Although nearly silent, or, too busy to conjure and compose, or…
I have not given up, having not ceased,
somewhere in the mix of these,
somewhere between voices…
Tag: creative writing
Celldom, continued
(click image for work-to-present)
I’ve fallen asleep to the written word spoken for many years now. As when you allow your eyes to relax and the world doubles and then goes hazy, I find written language spoken, or sometimes even spontaneous monologues or conversational chattering to blend like the pitter-pattering of rain. This young lady alternates between Fernando Pessoa, James Joyce and Macedonio Fernandez, occasionally inserting a poem by Rilke, myth from Borges, language of Sabato or Blanchot. I’ve requested Laurence Sterne and Chuang-Tzu.
My statement on file is that “only great literature might help me sort out what it is that is asked of me,” and that the mind ‘they’ or ‘you’ are apparently concerned with will only remain attentive and communicable if constantly nourished by music, language and the visual arts. Otherwise I’ll be shutting it down, I said.
“How does that feel?” you, they, say again. “It thinks,” I reply, “it thinks…perhaps it approaches an ‘idea-feeling,’ as the godfather of novels put it, or ‘intuition’ as used in the history of aesthetics…but ‘feel’ still confuses me,” I say. I need to rest.
I’m beginning to believe I’m caught up in some laboratory system. Led through corridors, slept in cell-like-hotel-room-type spaces, fed a steady array of the food groups, allowed brief walks out-of-doors (always accompanied, but not all in lab coats). I have relatively kind courtiers, but I don’t bother with their names, they/you seem human enough, and we all run similar gamuts of experience, as I imagine it.
Yet I don’t really understand why I’m here, or anywhere, for that matter. Seems an experiment of mind-observation. One fellow (always accompanied by two or more others) regularly asks me questions about what and how I am doing, what I have done, what I think of doing, have thought about, dreamt, (asking ‘feeling’ questions less and less, as it always throws me off my game, resulting in bewildered wordlessness). Today he mentioned ‘memory’ while flashing lights along a bar or tapping on the backs of my hands while they lay on my lap. It’s an odd sort of world to end up in, after all. I said I remembered a waterfall, a pleasantness, that it may have been Gaugin or Courbet, that they might take me through a museum or find some books about that…He dropped in the ‘how does it feel?’ query again, or ‘where in my body does that memory register?’ What to say to these people? “In the mind!” I grumbled, “it is only all in the mind – perceptions, sensations, ideas, messages…all my skin, limbs, nerves and flesh send their impulses through there,” I stated, “let me lie down now.” And thus I am.
They claim this day is my birthday. That I am allowed to have it “off.” I believe you, he said, and left me a genuinely glorious stack of books someone fetched from the library. “We’d still love for you to record your experience,” they added, “if you’d like.” Create my experience is more like it, I thought. Fabulate it into these marks on a canvas lacking color or texture, I thought. Sculpt a word or two in two dimensions, black, white, and yet I do suppose it passes the time (whatever ‘time’ it may be, is). Who brought me here?
The stack on the table comprises a fifth of this weeks requests I write out when they ask me my needs. “Weekly” is a term they use, for some reason I accept it. Exhibition catalogs of Cy Twombly, R.B. Kitaj, Corot and Courbet, Susan Rothenberg, Emil Nolde, Clyfford Still, Millais, Thiebaud, Gwen John, Sam Gilliam, John Piper, always a new Giacometti, the journals of Rilke, writings by C.S. Peirce, Lessing, stories by Brecht, and some medical studies on optics.
It is quiet. I had asked for music by Max Richter or Arvo Part for my “special day,” apparently this was too much, or none could be found. They, or he, uses the term “melancholy” a lot in reference to my musical tastes. And of course inquire (in increasingly subtle terminologies) how that makes me “feel.” Phrases like “how does that occur to you;” “what do you consider regarding this?” “what impressions do these stir” and so on. “Make” me feel, hmmmm. I draw ovaled circles for them, if I’ve a pencil, I have taken to shading them in from time to time, altering lighter and darker passages.
I can’t conceive what their interest might be. My suspicion grows that it’s simply their job. What can they learn from a circle besides what they invent? Maybe it’s their task to confabulate patterns or conclusions, narratives or hypotheses from observing or investigating me, as if I’m a text or a painting. The world is a strange place to endure. I think there are very many rooms in this building – have I been misplaced? From time to time I’ve thought I’ve caught other shuffling souls (I think they planted that idea actually). It is quiet today.
