Walled in under the snow, things will take a turn.
Dreaming and doing manually, self-raised of weeds.
The Old Garden, fruiting time, birdcraft.
To fruit time: games of patience.
There was a war.
DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.
I had some things to do before I could let it overcome me, stop me with its indifferent, tidal forces, rhythms of carnival activity, parades and acrobatics. I had so much to carry and I noticed others were in groups and sometimes had carts or sleds to help with their loads, but I struggled, making multiple trips, and also hiding. They would kill me, the war was advanced enough for that.
An older woman dressed in many layers, her lips bright red and eyes lined darkly, offered to paint my face, with “just the right highlight on the cheekbones”. This was her job and she was quite skilled, the best in fact. I thought it was about time to stop imagining that beauty might be different from craft, or to consider that honesty does not bear relation to fact or truth as we commonly suppose. The body has no natural state. The face has no natural state. And so I accepted her offer.
I found an old cart, I thought I might use this cart, like the others did, to escape the city more expeditiously. It was neglected, rusty, and one wheel looked askew. I had seen a woman using a sled, under her own power, and wanted this cart to be similar, but it was intended for oxen. I imagined that I could pull or push it just the same, even if it was not ideal. The large warehouse required some disguise if I were to enter. It was heavily attended by soldiers, a maze of rooms and floors, leaking. I abandoned that approach. I found a road out, out through a manicured lawn where people lounged as if collegiate. A woman I knew from years ago came smiling towards the lawn, her once-distinctively long hair, now short. She wore a colored leotard. She was an acrobat in the circus. This was a powerful position. Perhaps that’s why she headed in so freely. More people were coming in as I was leaving, so many people. A brigade of women holding signs, signs having to do with women – white with black hand-written letters. They were wearing orange leotards, orange hair, and with silver batons. They were in formation, quite choreographed. Leading the array were old acquaintances; they had maintained their friendships through these years, the same two that shared the ocean front condominium and swam in the rip tide, and now they were en pointe with colorful ribbons and high-kicks, moving quickly, smiling, towards war. I hurried past, disguised, recognizing old friends among the faces in the eager crowd.
I continued down the long dirt road. It was lined with grand marble government buildings each with tall columns and surrounded by green lawn. Gradually, this population of advancing people and the white buildings gave way to open fields and finally, to a still lake surrounded by trees. I began to feel relief. I saw the flocks of birds at the far end of the lake and they flew, in formation, in escalating manifestations. They began softly black, fluttering flocks in the distance, but then began to take on silvery and mechanized attributes, like sharply folded paper airplanes. Until they turned and with increasing aggression flew like arrows towards my place on the shore; I dropped to the ground and lay flat. I tried to run between the onslaughts, but that time shortened to nothing and I would have to crawl away.
I drove the white van into the white compact Honda in the bright sunlight as if I were dreaming, or had known all of this before.
You were with me in the passenger seat and I knew, as you did, that you were impervious to automobile accidents, perhaps because you were already dead, but so was I, I just didn’t know it yet. We were breaking up, which felt more difficult than dying. I felt as though I were trying to convince you to stay close by until I actually died, it would be soon.
The streets were so beautiful that day, sunny and treelined with red bricks and houses nestled together. They had been there for a long time and one could tell because the landscaping was lush and mature. Perhaps there was something about the proportions and the scale of houses to houses and houses to streets and pathways that suggested it had not been built for automobiles, although there was no particular problem accommodating them now. There is something about the sun in my eyes that changes the state of things, from waking to sleep or from life to death.
The officers came to pull me out of the car. I felt as though I would be fine to walk, although my legs felt weak and I knew that even if I could walk it did not signify living or dying. You were already out of the car, organizing things. The white Honda that had driven towards and into the front of my white van was apparently driven by someone who was already dead. The officer said there was a dead man in the car, but that he had already died before the accident, implying perhaps that his being dead was the cause of the accident.
I heard many birds, the way I like to, and I waited for what came next.
In an attempt to speak about my affections, by which I was significantly moved, I discovered an incapacity for telling the truth.
A calculus cobbled of wooden (vestigial) folding rulers lost in the basement, used-only-once fishing bobbins, maybe some tangled crab trap, a bit of public radio, and a red compact umbrella turned out to be the best-fit apparatus for the task. (Do these things all fold?) To some dismay, precision and clarity might, in every case, be at odds.
