kozma’s postcards in the stack is from Alaska. It has a duck on the front that’s floating in water, and a smaller duckling behind it. The story written on the back tells of a mysterious virus that causes a replication of its host, made visible by a duck on a pond with a smaller duck on top of it, and smaller duck on top of that, and another, and so forth, “ducks all the way down”.
I think about the way that this postcard brings the fiction into the nonfiction, the ducks in the image on the front becoming the ducks in the story on the back, and vice versa, in an infinite feedback loop.
As I imagine this, a chipmunk darts across the trail ahead of me and then disappears into the snow, and I realize I’m breathing the chipmunk’s air, and it’s breathing mine. Where does the chipmunk end and I begin? Or do we at all? I’ve altered this trail in some tangible but immeasurable way, and it’s altered me. I don’t yet know the ramifications of this.
Plaza
Later in my journey, I’m in a plaza on campus, sitting on a bench underneath leafless black locust trees and I’m gazing at a large lawn and then a street and the mountains behind it all. The grass in the lawn is brown and campus is an interweb of foot traffic, all faceless students and faculty heading from building to building.
I look at the next postcard. The front is a picture of a German festival, which makes sense because this one is from a small town in Germany called Oberammergau, and for some reason that feels as meaningless as the people streaming through the plaza. The story on the postcard is of a tourist at a festival who recounts the transformation of the locals into historical villagers dressed in period costumes. The tourist remarks that “their unique features flatten”, and like the people I’m watching walk by, they have no real identity. They could be anyone.
This realization gives me an eerie feeling, as if the tourist could be amongst the people around me, escaped from the fiction of the postcard into reality, now observing me as one of the locals from some unknown vantage. Kozma himself could be here somewhere, watching. Or perhaps I’m in a postcard. Perhaps I’m not narrating my own story at all but being narrated. The boundaries become blurred, or they were never there to begin with.
Museum
The last postcard in the stack is from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and I’m reading it at the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University. This one is a collage of abstract art by the French cubist Georges Braque. On the back, the story’s narrator attempts to describe the surreal scene on the front, mentioning two people and a guitar on a chair that is also a table on which the narrator is apparently sitting eating breakfast which is the two people on the chair or perhaps the narrator is the breakfast and the narrator didn’t have legs and none of it really makes sense. Of course it’s not meant to. The narrator says, “…every noun was losing its definition and every definition lacked meaning”. I think about this for a while. If words lack meaning, what do they mean? Does their lack of meaning have meaning? Mathematicians say zero is a number.
I keep thinking about all of this while I’m standing in front of Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting, Lake George. I don’t know anything about paintings, but I’m drawn to the way the blue-green of the night sky bleeds into the dark outlines of the mountains and the lake and the shore, and how it’s hard to pinpoint where one feature begins and another ends despite the clear differentiation.
Light must filter through the atmosphere at interesting angles to create the blueish greens of the painting. Photons stream through the sky and some hit things and some don’t, and some eventually make their way down to us on the ground. Plants soak them up and animals eat the plants and somewhere in this chain of events I end up at a museum staring at a painting. Can there even be a narrator in such a sequence? Am I writing a story, or just a character in a larger one?
Kozma’s postcards have given me more questions than answers. Maybe that’s the point. I don’t know Andrew personally, or why he decided to take on this project, but postcards are strange media in their own right. They usually come from someone you know, but the places from where they are sent are bound up in their meanings. In a postcard, a spatial experience is transported from one place to another, and some things are lost in the journey, but some things are gained too. Like a story, postcards are interpreted.
I don’t know if I’ve gotten to the root of any of my confusions during any of this. When I leave the museum, the woman at the visitor’s desk smiles and hands me a free museum postcard. Outside the wind is blowing and it’s cold and I can see the mountain ridges in the distance.
— Ben Lockwood is a writer in central Pennsylvania. Ben’s work has been featured in Clarkesworld Magazine, Seize the Press, ergot., Maudlin House and others. You can find more of Ben’s writing at briefecology.com and brlockwood.com