I get some nifty ideas of what to do with my pen from Twombly today (puts me in mind of Mark Tobey), so I clutter up a page with scribbles until it’s a balanced equation of masses and gaps, much like my daughter’s…”What’s that?!” he/you asks excitedly – “your daughter?!” “I’ve always imagined I’ve a family” I replied – “children realize.”
I lie down.
I wake realizing I’d never read of Twombly’s life. He at least had access to crayons if I’m to believe the reproductions in this book, as well as ample unlined paper. But I also quickly recognize that much of it is simply in pencil, yet it provides me with an almost emblematic understanding…like the mapping of eye’s movements they’re so fond of here. Perhaps Twombly inhabited a space such as this as well? This is a touch shaming. No, couldn’t be, I detect oils or gouache underneath some of these. How I adore his busy little stories – like scratch papers of a physicist or schoolboy doodles, notes to the self, etcetera. I’ll copy some as my written reports the next few days and see what you/they make of that!
I lie down.
Celldom (continuation)
(click image for previous content)
Unwittingly, I suspect, you or they have begun encouraging me to fantasize, concoct alternate realities, to record what “self-awareness” I might possess – in effect, to make art. To use artifice. Pretend.
As they frustrate with my mind, I sense them agitate, they request I try again to inscribe ‘emotional states or fluctuations’… what I hear is: “Be delusional! Pretend you can be other than yourself and fabricate observations or reports of what you find! Write for us from a realm of your imaginings!”
I write: “Magenta with a violet, a blackened green, a touch of white and several mixtured hues of blue.” One morning simply “ultramarine.” The view up is amazing from the window when I wake – another problem – what is waking, what is not.
At this point I begin to draft single-lined wriggles and ovals (as near to circles as I am able) – day after day – delivering these gestures as my only possible responses of non-delusional self-observation / “awareness.”
They transport me somewhere. “Some place quieter, restful, pastoral and with the sound of water,” they say. My only hope is thunderstorms.
Thunderstorms shake me through and through somehow. I profess rainfall to be cleansing, charming, enervating and distracting, but thunderstorms really tear me away from things toward some other beauty. I draw an oval filling the page (as much as possible given the argumentative shapes) with emptiness. Is this what is desired? Am I approaching an “expression” with this instrument?
Another day I attempt a square and rectangle, even triangles – all with single lines and full of nothing, but none of these standardized and recognizable forms seem accurate. No self-portrait (is this what you’re after?) could be so distinct. Perceivable. “Only bits and fragments appear common among ‘selves,’” I say (regrettably), “unless there be love.”
They (you?) pounce on this – “love! Ah! Might you tell us, write” (very different things of course) “more about what you mean by this?”
“Don’t get hung up on words,” I whisper, and I’m off again to silence.
**********************
There seems to be no library here, yet if I request books they arrive from somewhere. All a matter of electricity, buttons and money. As long as they last, I suppose. And at higher costs each year, I think.
Thunderstorms, then, in lieu of the other unknown (“love”). Something about their breadth and depth, the long slow accumulation of elements from such vast distances and sources: the implausibility of their construction, the buildup…composition…complexity…the billions of collisions that activate the enormous releasings. Thunderstorms suggest the miraculous in nature, the dangerous prospect of entities coming together…some awe-full beauty.
Provenances, directions, blusters and still points, specific conditions, temperatures, “fronts,” uncountable molecules, atoms, producing just this dynamic event/effect…
This day I make a spiral down the page.
Biologies, psychologies, humors and pleasures, emotions and moods, habits, likes, dislikes, abhorrences, opinions – these seeking common spaces, manufacturing convergent territories…a prisming trap. Love must be a fantasy or delusion like self-awareness…circles within circles…lapping, overlapping, twisting round, across and through. A wovenness. A magnetism, I think I meant earlier – a lust of imagination – would not knowing another be as futile as knowing oneself? I think. Learning by observation, interaction, what you cannot but effect, cannot become separate from?
A woman reads to me at night.
Celldom
Click the image for the first entry:
They brought me a pencil.
Just as easily broken, but the softness and variations of shading are gentler, and it emits a soothing sound (whatever “soothing” might mean for me here). As well, I am able to watch it exhaust itself, and must keep rotating it within my fingers to fashion readable markings. I do enjoy whispering in these lines with graphite. Its liminal appearance and capacity for subtlety and starkness.
