Showing posts with label short story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label short story. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
[in progress]
A white unmarked car pulls up to their porch at 8:55 am. Juniper is fast asleep in their bedroom upstairs, but something in their body senses this arrival. Tensile, they stretch and open their eyes. Blackout shades roll tersely over their windows, the beige felt tracking a badlands through their otherwise colorful room. The breaks of the car sigh a little.
Blurry-eyed, Juniper sits up, awakening more fully from a dream of flying, of reckless and saucy aerial feats that cause everyone to fall in love with them. The secret of the dream had been to only attempt flight when they were far from any sort of ledge. This strikes Juniper as wisdom -- the idea not to attempt greatness unless one is safe from danger -- and their hazel eyes cross a little as Juniper's hands rub in small ovals. Idly Juniper think of their partner Jacob's eyes, glad to be spared of an astigmatism.
As the car's engine idles and then cuts out Juniper's squirrel, Mullein, stirs in her terrarium. Juniper found Mullein and her brother on the sidewalk six months ago at the base of a large cedar tree in outside of their favorite book store in Seattle. The city is famous for its large conifers, and this tree was no exception. Juniper had carefully scooped up the babies she'd found crumpled in the tree's shadow and carried them home, cradled in a scarf. Juniper fed them on kitten formula until the sixth week, when Brother didn't make it and Mullein was ready to transition to solid food.
The first night home it seemed like Mullein was going to lose her pulse at any moment, but Brother curled his small and hairless body around her, a gesture that ended up carrying them both through the night. Now when it is time to sleep Juniper has to keep Mullein in a 20-gallon fish tank with a wire top, but sometimes in the middle of the night Juniper will rise and curl their right wrist and arm around Mullein's reddish back, mimicking the hold that once saved her life. Juniper hopes that their witness to this extraordinary moment of sibling support -- so unheard of in Juniper's experience -- will allow them enough insight into Mullein's needs to nurture the young squirrel to powerful adulthood.
Juniper has trained Mullein not to chew or rattle the lid of her terrarium, but this morning she is unusually noisy. The sound of Mullein scrabbling around in her cage almost masks the persistent but quiet knocking coming from the front porch. Hearing this, a light runs up Juniper's spine like a sparkler, and they walk softly and unsteadily to the window to lift the shade.
This is when Juniper sees the car.
Oh god, they think. Oh no. No. No no no nono.
Their mind crackles out in a silence of static, and in an elegant arcing lunge they grab Mullein in one hand and an armful of clothes in the other. Finding a small orange daypack with flimsy waist straps, Juniper stuffs the clothes and Mullein into the inside pouch, pulling the drawstring shut and buckling the bag's cloth lid. Pulling on shoes without untying the laces, Juniper catches a glimpse of themself in a red-framed mirror, of the curved arch of their back and their brown hair spinning wildly around their face like a swing carousel.
Shit.This is not going to work. I'll look way too much like a girl to them. This is who they'll expect me to be. I can't let myself become a women to them--or to me. Much less to me.
There is time for this. Almost mechanically, Juniper gathers half of their hair in a fist above their left ear and stands in front of the red-framed mirror. Reaching with their other hand for the pair of scissors they always keep accessible but hidden, Juniper works the blades through their clenched hank of hair, a five-year-old trying to shear a Barbie doll. Hair comes tumbling down around their shoulders in thick curtains, pooling on the ground and hanging off the elbows of their sweater like [the dangling filaments of] a destroyed spiderweb. This is how Juniper feels -- how they would feel if they were not panicking. Like a destroyed spider. Like a beaver whose dam has been blown up.
Juniper reaches under their extended left hand to cut off the other side of their hair. They stuff these wads into their pack, realizing that too much left behind might look suspicious.
Besides, Mullein will appreciate the nesting material.
After quietly shutting the door to their bedroom, Juniper shimmies out the eastern window of their apartment. Juniper's house is a maze of hallways, an old square Victorian converted into apartments during the 1960s, and the side windows on Juniper's floor lead to a balcony with a drainpipe that is sturdy and close enough to the ledge for climbing. Juniper often watches moonrises and summer meteor showers from the roof, whose access the pipe permits. They climb the drainpipe fast, muscle memory pulling their body along despite their panic. But their hands do slip a little, the palms are wet with sweat.
When Juniper reaches the roof, their hands are covered in a tacky mixture of rust, saline, and blood. The pipe has cut a small trench between their forefinger and thumb, and it is bleeding steadily. The brown ooze camouflages the scabs and calluses that line Juniper's fingers.
Fuck. Juniper stamps the ground. Fuck this.
They can't remember the date of their last tetanus shot, and for a moment the blood swims before their eyes.
It's ok though. I'm sure Flint will have some tincture or salve for this. Stay focused.
The world comes into focus and Juniper immediately drops to their belly. Shit. That was too close. If the men at the door see them up here then all Juniper's packing and preparing will have been nothing more than time wasted. The tarpaper snags at their tights as they shimmy along the roof's surface, leaving runs. Behind the house there is an abandoned lot. Asian pear trees that lean over from the neighbor's yard have left their seeds for enough years that the yard has become an orchard. Juniper glimpses the trees' dark shiny tops and for a moment remembers the first night they brought Jacob there to gather the windfall fruits. The two came back later to rattle the trees dry, with a bike helmet and two oversize t-shirts.
The trees will catch them. Juniper watched their housemate Mirah successfully leap from the roof to the orchard on the fourth of July. She was drunk, and taller than Juniper, but it seems safe as anything else right now. The orchard will provide cover, and lets out onto an alley that Juniper will take, they hope, to safety.
2005,6 (written 2012)
i remember writing an entry in my journal when i was 15 about how i felt like i was growing up in spurts that were so dizzying. i felt like i was competing in a bicycle race weeks after learning how to ride one. i think that it was recently after the 'cool kids' in high school started talking to me like i had a pulse, like i might be as alive as they seemed, and i had started my band with violet and we were getting noticed and photographed on the street all the time, which was weird because there was no music on our myspace yet. we didn't even have any songs back then, but we would hang out in union square all day covered in shiny beads and scarves, singing at the top of our lungs (mostly janis joplin and that one song from rent), arms wound around each other's waists. people thought we were sisters or dating, and i think back then we were both. we felt so invincible, but i was incredibly fragile. i remember writing in my journal, "four months ago i didn't even know what a hipster was" and this was back in '05 when that word wasn't an insult yet and it was really all we wanted, a craving like the taste of salt on our hungry tongues.
i used to sit on the corner of east houston and eldridge in a red and white striped dress, no shoes on, back shoved up against the glass windows of the 24-hour pool hall. this was "the spot." one of many, but the best one because it was just outside of "territory," the rectangle we all used to walk that stretched from avenue B to the Bowery, but close to silver spurs too, where violet and i split grilled cheeses with bacon (extra crispy) and always had to go to the bathroom at exactly the same time. their milkshakes were thick as cement.
territory was the neighborhood where our high school is and where my and violet's ex boyfriends both lived. we used to walk the streets giddily there, half-hoping we'd see them so we could run away holding hands and laughing. one night we stalked up avenue A at midnight and covered all of his band's stickers with ones of our own. we always joked that each other were the prizes won out of those early attempts at love. i remember when ben and violet used to come down the stairs of his apartment and it was so obvious that they'd just been fucking, and half the time she was crying, but she never ever wanted to let go of his hand. one night he threw a printer at the wall beside her. i remember hearing stories about sex and vaseline, violet's dislocated jaw and seizures. i remember the story about how they finally did it on the floor of her bedroom in a pile of stuffed animals after months of Ben not being able to get it up.
they were my model for what it was like to be an adult. i think that ben was 16, and violet a year older.
i remember when they finally broke up for the last time. there had been twenty-seven ruptures before this one, a number that you can't make up. i forced my way into violet's apartment and held her while she sobbed in jerky breaths. we were both afraid she was going to die, but she didn't. after that night her bed became another spot for us. a place where we sat end exchanged dreams through our open hearts.
one night violet asked me if i thought i was a good person or not. i wasn't sure, but we were determined to figure it out. "i know" she said, smiling. pulling out a piece of paper, she began writing a list of names on it. we were sitting on her bed and i was backlit by a standing lamp that always shone in my eyes. my shadow fell across the page. "write down the name of every relationship you've had that's ended. friends too. cross out the ones where they hurt you. if you have more crossed than uncrossed, you're good. you know what makes you bad." i found a piece of paper of my own and started writing. this girl was complicated and sharp in a way i'd never seen before.
