Scroll for a soundless experience.
A thing, somehow, gains entrance. For instance, the blue of the coffee mug, its smoothness, and its heat before me now appear as a thing. Why, for instance though, doesn’t its heat, the grey of the bird outside, the sound of the asphalt truck beyond, enter consciousness as a thing? This is the first mystery. A thing may also continuously appear, reinaugurate itself as itself (or slip away to a name or namelessness). For instance, why does the coffee mug not only appear as a thing, but over-and-over as a thing continuously, until dropped or shattered to new form. Or, as a pastor once explained to me rather haphazardly, at age 11, and incorrectly, concerning atoms, the space between atoms: something holds all things together. Otherwise, supposedly, all things would ease to formlessness, tend that way, to something less than nothing. Entrance and infinitude. This is, even as it appears at times to come first, the second mystery.
*
A splay of fruit flies span my face, fruit at my feet. There is nothing to confess. Remembered our house, the one my brothers are still convinced was haunted. Upright—the peppercorns surfacing the shade of a pink peppercorn tree like the one on the lot, where I’d eye the cityscape before heading back home on my routine run-aways from home. Rotted out balcony, overgrown bit of wildlife, supposed, along the side. And the low brick walls with greens reaching up over the top—father threw xmas lights there once and never took them down—a patio inside it. Where the family rabbit once fought a possum and won—it’s life was short-lived then. Greenhouse around the corner, brown behind a bathroom window. Above where I closed the shower curtain and checked behind every late-night piss. Sawdust backyard scruff of a playset bought right before the eviction with the moaning of a make-shift Orange County housing crisis slapdash mass-produced plywood heap. Unsure and muddy base. Stilted driveway I dropped a trader joe’s bag of mugs the day I left. I could not believe it, me, the one off to college, alone, then wept at the blue steps where I wrote my first “good” poem. It was the discovery, I thought, of a new species—but, just two beetles my Father told me, making love. The hard floor as one walks in, the wall-to-wall carpeting beginning above and below and beyond. I was the one who cleaned it. The steps to the right trekking down to my parent’s room, where the belts lie, and I could not walk down, but once called CPS from their phone and someone called back and I apologized, and late at night, when they grew weary of my insomnia, couldn’t leave my bed, outside their door and weeping. J— told me later he heard me once, knife in hand, two iterations of the same pilgrimage. The stairs to the left of the main hall, mine, and J—’s, living room to the right, family room, a faux bar there, I had forgot, bags and batteries in the cabinet, the dent above it from the summer before college I slammed my head, hard as I could, into it, drinking Tecate and seventeen. No one else there. I’ve been dreaming about it again, waking up and walking out my room there, seeing the front doors open or off the hinge. During a student’s generative writing visualization exercise, I turn back into my room, an inverse-dreamer. As I open the door I see, instead, a garbage heap, the other one from that other dream, seven, smoke from distant fires. Smelling of nothing. On top of the heap my cousin, R—, reaches, in white, toward my open palm to which she’s placing a penny, like the one I had choked on outside Pic-N-Save, feeling the need to swallow it, like bleach, any chemicals I could reach. I wanted to know that passage—and the penny is falling—and a great heat, not from the fires peppering the skyline’s delimiting but from the penny. It’s falling into my palm and nothing hurts so much.
*
I managed to write out, truly, “there have only ever been two inscriptions: the law and poetry”—before giving up on the poem.
*
Father called last night. Throat cancer again. After our conversation the other day—the first time, maybe ever, I didn’t acquiesce to his sudden desire to hang out, no context, the way I’ve been trained to anticipate what he really wants, never calling to call—I suspect his “I’m calling because you never know” is more pretense than truth, but I’m happy to hear from him. He brought up that story, the one that was told, like the baby video of me shitting on screen, that precedes my memory. The story existed before the cognitive capacity to identify, hear, conceptualize, “stories.” He reminds me how I scratched up the face of that kid, age two or three or something, because I wanted his toy truck. I assume—the outburst, the noise—it was one of my dad’s Christian rock band concerts—and, a bit of extrapolation, given the kid was a pastor’s kid—there must’ve been some overwhelm or meltdown as I was prone to them then. I had been relating my recent scratching up of my face to, of all things, Heurodis’ self-mutilation in Sir Orfeo, the self-harming of effeminates in Augustine, but it was nothing so grand as that, I see, now. I had become the pastor’s kid. Remove the mask.
*
Imagined, today, describing this period as my “religious turn” with a full-awareness of the types of assholes who have been described as having a religious turn. How every prophet turns to the people only to cry, “what have you done to my people?”
*
I hope from this what I hope from my poetry—that I might think I have something to say, that the writing prove me wrong, I have nothing to say, but at times am lead elsewhere, that there is something ahead of me I know but am not saying, but even further, that there might be something the language knows it is not capable of forming within its syntax, which lags behind it, how politics lags behind desire, the libidinal, how revolution is possible and how repression is possible, for instance, and that we might be able to come upon our own unknowing as unknowing, briefly, in the gap, that that is precisely where the reader enters, and the author enters too. Like in Chaucer’s House of Fame there is this gap in the spinning wicker mess of the house of rumor where lies and truth must fuse together in order to exit, to circulate. I remain skeptical of fusion though. I prefer homotopy—they are neither equal nor together—but nevertheless might be deformed to the same space, triangulated into relation by virtue of a constituting object or function, kingdom, we pass through. Separate hands.
*
At the back of the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art there is a large Alexander Calder mobile which leans among the trees there. I look with you through the trees to the tar pits past and take a picture of you, your precise shoulders bare and among the silhouette of trees and sculpture. When I was in third grade we took a fieldtrip to these pits. I was terrified by the Wooly Mammoth mother, as many, I’m sure, were and are, reaching for her young through the wreckage. This is not how things happened we were told. In fact, we lived besides these beasts the teacher said. On the other side now, I imagined me looking up through to here, I did, I remember, through the trees, to see the large, breathing, mechanical branches of Calder, these other leaves of red and black. It is an anecdote I return to: how art may, not rearrange data, but orient one to a new perception. How leaves, on that day, became perceivable, articulable, through this spinning, exoskeletal creature of welding and imagination. It looked down, I felt, through the trees, backwards, to me, my class and the mammoths, the mother and child besides us. How we were with only in this conditional, relational glance of another thing, a lineage made up entirely in this indifferent, active, leaning grace.