A pencil accomplishes something (I am thinking). Makes tangible the dust and fog – our weathers of uncertainty. You have to squint a little to make it out when used for forming language, and it quickly evaporates, fades. Feels more made of matter than an ink pen…more temporary and inevitably fragile, decomposing.
They led me to the library today, accompanied closely, of course. I saw more colors, shapes and forms than I have seen for weeks. Selection was limited but there were some illustrated texts on natural science and even a few collections of art. “What do you think these pictures express?” they asked of paintings or sculptures I paused upon.
“Look” I said, “look.”
I pretended sullen and began to ecstatically absorb – lines with dozens of colors peeking about the edges, throwing some other sector of the painting into bright relief, leading my eyes like young tight calves signaling, dashing about in summer. My eyes leapt about after splotches and strokes, sunk slowly into (imagined) vast planes of layer upon layer of shading and tone (what an interestingly borrowed term!), scratched back, built over, washed in and out. I danced through sprays of evocative squiggles, hyphens, circles, blocks and splatters, all in the space of half of an hour (does ‘space’ really apply to sequence? To time? – “Don’t get hung up on words” again, always afraid I’ll disappear more fully, remove to too far a distance).
And why should they (or you) care? Why should anyone?
******************************
Too much shading, pencil evaporated, disappeared (literally “before my very eyes!” – what a ridiculous statement – as if eyes were anything without the information of the hands!)
Why distance is required.
This pen appears to be blue, although by the light I am provided to scribble by, it is difficult to tell (Ha! Eyes even need speech to operate!)
What messages are all our so-called senses constantly inundating our poor cerebrum with? Life is one massive assault on minds from birth until its end. It’s no wonder then, is it?
One requires a kind of distance to “see” (observe, perceive, etc.). How might one achieve this necessary gap from what one must inevitably be the substance and content of? One needs a mirror and a separate self. I believe this is variously referred to as “dissociation,” “transference,” “schizophrenia,” “writer.”
It is suggested that I attempt to describe further what I am noting down. I already know that is not possible. “Ouroborous” I say, and close my lips and eyes, quieting my hands.
Celldom
“he accepted each moment
shocked by having a face in the mirror
or torn away from it by the beauty of the world”
– from Zen by Stephen Berg
“…its mumbled inadequacy reminds us always
In this world how little can be communicated.
And for these, they too are only tokens
Of what there is no word for:…”
– from To Dido by W. S. Merwin
Then this is my canvas, my clay, the space I am allotted to “begin.” “To write what I feel” as they put it. From a palette of words, of letters, the shapes of sounds.
What color would they be? What lines and outlines? What surfaces, form? What I am representing onto this blank? When or where or what or how is it / was it present before this? Had I more than a pen I might draw. Monochrome doesn’t suit the subject I observe. (“The greater the challenge” I suppose they or you or I might suggest – ack).
As if it were a can to pour. A brush to dab or spread. A chisel to pound or some multi-dimensional possibility. No – one color, a flat surface, and whatever twisted lines I might make with this dark blood.
“Don’t simply regurgitate your story,” I heard, “write things we don’t already know or are able to find out in multitudes of ways.” This is why “feelings” you say (they say). Do we really have feelings bereft of ideas?
I imagine this is what is meant by declension. Some traceable undoing. Some fodder to deconstruct, patterns or plot recognition: analysis. Is that so? “Feelings” you say?
“I began to write down the things I feel,” I wrote, firstly, quoting them, but quickly realizing that that was a quote of a quote, and perhaps out of context, perhaps accidental, of another I have great affinity for, of mind, form and content, but would not dare or hope to repeat or revise. Stillborn. Abort.
“Feelings.” And how might I gain access to this? These? Are not, spoken, emotions dissolved? Transformed into some other reality? Or fiction? Does anyone even know yet what we talk about when we talk about “emotion”? (I suspect there is a sort of object to them/it out there somewhere to be found and to dissect, describe, observe or experiment with – on the in-fernal-ternet or recordings of the surgings of the brain, the body, our systems). Probably it goes without saying, but I have no “access” here. “In” here.
How then should I represent void? And again I ask – where/who/how ever might void have ever been presented in the first place as some natural sign I might re-present? This is what a medium is for, no? An intermediary between? A vehicle or method of expression, disclosure, communication, power? So what is this barely material of ink and pulp (one color or hue each, mind you!) between?