Eventually we concluded that we were both good people. Out of my eight, I'd hurt three; out of violet's 15, she'd hurt six. it was may of 2006 and we were alone in her bedroom. the walls were painted pale green and her shelves were still lined with horse figurines and children's books. i was supposed to have been home hours ago, but i didn't really care. i'd never known a person who approached her world so systematically, and with so much force. it meant so much to me to be good in the eyes of the world, and in this spring, that's what violet was.
i laid back on her comforter. violet's ceiling was speckled with little black marks from when she and a boy (years ago) had thrown firecrackers at it in the dark--the kind that come in a box full of sawdust and explode when they hit the ground with tiny pops. "i love you," i whispered, and she jumped on top of me. we often sat like this, with her innocently straddling my hips. she'd kissed me once that year, in her sleep, but we hadn't talked about it since. the sky outside her window was black, and i could see our silhouettes reflected in the glass, dark and angular inside a yellow halo. violet replied carefully, so as not to include the "too" that would cancel out our words, a running joke. the pieces of paper slid to the ground.
"i love you."
Sunday, June 9, 2013
untitled (work in progress)
Once upon a time there was a human person that loved rabbits.
They vacillated between the preference
for linguistic transparency and ossification.
for linguistic transparency and ossification.
This character, when represented
in text, seems invisible without a gender.
in text, seems invisible without a gender.
Circumscribing their identity seems a great deal harder without the use of pronouns.
But this person resists the history their genitalia tells.
Themes weave through their life in high, flat clouds.
They can't be held to the earth
in rivulets, the carved channels of stream beds.
Perhaps it is the extent to which their body has been regarded as permeable
that they embrace a transitoriness in their relationship with identity.
Perhaps their life is an exercise in being named.
Nyx is their pronoun as often as possible.
Night and a sheath like the skinny clouds
that glide across the face of the moon.
Nyx is wreathed in
Nyxselves, and they are
always leaving.
__
The moon is a sleeping rabbit.
Nyx stares out at its heaviness.
The moon is a different thing each night, like a heart.
Nyx remembers when it was a red-gutted slash
over the black hills of central California.
It was so visceral and terribly
open. It
was the body of the bleeding
rabbit exposed
and Nyx wanted nothing but
to penetrate it.
With this desire a pull opened from within them
The vomited heavily onto the dark floor
as their moving train car traveled north.
__
No one had fucked them in a short while
and the desire was a shock
to be inside the moon
to hold its slippery guts
to move silently and slowly back and forth
lacking nothing.
there had been a spark
of anger at knowing
S____ a few nights before.
They had decided to sleep in the Jesuits mission
after that
after that audacity after they had put their damp nose
to Nyx's cold dry nose
after they had dared to fall asleep like that
after they had dared to hold Nyx in their arms
after
a lot of nights of ignoring them
and their slippery guts
and their ankles
and their ability to lock tight
lock tight around a neck
__
This is an exercise in feeling the other side
of safety
of returning to where it hurt
where it started to rot
where it became gangrenous
where it fell off
__
a return to when Nyx's doctor said
dismissive that the skin was necrotic
that the body was killing itself
from Nyx's genitals
"it looks herpectic"
and three years later Nyx dreamed of a white rabbit
covered in scars and horrible wounds
a white rabbit that they drowned
in an industrial sink
their arms spasmodic,
a tension in the muscles.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
fairytale
This is a fairytale.
It's the story of a little boy
who was invisible
and a little girl who knew
he was there.
And all she has to do is know
and believe
and he will become real
but he is timid and scared
so she has to be very, very quiet.
These little children knew each other
before
but the little boy got left somewhere.
She can feel his heart
still beating,
connected to her heart
by a golden thread.
And so she goes to find him
but he can only visit her
in dreams
so she dreams with him
until he wakes up.
She had been a dream of his own
for the whole long time
he'd been orbiting the black hole of death.
He woke up for the first time
in ten years
and was himself again.
- -
The Amber Peach Child
Once upon a time, a little boy and a little girl met and were created in dreams. They were spirits of the dream world -- little embodiments of its essence.
As such, they were invisible. But, because they were both of the same stuff, they could see each other and the glowing light held inside each of their chests. The little boy and girl were siblings -- kindred -- and they loved each other very much. They told each other stories, and when they laid together, this is what they felt:
stage I
Closing eyes leads to
thoughts, visions
of pink clouds swirling mysteriously
like Japanese wallpaper.
This nebulous form is dotted
with a uniform panoply of gold flecks,
a frail shell
which contains and controls the pale dream
as it spins silently
through black velvet space-
a capsule unto itself.
stage II
We are lying
I hold your hand
both eyes are closed
but we talk
and I think that we are traveling;
the small of your back arches gently.
stage III
You are here, on my planet
and around us, the air is humming.
- - - -
But something happened to the dreamworld. It was wrenched and sundered (the tower) and they were torn apart. The little boy got left in the dreaming, while the little girl awoke to find herself in the body of a human. she was very confused as to how she got there and missed the boy and the dreamworld very much.
But she adapted. She found other people who had been torn from the dreamworld and put in human bodies. Eventually she began to realize that most people had been born there, like she.
Eventually she forgot about the little boy -- but she was nonetheless aware that there was something missing, something wrong.
People couldn't see her. They could see her body, sure, and they could see the things she had conditioned it to do. Some people were very impressed by how she'd trained it -- they were amazed by the breadth and depth of her skill for self-cultivation.
But nobody saw her -- they saw the contours and motions of the living flesh that she controlled, but not her, the puppeteer. she was a spark and a force, not a living human body.
- -
Then, one day, another pair of eyes found her. They looked through her body -- into her -- and fixed on her. She froze. What was happening to her? She'd waited for so long to be seen again, but now that it was happening, she was scared. Every time she looked back, she felt her gaze being captured and drawn within the other body in front of her.
Those eyes connected straight back to the dreamworld.
The girl realized this in a rush that terrified and enlivened her. The force behind these eyes -- the spirit -- was still in the dreaming.
The girl became drawn to these eyes -- magnetized. She needed to see what they led to, but the force and power contained within that place were so raw that she was unable to maintain her gaze -- every time she caught a glimpse of it she had to turn away. But how she had to look…
- -
Eventually, the girl became accustomed to staring into the heart of the dreamworld. She began to be able to look for longer, to slowly pick out murky forms. She kept looking, and as she did, she noticed her heart began to change itself -- it began to glow.
The girl remembered this. She knew she must be getting close. There was something in this place -- some spirit -- that was connected to her own. This spirit was meandering, aimless, but alive and so very present. Slowly, the girl began to feel it watching her.
The glow around her heart was getting more and more intense. As time went on, the girl began to feel the glow taking form, unspooling from her chest to create a line extending from the front of her. This tendril soon unwound farther than she could see.
The girl chose to follow it.
She took a step further -- finally, she moved.
She was fully in the dreaming now.
The girl allowed the thread to lead her like Daedalus. She was in an utterly new place, but did not feel disoriented or scared. She had the golden thread to guide her -- and so she began to feel comfortable where she was. She began to remember how it felt to walk in dreams.
- -
Eventually she will see him.
What will happen then?
