The Temptress in 78 words
Her words taste pomegranate – the tart – bitter, erotic, and sweet. I tickle them over my teeth with my tongue, trying to untie them. I like the way the air glides over them, whispering cool and moist into my ears. I swallow. She speaks without using her mouth. I listen hard. So this is what it tastes like? Is difficult to digest, it vaguely turns the stomach, and I want more. Addicted as I am to the showers of seeds.
N Filbert 2012
So a new formal challenge emerges. Tipped off by Duotrope, I stumbled on this interesting competition sponsored by the Aspen Writers Foundatino and Esquire magazine: A short short story of exactly 79 words, judged 25% plot, 25% characterization, 25% theme and 25% originality. Why not, right? I mean many of us compose 100-word stories (rarely EXACTLY 100, but) for Madison Woods “Friday Fictioneers” photo-prompts…so why not give 79 a shot, eh? So as a little side project over the next month or so I’ll be delivering various aborted attempts…I’d love feedback, but they’ll probably keep appearing anyway! Thanks all.
1. A 79-word story in 78 words
I slipped there, on my way out. I cried.
Someone held me, shaping me thus. That’s what I heard, but never quite believed. So they told me other things, and showed me pictures. It began to sound like music, that I’d made. I played. And continued to study. Soon it was all words and experience and me stumbling away. Or sailing back, on rough waters with a rowdy entourage, and fear. And love. In either direction, I’m here.
N Filbert 2012
Feeling Blind
“Art always divides objects and offers a part instead of the whole, a feature of the whole, and no matter how detailed it is, it still is a dashed line representing a line”
-Viktor Shklovsky-
“A fragment is not a fraction, but a whole piece”
-Lyn Hejinian-
“Those girls!,” we say of our puppies, as if we know. As if they behaved like us. We are, after all, wild animals, without a master large enough to keep us from fighting. The puppies are so small.
I remember filling a large square of canvas (“large” being relative to my body, not a mountain) with loads of spattered paint. It felt good and looked neat, even interesting, crammed as it was with accidents and intentions. Runs and spills and layers of carefully made strokes. Nothing was recognizable or familiar in the result, but I’d swear it was representation.
Again and again I attempt to feel blind. Not empathetically, by tightly wrapping my head and completely covering my eyes with some solid fold of cloth, then wandering through a day or night or week of time. Nothing like that. I’m capable of removing my glasses and learning the world without edges or shapes. Feeling blind is usually sexual for me. In the way I use my senses. It’s never the same if I know what I’m touching or tasting, hearing or smelling. To “feel blind” means losing familiar. I write blind every day. Defamiliarizing myself in order to learn something. About language, about emotion, about me and a world of signs. It’s de-meaning. Bring me my lover’s body replete with organs and breath, thoughts and flesh, and lay her down beside me. I’ll tell you what it’s like.
They like to escape, to cross boundaries. If you turn your back, they scamper. They’ll sniff and chew on anything, and leave their feces anywhere. Artistic mediums rarely work the way I want them to. Paint slips away where I place it thick and neat, clay cracks when it dries or fractures in the fire. Words mean something else. Her breath creates an atmosphere, moving particles and waves. I can smell the colors of her thoughts. At this distance it is easy to hear the goosebumps on her shoulder curling forward to her armpit. I feel her hair, thick and brown, around my ankles.
I try to use mistakes. The pups will eat their poop. Her buttocks create parentheses in my dreams. If I stack the pieces just so, another thing will happen, come to be. Sticks preferable to stuffies. The arches of her feet never cease whispering their curving tones. I rarely intend what I make. They stumble their way to fresh treasures of foul-smelling, old-buried rot. Her crotch controls weather, I ache deep in my bones when it’s humid.
It does not cease to amaze me, what’s found. Candy-wrapper, weed-stalk, squirrel-scent. Everyone’s a critic. The purposeless finds purpose in the eyes of the beholders. The meeting of the needs. The way the caps of her knees taste like buttons of mushrooms, just that tiny and soft on my tongue. The slogans her scent shouts into my ears, rushing the drums like a throng. They drag it until it dissolves. Everyone makes up a context.
And eventually tire. With ignorance things are recharged. She is different when I open my eyes. I had registered warm mango with coconut milk, they’d spilt honey on an old wet rag. Apparently the “trajectory of my new works on paper.” She came with a gasp and a shudder as I deciphered her Braille, she had never liked crowds and my mouth was crowded by terms. No one understands it, or perhaps they do and I don’t, pups fast asleep and me feeling so blind with attention.