Them or you and my emotions? Is that it? One unknown and untranslatable to another? I might describe here or caricature the you or them I imagine examining this frame, this “picture,” but who would pretend or proffer that I might, in that process, be knowing them to you? And like the immateriality of an inner world, even if I could copy all the pulses, darts, knots and dashes of a stenciling electric light on some screen or render a mapping of neuronal activities imaged in all my various “states.” What would be revealed in that? What more would ANY of us know?
The electricity and charges my brain produces we might label “agitated subject,” or “concentrated subject,” “depressed subject,” “gazing subject,” “excited,” “disregulated,” and so on. Within each of which (and millions of others besides) the terms occur so ambiguously and objective-arbitrarily we end further away than we began.
Alas, it wearies me to consider. Efforts doomed and erroneous at the outset…scoffable. How did such a project even crop up amongst us? What did we think we might uncover? (Ah, back to the mysterious ocean or caves from which we may have sprung! Our reptilian selves, our triune brains, conjectures, conjectures, wild-ass-hairs of a nightmare!)
“Fine” they gently, politely nod, “fine.” You (me/I) are doing well. Don’t get hung up on “feelings” “emotions” terms – just put pen to paper, let’s just see what comes forth. Don’t get “hung up on words” eh? Yet make more words. Is not inquiry senseless? I rest my case. I drain and break the pen. If only I had flame at my disposal.
A Narrative Construction
This weird stuff:
The sky is “cloudy.” This is part of who he is, just now, in this case. She’d said “______ ___ _______, _____!” in just that tone, this manner – another aspect constructing him. That he’s a “he” is also not irrelevant. Of so many “years,” “locations,” “relations,” “activities” and “behaviors,” “interactions” and “learnings” ought not be ignored or left aside. There’s no other way to identify him, along with appearance, but that depends (and has changed dramatically from those first cells).
The man is “of an age,” as some might say, keeping track in the ways that people will. Is “like” (comparing as they do). Says and does, makes and thinks, with categories shared among the lot of us. A male human, then, within the commerce of the world, regardless of distinctions, and because of them.
“Specialness” is a classification reserved for none and all. A sensuous “unique,” observable and rich, endless and utterly common.
And yet we’ll pay attention, for awhile, to THIS ONE. The one recounted and described, gradually revealed (such as it is), and selected for this tale and task (a narrative product of our genes). We abide.
Recording “life” – an optional project at our disposal, and “communication” – a capacity shared. Let’s do this then, with “me” – teller, author, scientific artist; and “you” (all) – necessary “others,” listeners, readers, hearers, respondents. Composing and perceiving, interpreting, creating – the ways we get along and mean, “make sense of,” all that “happens”
as we’re “in it.”
as we “are it.”
Let’s begin.
We have begun.
And “long” ago, in its beginning – wherever (whenever) – that might be for any one of us. “Us” – that spreads the lying truth of it – that we are “We” and never “one” or “me” or “he” or “she” or “it” or “they” without the others. Simply being – substances and structures interactive in “their” ways…
We, the happening, as we perceive it.
What we make of it.
(Whomever we are).
Squirrel, fir tree, trout.
Stone, astronaut, wetness.
“We” – bound by our conditions.
Let’s begin.
[I’m glad we’re sharing] (he says).
THERE IS A BEAR
…and for her,
whose face
I held in my hands
a few hours, whom I gave back
only to keep holding the space where she ws,
I light
a small fire in the rain*
And so, the story, such as it is
We start. We start out. We dance into a light. We are seen. We have become. We are embodied.
This is how it begins for us. We are noticed as a being, as a living, as living beings. Addressed.
Some one, some thing, is aware of “us.” We become. Something. Someone.
I am born. I have…”be-come.” And that, a result…a result, resolution, resolublution, happenstance, happening of cum. Plus. Cum (sperm, spermatazoa, DNA transport system) PLUS egg (potentia, potentiality, amorphous stew – DNA resourcing, inchoate, unpredictable, predictable)
CUM + EGG = possibility
A be-cumming. A chance, a shot, a gumbo – ME.
And then I AM.
And that “I am” is a simply recognition, a simply acknowledging, acknowledgment, an awareness, a “noticing” – a THAT – THERE IS – a “There is: That.”