Will it be like seeing the sun and becoming the world, as in tarot?
Will they both die?
Will she return to the dreamworld?
Will he come to the physical world?
Or, will she eventually leave him, having to return to her body and, upon waking, leave him back where he was?
Or, will he wake up? He will wake up and be himself, aware and alive. And she will have been his dream.
It's the story of a little boy
who was invisible
and a little girl who knew
he was there.
And all she has to do is know
and believe
and he will become real
but he is timid and scared
so she has to be very, very quiet.
These little children knew each other
before
but the little boy got left somewhere.
She can feel his heart
still beating,
connected to her heart
by a golden thread.
And so she goes to find him
but he can only visit her
in dreams
so she dreams with him
until he wakes up.
She had been a dream of his own
for the whole long time
he'd been orbiting the black hole of death.
He woke up for the first time
in ten years
and was himself again.
- -
The Amber Peach Child
Once upon a time, a little boy and a little girl met and were created in dreams. They were spirits of the dream world -- little embodiments of its essence.
As such, they were invisible. But, because they were both of the same stuff, they could see each other and the glowing light held inside each of their chests. The little boy and girl were siblings -- kindred -- and they loved each other very much. They told each other stories, and when they laid together, this is what they felt:
stage I
Closing eyes leads to
thoughts, visions
of pink clouds swirling mysteriously
like Japanese wallpaper.
This nebulous form is dotted
with a uniform panoply of gold flecks,
a frail shell
which contains and controls the pale dream
as it spins silently
through black velvet space-
a capsule unto itself.
stage II
We are lying
I hold your hand
both eyes are closed
but we talk
and I think that we are traveling;
the small of your back arches gently.
stage III
You are here, on my planet
and around us, the air is humming.
- - - -
But something happened to the dreamworld. It was wrenched and sundered (the tower) and they were torn apart. The little boy got left in the dreaming, while the little girl awoke to find herself in the body of a human. she was very confused as to how she got there and missed the boy and the dreamworld very much.
But she adapted. She found other people who had been torn from the dreamworld and put in human bodies. Eventually she began to realize that most people had been born there, like she.
Eventually she forgot about the little boy -- but she was nonetheless aware that there was something missing, something wrong.
People couldn't see her. They could see her body, sure, and they could see the things she had conditioned it to do. Some people were very impressed by how she'd trained it -- they were amazed by the breadth and depth of her skill for self-cultivation.
But nobody saw her -- they saw the contours and motions of the living flesh that she controlled, but not her, the puppeteer. she was a spark and a force, not a living human body.
- -
Then, one day, another pair of eyes found her. They looked through her body -- into her -- and fixed on her. She froze. What was happening to her? She'd waited for so long to be seen again, but now that it was happening, she was scared. Every time she looked back, she felt her gaze being captured and drawn within the other body in front of her.
Those eyes connected straight back to the dreamworld.
The girl realized this in a rush that terrified and enlivened her. The force behind these eyes -- the spirit -- was still in the dreaming.
The girl became drawn to these eyes -- magnetized. She needed to see what they led to, but the force and power contained within that place were so raw that she was unable to maintain her gaze -- every time she caught a glimpse of it she had to turn away. But how she had to look…
- -
Eventually, the girl became accustomed to staring into the heart of the dreamworld. She began to be able to look for longer, to slowly pick out murky forms. She kept looking, and as she did, she noticed her heart began to change itself -- it began to glow.
The girl remembered this. She knew she must be getting close. There was something in this place -- some spirit -- that was connected to her own. This spirit was meandering, aimless, but alive and so very present. Slowly, the girl began to feel it watching her.
The glow around her heart was getting more and more intense. As time went on, the girl began to feel the glow taking form, unspooling from her chest to create a line extending from the front of her. This tendril soon unwound farther than she could see.
The girl chose to follow it.
She took a step further -- finally, she moved.
She was fully in the dreaming now.
The girl allowed the thread to lead her like Daedalus. She was in an utterly new place, but did not feel disoriented or scared. She had the golden thread to guide her -- and so she began to feel comfortable where she was. She began to remember how it felt to walk in dreams.
- -
Eventually she will see him.
What will happen then?
Will it be like seeing the sun and becoming the world, as in tarot?
Will they both die?
Will she return to the dreamworld?
Will he come to the physical world?
Or, will she eventually leave him, having to return to her body and, upon waking, leave him back where he was?
Or, will he wake up? He will wake up and be himself, aware and alive. And she will have been his dream.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Musings on Kiki Smith / Night at the Batcave (poem)
The ever-present old woman
The glass glitter
The delicately painted mirrors
The feeling of old, white cotton linen
and quiet sunlight in the attic.
A room of one’s own
The space between inhaling and exhaling
The darkness at the bottom of the spaces
between blades of grass
The contained expansiveness of a dandelion.
Space,
mute and white.
The smell of the porch at night
The sound of staring straight into the darkness,
and not being able to see anything
The feeling of taking a trip to nowhere
with the person you love.
Looking up at the milky way at night
Looking up at the moon
The feeling of space
and of looking—
the feeling of experiencing the self
within a context.
/
When the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by nature, we are
happy, and feel like giants;
the space
within us
grows.
But when the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by man or his materials,
we feel terrible, like ants; we are discomfited
and forced to feel
the confines of our fleshly bodies, of
our faces.
We submit to recognition
in the grasp of human hands; we cannot
circumvent the obligations that our common humanity binds us to
when in the presence of our own kind:
We feel small.
:
But I love the greatness of the clouds.
I love the grass that wraps my calves
like a stocking.
I love that I crept, knock-kneed and uptight, into the Gowanus, led, precarious, by expert night crawlers,
over the most sloping and rusted lean-to fences, and scrambled,
scrambled slipshod in the dark grass,
with wind
rushing and sticky arms waving,
to rest at the foot of my favorite building,
the monolith, beautiful
and resplendent in the faint starlight.
We watched raccoons and bats shuffle and flap
fleet-foot and leather-winged
in their nocturnal dance under that purple sky,
all stretched out in the haunted gloom
of the structure’s moon-
wrought shadow and gutted
windows like empty eyes.
Our every shiver in that weirdly consecrated place
was ordained by the crisply painted, revelation-
seeking banner
that crowned the brow of the beast,
that shouted into the darkness:
“OPEN YOUR EYE GIRL.”
Our singular movements across that concrete veldt
were all brought into being,
our skins all wriggled
and our brains all turned
in the way they did
because that order hung above our heads.
:
We settled into the night like deer
that tramp listless circles into the high grasses
to create their chosen torpid nests;
mosquitoes
hummed lazily around us as we sipped our stolen beers
and waited, growing dimmer and stumbly,
for something to happen.
And imperceptibly, it did.The stars shifted overhead
and the dimly glowing hands of the Fulton Clocktower
lazily circled the hours on its invisible face, carving
time out of the blackness
like two small trails of dark blood
swirling in a slow and shallow drain.
Various thuds passed in the night;
we felt as though we were being watched
by all manner of creatures, and more
than once caught looks from a pair of shyly glowing,
close-set eyes
that peered, humble and inquisitive,
from the bushes that sprang
(dark fireworks)
from of the cracks in that abandoned lot.
The only way into the towering structure, full
of holes and trick boards
like loose teeth in the vast and damply shifting floor,
is to scale a wall, catlike and fearless,
until you reach the lone, creaky fire escape
that is to be swung onto
as if it were the bow
of the boat to your salvation
(it is).
:
During the day I am told
the light filters through the blackeye windows
honeygold like pure laughter,
and illuminates the traps and dead zones in the toothless floor.
The light, always filtered through a smoky screen
of luminescence, moted,
and filled with the tranquility of a dead and silent space, alights
on what parts of the walls it can touch, revealing
the forgotten art
that dwells there
in the same way an overheard whisper reveals lovers.