“To tie knots, not decipher them”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-
Thinking again of my father. Which wends its way to thinking of my friends, my nearest family, my mother, sister, sibs-in-law. Children.
Mainly I’ve been thinking of my father. For decades now.
(Rewritten 41 times).
I keep trying to decipher. In fact in yesterday’s version I described my desire lacking the keys to its secrets, and declared us all impossible to descry.
If that’s the word for it.
Forty-one years using letters for rope. That is fraying.
I’ve said that I want to be known better than I can know myself. By him. By which I meant differently.
I’m sure that’s correct.
Otherwise not being possible.
And vice-versa.
Such knotted things.
Unfortunately I deciphered it, thereby fancying a code of simplifications and falsity. Reading something like this: ta TAH ta TAH ta TAH / de dum de dum de dum dum dum.
Sounding better than the truth I never hear.
In other words, by desiring my desire (to comprehend it – synonym: “fit it into my small frame”) I laid it out in lines of script as on a butcher’s table. And looked for patterns.
xxxx— I want to be known better (elsewise) than I know myself —xxxx
by: +@+@+@ my spouse; -/-/- my siblings; o][o my friends; ~!~~!~ my children; ^*_= my parents…
and likewise inter-pret them
forever crafting spies sniping through tiny keyholes
one another.
The dimensions are not vast enough.
We don’t possess the organs (apparently).
I’m not sure any of this has much to do with knowledge (though I keep on using those terms).
It was about knotting ropes or threads, veins or limbs, ideas. Tangling memories, blending emotions, and cross-narrations.
I tried actions (working-with, snuggling, fighting, conversation and more). I tried history (genealogy, geology, agriculture, politics, religion and so on).
Think of these as ropes or twine.
Perhaps tied is a better word than tried here.
I tied performing, misbehaving, more languages and themes. I tied sickness and health, better and worse for this knowing, this desire. These persons.
to no avail
What was I expecting?
Transparency.
Demystification.
Understanding.
Deciphered companions.
What have I got?
Unclear, confused and knotty, my hands can’t pass through them.
I can’t wrap my brain around it/them/us, nor define.
At a loss as to explanation (a probable gain).
Father-cipher. Mother-cipher. Spouse-cipher. Family and friend-ciphers.
Something substantial.
Where Am I?
“Space seems to be either tamer or more inoffensive than time; we’re forever meeting people who have watches, very seldom people who have compasses. We always need to know what time it is (who still knows how to deduce it from the position of the sun?) but we never ask ourselves where we are. We think we know…”
-Georges Perec-
Feeling displaced, it seemed like the time had come to ask into it.
Judging by the quilted charcoal sky, this must have occurred in the hours between night and day or that malleable period in which what’s bright becomes the dark.
I discovered that I was uncertain as to where, indeed, I was.
I cast about, but given the diffuse and myopic atmosphere, my bearings were difficult to draw.
My question just grew longer.
Within the nondescript what seek we to describe?
My whereabouts. For even about can provide a circumference of radial lines, fashioned carefully.
It seemed to me that I must have been partway. Having begun some time ago, though ill-remembered, I must have set out in some direction, making this a point along that plane or trajectory, on the way to the someplace I am going. But where? Whereto? And wherefrom? (the brain adds wherefore?)
I’m uncertain.
Most people do certain things at certain times, so time must be a deed, I guess. Needing neither to eat, nor to relieve myself, it must not be too early or late, nor a mealtime. The dim and the greys, they confuse me.
The ground being solid, but whether a road or a path or a field lying fallow, I could not say. A fogging has thickened and the chalky gravel pierced with grasses and weeds does not provide location.
The best I can wager is midst. I appear to be in the midst of things: of my life, of this land, of my journey and day (or evening) – beyond this it just is not clear.
By the look of my hands and my feet – we say “character” – it would seem I am no longer “young.” Hair has grown dark in places, I have visible veins, and numerous scarrings and wrinkles. I never expect them to grow and they haven’t for many years, yet they can’t be called webbed with their linings, nor aged. The skin is tanned and supple, not spotted, the knuckles aren’t gnarly or constricted. Improvement or beauty I do not anticipate, but it appears I am not quite undone, not decrepit.
I’d guess I am “over the hill,” as they say, but still in reach of my prime. A certain flair or panache, but the style of the action requires more will. And attention. Strong, yet not powerful. Active, not quite agile. Competent, not convincing.
I sit down. The weeds and the grass are grey-green, grown in tufts. The gravel is packed and yet dusty. The stones are not worn but all small.
I trace my palms over the surface.
My legs feel the pain of my back.
I rise up.
I would find it much easier to lean.
I step forth.