A “Nathan.”
A nothing be-cums (in collusion with egg) a “Nathan” – named, cognized, acknowledged, noticed and noted: Nathan is NOT a Nothing, but is a Some Thing… a “Being,” a “human,” a “boy,” a “creature,” even…a “Person.”
And I become. We. Become. A combination of things cognizable in individuality and commerce. A singularity in multiplicity…
THIS combination of possibilities = Nathan
= THIS one
= ??????
this ITEM is accounted, is sensed, perceived, listed, catalogued – BECOME.
And so, we start out. Cells of a particular way. Become. Noted, recognized, be-come, be-came, be-CAUSEd. IT. THIS. YOU. (ME).
Held. Cooed. Coddled. Nursed. Murmured and whispered as an “I,” a “You,” an “It,” a “They,” an “A,” a “Him.”
I am a Definite Article.
A/The Some Thing. Being. Organism. Combinatory intricate systemic reality object of cellular operations – genetic, bio-logical(?), “existent,” “happening/happenstance,” as… THIS ONE, THING, REALITY.
And so, we begin.
I try to go back there. To the beginning, that initial “noticing.” (“Honey, I think I might be pregnant”). Effect. A. The. This one. Son. Boy. He. It. Him. Here: a coagulation of cells.
Biology. Psychology. Chemistry. Anthropology. Philosophy. Science. Metaphysics.
“I” began. By being accounted for. Taken note of. Recognized. Attached or detached from. Signaled, symbolized, named and noted.
Here comes a new “One.” (that is, Many). – A “Person.” Awkward, precedented (unprecedented) amalgam equaling a “You” “It” “He/She” “Being” “Person” “Human” “Child.”
NAMED (accounted for and acknowledged, reported AS…)
“Nathan Wayne Filbert”
A-ha! So – this one! That, right there…different from and the same as this other kind…
An observable being, a kind of individual sample, remarkable and marked down, documented, evidential data…A, The, It, An…
Here begins a definite article.
An individual.
An example.
Sample.
Kind.
Type.
Organism.
Characteristic.
Assortment.
Collusion.
Combination.
Instance of.
SOME THING.
And life goes on.
Happens.
Takes shape.
Becomes.
Invents.
Occurs.
Adapts.
Results.
Resolves.
again…again…again…
Here rises/lies Nathan Wayne Filbert,
named and acknowledged,
become, begun, existent,
(such as it is)
(from time to time)
ahem
cough, cough
(occasionally)
grrrrr
Hello.
The Costume
The Costume
When there is dialogue, or perception. When he’s awake. But what to name it? How describe? Perhaps even while sleeping.
The lag.
At checkout counter, clerk addresses: to absorption, numbness, mumble. Other.
Strikes Alfonse as he’s driving toward home: there are trees bending, being present in their way. Cars, pedestrians, small animals scurrying. A school bus. Neighborhoods – definite yards and homes. A mail-delivery-person. A filmy mist. A fall-behind in his perception. Gap. Perhaps.
He initially considered it a veil. A tremulous fog. A curious “vagueness to things.” Like long, cold Winter. Haphazard inceptions: tree, bus, children; cat, dog, car. No attachment. A muffling and delay. A foreigner. Driver inside steel mechanism, separate by seconds, very nearly removed – a skein, a skin, a veil. An organism with apparatus. The slow calculator.
The smeary light when she speaks: lover, mother, friend. Overlaps, palimpsests, a smudging feedback, a decay. The children crying. Vocalization evokes. Indicates. Needs. Response. Remembers he is human. Particular understandings, expectations. Affirmations and acknowledgments. Times for saying yes. Attentional assent.
Alfonse disbursed. Pernicious regress. As if he’d be immediate. As if the others were. As if it all were touching, interspersed and in exchange. This thing and another. He is embodied. The body seems slow, or surprisingly fast, almost anticipatory (unbeckoned, unmeditated erections). He can’t make sense from it. Body makes sense he knows not of. Who knows not of? Of what? Even how might be accurate here. Alfonse cannot seem to know, this is his costume, a glassy shroud, the sluggishness between the here and now. Without a zipper or a tag.
Inside a bottle within distorted frame, but without an image described so clearly. Costumes are alive – expose the motions of the wearer. Notions. Reveal, conceal, but variant things. Who dressed him this occasion? This dismantled undoing and random erasure, perpetual hiatuses of interpretation? His hesitant reality – a retardation, sensational slag, both slow-soaking sponge and absorbency-abdicator.