The sheer emptiness of this space,
its ultimate abandonment,
makes the dusty vacuousness that you find there more truly intimate than a
kiss.
Its silence envelops you in a totality
so solid and musty, so clearly unadulterated
that in your solitude you are more surrounded
than you have ever been before.
The surety of yourself, and only yourself, in that place, is a warmth unbroken by all time
and that embraces the entire space of your being.
You cannot think of anything else but the fact
that you are completely alone there,
and that it is truly only you,
for as long as you wish.
You bathe in this silence, luxuriate
in the way it muffles everything
but a resounding impression of your own wholeness.
:
But the infinite quietness is not the deepest phenomenon of that hollow place—after having stood transfixed for an entire day
and slowly losing your sight,
the expansive
perception you have gained from so deeply excavating yourself
within that hallowed space allows you to hear,
with unmitigated clarity,
the tiny sounds of the silent house—you notice
that there is a moth nearby, fluttering
a muted waltz outside the window.
Later you realize, almost impossibly, that it has left
and gone somewhere else.
You hear the minikin squeaks of the sweeping bats as they echolocate, laughing
as you come to realize that the gloom is just as inconceivable
to them as it is to you.
You laugh, and as you do you come alive, and bring with you
that dead space. The whole house rings
with your joyous, triumphant laughter, and the silence is so shocked in its departure
that your tiny laugh, writ so large across the fleeing back if what that space once was, shakes some plaster from the wall.
:
Your laughter shakes up the still summer night—the bats flurry
out around the old, broken windows
and begin feasting on moths and spiders that they would never have caught had you not come there.
The raccoons sit upright in their bosky bowers, shaking off their usual, sleepy affectation
to be momentarily transformed into lean and stalwart sentinels.
Sooty, swaybacked meerkats,
they appear to be heralding the dawn
and for an instant the disparate and wily tribe, scattered
throughout the empty lot and Brooklyn,
is united in their alertness.
The katydids and other clickhumming
night beetles quit
their buzzing as your laughter rolls across their antennae
in a singular, momentous signal
to their robotic brains.
The feral cats that had come to war
with the masked and bandit-like raccoons
in a territorial dispute
lope
away into the distance,
whiskers twitching and backs arched;
they can sense the mood is wrong for a fight this evening.
:
Even the slimy fish
resting at the farthest reaches of the murky canal
are wrested from their slow, cold-blooded delirium.
Your laugh has caught the breeze, and ripples the surface of the water, tinkling merrily
upon the crests of the convex, crested ridges
and circles it creates, and spiraling
down to the silted brown bottom, echoes
in a muffled cascade through the green water:
your laugh, the dispersing
eidolon of its selfsame source,
has gained entry to the stygian depths through the small portal created
by a rising pocket of gaseous levity,
the canal’s bubbly response to your genuine display.
And so the fish stir too, wending
their way among the fragments of broken fruit crates
and rusted anchor chains
that line the muddy, clouded bottom,
smiling slightly as their cold eyes and algae-bearded lips
light up
for the first time since winter’s stilling caress rocked them
resting,
to the bottom,
to sleep.
:
The whole night, quiet but already living, is woken up
by the ghost
of your gentle laugh in the toothless, eyeless, gutless building;
by the recognition that even in total solitude there is
a superabundance of life, perfect
and intricate in all its forms.
As you laugh, you nearly begin to weep—
you have never been to such a beautiful place,
and the cells in your heart feel this, and begin
to resonate with the quiet frequencies of all the secretly living things there.
And your heart beats
newly,
like it never has before:
your chest is filled with the warm
and solid spaciousness
of the man-made building
that has become a precious,
organic cavern.
The glass glitter
The delicately painted mirrors
The feeling of old, white cotton linen
and quiet sunlight in the attic.
A room of one’s own
The space between inhaling and exhaling
The darkness at the bottom of the spaces
between blades of grass
The contained expansiveness of a dandelion.
Space,
mute and white.
The smell of the porch at night
The sound of staring straight into the darkness,
and not being able to see anything
The feeling of taking a trip to nowhere
with the person you love.
Looking up at the milky way at night
Looking up at the moon
The feeling of space
and of looking—
the feeling of experiencing the self
within a context.
/
When the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by nature, we are
happy, and feel like giants;
the space
within us
grows.
But when the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by man or his materials,
we feel terrible, like ants; we are discomfited
and forced to feel
the confines of our fleshly bodies, of
our faces.
We submit to recognition
in the grasp of human hands; we cannot
circumvent the obligations that our common humanity binds us to
when in the presence of our own kind:
We feel small.
:
But I love the greatness of the clouds.
I love the grass that wraps my calves
like a stocking.
I love that I crept, knock-kneed and uptight, into the Gowanus, led, precarious, by expert night crawlers,
over the most sloping and rusted lean-to fences, and scrambled,
scrambled slipshod in the dark grass,
with wind
rushing and sticky arms waving,
to rest at the foot of my favorite building,
the monolith, beautiful
and resplendent in the faint starlight.
We watched raccoons and bats shuffle and flap
fleet-foot and leather-winged
in their nocturnal dance under that purple sky,
all stretched out in the haunted gloom
of the structure’s moon-
wrought shadow and gutted
windows like empty eyes.
Our every shiver in that weirdly consecrated place
was ordained by the crisply painted, revelation-
seeking banner
that crowned the brow of the beast,
that shouted into the darkness:
“OPEN YOUR EYE GIRL.”
Our singular movements across that concrete veldt
were all brought into being,
our skins all wriggled
and our brains all turned
in the way they did
because that order hung above our heads.
:
We settled into the night like deer
that tramp listless circles into the high grasses
to create their chosen torpid nests;
mosquitoes
hummed lazily around us as we sipped our stolen beers
and waited, growing dimmer and stumbly,
for something to happen.
And imperceptibly, it did.The stars shifted overhead
and the dimly glowing hands of the Fulton Clocktower
lazily circled the hours on its invisible face, carving
time out of the blackness
like two small trails of dark blood
swirling in a slow and shallow drain.
Various thuds passed in the night;
we felt as though we were being watched
by all manner of creatures, and more
than once caught looks from a pair of shyly glowing,
close-set eyes
that peered, humble and inquisitive,
from the bushes that sprang
(dark fireworks)
from of the cracks in that abandoned lot.
The only way into the towering structure, full
of holes and trick boards
like loose teeth in the vast and damply shifting floor,
is to scale a wall, catlike and fearless,
until you reach the lone, creaky fire escape
that is to be swung onto
as if it were the bow
of the boat to your salvation
(it is).
:
During the day I am told
the light filters through the blackeye windows
honeygold like pure laughter,
and illuminates the traps and dead zones in the toothless floor.
The light, always filtered through a smoky screen
of luminescence, moted,
and filled with the tranquility of a dead and silent space, alights
on what parts of the walls it can touch, revealing
the forgotten art
that dwells there
in the same way an overheard whisper reveals lovers.
The sheer emptiness of this space,
its ultimate abandonment,
makes the dusty vacuousness that you find there more truly intimate than a
kiss.
Its silence envelops you in a totality
so solid and musty, so clearly unadulterated
that in your solitude you are more surrounded
than you have ever been before.
The surety of yourself, and only yourself, in that place, is a warmth unbroken by all time
and that embraces the entire space of your being.
You cannot think of anything else but the fact
that you are completely alone there,
and that it is truly only you,
for as long as you wish.
You bathe in this silence, luxuriate
in the way it muffles everything
but a resounding impression of your own wholeness.
:
But the infinite quietness is not the deepest phenomenon of that hollow place—after having stood transfixed for an entire day
and slowly losing your sight,
the expansive
perception you have gained from so deeply excavating yourself
within that hallowed space allows you to hear,
with unmitigated clarity,
the tiny sounds of the silent house—you notice
that there is a moth nearby, fluttering
a muted waltz outside the window.
