FAMILY: A FICTION, PT. 1

2

            Quick to give up, or in, to description.  Sidelong glances, or enough periphery, and it’s known – they are there.  Are here.  Which is firstly what needs be established.  Shaggy in-turned male and self-consciously-nondescript-as-a-waged-war-within-herself – are here – whether explicitly denoted or not, for that is not what this story’s about.  And all of their children – as if we’re in shadows – near presences felt.

If the man were currently reading (he is reading now), and is sitting at his desk, surrounded by more words, words bound up to burst and licking the chops of their leafy lips, prepared to murmur and shout.  It seems to him.

And she would be (read “is”) pushing a broken body into limited stress-inducing motions purposed to loosen and tighten.  Laying on a mat on a floor watching women on a screen count and stretch and breathe, mimicking them with her own limbs and torso. Accentuating her “core,” strengthening her “self” for this losing battle.

The children are learning and eating, playing and working – whatever it is youth do to fend for themselves and their futures – their shadow-dance with age.

Unable to say it as is – the is too complete and far from attainable – in segments and particles, or a falsified whole from great distance.  Oh nature.  Oh being.  Because of the facts, we have to just enter, and being recursive it matters only slightly where or when – inception/conclusion are unrecognizable to a decentralized everywhere, connective and mobile.

Some are known by their doings, some by their fathers’ or mums’; others according to their works or the times.  Some hardly known of at all.  To speak of them is to personally encounter –  as if face-to-face – an intersubjectivity of optimal expressivity.

Or not.  Language gets carried away.  When we search for a meaning or some explanation is it not because we already believe it is there?  Something already imagined?  What remains is a tying together in  idealized systems like logic – building a case or crafting a theory, replete with supporting cast of regulatory theorems.  Which demonstrates little but our ability to make science out of anything.  Exercise in closing the systems.  While all remain open.

The rugged male shifts from his papers, given possibilities, which it turns out rhymes everything.  She teases her hair nonchalantly (she hopes) and attempts to forget her over-calculations by delving into them – representing them – externalizing image and textures.  Viewed askance not head-on, but in outlines and shades or peered at and through, as we’d envision a form from behind.  Anything to remove the scrutiny of mere appearance – incorporate more and defraggle illusions of skin.

She scribbles it onto used papers,  ready surfaces already marred, turning scarrings and blots into figures and wounds; while he accentuates the peculiar, alarmed by specifics and seeking connective similitude.  If a thought comes queer, he tattoos it with ink until it sounds available.

Both, in a way, finding commerce, a transaction with others engaging/avoiding themselves.  Feeling so like and unlike.  A pestilence of the species, er, human condition – overwhelming similarities of form with infinite intricacies of difference.  Everything related – never one without another – a closed system of incalculable possibilities.  They labor in.

Male smells sour in just a few days, not accustomed to shouldering public, perhaps what allows for his mess.  Adapting  to the threat of her attention, though in the absence of comprehension.  She allows him his comforts till they confront and offend.  Peaceable enough – this arrangement – and duly provocative:  they enhance and combine, stimulate and remind one another in a struggling intimacy – they love.  Not without precedents or fear, but they love.

And in their sleep, the gears will turn.

He writes off stuck places – the uncanny processes of dreams.

The children behave like loosely arranged magnets, at times slamming close, or sullenly repelled.  Usually vibrating, tensely, between.  The volatility of past and a future reacts in young bodies as now.

Viewed collectively – it’s an inter-&-co-dependent mechanism, sketchy and atomically diagrammed – similarly potent (at least potentially) in its splittings and pressures.

Live things best metaphor themselves.