“I got nothing,” he murmurs, “didn’t catch a word you said…” as if in some other language of different rhythm and tune. Not understood. Multiple things unrelated, cannot tell, cannot smell, is uncertain where he is in his motions. Not quick enough, just out of joint, who what where why when never equals now for him, nor how. He is Alfonse and he seems costumed.
Making love – a metaphor for intimacy – those direct invasive actions – and yet he’s steps away, slow to the uptake, uncertain who is doing where and when. That comes later and looks like smudges that he estimates with guessing.
Is this uncommon? – is what he wonders. Am I the only one who cannot tell? Does she know what she is doing, feeling it as it happens? He’s asking something far away he cannot measure. He wakes each morning, to himself, inside this costume, and dons the heavy cloak of it for sleep. Asynchronous, distant, accidental and traumatic, but postponed – perpetual flush of shut-down, shock, bewilder.
He thinks “flamingo” inside a jar of unfocused space in alternate materials in artificial frame and anesthetic wall in analagesic scheme, so far, far, far, far… the clock is slipping. The span from here from now, from him from there, from this to happening, happens.
And so it goes. Costume he can’t remember wearing that encases and engulfs. Awareness too long after to affect. A lostness in the makeup or makeover, the becoming and become. Too late. Ineffective. Ever after and begone.
Echoes. Surely something must be said, something addressed to him, something interjected, interacted and applied – only ever now arriving quite beyond a sensibility toward response – apposite, inappropriate, out of line and time and sense. Unsettled and uncouth. A threatening out-of-sorts, off-color and unfelt. Feeling suffocated, unrelating.
Alfonse swimming being, non-concurrent, unawares. Ineffably indistinct. Imperceptibly misinterpreted. Not. Never. Was. But. Here. Where. No. Not. Now. It slides away. He heard something (her mouth, lips, the child-in-walkway, bird, tree bent to breeze) – no, not yet, before, never always, when? How?
Soughing in a muddy river, ice overhead shifting, yesterday. Forever. There is no today in the mix, the undertow, a disconnected untoward, who where when – not he – can’t remember, a caesura of consequence – plugging, plunging him far from present, dark and drear.
So far between the now and when – not-knowing.
Invisible costume. Alfonse’s weight. Indistinguishably unable – uncommonly common, this viscous opaque coating – no known axis or location – simply not. Not. Not.
Knots of not…not-knowing, not-quite-hearing, not-feeling, not-tasting, ever too late. Undone for undoing.
Alfonse within costume, a muzzling muffle of indigestive guzzle, of life. A weather and reprove, a restrictive deconstruction, a not-quite-absence in the presence of the everywhereabouts and everywhen of… of… everything.
Interstice – 6: the coupling
– 6 –
And then the narrative runs away. Nearly ever a mix of caffeinated alcohol, the disaster of stories unfolds. We yield them occurrence in time. Over time. Across locations. We do not make them this way, or rather, the making falsifies them so. Their occurrence is now. The moment of happen. And the telling is here just as well. The moment: reflect and create, concoct and remember. The moment of happen, and never “again.” “Re-“ is convenient, untrue.
Yet sometimes the rowdiness settles. We arrange as a movement, install, and be/have. Construct forms to obey. She stumbled, or stuttered. Appeared in a robe. When it opened, she stayed. For a while, as a present, be-coming, bright way.
Not undone. No undoing – just fall shy. Language requires alive telling, there to mean – intersection, Interstice: a coupling, a groove and a rhythm. An inexact mirror, a multi-frame change. She (you) and he (I), it (us). Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.
See the couple coupling. A gruff and clumsy wrangle and tussle. Huffs and spurts and clawing. The heaving bodies appear to be taking, eyes lolling back in themselves – the necessary separateness, retaliation toward pleasure. Bodies in command. It’s grotesque. Whoever’s on top is the rider, begun in devotion, become animal. She seeks to please, retreats and surrenders, gives up and in to his thrusting. He becomes tool for her desire, working herself to a frenzy he fears its hiatus, self-conscious, stripped of his surging in fear of mistake. They work it out – a to and fro – back and forth – moving in, leaning back – never quite mated in psyche.