Later you realize, almost impossibly, that it has left
and gone somewhere else.
You hear the minikin squeaks of the sweeping bats as they echolocate, laughing
as you come to realize that the gloom is just as inconceivable
to them as it is to you.
You laugh, and as you do you come alive, and bring with you
that dead space. The whole house rings
with your joyous, triumphant laughter, and the silence is so shocked in its departure
that your tiny laugh, writ so large across the fleeing back if what that space once was, shakes some plaster from the wall.
:
Your laughter shakes up the still summer night—the bats flurry
out around the old, broken windows
and begin feasting on moths and spiders that they would never have caught had you not come there.
The raccoons sit upright in their bosky bowers, shaking off their usual, sleepy affectation
to be momentarily transformed into lean and stalwart sentinels.
Sooty, swaybacked meerkats,
they appear to be heralding the dawn
and for an instant the disparate and wily tribe, scattered
throughout the empty lot and Brooklyn,
is united in their alertness.
The katydids and other clickhumming
night beetles quit
their buzzing as your laughter rolls across their antennae
in a singular, momentous signal
to their robotic brains.
The feral cats that had come to war
with the masked and bandit-like raccoons
in a territorial dispute
lope
away into the distance,
whiskers twitching and backs arched;
they can sense the mood is wrong for a fight this evening.
:
Even the slimy fish
resting at the farthest reaches of the murky canal
are wrested from their slow, cold-blooded delirium.
Your laugh has caught the breeze, and ripples the surface of the water, tinkling merrily
upon the crests of the convex, crested ridges
and circles it creates, and spiraling
down to the silted brown bottom, echoes
in a muffled cascade through the green water:
your laugh, the dispersing
eidolon of its selfsame source,
has gained entry to the stygian depths through the small portal created
by a rising pocket of gaseous levity,
the canal’s bubbly response to your genuine display.
And so the fish stir too, wending
their way among the fragments of broken fruit crates
and rusted anchor chains
that line the muddy, clouded bottom,
smiling slightly as their cold eyes and algae-bearded lips
light up
for the first time since winter’s stilling caress rocked them
resting,
to the bottom,
to sleep.
:
The whole night, quiet but already living, is woken up
by the ghost
of your gentle laugh in the toothless, eyeless, gutless building;
by the recognition that even in total solitude there is
a superabundance of life, perfect
and intricate in all its forms.
As you laugh, you nearly begin to weep—
you have never been to such a beautiful place,
and the cells in your heart feel this, and begin
to resonate with the quiet frequencies of all the secretly living things there.
And your heart beats
newly,
like it never has before:
your chest is filled with the warm
and solid spaciousness
of the man-made building
that has become a precious,
organic cavern.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Musings on Kiki Smith / Night at the Batcave
The ever-present old woman
The glass glitter
The delicately painted mirrors
The feeling of old, white linen
and quiet sunlight in the attic.
A room of one’s own
The space between inhaling and exhaling
The darkness at the bottom of the spaces
between blades of grass
The contained expansiveness of a dandelion.
Space,
mute and white.
The smell of the porch at night
The sound of staring straight into the darkness,
and not being able to see anything
The feeling of taking a trip to nowhere
with the person you love.
Looking up at the milky way at night
Looking up at the moon
The feeling of space
and of looking—
the feeling of experiencing the self
within a context.
/
When the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by nature, we are
happy, and feel like giants;
the space
within us
grows.
But when the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by man or his materials,
we feel terrible, like ants; we are discomfited
and forced to feel
the confines of our fleshly bodies, of
our faces.
We submit to recognition
in the grasp of human hands; we cannot
circumvent the obligations that our common humanity binds us to
when in the presence of our own kind:
We feel small.
I love the greatness of the clouds. I love the grass that I currently wrap myself in. I love that last night I crept, knock-kneed and uptight into the Gowanus, led precarious by expert night crawlers over the most broken corrugated and rusted lean-to fences, and scrambled, scrambled slipshod in the dark grass, with wind rushing and sticky arms waving, to rest at the foot of my favorite building, the monolith, beautiful and resplendent in the faint starlight. We watched raccoons and bats shuffle and flap fleet-foot and leather-winged in their nocturnal dance under that purple sky, resting in the haunted gloom of the structure’s moon-wrought shadow and gutted windows like empty eyes. Our every shiver in that weirdly consecrated place was ordained by the crisply painted, imposing banner that crowned the brow of the beast, that shouted into the darkness: “OPEN YOUR EYE GIRL.” Our singular movements across that concrete veldt were all brought into being, our skins all wriggled and our brains all turned in the way they did because that order hung above our heads.
We settled into the night like deer that tramp listless circles into the high grasses to create their chosen torpid nests; mosquitoes hummed lazily around us as we sipped our stolen beers and waited, growing dimmer and stumbly, for something to happen. And imperceptibly, it did. The stars shifted overhead and the dimly glowing hands of the Fulton Clocktower lazily circled the hours on its invisible face, carving time out of the blackness like two small trails of dark blood swirling in a slow and shallow drain. Various thuds passed in the night; we felt as though we were being watched by all manner of creatures, and more than once caught looks from a pair of shyly glowing, close-set eyes that peered, humble and inquisitive, from the bushes that sprang out of the cracks in that abandoned lot. The only way into the towering structure, full of holes and trick boards like loose teeth in the vast and damply shifting floor, is to scale a wall, catlike and fearless, until you reach the lone, creaky fire escape that is to be swung onto as if it were the bow of the boat to your salvation (it is).
During the day I am told the light filters through the blackeye windows honey-gold like pure laughter, and illuminates the traps and dead zones in the toothless floor. The light, always filtered through a smoky screen of luminescence, moted, and filled with the tranquility of a dead and silent space, alights on what parts of the walls it can touch, revealing the forgotten art that dwells there the same way an overheard whisper reveals lovers. The sheer emptiness of this space, its ultimate abandonment, makes the dusty vacuousness that you find there more truly intimate than a kiss. Its silence envelops you in a totality so solid and musty, so clearly unadulterated that in your solitude you are more surrounded than you have ever been before. The surety of yourself, and only yourself, in that place, is a warmth unbroken by all time and that embraces the entire space of your being. You cannot think of anything else but the fact that you are completely alone there, and that it is truly only you, for as long as you wish. You bathe in this silence, luxuriate in the way it muffles everything but a resounding impression of your own wholeness.
But the infinite quietness is not the deepest phenomenon of that hollow place—you have stood transfixed for an entire day, and the loss of your sight, combined with the deepened attention you have gained from so deeply excavating yourself in that hallowed space, allows you to hear, with unmitigated clarity, the tiny sounds of the silent house—you notice that there is a moth nearby, fluttering a muted waltz outside the window. Later you realize, almost impossibly, that it has left and gone somewhere else. You hear the minikin squeaks of the sweeping bats as they echolocate, laughing as you come to realize that the gloom is just as inconceivable to them as it is to you. You laugh, and as you do you come alive, and bring with you that dead space. The whole house rings with your joyous, triumphant laughter, and the silence is so shocked in its departure that the momentum it gains from your tiny laugh, writ so large across the fleeing back of what that space once was, shakes some plaster from the wall.
Your laughter shakes up the still summer night—the bats flurry out around the old, broken windows and begin feasting on moths and spiders that they would never have caught had you not come there. The raccoons sit upright in their bosky bowers, shaking off their usual, sleepy affectation to be momentarily transformed into lean and stalwart sentinels. They become meerkats for a moment, and appear to be heralding the dawn; for an instant the disparate and wily tribe, scattered throughout the empty lot and Brooklyn, is united in their alertness. The katydids and other clickhumming night beetles quit their buzzing as your laughter rolls across their antennae in a singular, momentous signal to their robotic brains. The feral cats that had come to war with the masked and bandit-like raccoons in a territorial dispute lope away into the distance, whiskers twitching and backs arched; they can sense the mood is wrong for a fight this evening.