I smell no particular smells – almost rain, dusty remnants, a particular quality of air, but what? (From where?) Neither salted nor briny exactly, I must not be near to the sea. Not fuelly or floral, musty nor pale, I scratch off city and countryside, forests or plains. And not fertile. The air is just as you’d imagine it wherever the sky meets the land – in the absence of obvious effects (are they causes?) – just me.
It hasn’t grown lighter, nor darkened.
I breathe.
From the sound of it (silent) and its fullness, my lungs must be doing their job, performing their roles without much complaint. As also my heart and my brain, liver and plumbworks. I think I may have heard insects or birds, but the distance so vast I’d fail to call the sense knowledge. And I mentioned I cannot see far. These conditions.
I’d say it’s uncanny – to find myself here – but that’s exactly what I cannot find.
I reach out.
I step forth.
I breathe in.
Where am I?
If my memory served, as to where I’d last been, such info would greatly assist me. But the best I remember is “home,” and that has been so many places.
I spread my arms and slowly spin, they cut the air like freedom. I feel like a ray of light or drop of rain, something passing quickly, staying still. As if I belonged…
belonged just here…
but where…
…am I?…
(How long do I have?)
SUMMER READING 2012
from top-to-bottom as they appear at this moment on the table
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Dostoevsky’s Occasional Writings
Joe Bolton – The Last Nostalgia
Susan Howe – The Midnight
Laurie Sheck – Captivity
Ann Smock – What is There to Say?
Jerome Klinkowitz – The Self-Apparent Word Continue reading “Man-O’-Word’s Summer Reading List”
The Inevitable
What do we mean when we say “that ______ looks so German!”
To write. It.
That unnerving pronoun – the impossibility nothing is.
And probable.
The work of understanding. While standing under rain. The gravity of melancholy.
Resulting in a study of colors. As related to moods.
Desired solitude. Desiring. An oxymoron. (To solitude).
What would you desire in solitude? (While playing with yourself).
The “with” would be the problem.
Ever positing an other.
“we must each retain (and be granted) our uniqueness, even as we retain our relevance –
which is to say our interrelatedness”
-Lyn Hejinian-
In other words it is possible that we yearn for uniqueness and relevance, both requiring something else.
However might one be uniquely alone? And still recognize red?
Or relevance? (in solitude)?
The antimony that meaning is.
Meaning, nothing. Large terms stripped of their content. Yet undone.
If, then. If infinity, then an eternity of incompletion.
Is that what you wanted?
Like desiring wholeness. Oxymoron.
Living is logically incompatible.
Inevitably.
Upon viewing the sketch like a mirror. Its frenzy. Its worry. An uncertain field of marks.
Energy moves.
Impossible object, in other words. The world never calmer than an excited child with a squirming pup, in front of a camera. Using your eyes as camera is moving in barely calculable jitters. Each second.
How we view the world. Ourselves. Skittering fragments, objectless, composing subjective states, the subject of which, well, frankly, is subjectless, being, as it is, subjective.
A field, a spray, a flickering shower. Drowning in waves. Particles and fragments, all strung together without points of contact.
Inevitable delay. Perception. Duller senses.
Process requiring instants = moments = past.
Hardship of irony. What one pays for attention. Tolls of false awareness. Delayed. A logical impossibility. I.e. “presence” (presently).
Lucky for suffixes as arbitrary denotations. Arbitrarying.
Their simultaneity (e.g. –ed, -ing, -“ “).
You might say we “locked eyes” (past tense signifying long enough to catch up to the present experience thereby missing out on the initial wonder).
Processed cheese is not the same.
Fortunately every synapse of the factory also makes up now (as it makes it up) making up experience in order to. Experience.
Some animals delight in chasing their tales (that was a genuine error there, though the audience following Moses following Discontent following Freud). Tails, then. Or heads. Each swallowing another.
You know what I mean. Swatting at air.
Meaning, well, nothing = something (and vacuous nevertheless). Than?
Equals ever updating profile passed, passing, will pass, NOW.
It’s inevitable.
A Series of Stories of Love, by a Husband
Searching for subjects, I began writing the stories of my wife and each of her lovers, as I imagine them, having all dissipated before I was truly “on the scene.” Still they are here. Current as histories are. Not mine (of course), or only when I want it to be.
The stories go like this: with exotic names and muscular bodies; wealth and infectious intellects; and of course style…whatever things I lack I desire…they all possess in spades. Like spontaneity. Torture and foreknowledge = learning from the past. I’m no gardener.
By which I mean to say I lack certain skills possessed by each lover, each “other” – from youth to culture and their quality of independence coupled to vocation (so I tell it). Spontaneity (I feel like I’ve written that before, being a creature of habit and repetition, of comfort, of fear).