This calculus, being prone to impaction, requires expulsion for health (i.e., the persistence of the body via processes). It begins to feel like a lump in the throat, massed up and solid and legitimate. But in an expelled, and therefore attenuated situation, it can be most rightly understood as a best-fit apparatus of appropriated approximations. The truly interesting part is that there is no empty space left, but rather, a new calculus is already in place and this new calculus is similar enough to the old one that in most cases it is considered to be the same. And from this it is clear that what is said once is never true but only the repetition of the untruth begins to approximate truth. The lump is comprised of layers of the same thing (almost) instead of an undifferentiated semi-hard mass. Like a small onion-vegetable whose integrity is subject to immediate chemical-physical alteration upon interaction with words, most especially written words, but also spoken.
Realizing I cannot tell the truth, but not wanting to lie, I began to repeat. Which is not a new strategy at all, from a historical vantage.
If one says something it becomes untrue.
If one says something it then has the capacity for becoming true.
If one repeats something it achieves relevance.
Something cannot be repeated, but we understand repetition none-the-less.
You Be Me
I will practice replacing girls with other girls. With moving them into the background. All of them, so there is nothing to be distinguished between a landscape and a swath of hair. The hills around my house and the back of an animal.
A puppet theater in the bathtub: two twins moving back and forth between personalities with a simple incantation “you be me.” And then to switch, “ok, now you be me.” Mimicking each others speech and manner. Telling one another’s story. Becoming one another like jumping rope double dutch style.
Just the body sitting in for another body, learning to speak the language.
“We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about
us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.
We are set down in life as in the element to which we best
correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of
years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we
hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be
distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to
mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors,
they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us;
are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we
arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us
that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now
still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust
and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those
ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into
princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps
everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless
that wants help from us. ”
Invisibility is a feature of the marginalized.
Visibility is marked by familiarity. We want to give up whatever attends the elusiveness of the unseen.
To draw out what is in common and to make concrete, a monument for those ways. To become visible.
The nature of background, in many cases, is to be invisible. It still must be apprehended, left to the mysterious and yet solved, as it were, by a more proper sense. A sense that once atrophied must be rehabilitated, cultivated, because it is not vision that finds the invisible.
When you sense what is invisible, or what is different than you sensed before, a different kind of substance, it may be considered an illness. Like deafness or blindness, a diminution of certain senses that allows others, now enhanced, to come to the forefront. This newly sensible is between the other stuff. Between the people and the words and the chairs. It is what lets double dutch jumpers know the moment to jump into the swinging ropes, it is not only where the ropes are but where they aren’t and this is never static. So what is it they are waiting for? What are they accustoming themselves to as they rock back and forth judging the moment. Sensing the moment.
Falling in love. Sensing the movement of space and substance and accommodating oneself to that rhythm, first inside feeling that particular fullness and lacking that is that other person. It is a rhythm that you must match before you can jump in. It feels good to be home in that way, to find a movement that is yours, even if it looks different than you thought it might.
I started seeing things differently. Only the word seeing no longer seems like the correct word. I have heard people talk about the spaces in between things. The illusory spaces and the idea that even in what we think of as discrete bodies there is more space than substance. In this way people can imagine the physicality of interconnectedness, as well of course as disconnectedness. I’m afraid once I invoke the language of the space-in-between, it concedes too much to the concept that there is in-between, somehow as primary, or in-fact.
I watch the girls playing double dutch. Two swing the ropes, connected not through ropes but through rhythm. And the one girl readying to jump in. She rocks back and forth, one might say waiting for her moment. She is not waiting. She is preparing. She is becoming part of the rhythm, taking on some part of the motion and adding her own.
I see now the rhythms that are entered into. The ones that match our own, so we can most easily move with and through them. It is seeing what isn’t there. It is learning to see what is not visible, like background. Like female.
You Be Me
The mosses that grew on her patios and walkways changed color afterward.
And her moods were endless, so much so that when we came over, we would ban her from her own house. And she would wander and pace outside, fingering the edge of her appliance and inspecting the mosses. Or lichens. She liked to tell us the difference, but for her the difference changed every time.
Everything was sunnier after the flood.
It was earliest spring. I remember once, when we went down to make her lunch, to talk, to discourage the installation of more carpet, that her appliance was caught in a privet briefly. And she yelled for help, and the yelling shook it loose, but we came out anyway. I could tell you were repulsed, but hiding it well.