Even the slimy fish resting at the farthest reaches of the murky canal are wrested from their slow, cold-blooded delirium. Your laugh has caught the breeze and ripples the surface of the water, tinkling merrily upon the crests of the convex, crested ridges and circles it creates and spiraling down to the silted brown bottom, echoing in a muffled cascade through the green water: it has gained entry to the stygian depths through the small portal that was created by a rising pocket of gaseous levity, the canal’s bubbly response to your genuine display. And so the fish stir too, wending their way among the fragments of broken fruit crates and rusted anchor chains that line the muddy, silty bottom, smiling slightly as their cold eyes and algae-bearded lips light up for the first time since winter’s stilling caress rocked them resting, to the bottom, to sleep.
The whole night, quiet but already living, is woken up by your gentle laugh in this toothless, eyeless, gutless building; by the recognition that even in total solitude there is a superabundance of life, perfect and intricate in all its forms. As you laugh, you nearly begin to weep—you have never been to such a beautiful place, and the cells in your heart feel this, and begin to resonate with the quiet frequencies of all the secretly living things there, and your heart beats newly, like it never has before: your chest is filled with the warm and solid spaciousness of the man-made building that has become a precious, organic cavern.
-----------
this is going to become a really long poem.
The glass glitter
The delicately painted mirrors
The feeling of old, white linen
and quiet sunlight in the attic.
A room of one’s own
The space between inhaling and exhaling
The darkness at the bottom of the spaces
between blades of grass
The contained expansiveness of a dandelion.
Space,
mute and white.
The smell of the porch at night
The sound of staring straight into the darkness,
and not being able to see anything
The feeling of taking a trip to nowhere
with the person you love.
Looking up at the milky way at night
Looking up at the moon
The feeling of space
and of looking—
the feeling of experiencing the self
within a context.
/
When the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by nature, we are
happy, and feel like giants;
the space
within us
grows.
But when the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by man or his materials,
we feel terrible, like ants; we are discomfited
and forced to feel
the confines of our fleshly bodies, of
our faces.
We submit to recognition
in the grasp of human hands; we cannot
circumvent the obligations that our common humanity binds us to
when in the presence of our own kind:
We feel small.
I love the greatness of the clouds. I love the grass that I currently wrap myself in. I love that last night I crept, knock-kneed and uptight into the Gowanus, led precarious by expert night crawlers over the most broken corrugated and rusted lean-to fences, and scrambled, scrambled slipshod in the dark grass, with wind rushing and sticky arms waving, to rest at the foot of my favorite building, the monolith, beautiful and resplendent in the faint starlight. We watched raccoons and bats shuffle and flap fleet-foot and leather-winged in their nocturnal dance under that purple sky, resting in the haunted gloom of the structure’s moon-wrought shadow and gutted windows like empty eyes. Our every shiver in that weirdly consecrated place was ordained by the crisply painted, imposing banner that crowned the brow of the beast, that shouted into the darkness: “OPEN YOUR EYE GIRL.” Our singular movements across that concrete veldt were all brought into being, our skins all wriggled and our brains all turned in the way they did because that order hung above our heads.
We settled into the night like deer that tramp listless circles into the high grasses to create their chosen torpid nests; mosquitoes hummed lazily around us as we sipped our stolen beers and waited, growing dimmer and stumbly, for something to happen. And imperceptibly, it did. The stars shifted overhead and the dimly glowing hands of the Fulton Clocktower lazily circled the hours on its invisible face, carving time out of the blackness like two small trails of dark blood swirling in a slow and shallow drain. Various thuds passed in the night; we felt as though we were being watched by all manner of creatures, and more than once caught looks from a pair of shyly glowing, close-set eyes that peered, humble and inquisitive, from the bushes that sprang out of the cracks in that abandoned lot. The only way into the towering structure, full of holes and trick boards like loose teeth in the vast and damply shifting floor, is to scale a wall, catlike and fearless, until you reach the lone, creaky fire escape that is to be swung onto as if it were the bow of the boat to your salvation (it is).
During the day I am told the light filters through the blackeye windows honey-gold like pure laughter, and illuminates the traps and dead zones in the toothless floor. The light, always filtered through a smoky screen of luminescence, moted, and filled with the tranquility of a dead and silent space, alights on what parts of the walls it can touch, revealing the forgotten art that dwells there the same way an overheard whisper reveals lovers. The sheer emptiness of this space, its ultimate abandonment, makes the dusty vacuousness that you find there more truly intimate than a kiss. Its silence envelops you in a totality so solid and musty, so clearly unadulterated that in your solitude you are more surrounded than you have ever been before. The surety of yourself, and only yourself, in that place, is a warmth unbroken by all time and that embraces the entire space of your being. You cannot think of anything else but the fact that you are completely alone there, and that it is truly only you, for as long as you wish. You bathe in this silence, luxuriate in the way it muffles everything but a resounding impression of your own wholeness.
But the infinite quietness is not the deepest phenomenon of that hollow place—you have stood transfixed for an entire day, and the loss of your sight, combined with the deepened attention you have gained from so deeply excavating yourself in that hallowed space, allows you to hear, with unmitigated clarity, the tiny sounds of the silent house—you notice that there is a moth nearby, fluttering a muted waltz outside the window. Later you realize, almost impossibly, that it has left and gone somewhere else. You hear the minikin squeaks of the sweeping bats as they echolocate, laughing as you come to realize that the gloom is just as inconceivable to them as it is to you. You laugh, and as you do you come alive, and bring with you that dead space. The whole house rings with your joyous, triumphant laughter, and the silence is so shocked in its departure that the momentum it gains from your tiny laugh, writ so large across the fleeing back of what that space once was, shakes some plaster from the wall.
Your laughter shakes up the still summer night—the bats flurry out around the old, broken windows and begin feasting on moths and spiders that they would never have caught had you not come there. The raccoons sit upright in their bosky bowers, shaking off their usual, sleepy affectation to be momentarily transformed into lean and stalwart sentinels. They become meerkats for a moment, and appear to be heralding the dawn; for an instant the disparate and wily tribe, scattered throughout the empty lot and Brooklyn, is united in their alertness. The katydids and other clickhumming night beetles quit their buzzing as your laughter rolls across their antennae in a singular, momentous signal to their robotic brains. The feral cats that had come to war with the masked and bandit-like raccoons in a territorial dispute lope away into the distance, whiskers twitching and backs arched; they can sense the mood is wrong for a fight this evening.
Even the slimy fish resting at the farthest reaches of the murky canal are wrested from their slow, cold-blooded delirium. Your laugh has caught the breeze and ripples the surface of the water, tinkling merrily upon the crests of the convex, crested ridges and circles it creates and spiraling down to the silted brown bottom, echoing in a muffled cascade through the green water: it has gained entry to the stygian depths through the small portal that was created by a rising pocket of gaseous levity, the canal’s bubbly response to your genuine display. And so the fish stir too, wending their way among the fragments of broken fruit crates and rusted anchor chains that line the muddy, silty bottom, smiling slightly as their cold eyes and algae-bearded lips light up for the first time since winter’s stilling caress rocked them resting, to the bottom, to sleep.
The whole night, quiet but already living, is woken up by your gentle laugh in this toothless, eyeless, gutless building; by the recognition that even in total solitude there is a superabundance of life, perfect and intricate in all its forms. As you laugh, you nearly begin to weep—you have never been to such a beautiful place, and the cells in your heart feel this, and begin to resonate with the quiet frequencies of all the secretly living things there, and your heart beats newly, like it never has before: your chest is filled with the warm and solid spaciousness of the man-made building that has become a precious, organic cavern.
-----------
this is going to become a really long poem.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Visions
There was just a lot of white stuff. No vision, just whiteness. I don't really remember anything except a booming voice. It was like being born. Or maybe dying. I don't know really, it's not like I'd be able to remember either of them. But the voice: it was getting hard to ignore.