The stories play out like this in my head and I’m hoping to inscribe them here – thus trapping them outside, cutting off munitions and supply – exorcising them like literature, something benign and contained. Easily misplaced, forgotten or overlooked. A measure of control and indifference – not the “these are flesh of her flesh, she has ridden their bones” instead a collection by Grimm or some sacred treasury – a set of frights and fairy tales to engage as horrid dreams and improbable possibilities. Child’s play.
Which bothers me. For if I’ve learned anything from writing, it’s the profligacy of error. The obsessive-compulsive drive to adjust, rearrange, endlessly edit and correct. And never end. Stuck in a locking swirl, just so, very like unto a toilet – to revise and submit, revise and submit, then regret. The opening of doors. An idea expressed becomes thing, and a thing is let loose in the world (the real one).
The stories are like this – embodiments of emotions and fears in an effort to be real, meaning actual, which is usually banal, like she says, but not enshrined. Words work as predictive preservers. Untamed and so tangled. I’m unable to let them go. Thus they spawn compendiums – thousands upon thousands of hallucinatory nights (in shining armors) – perpetrating my bride, but not against her will, which sets in motion. Multiplying false realities, now true (being actual). Histories – open to view, corroborations or denials, like the facts.
So I keep on writing these stories, like this, with the yearn to expunge, to transform doubt into trust by its emptying. But keep finding it full, to the brim, and still filling. In the absence of reliable witnesses, (they all being human and involved in the tales – inherently duplicitous), like words. Serving double purposes, like bridges made for both coming and going, and never knowing which.
Life is like this, which is why I write these stories, in this way, feebly uncertain and wildly provoked. If it didn’t go down like I say, how was it really, then? Oh I see! So the stories keep changing, suited to their purposes! Revision, submit; revision, submit; then regrets.
If more persons knew, would the truths wriggle out like perspectives? My idea in writing these tales – make something concrete to chisel and sculpt. Together, perhaps. As a team, like this, retelling the stories according to need – like lying – so we’ll never be sure. And then I’m also causing effects. This is what happens in writing these stories, the truth, with all of its possible endings.
I digress. The stories are like that – my wife and her loves – digressions, diversions and facts. I’ll get to their bottoms and be done with them all! (I hope, if they don’t get to her bottom first!). My stories of anger and loving, my stories of panic and lack.
I lived for awhile in Grand Rapids, Michigan, attending graduate school and being regenerated and grown in-vitro like a culture into the family, religion and industry of literature. I’ve recently stumbled across a photographer’s blog who shoots many subjects in and around that West Michigan area. If you browse her photos over the past week or two it will provide you a feel for snapshotting summer…and here are some verbal renditions…
Snap-shotting Summer
Ever the distortion of mind. With emotion, contortion.
At times, a necessary snap.
.
.
A young woman peddling her bicycle, unclothed for summer. Body moving like taffy on its paddles. Just as pliant, just as tight, and just as supple. As salty, as mouth-watering, as sweet.
.
.
Tumbles in the machinery like loose screws, clanking and rattling around.
A clicker, a habit, desire.
.
.
Sun sears glares upon moments, lasering trains of thought. Dis integration. You stumble, you wobble, you very nearly fall. Erasing inspiration with foul mood. You adjust.
.
.
Scars like the outside, on the surface of the brain.
Called memory, called dreaming, called thought.
Or so you imagine.
.
.
Pool or sprinkler, sweat and breeze, you forgot. Moment’s season’s change, and you were happy. Somewhere in mountains, or North by the sea. Without belongings.
.
.
It emerges like a wire, a monster’s bite.
You’ll call it “me” or “I” and it’ll stand for something. Continuity.
An inventor’s dream.
.
.
Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
.
.
“I” continues to sit and walk, lie and stand. To eat. To breathe.
I labor steady, slowly, surely. Block after block, hewn from my ruin. This hapless task at hand. Construct a habitation of words. I use whatever I come by, wherever I happen to be. With an eye for the concrete and a feeling for sky. I’m a weedy terrain, dried up from AA and a searing of spurn. No smoke, no rain. I’ve been looking for signs or instructions: there are none. Or far too many. So I set out simply to make. A noun, a verb, an adjective; pasting with participles and pronouns. Tedious, thankless, alone. I build, it crumbles. It cracks, I evolve. Not much of a shelter, but it holds. And remains, opening up to the night.
Thanks for Madison Woods et.al. and the continuous production of prompts for this weekly challenge and exercise: Friday Fictioneers
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All my Words are Silent 