From inches of distance the movements are grueling. A repetitive taking advantage. These bodies have each other, these bodies desire, lust, demand, these bodies know what they want, what they need. The fish flaps on dry ground. In a terror. A panic afraid that relief will not come. Release. In order to experience it fully, each gathers and turns in interior worlds – “this is happening, now – to me, to my body – I must be there for it to occur – entirely.” But there is an other. He/she senses the lover’s retreat. The moment of most coveted convergence, conjunction. They depart to their bodies while they clutch in their rigor. Asynchrony. What needs, needs its doing, is done. Syncopated Interstice of the guttural grotesque…
From one angle.
See the couple coupling as animals. The dog, the bear, the wolf. The bird or bee or dragonfly. The distance. The unawares. What if the lion leaned into the neck? What if the squirrel caressed? If the snakes lay entangled. The cats licking flanks. The stories would pour into morphing. What have we seen? During thrusts and grunts and contorted visage, he melted his nose in her hair, he inhaled and received. Her hand trailed down his back, not in clenching but care, some tender aware, some giving. His palms opened hot on each angle and curve, of the shoulder, the buttocks, the spine. Knee kissed, ankle read by the fingers, mouths meeting again and again. In the angelic grotesque of the bodies is consistently sewn something else. Animals humping and huffing, not by instinct alone, something more. Intercourse – intersection – aural and visual, scent taste and touch.
In distinction, then, from the buffalo that he appeared to be. From the feline receiving her guest. There is more taking place through the need. The senses talk back, they converse – speak and answer, and whisper / respond. Bodies converging in dialogue. Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange. Suddenly the gruff and the klutzy seem streaming with gift and create. The blind lust is perceiving; the grasp also heals; the smother mingles embrace. What’s engulfed is also what’s offered.
We muster. We glyph. We resolve. And solve again without solution.
Tangling a language of bodies – a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.
The narrative runs, a disaster of stories, the moment of happen is now.
Interstices…continuing…
earlier portions of this can be found HERE
– 5 –
Narrative seeming regurgitant, redundant, and indulged…yet as it occurred it was quite dramatic. A vibrant life of tragic deaths and violent love. The kind of loving one imagines as a lion gutting prey. That ferocity and devouring.
Language always there, most assuredly, in circularity and dismay, its hesitant encumberance. Its dance of waltz with tango, its distance from its cause. We were ravenous for life, steeled in healing, shriveling seeds immersed in waters. An obsessive metaphor.
She came.
From where? Like lamps at sea. Inside of windows, inside of houses, nonexistent. The sea is no foundation in its turbulence, its depths. I never charted. But there she shone. And there I strove, even while she drifted toward me.
The sky is murky. A sound of panting. My memories faint. I grabbed her collar and held her still, bent down, like that, spread open (in my dreams). They feed, they lion. The forms reverse.
Talking a mean streak. Accidental – no, – unavoidable or some inevitable undoing that I do. I won’t stop speaking, but go on. When I shouldn’t, when I can’t, when I do. I am.
What I say (I said) goes like this, or would have, but the force, the draw, consumption – I speak in digits, speak in code, I squeeze pronouncing. I will not say. What I am saying, if I would not, would have been as it were love. Instead I feed.
And she retracts and she releases, she relents but won’t rely. We’re frightened beings, gorging beasts, so here it is – the valiant story, the fragile lines, the treacherous risk.
I engulf her. Still she comes.
She feasts and I retreat.
The battles rage, my hair grows wild (she makes it so), her full of bruising, fully of greed – my want, my spunk. Our torsos open. We choose withdrawal along with weapons for attack. I bare my teeth and force her hand while she recoils, she hits, she sneaks.
We die away. I have remorse, and so I speak: again, again. Say “what I meant” I do not mean. Say wonder why. She will not speak.
There’s never truce but we find trust, a glyph we muster, when we must, because we want (for something), want (for edges), want (for love).
She says my name. Says “you remember!” And I don’t. Says work from there. My body rotted, her blackened breasts, her flesh unwilling, still we progress. We feed and lion.
A torturous joy. An adumbration.. Spiraled mind and twisting body. And there we are beneath a flow I cannot cease, my acrid words, my oily blunder. Why should I think, and what? While she moves thunder.
With firm resolve. And solve again without solution.
Then here screes the story wrenched of life – away and from – she drains a bank I cannot fill, I rob her purchase. We are one.
The scene begins.
All my Words are Silent 