"'God' is just what is true: physics, numbers, time. Wavelengths and vibrations. Resonance. We have forgotten our prophets -- we rename them philosophers in order to strip away the old religious connotations that would otherwise continue an order of consciousness that is currently becoming ineffective. It is the job of the philosopher, the prophet, to translate the truth of the universe, these patterns, into a code that can be understood by the maximum populous. The time has come to re-write the code: because the- rather, we inhabitants of the modern West are no longer competently literate in the old code, the ancient, mystical, 'religious' symbols have lost their integrity within society. Presently they will lose their meaning. Unfortunately, with the understanding of the universe provided by such knowledge will go any semblance of contact between individuals and their internal vibrations (instinct and essence). If such a thing were to happen a very large cosmic shift would be inevitable. I doubt it would be very much in our favor."
"But!" I felt myself crying. I don't know why I was doing it, I didn't want to. I hadn't been listening very much to what he was saying. But there my mouth went again: "But fortunately humans aren't... aren't incompetent! We're biologically destined, we've been crafted by time to succeed!"
Slowly, a man walked out of the void. Or maybe he materialized a little bit first, in a stationary position, and then walked. He looked kinda like John Malkovich and from then on I couldn't think of him as anyone else. He was impeccably dressed in a black turtleneck and slacks. His shoes and bald head gleamed, and he laid a hand on my left shoulder. I thought this was a kind gesture, attempting to calm me in such a confusing environment. His aura would have been purple if he'd had one, but don't ask me how I know that. I guess I just associate that color with nice things, like my mother. Lilacs were always her favorite flower.
In the midst of this kinda reverie I was struck with the curious sensation that I ought to listen to him, so I did, and then he opened his mouth and started speaking.
"Against alien environments- we can succeed against alien beings. But no, no, not E.T. -- I felt you thinking that. No. Just against the outer, separate things that the brain is capable of conceptualizing, replicating, thus destroying. But man can never truly conceptualize himself until he has become selfless. Ego gets in the way. We keep who we are on the most real level a mystery so as not to be thrown into despair by what we are- do you see the problem? And even if we were, deep down, resplendent, have you yet met a man who can see his own face, who can truly get outside himself? You see, everything must have a yang, Ricky."
I knew John was speaking. I could see his mouth moving. But the words seemed to be being rerouted within the atmosphere- I had a horrifyingly distinct sense that he was both behind and in front of me at the same time. There was a slight metallic buzzing all around. This couldn't be real, and if it was I didn't want to believe he was telling the truth. He had to have been mistaken, thought I was someone else, addressed some other, inaudible question. The man hadn't known my name, I realized, and breathed a sigh of relief. The whole day, or hour, or five minutes or whatever, had been weird enough that I didn't really notice being addressed as Ricky, but now the name hung over my brain like a cool mist. John Malkovich had to be wrong. He had to be. He didn't even know who I was! I thought to myself that perhaps he was the other voice, that he had just been behind some kinda one-way mirror, and that maybe he just had messianic delusions, and we were really in this white room for a safe, routine reason. Maybe we were a part of a focus group and about to be provided with a new kind of food or an antidepressant or a pair of socks. That had to be it; otherwise, I wanted out.
There was a metallic sound, like a scraping or a slight shock, and I was filled with a feeling of déjà vu concerning being very grateful that the green grid which had previously been superimposed over my vision was finally gone. I was sure that nothing remotely like this this had ever happened before, but neither had anything that was currently entering my eye- and ear-holes. When the remembering feeling subsided, although everything still felt quite strange and I couldn't really see once more, I was filled with an irrevocable sense of pleasure, and slowly I sat down. It was nice to just see some plain white again. Although I like John Malkovich quite a bit and I really respect his work, it always makes me feel kind of nervous to be around famous people, like they're perpetually doing something right and I'm just some guy in the corner of the room who's taking up more space than anyone with his flappy elbows or something, so then I'm not quite anonymous but nobody really likes me either. It's like I feel as though they'd only wanna pay attention to me to complain or because I was close to someone who we all think is great, know what I mean?
A while later my analyst said that this was what's called a psychotic vision, but I remember feeling pretty calm the entire time. I'm not sure how much I trust my analyst most of the time but I'm pretty sure I get more than him, and he's an alright guy, so I can't say I mind the little extra company and attention every couple of weeks. And I feel like I can maintain my dignity when he tells me what to do, because at least he isn't a famous asshole like John Malkovich.
Friday, May 16, 2008
The Dream: a translation
I am on the side of the road -- suburban highway at night with banks swelling up, high, waves pierced with green grass and telephone poles. I am cowering there, in a circle of light, waiting for the action to come. And I see it -- run! The Jeep approaches, drawing nearer, wheels hissing serpentine on the wet tarmac, headlights muffled by some internal anguish. And I fled then, desperate to cross at that very moment when it seemed most imminent, driven by the horrible animal urge to- I collapsed on the opposite bank, chest heaving as I pushed my face further and further into the ground. My ears whistled and rang, echoing cries of an underworld that I had so narrowly escaped. And I lay there for a while, rested safe in the shadow of a pine bush -- safe out of the light, filling my nostrils with the grass.
And so I lay until, slowly, I rose, sensing something on the night wind. I looked across the yawning chasm of road to the faint and artificial sunspot which gleamed like limelight. Its clarity was marred by a dark figure who both shone and consumed all light, like obsidian. A black leopard. But then, o horrors -- it glanced at me and within its face I saw human eyes and then -- a human nose and mouth as well. And it began to stalk.
Quivering and frozen like a useless animal I shrank back into the hillside, desperately hoping to be enveloped as though some mystery lay beneath the dark earth. But there was only time, and dead things, and it seemed no magic could spare me from the beast. And then I remembered the bush -- muffling a scream, I dove behind it as the animal began its graceful ascent from tarmac to hill, my hill, and I realized with horrible astonishment that I was not behind the bush. I looked in all directions in terror -- the bush was suddenly to my left. But I could make out a figure behind the bush -- and in my confusion I slowly understood that it was I. But the beast ignored me, ignored the plain me, ignored the me that was out-of-hiding and exposed, and instead slowly crept up upon the form who was cowering like a hare there among the roots. And I closed my eyes, the silence unbearable, waiting hopelessly to die. But I did not! and slowly I saw it emerge. The man-leopard was no more; emerging from the bush were I, clearly enamored, wrapped in the arms of a man, an Indian, while his brother trailed close behind, almost brushing their backs with his long fingertips as the three strode, moving like ghosts. And the brother stared at me, finger crooked, and I knew he was beckoning for me to follow, to join my half-self and to join him, the half-brother. But I knew, from old stories, that this could not be so. She was not me, and they were not man but demons, come to drag an innocent soul down to hell in an attempt to light their world. They were the demon who is many, they were Legion, they were tricksters that preyed upon the human instincts to abstain from solitude, to move in packs, to trust. They were Legion: they were the tide that turned against you, jealous of all, jealous most specifically of the innocence.
So I did not go with them, but instead sat there, motionless, and watched their bodies fade into the mist as the sky grew slowly lighter.
Fín.
And so I lay until, slowly, I rose, sensing something on the night wind. I looked across the yawning chasm of road to the faint and artificial sunspot which gleamed like limelight. Its clarity was marred by a dark figure who both shone and consumed all light, like obsidian. A black leopard. But then, o horrors -- it glanced at me and within its face I saw human eyes and then -- a human nose and mouth as well. And it began to stalk.
Quivering and frozen like a useless animal I shrank back into the hillside, desperately hoping to be enveloped as though some mystery lay beneath the dark earth. But there was only time, and dead things, and it seemed no magic could spare me from the beast. And then I remembered the bush -- muffling a scream, I dove behind it as the animal began its graceful ascent from tarmac to hill, my hill, and I realized with horrible astonishment that I was not behind the bush. I looked in all directions in terror -- the bush was suddenly to my left. But I could make out a figure behind the bush -- and in my confusion I slowly understood that it was I. But the beast ignored me, ignored the plain me, ignored the me that was out-of-hiding and exposed, and instead slowly crept up upon the form who was cowering like a hare there among the roots. And I closed my eyes, the silence unbearable, waiting hopelessly to die. But I did not! and slowly I saw it emerge. The man-leopard was no more; emerging from the bush were I, clearly enamored, wrapped in the arms of a man, an Indian, while his brother trailed close behind, almost brushing their backs with his long fingertips as the three strode, moving like ghosts. And the brother stared at me, finger crooked, and I knew he was beckoning for me to follow, to join my half-self and to join him, the half-brother. But I knew, from old stories, that this could not be so. She was not me, and they were not man but demons, come to drag an innocent soul down to hell in an attempt to light their world. They were the demon who is many, they were Legion, they were tricksters that preyed upon the human instincts to abstain from solitude, to move in packs, to trust. They were Legion: they were the tide that turned against you, jealous of all, jealous most specifically of the innocence.
So I did not go with them, but instead sat there, motionless, and watched their bodies fade into the mist as the sky grew slowly lighter.
Fín.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
El Sueño
Estoy al lado del camino -- una carretera suburbana a noche con riberas hinchándose, alto, ondas perferaron para césped verde y astas telefónicas. Estoy encojado allí, en un circulo de la luz, esperando que la acción venir. Y verlo -- ¡corra! El Jeep acercame, más cercano, las ruedas silbando como serpientes en el asfaltado mojado, los faros amortiguados por alguna angustia interna. Y huí entonces, desesperado cruzar en que momento cuando pareció más inminente, conducido por el impulso horrible y animal a -- Desplomé en la ribera contrario, el pecho tirado como empujé mi cara aún más y más adentro del suelo. Mis orejas silbado y llamó, resonando con los gritos de un mundo abajo que había escapado tan por poco. Y me acosté allí un rato, descansé seguro a la sombra de un arbusto de pino -- seguro fuera de la luz, llenando mis narices con el césped.
Y así me acosté hasta que, lentamente, subí, presentiendo algo en el viento de la noche. Miré a través de la sima abierta del camino a la mancha solar débil y artificial que brilló como un candelero. Su claridad estuve estropeado por una figura oscura, que brillado y también consumido toda luz como la obsidiana. Un leopardo negro. Pero entonces, que horror -- miró a mí y dentro de su cara yo ví ojos humanos y entonces -- la nariz y la boca humanas también. Y comenzó a cazar al acecho.
Temblando y congelado como un animal inútil me encogí atrás en la ladera, desesperadamente esperando para ser envuelto como si algun misterio se acostó bajo la tierra oscura. Pero solo fue el tiempo, y cosas muertas, y pareció que ninguna magia me podría guardar de la bestia. Y entonces recordé al arbusto -- amortiguando un chillido, zambullé detrás de lo como el animal empezó su subida elegante del asfaltado a la colina, mi colina, y me di cuenta de con el asombro horrible que no estuve detrás del arbusto. Miré en todas direcciónes con terror -- el arbusto fue de repente a mi izquierda. Pero pude entender una figura detrás del arbusto -- y a mi confusión creciente comprendí que fui yo. Pero la bestia me ignoró, ignoró la mí llanura, la mí que no fui ocultado y fui expusó, y en lugar lentamente arrastrado arriba sobre la forma que se encogía como una liebre entre las raíces. Y cerré mis ojos, la silencia intolerable, esperando sin espera para el muerte. ¡Pero no hice! y lentamente lo ví surge. El hombre-leopardo no fue más; surgiendo del arbusto estuvieron yo, claramente enamorado, envuelté en los brazos de un hombre, un indio, mientras su hermano arrastró cierra atrás, casi cepillando nuestras espaldas con sus puntas de los dedos largos como el tres anduvieron a zancadas, moviendo como fantasmas. El hermano miró fijamente a mí, el dedo torcido, y supe que él atraía para mí seguir, unir con mi medio-ser y para encontrarlo, el hermanastro. Pero conocí, de las cuentas viejas, que no podría así. Ella no me fue, y ustedes no fueron hombres pero demonios, quién había venido para arrastrar un alma inocente hacia abajo al infierno en una tentativa para encender su mundo. Fueron el demonio quien es muchos, fueron Legión, fueron embusteros que atacaron sobre el instinto humano para abstenerse de la soledad, para mover en paquetes, para fiarse. Fueron la Legión: fueron la marea que giró contra usted, celoso de todo, celoso más específicamente de las sociedades armoniosas, los grupos comunales que nunca dominarán, nunca crearán dentro de sí mismo. Estuvieron celosos de la inocencia.
Así no fui con ellos pero en lugar me senté allí, sin movimiento, y miré sus cuerpos destiñiendo en la niebla como el cielo lentamente creció más ligero.
Fín.
Y así me acosté hasta que, lentamente, subí, presentiendo algo en el viento de la noche. Miré a través de la sima abierta del camino a la mancha solar débil y artificial que brilló como un candelero. Su claridad estuve estropeado por una figura oscura, que brillado y también consumido toda luz como la obsidiana. Un leopardo negro. Pero entonces, que horror -- miró a mí y dentro de su cara yo ví ojos humanos y entonces -- la nariz y la boca humanas también. Y comenzó a cazar al acecho.
Temblando y congelado como un animal inútil me encogí atrás en la ladera, desesperadamente esperando para ser envuelto como si algun misterio se acostó bajo la tierra oscura. Pero solo fue el tiempo, y cosas muertas, y pareció que ninguna magia me podría guardar de la bestia. Y entonces recordé al arbusto -- amortiguando un chillido, zambullé detrás de lo como el animal empezó su subida elegante del asfaltado a la colina, mi colina, y me di cuenta de con el asombro horrible que no estuve detrás del arbusto. Miré en todas direcciónes con terror -- el arbusto fue de repente a mi izquierda. Pero pude entender una figura detrás del arbusto -- y a mi confusión creciente comprendí que fui yo. Pero la bestia me ignoró, ignoró la mí llanura, la mí que no fui ocultado y fui expusó, y en lugar lentamente arrastrado arriba sobre la forma que se encogía como una liebre entre las raíces. Y cerré mis ojos, la silencia intolerable, esperando sin espera para el muerte. ¡Pero no hice! y lentamente lo ví surge. El hombre-leopardo no fue más; surgiendo del arbusto estuvieron yo, claramente enamorado, envuelté en los brazos de un hombre, un indio, mientras su hermano arrastró cierra atrás, casi cepillando nuestras espaldas con sus puntas de los dedos largos como el tres anduvieron a zancadas, moviendo como fantasmas. El hermano miró fijamente a mí, el dedo torcido, y supe que él atraía para mí seguir, unir con mi medio-ser y para encontrarlo, el hermanastro. Pero conocí, de las cuentas viejas, que no podría así. Ella no me fue, y ustedes no fueron hombres pero demonios, quién había venido para arrastrar un alma inocente hacia abajo al infierno en una tentativa para encender su mundo. Fueron el demonio quien es muchos, fueron Legión, fueron embusteros que atacaron sobre el instinto humano para abstenerse de la soledad, para mover en paquetes, para fiarse. Fueron la Legión: fueron la marea que giró contra usted, celoso de todo, celoso más específicamente de las sociedades armoniosas, los grupos comunales que nunca dominarán, nunca crearán dentro de sí mismo. Estuvieron celosos de la inocencia.
Así no fui con ellos pero en lugar me senté allí, sin movimiento, y miré sus cuerpos destiñiendo en la niebla como el cielo lentamente creció más ligero.
Fín.
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